Today's podcast guest is Fred Turner, a Professor of Communication at Stanford and the best historian of Silicon Valley culture over the past 100 years.
His book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, is my favorite book on the region’s history, focusing on how hippies and hackers came together from the 60s to the 90s. But he’s researched essentially every Silicon Valley subculture, from Buckminster Fuller to the maker movement to diversity posters at Facebook.
Fred is also one of the warmest, most enthusiastic storytellers I know—the kind of history teacher everyone wishes they had. You’ll leave this listen with a bunch of fun facts about the Whole Earth Catalog, Burning Man, and the Italian futurists; but more importantly, a deep appreciation for what humans and the humanities can offer.
P.S. Two podcasts I enjoyed doing recently: AI and writing with
, and Overfit, a chatty AI/media series with and .Full transcript
Jasmine Sun [00:00:00]
Today's podcast guest is Fred Turner, who I am delighted to have on to discuss the history of Silicon Valley culture and politics. Fred is the Harry and Norman Chandler Professor of Communication at Stanford University. His book, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, is my absolute favorite book on Silicon Valley's history, and I've read a good number. I once purchased 30 or 35 copies to make my friends book club it with me during the pandemic, which is originally how we got in touch. The other thing that I can say about Fred's writing is that despite being an academic, he's trained as a journalist, so everything he writes is extremely fun and readable. Welcome Fred!
Fred Turner [00:00:46]
Thank you, Jasmine. That's a lovely opening. I appreciate it.
Jasmine Sun [00:00:50]
I would love to start with From Counterculture to Cyberculture. The subtitle is Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. I was curious to hear just how you got started researching this topic.
Fred Turner [01:00:00]
I stumbled into it. I was a journalist for 10 years in Boston, and while I was a journalist, I wrote a book about how Americans remembered the Vietnam War. That was a trade book and came out in 1996. While I was working on that book, I was in a world where computers were supposed to be the emblem of the Cold War state. During Vietnam, they were tools of the military. I moved to California in '96 to go to grad school in communication, and I moved from Boston.
When I got to California, there was this magazine, Wired magazine. The cover of Wired magazine was this pseudo-psychedelic look, and inside the magazine were these former hippies that I knew about from my Vietnam book. Instead of critiquing computers, they were celebrating computers. People like Stewart Brand were arguing, “Look, computers are the key to liberation. Now finally we can have our countercultural revolution.” And I found this endlessly baffling. What I did was the journalistic thing. I started rummaging through Wired magazine and working back in time.
Over time, it became clear that there was a group of people who had been together since the sixties connected to the Whole Earth Catalog of the sixties. They were a coherent network centered around Stewart Brand, and they had never been against technology. They had always seen technology as a tool of liberation, and that really surprised me.
Jasmine Sun [01:22:00]
I had no idea it had to do with your Vietnam book. So you were covering the same hippies for the Vietnam book, like Stewart Brand and the same folks?
Fred Turner [01:29:00]
The Vietnam book was really a book about trauma and culture. I actually spent several years interviewing combat vets in a Veterans Administration program and trying to understand processes by which individual suffering and collective suffering might be related. In the course of that, of course, I saw a bunch of stuff about hippies. The hippies in that period really were, I thought, anti-technology and anti-military in every sense of the word.
I then saw that there were actually two quite distinct countercultures: a New Left, anti-war, protesting, doing politics to change politics; and then this group that I ended up calling the New Communalists, who are the Stewart Brand, LSD-oriented folks who celebrated technology as a route to making a new kind of world. Those folks were way outside the world of the Vietnam veterans I interviewed in the first space. That's one of the reasons I didn't know them. But when I got to California and there was Stewart Brand and Wired magazine, boy, that was a wake-up call.
Two types of hippies
Jasmine Sun [03:36:00]
Can you say more about the difference between the New Left and the New Communalists? As you say, they often do get conflated into “the hippies.”
Fred Turner [03:45:00]
When I was working on the book, I was told that a whole generation of historians had said, “Look, Fred, there was this thing called the counterculture. In the counterculture, you get up in the morning and you march against the Vietnam War, and then at night you take LSD or get high.” In that telling, politics and culture are entwined, but that telling, I gradually realized, was created by people who lived through the sixties and wanted to celebrate their own contributions. When you actually look up a little closer, you could see these robust divisions.
I told Todd Gitlin, who was one of the leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society, that I was working on a book about Stewart Brand, and he said, “Ugh, that guy.” So then I said to Stewart Brand, “I talked to Todd Gitlin about the sixties.” And he went, “Ugh, that guy.” What became clear was that they represented different wings. The New Left was very much anchored in Berkeley—Mario Savio, the Free Speech Movement, do politics, march, organize, form unions, form groups. The other, who we call the New Communalists, were really built out of Haight-Ashbury and the psychedelic part of San Francisco. They were the Grateful Dead, they were LSD, they were Janis Joplin. They were the hope that we could leave politics behind, find a new technology like LSD or musical technologies like stereos, and we would leave our normal lives and go back to the land and build a different kind of world.
In brief, the New Left wanted to change politics in the world right here and now. The New Communalists wanted to build new communities outside. They wanted to escape and, in those communities, step away from politics entirely and focus instead on shared consciousness, on “getting their heads together.”
Between 1966 and '73, we have the largest wave of commune-building in American history. Somewhere between three-quarters of a million and a million Americans leave their homes and enter communal living. That's an incredible thing, and Stewart Brand was right there in the middle of it.
Jasmine Sun [05:59:00]
What gave these folks the idea that politics was doomed and the only way out was to escape?
Fred Turner [06:06:00]
Well, this is where we come back to Vietnam, I'm afraid. Imagine that you are 25 years old in 1969, or maybe 17, 18, and you're looking at the adult world around you. You see these men in button-down suits, Lyndon Johnson, and you see guys going off to war and you see a draft. You think, “I don't want any part of that world.” That world seems to be nuclearized. It seems to be militarized. It seems to be big tech. At the same time, though, you've grown up in this brand-new America post-World War II where we have a highway system. Cars are cheap, we have stereos, we have record players, and you don't want to lose all that incredibly fun technology.
So what I think happened was that under the influence of Buckminster Fuller, the New Communalists said, “Well, here's a solution. We can build communities around the technologies that we love and that make us feel like whole people while rejecting the big technologies and all the rigid, bureaucratic, hierarchical, militarized ways of working that seem to be part of our parents' generation. We can turn our back on that and build consciousness spaces of our own.”
Jasmine Sun [07:31:00]
So there's one set of technologies that are associated with the military, with hierarchies, with bureaucracy, and there's another set of technologies that are much more about the individual, whether that be psychedelics, personal computers, etc.
Fred Turner [07:46:00]
Absolutely. So Buckminster Fuller, who is the mid-century architect and wild man—not the inventor of the geodesic dome, though he claims to be. He's the patenter of the geodesic dome.
Jasmine Sun [07:59:00]
Wait, who invented it?
Fred Turner [08:00:00]
As I understand it, it was invented by, I believe, a Polish guy in the twenties.
Jasmine Sun [08:05:00]
Okay, because I bought his marketing. I thought that he did.
Fred Turner [08:08:00]
We all did. I did too, until someone hammered me over the head with it at a talk. He patented it and he used it first to house radar for the military, and then ultimately it became the hippie commune domicile of choice. You can still see it, of course, at Burning Man.
Fuller had this idea of what he called the “comprehensive designer,” and he wrote about this as early as 1941. He said, “Industry is out of hand, it's disproportionate, it concentrates resources. What we need to do is take the products of mass industrial technology, valve them”—that was his word, “valve them down into our lives and use them for individual growth, individual worlds, individual improvement.” The hippies took that very much to heart. His work circulated everywhere in the hippie world, and Stewart Brand leaned on it very hard. They were very close friends. He was his first real mentor after Ken Kesey. That notion of taking industrial products and turning them into tools for individual growth, that's what we see when Apple starts marketing around 1980.
Jasmine Sun [08:58:00]
Right. And then it’s the Whole Earth Catalog that becomes the convener of all these people. It's about recommending these tools, these products, right? Whether it be camping gear, classes to learn about stuff, hiking boots, tents, and then eventually computers too.
There's that famous Stewart Brand line that opens the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” How do you interpret that line?
Fred Turner [09:28:00]
I've thought an awful lot about that. The sense of being gods is something that might be harder for us to sympathize with now, but imagine yourself in the late 1960s. You're only 23 years out from the end of World War II. You've just entered a world in which nuclear technologies can literally destroy the entire Earth. Humanity now has for the very first time, in your lifetime or ever, the ability to destroy the earth, and in that sense, it has a god-like power that people describe as a god-like power. Likewise, suddenly we're doing things like taking airplanes everywhere. Remember, air travel is relatively new in this period, at least affordable air travel. Suddenly, people are singing folk songs like “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” You can wave a romantic goodbye to your sweetheart as she gets on the airplane because airplanes are there, and that too is new. Automobiles are new. So there are these new technologies everywhere around someone like Stewart Brand.
The follow-on quote is, “a realm of personal power is appearing.” Personal power is that space in which you leverage and access all of these things—airplanes, automobiles, hopefully not weapons—in order to build a kind of self that wouldn't have been available to be built in previous years. So we are gods in the sense that we have technologies that dramatically extend human capacity, and we are gods of our own little worlds in that we can use those to make ourselves the people we want to be.
Jasmine Sun [10:59:00]
Did the New Communalists have a position on weapons and military technology?
Fred Turner [11:06:00]
It's really interesting. One of my most painful moments when I was reading the Whole Earth Catalog was I came upon an advertisement for how to get used military gear to wear in civilian life. That was in 1969, and '69 was the year of the highest mortality rate among American soldiers in the field during the entire war. So at a moment when hundreds of thousands of young American men are dying—and millions of Vietnamese, three million Vietnamese died during the American War—here in California, the Whole Earth Catalog is recommending that you use their castoffs for your personal development.
They were anti-war, broadly construed, broadly speaking, but Stewart Brand had trained to be a soldier. He had gone through the draft, and finished his service. So he often feels like he's aligned with the military. But I think they were broadly anti-military. Even more than that, they were often in a social class that made military service seem like something somebody else did. Remember that during the Vietnam War, if you stayed in college, you didn't have to go to fight. You could stay out. That's why a lot of your older professors stayed in grad school to stay out of the war.
So when I came into the project after being with the veterans, I was enormously pained because I thought they had no feel for the war. The young men I knew had suffered enormously and had done enormous violence in Vietnam. What they had done and seen was completely out of scale with an advertisement for an army jacket. If you had known or had a feel for what they had done and seen in Vietnam, you couldn't have written that ad.
Dreams of disembodiment
Jasmine Sun [12:54:00]
Do you think it's geographic or is it mainly a class thing?
Sometimes I think about why California, maybe because it's so far from DC or something and people don't have as much of a relationship to these institutions. Even today, one thing that concerns me that I've talked about with Tianyu, is that people are way too flippant about the prospect of a US-China war. Don't people understand how bad that would be and how you can't just throw these things around as advertisements for your SaaS company? But for many people in tech, it feels immaterial to them.
Fred Turner [13:42:00]
The immateriality is a really good point. It has a couple of points of origin.
The first really is class. If you haven't been near combat or if you don't come from a military family where someone has described combat to you, and even if you do, it's very hard to imagine how utterly violent and horrifying those worlds are. The United States has not been invaded as a landmass in our lifetimes or in the lifetimes of anyone in several generations. The Civil War is 150 years ago. We don't have an experience of combat.
The immateriality also comes from class. If you can hop airplanes, travel easily, move smoothly through the world, you don't have to worry about your body and what it signals in a way that other folks might. You can imagine that you are, in fact, like a bit circulating through an information system. When I'm in an airport lobby in Shanghai, nobody looks at me funny. I just look like a guy traveling through. I'm exactly the right kind of person. If I maybe had a different color, was a different shape, maybe didn't dress in the way that I do, that might not be the case.
Part of it too is contact with information machines. I've always been struck that as new manufacturing technologies come into being, human beings tend to reimagine what it means to be a person along with those technologies. So at the end of the 19th century, as manufacturing really ramped up in the United States, huge machines were there. A historian named Anson Rabinbach showed that people imagined themselves as human motors. They began to think their bodies were like mechanical machines, and hence, they went to the YMCA. They learned how to lift weights. They needed to maintain their energy. This whole rhetoric that we use now around fueling ourselves with food, it comes from that moment when we imagined we were machines.
Okay, now we inhabit a world where we use screens all the time, and a lot of our most intimate relationships are dematerialized. At the very least, I have relationships with people on screens much like the one we're having right now, where we can see each other—but only see. We exist in bits for each other. That experience of existing in bits, especially if you code or do other things that require leaving your body behind for periods of intense concentration, those things give you an experience of disembodiment that make something like the blood and guts of military experience and combat seem totally alien.
Jasmine Sun [16:04:00]
Even the way that a lot of people experience war is by watching footage of it.
Fred Turner [16:13:00]
Exactly right. You watch footage and it just looks like a great big “shock and awe.” When we went into Iraq—shock and awe! Well, let me tell you, if you're at the receiving end, or even sometimes at the delivery end of those technologies, the shock and the awe are excruciating. I've never known people to suffer the way that the veterans I talked with did.
Jasmine Sun [16:40:00]
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Fred Turner [16:43:00]
We should probably say a word about the Whole Earth Catalog just for folks who might not know what it is. The Whole Earth Catalog was Stewart Brand's attempt to help the New Communalist movement as they headed back to the land in 1968. He was down here at Stanford and then he spent a lot of time up in Haight-Ashbury, and he saw that his friends were leaving the city and trying to go build these alternative communities. He wanted to help, and he thought that the most useful thing he could do was to create a catalog by which they could find the tools that they would need to build things. So he and his then-wife Lois headed back to the land in a truck, and they drove around from commune to commune, and they made a list of things that they brought with them.
Eventually, the catalog that they created came out twice a year for four years and sold more than a million copies. It was not a catalog in the usual sense that you order something through it. Rather, it was a catalog that showed you how to find things that you might need. That had two results. One result was that it manifested a vision of the world as information, that the whole world could be there. The whole Earth was a catalog. We were as gods, and like a god, you could peruse the products of the entire world and find what you needed for your own personal improvement.
Another thing that it did was it revealed the locations of the hippie world. This is 1968. The internet doesn't exist for anybody except a few defense officials. If you know there are hippies out there somewhere, but you don't know where they are, you go to the catalog and what you see there are people recommending products with their addresses, and then that lets you find the communes that are out there. So it became a map of that social world, and as Steve Jobs later said, it was Google for the young.
Jasmine Sun [18:24:00]
A lot of the original tools in the Whole Earth Catalog are things that you would load onto your truck to take out to the communes. It's very material, it's very grounded, it's very physical. At what point does this community and the catalog shift into the world of bits, and why does that happen?
Fred Turner [18:55:00]
This was one of the great shocks that I had when I studied the catalogs. First off, you got to picture: I'm in grad school. I've got this thing called the Whole Earth Catalog in front of me. The big one is hundreds of pages long. The first one's only 65 or so, but the last one is several hundred. I'm like, what do I make of this thing? One of the things that I did was I counted the types of objects that were in it. It turns out that about 80% of what was in there was books. And then there were other strange things. There's this book on cybernetics or Hewlett-Packard's first large-scale individual calculator. Why would you need that?
What I discovered was that the turn toward the immaterial had already happened. The catalog was not, by and large, offering things like tools and backhoes and the kinds of things you would need to actually farm. What it was offering was tools to help you rethink your position in the world, to imagine yourself on a network of information, to think about yourself reading Norbert Wiener and Cybernetics, using a Hewlett-Packard calculator. Now, people are not using computers in that world, but all of the predicates for what we will later understand as cyberculture are in place: a disembodied sense of community, a sense that an information technology—in this case, the Whole Earth Catalog—can make visible the social world, and that you can access it through the pages of the catalog as we will later access the world through our screens and Google. It's all there.
The other thing that's there that's a little harder to talk about is a set of racial distinctions, a kind of segregation. The other piece of disembodiment that has really come home to me over time is that disembodiment is something you can experience if you're part of the dominant group in a particular place. You can move easily through the world. If you're not part of that dominant group, people will stop you and check you and say, “No, this is for the dominant group.”
The communes of the 1960s, I thought, were going to be wide-open social environments. On the contrary, they were incredibly segregated by race and incredibly heteronormative. They were dominated by charismatic men. I was very, very surprised by that. I'm less surprised now that predominantly white, dominant-culture communities inhabited by people who could have or did go to college would've imagined a world that you move through freely, like you might with computation, because they hadn't necessarily experienced the kinds of things that a person of color, an impoverished person, a person who hadn't had the kinds of access that other people did.
Jasmine Sun [21:28:00]
It's interesting that you noted that by the time the catalog existed, 80% of it was books. It’s the idea that a person was made of the information they consumed, rather than their body.
Fred Turner [21:43:00]
I love the way you just said that because it's exactly right. That's an idea that comes to us actually from the forties and from cybernetics. Cybernetics is the science of control through communication, as Norbert Wiener famously put it. But that's a science, and Stewart Brand is deeply enmeshed in it, that imagines that the world is literally an information system. Norbert Wiener says, “We're but patterns of information in rivers of time,” which is a lovely phrase.
Jasmine Sun [22:15:00]
That is. It's funny because I still hear it all the time. I've been spending a lot of time this year talking to a lot of people in the AI world. One of the common threads among real AGI believers is something like: “Isn't your body just a system of information? If we just gave that information to the machines, then they too would be as intelligent as we are. Yes, sure, there's tacit knowledge in, say, cooking, but you could take videos of it, you could put sensors in, and if that information simply got into the machine, then they too would have the same intelligence.” The idea that a human is composed of the information flows that they intake and output is very common among the folks I talk to about AI.
Fred Turner [22:59:00]
It's a super interesting idea, and you just took us from immateriality to the denial of the body.
There's a way in which you can only imagine some of the utopias that people imagined in the sixties or that some of our colleagues are imagining now with tech if you deny the way bodies actually work. If you deny age, for example. I'm 64. I'm here to tell you, aging is a real thing. You cannot stop biology. It comes for you, and it comes for everyone, it really does. I cannot download my consciousness fast enough to stop arthritis. The denial of the body, I think, is one of the things that really hurts us in trying to make a better world. If we deny our bodies, we end up making these beautiful systems that do very little for us politically. That's a longer rant.
Jasmine Sun [23:51:00]
Can you give an example now?
Fred Turner [23:54:00]
Sure. I'll take an example from a non-political realm, and start with dating. I've taught this class at Stanford, The Rise of Digital Culture, every year, for 20 years. When I started teaching that class, I would ask students, “Well, if you wanted to ask a fellow student out, how would you do it?” About 90-95% of them would say, “Oh, well, I'd ask them in person or I'd call them on the phone.” A few would say, “I'd text.”
Now everyone texts, and I ask why. They say, “Well, it's so scary to get turned down in person.” I'm like, “Are you kidding? I'd hate to get turned down by text.” But more to the point, many students at Stanford now are apparently using apps to find one another for dating, which I just find baffling. You're surrounded by 5,000-10,000 people, all interesting, all young, as far as I can tell, all attractive, and you have to use an app.
Jasmine Sun [24:50:00]
On college campuses in particular, it's weird because it's not like you're the lone person in a sea of whatever. Everyone is eligible and in your age range and has a bunch of things in common.
Fred Turner [25:00:00]
You'll never experience an eligibility pool like that again on this planet. What's interesting to me about the dematerialization, about turning your body into a set of pictures and stories online for the purpose of attracting a mate, is that when you do that, you don't just turn yourself as you are into the screen. You winnow yourself, you filter yourself, and do that in terms set by the mass media industries around you.
I bet I could ask you for rules as to what constitutes a good Instagram handle for someone who wants to be dating, right?
Jasmine Sun [25:43:00]
Yeah, totally.
Fred Turner [25:44:00]
When we turn ourselves into information, we take away the parts of ourselves on which we're going to have to navigate a complex relationship later in life. We turn ourselves temporarily into advertising in very generic terms, in ways that make more complex negotiations harder to have. I assume that people figure it out later, but in the beginning, not so much.
Jasmine Sun [26:07:00]
I think this is totally right. I did one or two years on the apps, as they say. In college, I just dated the normal way, in person. Then for a couple of years, I tried to use Hinge because my friends were on it.
The reason I stopped was that it turns everybody into a profile, an advertisement, and a very narrow set of information that actually the platform gives you. You put in your height, age, school, job, and you answer three prompts and do three photos. Hinge is very prescriptive about which elements of your personhood you show. Then because you're presented with so many people—hundreds of profiles as a woman that you have to go through—I began to see all the people as their stats. I started caring about pieces of information that I did not actually care about. For example, in my normal life, I would not ask someone where they went to school. I would not notice if they were 5’9 or 5’11. But then I started differentiating by that information on Hinge because it was what the platform made most visible to me.
Fred Turner [27:32:00]
Exactly. So now let's amp that up to the political level, right? What we need to do in a democracy is discuss the distribution of resources across under-resourced communities. We need to figure out how to be fair with one another. Now we try to do that through Facebook and other systems where we are, once again, producing ourselves as highly narrowed profiles, not whole people. I'm here in rural Maine, and rural Maine's pretty conservative. I'm pretty liberal, but I can talk with my local friends with care and concern. We sit down and we'll have a beer and we'll just talk because we're in person. These same folks, if they appeared on my Facebook feed, we'd be shouting at each other.
It's in this sense that turning ourselves into information does not help us hear ourselves. It does not help us hear one another, even, because hearing and speaking are not just words, voices, signals, bits of information. They are communications from our whole bodies, our whole beings, aimed to reach out to other bodies and other whole beings. Take those things away and you end up with a very narrow channel and a whole lot of distorted political life.
Jasmine Sun [28:34:00]
Tying it back to the Whole Earth Catalog—I'm imagining you and your neighbors in rural Maine, and if all you had to decide “should I be friends with these people?” was what was on their bookshelf and what media they consumed, you would probably think, “I absolutely do not want to be friends with them.”
Fred Turner [28:50:00]
Absolutely. That is so true. I do a lot of outdoor things. I canoe a lot, I kayak, and I fish, and the guys I do that with tend not to be big readers. They tend to read mysteries and stuff. If it was just a mutual bookshelf gaze, they looked at my bookshelf with all these weird academic books and I looked at theirs with all these mysteries, I'd be just like, we couldn't talk to each other. But in fact, we adore each other and love to get out in the woods together.
Jasmine Sun [29:21:00]
That makes a lot of sense. One of the things that has come up in this tangent is the platforms: the Facebooks, the Hinges, the Tinders, and whatever.
One thing that happens by the end of From Counterculture to Cyberculture is that the cyberculture, which starts in this very anti-authoritarian, grassroots bent, becomes co-opted by the libertarian New Right. Wired starts celebrating Newt Gingrich, and how these internet corporations are going to free us from our shackles. I'm curious, A) if you could say a little about how that co-optation happened, and then B) if you think it's inevitable—if you think there was a path forward for cyberculture that didn't result in co-optation.
Fred Turner [30:00:00]
I'm gonna dispute the notion of co-optation, and this is a historiographical bugaboo I have. One thing that struck me about Stewart Brand was that he did not create a world outside commerce and then get taken over by commerce. On the contrary, when he wanted to make social change, he embraced a catalog. He embraced the model of L.L. Bean. He embraced business. He and his friend, Paul Hawken, founder of the Smith & Hawken garden company, thought business was by far the best way to make social change. That was true of the New Communalists generally. They didn't want to do politics in the traditional sense. They wanted to live differently, get the right products, they wanted to be good consumers, and they wanted to build societies built around consumption.
So as we move forward in time and the sixties fade away and the communes collapse, we get to the eighties. In the early eighties, Stewart Brand and others are just bereft. The revolution they thought would come didn't come. They all went back to the land and it fell apart and was horrible. Now there were these computers all around, what the heck? People needed jobs and it's Northern California, so they went to work in the tech industry, and they weren't averse to business, on the contrary. They weren't averse to technology, also on the contrary.
Alright, move a little bit farther in time. We begin to get people like Newt Gingrich, a libertarian right-winger who helped set the stage for the right wing we have now. Gingrich utterly rejects the free love, the drugs—the sex, drugs, and rock and roll part of the sixties. But he completely embraces the individual entrepreneurialism of people like Stewart Brand. The notion that we were all individual gods and could get good at it by consuming the right goods, by cataloging the right goods, that makes total sense to Gingrich. Gingrich is right on board with that, as are a series of other people. By that time, Brand himself and a number of people who will be instrumental in getting Wired going are consulting for the Global Business Network. They've created the Global Business Network, they're consulting for Royal Dutch Shell. Business is not antithetical to what they want to do.
The co-optation story gives the lie to this habit of thinking that there's an original moment when things are good, and that bad forces come in and step on it. It's a habit of mine. I should start calling it the Bambi Syndrome. Did you ever see the movie Bambi?
Jasmine Sun [32:15:00]
As a kid, a long time ago.
Fred Turner [32:17:00]
As a kid, Bambi's mom goes down. Everything was good until Bambi's mom goes down. But that's not actually how it works.
There wasn't ever a counterculture that was entirely disconnected from consumption, from technology, from the industrial heart of mainstream America, despite the fact that its members said that they were. As the economy changed around them and as the political world changed around them, they were able to navigate and find their way because they were already embracing some of the core things that people on the right wanted.
But that still leaves us with the problem that you flag, right? Which is, is there a way not to go down that road? I don't know. My sense is that there's never going to be a revolution. There's never a before and after. What there is is a moment-by-moment struggle to try to live the best life you can, to change things where you can, and to work within a world that is not your own. You didn't make it, but you were born into it. You work with the tools that you have and you try to do your bit while you're here, and other people try to do their bit. I think one of the things that really has thrown the left off its game is since the Bolshevik Revolution is the hope of a single overwhelming wave of change. People sometimes read the counterculture that way and they say, “Oh, that was a single wave of change. Look at all the good it did, and then it got crushed by business.” I don't think that's actually the case. I don't believe in revolutions, not really.
Jasmine Sun [34:06:00]
Like the Arab Spring and Twitter—that was another wave of, “Oh, Twitter's here. Now we're all going to overthrow our dictators on Twitter, and then we're going to have perfect democracy in every place around the world.”
Fred Turner [34:22:00]
And boy, look how that worked out.
Jasmine Sun [34:25:00]
Yeah, it's very disappointing. I was about 12-ish, in middle school, and I was in some social studies class, and they were handing us printouts of news articles from Al Jazeera about the Arab Spring and Twitter. That was how I got so interested in the internet, because as a 12-year-old, I was like, “This is amazing. This is so awesome.” That was the inspiring, energizing thing about the internet.
The tension that I feel is that I do resonate with the New Communalists and their desire to have all the nice things, have the music and the fun internet stuff, while reconciling that with political reality.
Fred Turner [35:00:00]
You've put your finger here on something that's fascinated me for a long time. The internet and cybernetics before it are universal technologies and a universal set of ideas. The idea in cybernetics is that we are all part of an information system. The idea of the internet is we are all part of an information system, and the information system goes around the globe and it knits us into what Marshall McLuhan used to call “global villages.” Well, no. If you try to do politics that way, you end up flying around in the air, polluting the earth, and missing it.
So, I kind of want to offer you some cheer by suggesting that if there's no revolution and if the global internet move doesn't solve the problem, it leaves us with a whole lot of very good local work to do. I know you actually do a lot of this: building local community, working with people who are different than oneself, doing it in our bodies. That's how you make change. I've come down on the side of the New Left, less than the Communalists.
The origins of Burning Man
Jasmine Sun [36:10:00]
I buy that. I've mentioned the writer happy hours to you, and part of that is that I really think that the Bay Area is a very intellectually vibrant place, but everyone's very siloed and they're not going to talk to each other on the internet. But maybe if you have an open bar, people start chatting with some folks who have very different views, and they don't fight. It actually goes quite well most of the time.
Before we turn to the modern day, I want to talk a little bit about Burning Man. I only know Burning Man in its modern incarnation, and I'm curious to hear more about its history. It started in the eighties, is that right?
Fred Turner [36:50:00]
Have you been?
Jasmine Sun [36:51:00]
I have not, but my friends have. I need to go at some point.
Fred Turner [36:55:00]
Burning Man starts in the late eighties on Baker Beach in San Francisco. A couple of guys get together and they basically tack together a set of two-by-fours into the figure of a man and they set it on fire. It's just them, and some people gather around and notice that. The next year they decide to do it again, and this time about a hundred people gather and it starts to build up.
Then in the early nineties, the Park Service got tired of these guys burning sticks on the beach, so they head out to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. The Black Rock Desert is a very hot, hostile environment. It's very alkali. It's a former lake bed, and it's alkali dust that will eat your flesh if you do not wear the proper lotions to protect yourself. They go there and they draw a line in the sand, and they say, “Okay, when you jump over this line in the sand, you've left the other world behind, and we're in a world of total freedom.”
At first, it's a few hundred people, and they range. There are some artists, there are a lot of tech folks, there's some gun nuts, people with some alternative sexual proclivities. It goes from there and it builds just incredibly rapidly. I went three times. The first time I went was I think 2006, and there might have been 13,000 to 14,000 people there. The last time I went was 2017 maybe, and I think there were 35,000. Last time, 70,000. Just an incredible thing.
For folks who haven't been, Burning Man is a giant horseshoe-shaped city in the middle of the desert, surrounded by mountains on all sides. The points of the horseshoe are probably a mile or two apart. There's officially no money, though you can in fact spend money at a cafe. You have to bring everything of your own to take care of yourself, and you're expected to do something to contribute to the community, whether that's a lecture or an art performance or just costuming yourself in a happy way. Then there are cars allowed, but the cars are art cars, and some are giant ships, some are giant monsters. These are all public transportation, so you can hail them and ride around in them.
There's a tremendous amount of building under difficult circumstances, which is very fun. People get together before the burn, form a camp, build something with the camp, bring it to the desert, erect it, do something in the desert, perform in the desert, and then eventually go home.
What I've argued is that that process is the value system of Silicon Valley in miniature. When you go out there, there are all these tech folks, and they're like, “Yeah, it's great. This is like the dream team, right? This is like the dream development team, only this time we're working for ourselves and the things that we make will be seen.” It's almost as though the values of Burning Man are the values of Silicon Valley without the corporate side of it.
I often think of it as being like a Protestant church in the industrial era. In the industrial era, if you lived in a factory town, you would all go to church on Sunday. The factory shuts down, you go to church. In the church, the bosses sit up front, middle management sits behind them, and the workers sit and stand behind that. At Burning Man, you all get together in project teams, you form a camp, you build a product, and you disassemble and go home. Then next year you do it again, and you do it with a religious patina, with a ceremonial patina, partying every night, sometimes taking LSD, other drugs, dancing around the Man when or running around the Man when he burns, and then sitting quietly the next day.
It's an incredible experience. I don't need to go again, but I'm very glad I went.
Jasmine Sun [40:34:00]
For the first burners, what were their goals?
Fred Turner [40:37:00]
I really don't know for the first two. I think only one is alive.
By the time we get to the early nineties and people are heading out to the desert, the goal is to create what Hakim Bey used to call a “temporary autonomous zone,” a zone where you can be autonomous for some period of time, do all the things that law proscribes in other places. I think that's the starting point, and then gradually it builds up.
Very early on, tech folks are going and bringing Silicon Valley values with them. Stewart Brand goes very early. Google hires Eric Schmidt, in part, because they meet him out there.
Jasmine Sun [41:20:00]
Oh really? I didn't know that.
Fred Turner [41:22:00]
Yeah. In '99, Google shut down the entire firm so that they could all go out to the playa. The whole reason I got onto Burning Man at all was that I'd finished the counterculture book and was looking for something new to do, and went to see a friend over at Google in Mountain View. I walk in the front door and there are all these pictures of shirtless people spinning fire. I'm like, “What? This is supposed to be a major tech firm.” I'd studied IBM; I was expecting people in tweed.
Jasmine Sun [41:51:00] Oh no.
Depending on the company, all work just stops. Even if they don't formally take the time off, work just stops because enough people are out that you can't really do anything anymore.
Which is really interesting. The permanent communes that they tried didn't work and they fell apart, but these are pop-up communes where people can still get their dose of it.
Fred Turner [42:15:00]
I really like the idea of a pop-up commune. I think that's really valuable.
It is funny, one of the years I went out, I went out with people who had been Merry Pranksters in the sixties, and that was fascinating to behold because these are people who, when we went out, were 70, 71, 72 years old. The Black Rock Desert is not an easy place, but I watched these folks who had been on communes get their camp set up and get things moving and making food and getting it all going. They had it going on, and I was like, “Yeah, these guys know how to do this because they did the communes.”
Jasmine Sun [42:47:00]
Yeah, it seems very hard. The cool thing about it that I hear from my friends is that you do get some amount of intergenerational transfer. Knowing how to put on the camps and make these big installations and brave the desert, which as you say is a very hostile environment, is a bunch of tacit knowledge. Obviously, you can look up guides; I'm sure people have written lots of blog posts and stuff. But the thing that probably makes it succeed is going in a group of people who have been before and having that knowledge transfer. My friends who are in their mid-twenties are like, “Yeah, I feel like I really got to know people who are older, who otherwise I never would've met in San Francisco.”
Fred Turner [43:24:00]
Right. And it's really fun. I will say that as one of the people who first went when he was middle-aged, that's part of the fun for me, is again, being in an intergenerational space. I want to meet people in their twenties and thirties. Right now, I'm learning more from people in their thirties and forties than I am from people my own age or older, that's for sure.
Jasmine Sun [43:44:00]
What was your gift or your camp when you went?
Fred Turner [43:49:00]
The first time I went out, I went with my fishing buddy as my helper. It turned out he was a terrible camper in the desert. Great on water, terrible in the desert. But we stayed in the journalist camp. There's a journalist camp out there because I was officially doing research. I had an Institutional Review Board certification from Stanford. That was one of my favorite things. The IRB board says, “Well, will anyone be intoxicated?” And I'm like, “Um, maybe.” I had to give this IRB form to everyone I was interviewing. It was hysterical.
During the day, I wore street clothes to try to look like the sociologist and not deceive people. In the evening, I partied and dressed up and did all the rest of it. But during the day, I went out. I went one day to this camp called Burning Silicon, because they were involved in a bunch of different local firms, and I was just curious about the connection between the firm and the event. I get there, it turns out that they are nudist polyamorists, mostly middle-aged, sitting in a giant circle, 20 or 30 people. I get there in my khaki pants and my white button-down shirt, and I meet the person I'm supposed to meet and I say, “I've got this IRB form.” He says, “Well, that's fine. You can give it to us if you give us each a hug.” They lined up and I hugged them one at a time and gave them the form and had some great interviews. So, it's a wild place.
Jasmine Sun [44:50:00]
Yeah, it's on my list. I will make it out there at some point.
Fred Turner [44:54:00]
I don't know that you need to. My wife says it's her worst nightmare.
Jasmine Sun [45:00:00]
But anthropologically at minimum, just because I'm so interested in the history of Silicon Valley culture, I feel like I have to. I don't really like dirt and camping, the bathrooms and showers, that stuff's a little gross to me. But I think it's something I gotta do.
Fred Turner [45:19:00]
Go out, go with experienced people, and make yourself a real nice shade structure. Those would be my two pieces of advice. You want a shade structure. It gets really hot during the day.
Silicon Valley’s hierarchical turn
Jasmine Sun [45:32:00]
Well, I want to change to some newer and, in some ways, darker strains of Silicon Valley subculture.
Silicon Valley in 2025 feels quite a bit less libertarian, and much more fascist-adjacent than it did back then. Before, there were forms of attempting to escape systems of top-down control, which of course still came with their own biases and unannounced hierarchies. But now a lot of the tech industry in Silicon Valley's interest in politics is actually, “Can we remake, rebuild, coup these systems of hierarchy? Can we place ourselves at the top of these systems of control?” Of course, the Elon Musk-DOGE thing, which now is falling apart, exemplifies it. Or even on a more local level, I've just noticed that a lot of VCs and influential people in the Valley have gotten much more interested in local politics and funding races. Even the new cities that are getting built, I would say 10, 15 years ago they were getting built seasteading in the ocean or in tax havens in the Caribbean. Now I feel like the new cities are actually in California, in normal legal terrain.
I'm curious what you make of what changed here and how Silicon Valley turned to an interest in hierarchy.
Fred Turner [46:44:00]
I think some things are continuous and some things have changed.
The continuity comes all the way back from cybernetics through the counterculture, and that's the hope that business systems and technical systems would be better than politics. Stewart Brand and his crew were not like the New Left. They thought that business and technology were the way to make America a better place, and that's what we needed to work on. That idea predates the turn to the right but sets the stage for it. That's why when we come to the eighties and nineties, the New Communalists could partner with a Newt Gingrich who's a proto-authoritarian because he too believed that business and technology were the royal road to social change.
What I think really changes is, in my view, in the late aughts, 2006, '07, '08, with the rise of social media and the rise of what Shoshana Zuboff calls surveillance capitalism. The notion that by harnessing attention and surveilling interactions, we can make tremendous amounts of money.
Once that kind of money is flying through the air, then CEOs start to do this funny thing. I saw it first at Google. I used to spend time around Google News in 2006, 2007. When I got there, people were really like, “Don't be evil. We're Google. We don't be evil.” Great. I'd say, “So what's good?” “Well, providing information for people is good.” “Okay. Who provides information for people?” “Well, we do.” “Oh, so you're suggesting that what's good for Google is good for the world?” “Oh yeah, of course.” You get in that loop pretty quickly and money starts to be an emblem of what you're doing, right? I've had people say to me, “Well, Fred, if this product were so bad, people wouldn't use it.” As if consumer choice were the same thing as a political voice. It's ridiculous.
So now I'm making a pile of money, I want to keep making money, and by the way, money is a sign of the rightness of what I'm doing. It begins to look like politics, regulators in particular, might get in the way of that. It might become grains of sand in my otherwise smoothly functioning gears. So what you start trying to do, as Zuckerberg did when he founded Facebook, was you start trying to use the parts of the state that you can to ensure your privileges. Zuckerberg famously builds a two-tier stock structure inside Facebook where he has the A-shares and he has enough of the A-shares that every single decision is ultimately his if he wants it. It is a dictatorship. He doesn't have to play it that way, but from the stock structure's point of view, he runs a dictatorship, straight up. That works. In the tech world you have these very strong founders. You have Bezos, you have Larry and Sergey at Google, and Sundar Pichai. You have Zuckerberg. You have these very top-down firms that are very collaborative at lower levels maybe, but at the top level, they really are dictatorships or very close to it.
Those folks have technologies that seem to be able to map the whole world. They literally are as gods in the Stewart Brand sense. They can see the whole earth through their systems and they can run systems that, from where they sit, seem to be working pretty well. Look at all the money we're raking in. Meanwhile, from that position, real actual government of embodied people of all different social classes with all different levels of capability, looks really messy, sloppy, inefficient. It looks like it must be riddled with waste and fraud because our companies are so smooth, they run so smoothly, but the government seems to be so tangled up. What is that about?
Jasmine Sun [50:41:00]
Also, side note, hilarious to think that the companies are not wasting money.
Fred Turner [50:45:00]
Right. I'm still a fan of a phrase that I think a lot of people find too extreme, but I'm a fan of the phrase “techno-fascism.” There's a way in which people in the tech world—so now we're talking about senior leaders, Thiel, Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, Pichai—I think they imagine a social world run on the terms that they run their companies. Because their companies are successful, they believe that if they ran the social world on those same terms, they too would be successful.
Now, what is success? This is where we get back to that body problem again. If success is seen in terms of your ability to circulate information and make money, that's the world of the cotton gin. That's the world of the cotton plantation. You're really successful if you don't have one of those bodies that has to be out in the field chopping the cotton. If you're Amazon, you're really successful if you're not working in the warehouse.
As a society, that's not what politics is. Politics is about the redistribution of resources across groups that are otherwise competing with each other. That's not what these companies are about. What they're about is the promise of smooth efficiency, just like Mussolini promised smooth efficiency. Mussolini said, “I'll get the trains to run on time, and then we'll have a society that'll be well-ordered and all these other problems that seem so messy and difficult will just drop away.” Well, they're not going to just drop away.
Jasmine Sun [52:21:00]
There's a bunch of stuff I want to dig in on there.
Fred Turner [52:24:00]
Good. Go for it.
Jasmine Sun [52:25:00]
One of the earlier things that you mentioned is the idea that consumer choice is the same thing as rights or political voice. I think that is something that people in tech feel very persuaded by: “If I want to gamble my money on sports, if I want to buy crypto, if I want to have an AI girlfriend who I talk to, why can't I? It must be good for me if they're choosing it. No one's forcing you to use Facebook. No one's forcing you to talk to Character.ai.” Why is that a flawed way of thinking?
Fred Turner [52:54:00]
I'm trying to keep the steam from coming out my ears too fast. The first thing that's broken in that way of thinking is the notion of how compulsion works. That way of thinking suggests that compulsion is something where you are forced, where someone stands over you and whips you until you do whatever the thing is. That's not the way compulsion works at all. Consider what we were talking about earlier, dating apps. No one requires you to use a dating app if you're at Stanford. You don't have to do it, but everybody's on them. You can be a data rebel, but that's making a real decision. Think about high school. Nobody forced you to wear the t-shirt that everybody else was wearing at that moment. Nobody forced you to shop at Forever 21 or wherever you shopped. I was in charge of my daughter's fashion choices and we spent a lot of time at Forever 21. Nobody forces you to do that, but the desire to conform, the desire to be recognized by your peers, the desire to be part of an organization that draws you in. Nobody forces me to use email, but if I don't use email, boy, it's going to be hard to do some of the things that I need to do and it's going to be hard to get stuff done.
There's a kind of structural compulsion that occurs. The variables within which you can choose are so constrained that what might feel like personal choice is not personal choice at all. Have you ever had that experience when you're at a party or with peers? It tends to happen when you're in your teens or early twenties maybe, where everybody's making individual choices, but they're all the same choices. Think about pop music. Why is it that everyone loves Chappell Roan right now? I like “Pink Pony Club” too, but…
Jasmine Sun [54:29:00]
What these tech folks would say is, “But that's just the free market. Chappell Roan is in fact a good artist, and so she deserves that.” Why do we blame Chappell Roan for satisfying consumer needs and creating art that everyone loves?
Fred Turner [54:47:00]
You see the loop here, right? The free market is the excuse. It's a market, people want stuff. Great. Okay, fine. Do they want it if it's all that they have on offer? Is that what they want? If it's all that they see, is that what they want?
When I was growing up in the sixties and seventies, the advertisements that you saw that featured women featured women mostly as homemakers or models, maybe a little bit in the office. They were always slim, they were always white, and by the time I got to be 25 or 30, I pretty much thought that was the definition of beauty. It took me another 10 or 15 years to unlearn that and to be able to literally see the beauty in all these different shapes around me and different ages, different colors. A generational turn that I just love is that the generation right after mine has come to really appreciate human variety in very new ways. It took a great deal of work because the free market was very busy slamming us with things that sold, but that were not, in fact, things that made us happy. We just didn't know to ask for anything else.
Jasmine Sun [55:59:00]
The other thing that I think about is what you want short term versus long term. There's a bunch of economic sociology folks who differentiate between preferences and meta-preferences. If you put the carrots and the fries in front of me, maybe right now I'm going to grab the fries, but in a meta sense, if I think about my life over the course of a month, would I prefer the version of myself that chose the fries every time? Probably not. I probably would've wished that I chose the carrots at least half the time.
Fred Turner [56:29:00]
I think that's exactly right. Let me go even a little bit further and just play with an idea. I'm not sure I believe this, but I think I do, so I'll try it. If you're in business, who are you serving? What are you serving? Are you serving the god of choice, which will be the god of profit for you? Which is a line that we see a lot around us today. Or maybe you're doing something else.
I had the pleasure some years ago, doing research, to read the Ford Foundation reports from 1951 and '52. Otherwise really boring stuff, but they had these corporate leaders, heads of automobile companies, seven years after the end of World War II, sitting there saying, “I do business for the good of America. I do business for my fellow man.” They're making 10 or 15 times what the guys on the line are making. Compare that to Bezos's salary and the difference now between Bezos's salary and the salary of the warehouse worker. If you are working to provide consumer choice in service of the quote “free market,” i.e., your shareholders, then you are not working in service of your fellow man, or at least not as much as you could be if you put actual service of the health of your fellow citizens first, and didn't hide behind the story that you tell yourself about the free market. You might do a different kind of business. American business used to do that, and we've lost track of that. That was something done at the height of industrial life in the fifties.
Jasmine Sun [57:51:00]
Another area where I want to play devil's advocate really quick, or to steelman the tech position, is you mentioned that politics is about the redistribution of resources between various groups. One point of view here would be, “Why are you thinking in such a constrained way about trade-offs? The world is positive-sum. We should expand the pie. We should increase the supply of all things. This is why NIMBYism is so evil. We actually just need to build way more housing rather than attempting to redistribute the same few single-family homes and the prices get higher. We should just be having wild abundance for everyone, and corporations can play a role in that. Governments can play a role in that, but why are you thinking in such a negative-sum way?”
Fred Turner [58:43:00]
I love that, and I don't think the two are opposed. I'm all in favor of wild abundance. I'm just aware that when there is pie, some people try to eat more than others do. One of the great things about the way that our government and the American government system was formed at the beginning was the system of checks and balances. It's not as though when you create great abundance, people just want to share it. That's naive. They want to take it, they want to control it, they want to build power around it. We live at a time at which most individuals, including some of the poorest, live lives that are infinitely better, infinitely better resourced than we might have in the Middle Ages or the 17th century. Yet even in that case, people at the top of the pyramid live entirely different lives than people farther down. I don't think abundance solves the problem of distribution. I'm all in favor of more abundance, more for everyone, absolutely. But you can't get there without focusing on inequality.
Jasmine Sun [59:45:00]
The last thing I was going to say was, when you were talking about these tech founders who essentially run dictatorships within their companies, thinking, “We're doing so well, the government seems really slow, we should export this model,” it made me think of the Yarvin faction of Silicon Valley.
Fred Turner [01:00:03]
A startup monarchy.
Jasmine Sun [01:00:04]
Right, a startup monarchy. He looks at companies and thinks this is the thing that we should bring into our governmental institutions.
Or another related area is Samo Burja wrote this big doc called “Great Founder Theory.” I don't know if you've seen that. In 2019 or so, it was getting passed around in Silicon Valley circles. It's a revision of great man theory as we all know it. It's saying, no, it's not about individual great men, it's about great founders. The difference between a great man and a great founder is a great founder creates an institution that outlasts him. Really the world is changed not by normal institutions, nor by individual great men, but by individual great men who create institutions like companies that can outlast them. They transform them in the way that Robert Moses did. I think this is an interesting encapsulation of the sentiment.
Fred Turner [01:01:01]
I love that idea. I just don't think it has to be a great man. My first interest was early American history, and in the American Revolution, we tell stories about George Washington and Paul Revere, and that's great. They were great men. But the person we don't talk about who matters tremendously is Martha Washington. She hosts the dinners at which the conversations take place, at which the teams get built that can actually make the change.
We mentioned earlier Tahrir Square and the Arab Spring. Analysts have argued that the Arab Spring failed not because people didn't communicate with one another, but because they hadn't built up the local, overtime networks of trust that made it possible for them to withstand the inevitable blowback. That's the work that we need to do, and no single man does that. But I agree that institutions are where the action is.
Jasmine Sun [01:01:59]
Yeah. Reading Zeynep's Twitter and Tear Gas in undergrad helped me make sense of what happened to the idealism of the internet. I realized that communities and social infrastructure is what matters. When you make everything frictionless, you lose all the—“network internalities” is what she calls them. You have to be printing out the posters and putting up the flyers and working through a spreadsheet and phone banking with all your friends. It's tedious work for sure, and maybe you want to automate it, but as soon as you automate it, you lose the trust that you've built.
Fred Turner [01:02:40]
If you've ever worked on a project in the middle of the night with your friends, you're going to be close with those people in a way that you're not going to be close with people you can't go through that with.
Jasmine Sun [01:02:51]
Yeah. Even making Kernel with Jacob and Hannah and the crew. We are closer friends because print is so goddamn annoying.
Fred Turner [01:03:04]
But it's wonderful, right?
Accelerationism and nihilism
Jasmine Sun [01:03:07]
It is. Now I want to talk about accelerationism. Accelerationism is making a comeback in the form of e/acc, which I'm sure you've seen floating around. But while e/acc is a Twitter meme that doesn't seem to have any serious thinking—it's more just, “We hate DEI, safety, deceleration”—there is a longer history to accelerationism, in both a left-wing form and right-wing form, from the Italian Futurists to the UK rave scene to Donna Haraway. Where would you point to as the origins of accelerationism?
Fred Turner [01:03:51]
Oh boy. I don't know that I can find a single origin. I tend to see accelerationism as a mindset that emerges as new, revolutionary technologies appear. There are moments when new technologies, like the steam engine, the cotton gin, and the electric light bulb appear. They seem to open out a vista onto a whole new way of living, a whole new way of being. What people close to the technologies want to do, whether they're electricians in the early 20th century working on electric lights or whether they're manufacturers with the cotton gin, is they want to accelerate the development and distribution of this new machinery, so as to bring about that new world ever more quickly. That new world looks better, looks more efficient, looks more profitable than the one they're in.
So I think accelerationism is a companion to technological change, and it rears its head at moments of intense technological change like the one we're inhabiting right now. I don't think we've inhabited an era of media technological change as radical as this one, maybe ever. The last two generations of human beings have seen things that several thousand years of human beings never saw, and I think we're really trying to figure it out. I think we've overestimated the power of the internet and underestimated the power of media in our everyday lives.
In that setting, there are people who try to grab onto those technologies and say, “We've got to push them forward.” You saw this in Italy, as you said, with trains. Speed and trains. The next thing you know, they're celebrating war, and the next thing you know after that, they've got Mussolini. Accelerationism is a companion fantasy as new technologies emerge. I think it's a deep confusion. I'll note one other thing, which is that accelerationism is a profitable discourse for people who make their living developing and selling technologies. If accelerating technology is the job, then the people who make the technology make the money.
Jasmine Sun [01:05:38]
The way you're describing it seems less like a coherent ideology and more like an attitude.
Fred Turner [01:05:48]
I think it's an attitude with varied beliefs, some from the left, some from the right, as you suggested earlier. Nick Srnicek has written a book that I actually thought was kind of interesting, where he critiqued left “folk politics,” which are about voice and about “let's get together and we'll sing kumbaya nicely and order will emerge and things will be good.” He said, “Stop all that. We live in a world of high tech and we need to develop high tech, maximize our ability to communicate with one another using these new information technologies, and order will emerge after that.” You see it in Balaji Srinivasan's The Network State book in a big way. It's time now to leave the land behind. The land is epiphenomenal. What we need to do is build community in these digital spaces, use the technology to accelerate human advancement.
Now, here's where it gets interesting. Human advancement toward what? Some people, like Kevin Kelly, who's a born-again Christian, will argue that we're getting toward the Godhead. Other people will say we're headed toward the singularity. Other people will say, “Well, we're just headed toward a better society.” But there's always a kind of “toward,” a sense of progress. The actual beliefs that get attached to that vary, but the sense of progress, the teleology, never does. I think that's a mistake.
By the way, I wouldn't include Donna Haraway in this. I would argue that she argues against teleology, and that's one of the good things about her. Now, she argues many things from many sides over the years, but I think when she talks about “staying with the trouble,” what she's talking about is the trouble of not having a teleology, of not having a story. We're not all going to heaven. There's not going to be a revolution. This fantasy that we can just press a button and leap forward into a better future is a fantasy. What we can do is work collaboratively with each other, and particularly with people who are different from and less empowered than ourselves, and make our local world better. If enough people do that, the whole thing gets better.
Jasmine Sun [01:07:53]
That makes sense, especially when you clarify accelerationism as being about this teleology, about accelerating towards some point.
In one of your essays about accelerationism, you use the phrase “nihilist rabbit hole,” and I seized onto it because nihilism is a word that comes to me when I think about the current mood in technology. A lot of the virtue-signaling people at this point have actually thrown away the global connectedness, diversity poster stuff. The tech companies are just like, “It doesn't matter. Trump's in office, we're going to suck up to him. Somebody else is in office, we're going to suck up to them.” It all feels very nihilistic to me.
Fred Turner [01:08:44]
The nihilism in accelerationism is all the way down. This gets back to the denial of the body. If you are alive in this world and you love yourself, you may have feelings about your body, but you're going to love your body. You're going to love your embodied self. You're going to love where you are now. You are not going to be straining to accelerate a departure from where you are now and an arrival somewhere else. You're going to learn how to be here now.
The opposite of nihilism is being fully present to oneself and to one's loved ones. Nihilism is shutting all that down, turning inward. It's a pseudo-erotic attachment to death and to destruction, to the kinds of power that go with that. Trump is all over this, of course. Cruelty is the nihilist's friend. Nothing matters, so I'm going to take the kinds of pleasures that are off the table when things do matter. When things matter, you don't hurt people. It's only after you've given up that you can commit the kinds of cruelty that we're seeing here. You've given up attachment.
People like Mussolini, who was an accelerationist, a child of the Italian Futurists in many ways, thought that we would just rocket forward into this era, but he did it in a way that was entirely nihilistic. It brought pain across the board. It was not engaged with the world that he inhabited in real time. It was about making the trains run faster to a destination yet to be determined. The destination that they reached in Germany was, of course, the camps. My hair is completely on fire with regard to our political situation at the moment. I think it's only our president's clumsiness so far that's saving us from a more rapid delivery to authoritarianism. When you see masked troops disappearing American citizens on the streets, you're really close to some really ugly stuff that we thought would never happen again. I think accelerationism takes us down that road. Nihilism is permission to be cruel.
Jasmine Sun [01:10:48]
The attitude that I see in Silicon Valley these days from the tech-right faction is like, “Before, we said we weren't going to be evil and we were going to save the world. Then some people said that we were doing it wrong or that we were making mistakes. So now we will throw away all of our pretense of saving the world. Yes, we are just trying to make a lot of money and build a lot of technology, and yes, we're going to run over a bunch of people in the process.” I feel like that's the attitude now: Morality and perfection are unattainable, so who cares? We're not trying anymore.
Fred Turner [01:11:22]
It's like Trump's embrace of the fossil fuel industry. We all know that we have to get away from that. We have to decarbonize or the planet will fry. But if we turn toward fossil fuels and embrace them as Trump has done, we can have that kind of demonic pleasure. It's like the Dr. Strangelove pleasure, where the general hops on the bomb as it goes down and rides it all the way down to Russia, the nuclear bomb, like a cowboy, “whoopee!” That pleasure of total submission, total submission to the evil, to the bad. Religious writers used to know about this. You know who the best-looking character in Paradise Lost is? Satan. Satan comes down from heaven and boy, is he spectacular.
What I see right now in Silicon Valley is a fascination with the incredible powers of the technologies we're developing, the incredible amounts of money flowing through them. The things that you can do when you have that kind of money, you are as a god.
Jasmine Sun [01:12:28]
It's an adrenaline high.
I think there's also this interesting generational thing going on. Gen Z is a relatively nihilistic generation. There's this “get my bag” culture, which is like, everything's a scam anyway. We all live in a post-truth society. I think about how Gen Zs have never voted in an election that didn't have Trump in it. That's the primary way you understand politics: as grift and scam. As a result, you have a culture of, “Well, if everyone else is just grifting and scamming, I better get my own bag.”
I think a lot about media and journalism. YouTubers are taking money from shady sources, not disclosing them. Everything is an ad that they're not going to disclose as an ad. Or even, if you've seen the Cluely startup stuff that's going on on Twitter, there's basically this startup started by this 20-year-old. He got kicked out of Columbia because he made an app to help people cheat on their coding interviews. His new startup is called “Cluely: Cheat on Everything.” They use these purposely very inflammatory ads and marketing style that's very much pro-cheating. “Everything is a scam, coding interviews are a scam, dating is a scam, so we're just going to build AI that tells you the answers for any scenario you might be in.” They're purposely very provocative, very inflammatory. It's all very young, 20-year-old influencers and tech guys. It's distasteful, but it exemplifies the Gen Z “get my bag” culture of “Our president's been a scammer for the last 10 years, so if you're going to be the moral and virtuous one, you're just going to lose.”
Fred Turner [01:14:14]
That is so fascinating and so depressing. I'm thinking of the men who believe that the way that you date is to manipulate people. What is that called? Gaming?
Jasmine Sun [01:14:29]
There's The Game and pickup artists and r/TheRedPill, and they're all related.
Fred Turner [01:14:33]
They're all related, and they all have in common the thing that you just flagged, which is that everybody's grifting, so I've got to get my grift on. Here's my game, here's my hustle. What disappears there is the thing that we were talking about earlier, the possibility of true intimacy. If you're a pickup artist, you're going to have a lot of trouble falling in love. And someone's going to have a lot of trouble loving you because you're not there. You're doing the pickup artist thing. That pattern shows up in lots of other places.
I'm sorry to hear about Cluely. It reminds me, actually, of Weimar Germany in the late twenties, early thirties, which was a period when—we romanticize it with Sally Bowles—everybody was hustling. There wasn't quite enough money, leadership was bad, everybody was hustling.
Jasmine Sun [01:15:26]
Maybe the thing that needs to happen is a reframing of what winning is. In a certain sense, it’s true that if you grift, you will win. You might get richer than your friends. If you use pickup artist tactics, you might, in the short term, get a few women to sleep with you. But is that really winning? Are you really happy? Are you really going to be fulfilled? To me, the answer is no. A lot of the men who get really rich in Silicon Valley seem to live quite lonely and depressing lives. Not all of them, but a lot. Probably the more vice you engage in, the more depressing your life is. I don't think Elon Musk is a happy guy. But it requires people to reframe what winning is and what reward they are seeking.
Fred Turner [01:16:10]
I love this. I would love to see you write an essay called, “Is That Really Winning?” Because I think that's exactly right.
One of the challenges that we have in our time too is that alternative systems for describing winning have faded out. Religion is one of them. Religion's making a big comeback, but unfortunately, it's very conservative religion. It's conservative Catholicism, it's Southern Baptism. But I would like to see systems of meaning that are not necessarily connected to the pursuit of profit, the acceleration of technological development, and the gaming of one another. In lieu of that, you have to have people in your life who can model other ways of being. If you're only on the internet and your parents are out at their jobs 24 hours a day, you're not going to get that. You have to have people show you what it means to be a good person.
Jasmine Sun [01:16:53]
The religion thing gets at the Christopher Lasch stuff a little bit. I read The Culture of Narcissism a few years ago, and it was very interesting. It totally makes sense why Lasch is having a revival. A lot of the critiques of therapy culture and individualism feel very prescient. But the thing that annoyed me is that he has this weird nostalgia for religious authority that I think is...
Fred Turner [01:17:19]
It's not weird, he has a deep…
Jasmine Sun [01:17:21]
Okay, yeah, a pretty aggressive nostalgia for religious authority. That's why you see this conservative Catholic revival going on, and I don't like that as a solution to modern malaise.
Fred Turner [01:17:34]
I think Lasch offered a fabulous diagnosis and the wrong cure. The part of Lasch that I try to hang on to in his private life was that he was a very serious family guy. Every year at Christmas, he would make a photo album for the family of the things the family had done that year. It's goofy, it's super traditional, it's the kind of thing that now you might find in a more religious family than a secular one, but it's really sweet. He's really working at holding the institution of his affections together. That I really value. The longing for a hierarchy of Catholic priests, men in dresses... yeah, not loving that part as much.
Jasmine Sun [01:18:24]
Are there technologies that you see as facilitating democracy or community in a serious way?
Fred Turner [01:18:31]
The first and foremost of those is print. Print is enormously powerful. Print on paper. Print on paper travels. Bruno Latour used to call it an “immutable mobile.” It doesn't change, it isn't easy to change. You can argue over it, you can hand it to one another, you can pass it forward. It's much harder to game. You can't apply an AI to it in real time. When I go to Germany, I get off the plane in Berlin and there's always a newspaper stand. Enormously powerful. So print is an enormously powerful technology. You can see that books have persisted despite all the efforts to blast us with Kindles and Nooks and all the things that we've lasted with. Books persist, and I think that's a hugely pro-democratic technology.
Jasmine Sun [01:19:23]
Do you think it is about the immutability? Is it the Walter Ong thing of, you can sit with it individually and reason? What is special about print?
Fred Turner [01:19:35]
The first thing is that it's there for you to go away from and come back to. Each time I come back to the internet, it's like coming back to a river. Yeah, there's water, but it's all different. There's nothing that's ever the same there. A book can travel through time to you unchanged. I'll read Greek philosophy. It's traveled 2,000 years to me in print and is available to me. Whereas if I go looking for something that maybe somebody wrote on the internet 10 years ago, it's gone unless the Wayback Machine saved it. So I think traveling through time is one thing.
I think another thing is that books, to survive, they get selected. Not all the great books survive through time and some really bad books do survive, okay? But over time, this is the magic of the truly free marketplace. Over time, institutions gather around books. Christianity is all about this one book called The Bible. You can build entire institutions around texts in a way that's hard otherwise. Farming becomes possible because we know how to do bills of sale, we know how to keep track of things. Reading and writing, I would argue, are the essential technologies of democracy.
Another piece that I think is incredibly important, but isn't a technology, is the practice of conversation, and particularly conversation across difference. The technology for that would be a kind of infrastructural technology. Whether you're religious or not, churches have historically been places where people with very different political views could come together and worship. The worship was in this space not called politics, it was called church. Then in the coffee hour you could talk to people who are quite different than yourself. I think those kinds of spaces where that happens are incredibly important. I fish, I paddle a canoe. I have a much more working-class life up in Maine than I do in California, and here I'm able, because I'm fishing with people and canoeing, to have conversations about politics that are very difficult and that I couldn't have in other settings. I think that practice of third-place conversations with people who are different than yourself is critical, and institutions that make it necessary for you to encounter, bump into, and engage with people who are not like you are key.
Fred’s AI skepticism
Jasmine Sun [01:21:44]
I imagine then, that you are quite skeptical of AI. AI is profoundly individualizing. It allows personalized media, personalized conversation with just you and the computer. At least with social media, there's some semblance of encountering other humans. With AI, you don't need to do that at all. In fact, you can have infinite conversations with avatars and agents with their own personalities, and not a single one of them has a body in the real world. Two people can encounter a piece of media that's personalized just for them. How are you thinking about AI?
Fred Turner [01:22:27]
I can't tell if I'm just in denial, but I've lived through now several earlier rounds of incredible tech enthusiasm and claims that the world was about to end. One of these came in the early sixties with the rise of automation, and people were just terrified that automating labor would result in generations of unemployed people. Whole schools of thought were devoted to what people do once they don't have to work anymore. Well, people found things to do. I went through the virtual community craze of the 1990s when everything was going to be commons-based peer production and we were not going to need factories anymore. Now here we are with AI, and AI is going to replace this, that, and the other. It's going to take our jobs.
My own take is that AI is a whole lot less important than people think it is. I'll hold that view until it becomes a lot more effective than it is. I use AI on a regular basis, but I use it for tasks that it's well suited to. An AI that's worked on a very large language model has imbibed a kind of middle mind. So when I give it my work and say, “Read this back to me in the middle mind,” it produces my work as it would for Time magazine, for an eighth-grade reader. It's great. I love it. It's very useful. But would I use AI to do real historical digging, to interpret a text from the past? No, not at all.
Nor am I especially worried about the people who talk too much to AI. I think there are lots of other things you could talk to. You can talk to your search engine, you can talk to your dolls, you can talk to all kinds of things. I'm just not very worried about it.
Jasmine Sun [01:24:12]
Oh, interesting. So you don't think it's as significant or as radical of a new media form as say, the internet.
Fred Turner [01:24:18]
Correct. I think it's an extension of search, some degree of social media. In the ways that you just described it, it's yet another de-skilling, where the person you're talking to doesn't even have to be there anymore. You can just have a bot.
But I don't know, I just don't think AI is our biggest worry right now. I'm very worried about the future of democracy. I'm very worried about corporate leaders who are trying to take advantage of the authoritarian in office to promote technologies that will make them a great deal of money. One of the ways that you do that is you stir up a great deal of attention, anxious attention as well as benevolent attention, for the technologies that you're developing. That's one of the things I see happening around AI. There's a wonderful article written in the 1990s by a scholar of technology named Rob Kling and his partner in crime, Susan Iacono, called “Computerization Movements.” It's about when a new technology emerges and a movement forms around it to assert its importance. It may not even be to promote it, it may be to critique it, but it asserts its importance. It puts it at the center of the discussion. I don't actually think AI should be at the center of our discussion right now. I think military policy, economic policy, distribution of resources, social problems first—that's where our attention should be.
Jasmine Sun [01:25:32]
And you think that corporate leaders are moving AI into the center of political discussion to give themselves more power?
Fred Turner [01:25:40]
Yeah. The people that I see moving it into the center of discussion are people in AI and cognate industries. I don't see the manufacturers of shoes screaming about AI. I see them screaming about tariffs and labor in China. So I do think that's the case. They may fully believe that AI is the—
Jasmine Sun [01:26:00]
I do think they believe it, but it is a self-serving belief, as you say, and these things are hard to disentangle.
Fred Turner [01:26:06]
Oh, very hard to disentangle. That's one of the definitions of ideology, is that it's something that you believe. It's not just a belief, it's a system of beliefs that you inhabit.
I went to an event at Stanford, which I found completely fascinating, in which two people who will go unnamed got up and spoke. One was a very famous political scientist, a former government official, and the other was arguably one of the most eminent people working in AI today. When they were talking about Europe, the first one says, “They regulate,” and the second one says, “We innovate.” That's ideology in action. Regulation is social innovation. It's an attempt to defend the parts of life that AI doesn't speak to.
So yeah, I think there's a big hustle underway. I'm not especially taken by the machines. I don't think they're actually as interesting or as effective as their makers seem to say they are. I think that they are really drawing the attention of many good people away from problems that are more pressing.
Jasmine Sun [01:26:55]
One of the things that I do worry about with AI is that AI costs so much money, and they've poured in so much money, and it's also a technology that's very publicly unpopular. If you look at all the public opinion polls, people don't like AI. Most Americans are worried about it, fearful of it, do not want AI in their workplaces dealing with their stuff, whatever.
One part I see, which could be conspiratorial of me, is the reason that AI gets played up so much in the US-China context. The party line across the labs right now is: “We need to accelerate AI because China, because we have to have democratic AI beat authoritarian AI, and AI is the deciding factor in whether the US or China wins.” I feel like that's their saving grace in hoping to not be regulated. If it were left up to non-military concerns, I think that AI would absolutely be regulated because Big Tech is unpopular in a bipartisan and public opinion way. The only way the labs can persuade Democrats and Republicans not to regulate AI more aggressively is to say, “We are going to go extinct because something, something, China war.”
Fred Turner [01:28:10]
It's very concerning. What you're flagging here is something that manufacturers of all devices do as they come online. They reach to attach their devices to already existing stories that have purchase in institutions that they need to have access to. The story that we have to defend America against China, that's as old as Christmas in the United States, right? Communism bad. So Senator Smith, who actually doesn't know anything from a large language model, hears, “Oh, you're going to help us defend against communism? Of course, we'll give you money.” The job of people like Sam Altman is precisely to attach themselves to those kinds of stories.
Jasmine Sun [01:28:51]
Yeah. Especially something that's so totalizing, has so much bipartisan support. I really have a lot of trouble with x-risk discourse because as soon as you make something existential, you can outweigh everything else. You can say, “Well, when we have a prospect of nuclear war, who cares about redistribution, social policy, blah, blah, blah, because obviously nuclear war would be so much worse.” It is this trump card that you can use. Then I'm like, “You think that authoritarian AI can only be built by the CCP?” A lot of people can create authoritarian AI in this world.
Fred Turner [01:29:22]
A former student of mine, Daniel Akselrad, did a wonderful study early in his time at Stanford of not AI, but digital military interfaces in the battlefield. One of the things that they did was they accelerated the decision-making time so quickly that a soldier found himself firing before they had fully thought out the decision to fire. That has deadly consequences in every direction.
You can see this other dynamic in the military is that, famously, generals compete with each other by virtue of controlling technologies. “Oh, I have a hundred tanks, I have a hundred missiles. I'm so important.” Alright, well once you have a hundred tanks and a hundred missiles, you have to use them. There's a way in which the technology demands to be used, and that scares the heck out of me.
Teaching the humanities in 2025
Jasmine Sun [03:00:06]
I'm curious to turn to more consumer AI stuff. You are a humanities professor at a moment that a lot of people think that the humanities is in crisis, partly because of AI, partly because of video, partly because higher education is in crisis. What is it like being a humanities professor right now?
Fred Turner [03:00:27]
It's a really interesting business. I feel endlessly lucky to be one, and I feel especially lucky to be one at Stanford. About 30% of my students are computer science majors, and I find them fascinating to talk to. I think that one of the opportunities that we have at Stanford in particular is to build a humanities that takes technology seriously and engages with it directly. The kind of work that you do would be right down the middle for the kind of humanities that I think we need now. To get there, we need to know our history. We need to know who Machiavelli was, we need to know who John Milton was. Then we can ask the kind of questions that are hard to ask if you only see those systems and you don't know the history.
I've been part of the Human-Centered AI project at Stanford for a while, and my mission there is to expand the definition of “human” beyond “user.” In the tech world, people talk about humans all the time, but almost invariably, they mean “user,” and many of the people who are doing that talking have not thought hard about what it means to be human in the 18th century, the 19th century. I was completely smitten by Balaji's The Network State, not by the book as a whole, but by his call for history. That book opens with a call for history. It says, “Look, if you're going to build a state, you have to know what states have been and you have to know what people have been. We're going to use new technologies, but we have to do it in a way that's in accord with humanity's deepest aspirations.” The humanities are what keep track of those aspirations. So I feel like it's an enormously valuable thing to be doing at this particular moment.
Now, at Stanford, the number of humanities majors is much lower than the number of engineering and science majors. Fair enough. But I'll tell you, the humanities majors that we have are some of the best minds I've ever seen. I teach in American Studies as well as Communication. Oh my gosh, the undergraduates there. I have one who wrote an honors thesis that, you know, were she a little older, I would've sent it to my magazine editor and said, “Just do this.” The stuff I see is amazing. So I think the humanities have a future.
I do think humanists need to be able to speak from their knowledge of, say, 15th-century Arabic script to a present that is suffused with Python. You have to be able to make those jumps, and that's what a good humanist has to do now. But I think we can do that.
Jasmine Sun [01:32:41]
What are some of the ways that you do that—that you feel are resonating with your computer science students?
Fred Turner [01:32:50]
My main vehicle is this course I teach called The Rise of Digital Culture. It's an undergraduate course named for mostly juniors and seniors. About 30% of the students who take it are computer science majors. It starts with cybernetics in the late forties and goes to the rise of Facebook. It's a study of how new technologies, new business models, and new ideas of what a good society is co-evolve. I work through several periods: the Cold War period, the virtual community period of the nineties, and then the social media period closer to the present.
As we move through those moments, the students see that what they know now could have been otherwise and was for a while. They also start to see how decisions that people made for the most benevolent reasons could have gone wrong. You see the cyberneticists of the forties and fifties believing that information systems are the key to democratic leveling that will prevent us from ever having to face fascism again. But by the end of the course, you're looking at Mark Zuckerberg and his stock structure and Facebook—the very same technologies the cyberneticists celebrated—and you're seeing the emergence of an authoritarian corporate leader and an authoritarian public life. I think it blows their minds.
For them, particularly technology students, it helps them recognize that they're social actors. They're not just builders of machines or systems, but they're social actors in every sense of the word, and they're really important that way. I think that's valuable, and I just love it.
Jasmine Sun [01:34:25]
Do you have to adapt the way that you do grading and assignments because of LLMs?
Fred Turner [01:34:30]
I've been teaching less than usual lately because I've been chairing our department. The courses I've taught are seminar-based, and so LLMs don't really fit there.
This coming year, I'll be teaching two very large courses, and the first thing we're going to do in Communication 1: Media, Culture, and Society, on day one, is we're going to have an hour-long discussion about how we should use LLMs, because they're just too easy to use. When I first started teaching with LLMs, I tried to prohibit them. One of my students said to me, “Professor Turner, you sound just like my professors used to sound when they talked about Wikipedia.” I'm like, “Yeah, actually, you're right. Nuts.” And AI is about as good as Wikipedia. It's about 70% good. So we have to find a way to work with it, not against it. I'm not sure what that way is yet.
The one thing I'm most concerned about is I don't want to de-skill our students. One of the things we teach very powerfully is writing. We make you really own your words and hone your words, hone your thinking through writing and rewriting. If you're using an LLM to get through that, you're going to leave without the skillset that I'm trying to build. Honestly, that's the most valuable thing I give you in my class. I give you the attention of someone who's spent his whole life writing to help you find language for the things you care most about and to say those things in the world. If you're letting the LLM stand in for you at that moment, you'll be a de-skilled person, and that will hurt you later in life. I can't prevent it, but I hope they don't do it.
Jasmine Sun [01:36:02]
I remember talking to a software engineer friend about why software engineers have really embraced LLMs. They use coding assistants all the time, most of them, and there are very few qualms about it. Most feel like it makes them better engineers, not worse. One difference is that in writing, you figure out what you want to say while you're trying to say it. You don't already know what you want. Whereas software engineers, they're usually handed a spec. They already know exactly what the end picture is, and they just need to produce that. If the LLM helps you do it faster or helps you get through some bug or some block, sure.
Whereas with writing, oftentimes I have an idea that I think is good, and then I start researching and writing, and I realize halfway through that my whole thesis is bunk and doesn't make any sense and there's a bunch of logical holes. Then I have to redo everything and I end up writing a different essay than what I planned. Whereas the LLM, if I were to use that, would've just spun the facts to fit the thing that I thought I was going to write. I don't know what I'm writing until I finish writing.
Fred Turner [01:37:05]
That's absolutely right. It's a lot like dating apps. Dating apps force you to take your very individual person and conform it to a series of norms so that you are recognizable to other people.
An LLM, when you deploy it in your writing, makes my writing sound like an eighth grader's. All my sentences suddenly have three clauses. It's this awful five-paragraph essay stuff. I hope that students will see the difference in quality between what the LLM gives them and what they can work toward if they do it themselves. I'm not sure everyone will.
Jasmine Sun [01:37:52]
I mean, college students are always looking for shortcuts.
Fred Turner [01:37:55]
I appreciate that. But I give this talk that I think my students probably ignore, but I try to give them a lesson from deep middle age. I'm 64, I'm looking back through time. I see you in your 20s, you're in my class. I'm here to tell you there are very few parts of your life where you're going to have three or four years of world-class experts focused on your development to help you do that. I know you got a lot of stuff going on. I know you got parties, I know you got the fencing team, but this is something extraordinary. Just because it came easily to you, more or less—you had to take a few tests, work hard from school—doesn't mean it's not an incredible gift. So use it. That's what I say to my students now. I don't know if they believe me.
I also tell them grades don't matter very much. Which is very true, but they don't believe that.
Jasmine Sun [01:38:43]
I know, they have to unlearn it. It's because Stanford selects for all the kids who were really good at thinking that grades mattered, and having to unlearn that is very hard for people.
The other thing that I was thinking about is seminars and Oxford-style tutorials. I studied abroad at Oxford when I was at Stanford, and I loved that course. I was at the Internet Institute, I was studying online social networks with Dr. Bernie Hogan; and he was great, but it was scary at first because American universities aren't set up to get grilled one-on-one for an hour every week. It's not just, “write an essay.” We didn't have good LLMs, but if I had it write the essay, that hour would've been absolutely mortifying because I couldn't explain a single decision. So the one hope that I have is the return of both tutorials in the United States, but also small seminar-based discussion classes, as you mentioned. By the end of undergrad, I was only taking seminars anyway because that's what I preferred.
Fred Turner [01:39:46]
It's the way to go. One of the horrors of my life at Stanford has been that it wasn't until about 18 years in that I taught a class smaller than 50 at the undergraduate level.
Jasmine Sun [01:39:57]
My favorite classes, the ones that I remember the most, were classes of like 10 people. You really get to know everyone and to argue your ideas through, and you feel like you actually know the professor. It's a conversation thing that you mentioned, and you can't fake it. You have to be there, you have to be responding. It's very dynamic.
Fred Turner [01:40:19]
I think you just actually laid out a political principle. The big class principle is, in some ways, like the internet or like broadcast TV. And the small class principle is where you can know one another in your complexity and test yourself and find out what you believe and what you think as you engage others, while at the same time building the unity that is the seminar. That's a political process that I would love to see elsewhere. Teachers can corrupt it. I've seen teachers be cruel and give bad grades and they can just mess it up. But if they're reasonably benevolent and thoughtful and the students are too, the community that you build in a seminar is an amazing thing.
Jasmine Sun [01:41:00]
That's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. I think you're onto something there.
Fred Turner [01:41:09]
Notice how it came about too. It only came about because the two of us were in conversation. I could never have thought that up on my own. This is what Brian Eno, the musician, talks about as “scenius,” not genius. When you have a scene, when you have multiple people collaborating, there's a genius that can emerge out of that group that could never have emerged out of any one mind.
Jasmine Sun [01:41:33]
That's the thing about this podcast. I've only started really podcasting six months ago, and I've been trying to think about what makes good guests. One of the principles that I landed on after trial-and-erroring a bunch is that sometimes you get a guest who just wants to talk their book the whole time. They're not really there to have a conversation. They're there to summarize the things that they wrote about, but they won't really engage you on anything else. I only want to do a podcast where I feel it feels like both people are participating and it feels like both of us will come out with at least one thought that we wouldn't have reached just by reading each other's books.
Fred Turner [01:42:13]
Absolutely, and I'll say that it goes exactly the same for me. I turn down most podcasts precisely because they don't have that element, because they seem to be asking me to report on a book, and I want to have exactly this kind of conversation.
Jasmine Sun [01:42:30]
Well, thanks so much. This is really lovely.
Fred Turner [01:42:33]
My pleasure. You keep doing what you're doing. I'm so happy to be able to talk with you and you're one of the people I learn from, so I feel very lucky.
Jasmine Sun [01:42:41]
No, same to you. The last question that I always ask folks is what research rabbit hole you're currently going down. I'd love it if you could give us a quick preview of what your new book is about that you're working on.
Fred Turner [01:42:58]
Sure. I'm working on a book that right at the moment is titled City of Desire, and it's about the New York art world in the seventies and eighties and how in that world, a media technology revolution that we've forgotten—the rise of cable television, of video cassette recorders, the Sony Walkman—collided with two social movements, feminism and gay rights. As those things collided and as artists worked at the face of that collision, I argue they brought us the very beginnings of what we now call identity politics. That's what I'm doing. I'm studying the art world from the mid-seventies to the early nineties, '75 to '93.
Jasmine Sun [01:43:37]
When's the book going to come out?
Fred Turner [01:43:39]
I think about two years. All of my books take five years, more or less, start to finish and then a year to publish. So I think we'll see the book on the shelves in about two years. That's my hope.
Jasmine Sun [01:43:58]
Well, I'm super excited to read it. That's a very fun period of New York art history.
Fred Turner [01:44:05]
It's a wild time.
Jasmine Sun [01:44:07]
Thank you so much, Fred. This was so fun. I learned a lot from you.
Fred Turner [01:44:13]
Same way, Jasmine, thank you very much. You have a great evening.
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