Henry Farrell

@henryfarrell

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Since it looks as though there aren't more immediate questions, and since I've got a bunch of essays to grade, I am signing off. Thank you all for the conversation!

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I'm not a regulatory policy person, so I am not good on specifics. But what I will say is that I'm worried by a world in which there are some people with sufficient grasp on infrastructures that democratically elected governments have to defer to them. I don't think that is healthy. While I disagree with people like Vitalik on plenty (while enormously valuing what he is looking to do), one of the places where I think we warmly agree is that one doesn't want that domination of infrastructure either by individuals or unaccountable governments.

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the Jervis book that I think is the most relevant today is his System Effects. I wrote a piece last week suggesting that it raises the core questions that US national security needs to address, even if it doesn't have the answers - https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/small-yard-high-fence-these-four For more on what Jervis means for my particular way of thinking (academic essay - but I think it is reasonably readable), see here https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/h4fess6e7jdmg46iwe7uz/System-Effects-and-Weaponized-Interdependence.pdf?rlkey=ptkug78hxad9s4hcrzdatiwbl&dl=0

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So the Afghan story is more complex than recognized by people - what the US did more or less was to sequester the funds to protect them from private litigants (there is a whole other book to be written on how private litigation against states over terrorism has reshaped politics - I am not the person to write it though). And the Russian central bank reserves question is ongoing. It is clear that the EU, where most of the funds are held, is more nervous than the US about doing more than just denying Russia access to them, which is what it is doing at the moment. We have not seen huge shifts as you say, and most of what we have seen is movement from USD to other Western currencies. I think that there is an "only game in town" aspect to this - https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8139947-the-finest-line-of-poetry-ever-uttered-in-the-history - also, so long as USDs are central to transactions, central banks are going to need 'em.

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I'd really recommend Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber's book, The Enigma of Reason (which is where I steal most of my related ideas from ) and the late Gerald Gaus's The Open Society and Its Complexities, which sets out a cog-psych literate understanding of classical liberalism that I think is very sharp even while I disagree with lots!

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So I think that the fragmentation and the efforts to reclaim sovereignty go hand-in-hand. It is no longer possible to do what the US did for a while, and exercise network power without sharp objections. So clearly, China is looking to establish its own networks in finance and infotech etc. But the more that one state controls a particular infrastructure, the less others are going to want to use it. I would guess we will see sharp fragmentation of finance, some of compute (as US strikes deals with UAE/Saudi etc using access to high power chips) and continued trade in other, less vexed areas with irregular disruptions. But if Trump wins in a couple of weeks it will all be much less predictable.

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It's an interesting place to be! I have two affiliations - the other is SNF Agora, which is concerned with democracy, both in theory and practice. SAIS is much more policy oriented. Going back and forward between the two allows me to be two very different kinds of academic at once, which is fun.

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We are all subject to what cognitive psychologists call the "fundamental attribution" problem and more specifically the belief that the actions of people we don't like are malignly motivated and intended to hurt us. And that we are uniquely rational, but our adversaries are irrational idiots, where they are not positively wicked. We all need to realize that this is part and parcel of our cognitive architecture, and not, usually, the architecture of the world we live in. The essay I wrote tries to take a different approach - it does not attack Marc et al. as wicked or stupid, but instead suggests that their thinking and action points in directions that go contrary to their expressed philosophy. I may not have done this well! - it is trying to model other people's thinking. But I believe that doing that will get us a lot further than dismissing the other side as gaslighters, idiots, or worse, which is the unfortunate habit that we revert to without constant vigilance.

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For better or worse, this pain and mess is unavoidable. If you want to live in a free and open society, you have no choice but to endure it. When Silicon Valley thinkers fantasize about the exit door, it’s hard to avoid the impression that they would dearly prefer not to have to put up with disagreement. That is an unsurprising human reaction. None of us love being contradicted, and we are all individually incapable of seeing the huge flaws and mistakes in our views of the world."

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As the conclusion of the piece states, "the open society is inevitably vexing. It is full of people who disagree with you, who have different aspirations and understandings of how to reach them, who will criticize you, annoy you, and make you generally unhappy. You can respond by pointing out the multitudinous ways in which they are wrong, and seem to be readily taken in by obviously ludicrous beliefs. They can respond by pointing out your own particular stupidities and flaws, almost certainly with equal justice.

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My response to Marc would be "physician, heal thyself!" I think that there is plenty that is wrong with mainstream media, and many very stupid things that are published. But frankly, I think that Marc needs to get over it, and to recognize that everyone is prone to availability cascades and obsession with the "current thing," including him. As, for that matter, am I. And that we are all over inclined to treat as malice or base irrationality what is rational, even reasonable, to believe, if you start from a different place.

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Also - the kind of reduced form reasoning. I would really recommend Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine as an alternative way of thinking about tech; also Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy's recent book, The Ordinal Society. Also Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon's Rewilding the Internet - but she's my sister so I'm biased - https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

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It's an interesting question that I haven't thought about properly. My off-the-cuff reaction would be that there may be some _specific_ ethical pathologies associated with the blitzscaling mentality, but I don't know if they are specifically better or worse than the pathologies associated with other profit models, or predatory politics. I think what is more visibly different is the focus on optimization as a means to get things done (which is incredibly powerful - but has sharp limits in its appreciation of politics) and the blurring together of connectivity and community that e.g. Andrew Bosworth used to defend Facebook's approach - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/growth-at-any-cost-top-facebook-executive-defended-data

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I wrote a piece today about how some of the political debates right now remind me of what Ireland looked like in the 1950s - https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/preventing-the-future. But more generally, I buy into Cosma Shalizi's argument that we are still in the throes of the Long Industrial Revolution, and that soi-disant "AI" is an aftershock of the extension of markets and bureaucracy - http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html . Cosma and I have a riff on that argument here - https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2023/06/21/artificial-intelligence-is-a-familiar-looking-monster-say-henry-farrell-and-cosma-shalizi

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I wandered into the field by accident. I started in comparative politics, which is a very different way of looking at the world, but ended up co-authoring a piece for a good international affairs journal, which helped me get my first job. That involved teaching a Ph.D. level seminar to the graduate students, which was a bit of a stretch, since I had never actually taken a Ph.D. level course in international politics in my life. I've been bluffing my way through ever since ... More seriously, I do international politics, but in a slightly weird way. If you asked me how I would identify, I would say as someone who studies political economy, institutions, and technology. Some of that work is international; some very far afield from that.

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I think of this as voice in the _very_ limited sense that money talks - it is a pretty explicit threat that if you take positions we don't like, you will find huge amounts of money being spent to defeat you. Less persuasion than palm-greasing and panic-mongering. You could see it as buying into the existing political system (in a literal sense) but classical liberals like e.g. Adam Smith were highly skeptical of the role of such power mongering (also more recently the late Mancur Olson, whose books I warmly recommend)

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The very short version is that it is going to get messier and more complicated, and that politicians' limited understanding of it is liable to lead to arms races between great powers. The _much_ longer version is https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/small-yard-high-fence-these-four

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That inclines them to strike alliances with people who are similarly not interested in constraint and the rule of law, which I think is a fundamental political error. But I also think there is a lot to e.g. the Vitalik Buterin stance (which Vitalik laid out after I had written my essay) in favor of a more nuanced approach to politics ihttps://vitalik.eth.limo/general/2024/07/17/procrypto.html

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First - I think that there is a lot of variation in SV, and among right leaning people in SV. But I also think, which is the burden of the essay, that there are a bunch of influential people who do not recognize that restraint and some role for the state are part of classical liberalism.

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Hi - happy to kick off. I'm Henry. My new book with Abe Newman, which I'm obliged to promote at every opportunity is Underground Empire - https://amzn.to/3PbIyqX . The New York Times had a brief description last Sunday. "From Internet infrastructure to the Swift bank-messaging system, Farrell and Newman write, the United States has "slowly but surely" turned economic and technological networks into "tools of domination." My recent essay on Silicon Valley culture is here - https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/08/no-exit-opportunities-business-models-and-political-thought-in-silicon-valley/ . And my Substack is at https://www.programmablemutter.com/

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