The Conversation

From The Conversation's inception, geoengineering—the deliberate manipulation of the climate through technology—has been high on my list of subjects to include in the series. To address the issue, I spoke with David Keith, a Harvard professor with a joint appointment in Applied Physics and Public Policy. David has spent the better part of two decades researching climate science and geoengineering, was named a Hero of the Environment by TIME in 2009, and is also the President of Carbon Engineering, a startup dedicated to reducing atmospheric CO2. He is also publicly visible, having testified before the US Congress, spoken at TED, and appeared on numerous television and radio programs in an effort to spark a broader conversation about geoengineering. During these appearances, David steps refreshingly beyond science and into the thorny moral and philosophical questions raised by geoengineering—and that is exactly why I invited him to join The Conversation.

David's conversation starts with a tiny parcel of information about geoengineering but, within minutes, we're into questions of value. If you've been listening to The Conversation for a while this will feel like we skipped over the usual foundation of information I try to build at the beginning of each episode, so you may actually want to skim the Wikipedia link up top.

That out of the way, we return to the anthropocentrism/biocentrism theme that characterized many earlier episodes from John Zerzan to Robert Zubrin. Echoing Carolyn Raffensperger, utilitarian philosophy finds itself in the line of fire again as David argues that utilitarianism is insufficient to justify meaningful environmental preservation. At one point, Wes Jackson (explicitly) and Douglas Rushkoff (implicitly) come up in conversation as we discuss what is knowable and, conflating Jackson and Zerzan, David smacks down Zerzan's neoprimitivism. This list could stretch for pages, but let's conclude here with a connection between David and John Fife, both of whom see the obsolescence of the nation state, though for very different reasons.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Ethan Zuckerman is the Director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, a former fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center, and co-founder of Global Voices, a hub of international news written by bloggers. We spoke about the need for global awareness, the relationship between information and empathy, and the challenge homophily presents to thinking about the public good (homophily is the fancy way of saying "birds of a feather flock together"). This conversation takes us through the the media's power to set the public agenda, three current media paradigms, and Ethan's suggestion for a new, forth paradigm based on the serendipitous discovery of information about the broader world.  And that's just where our conversation begins.

Connections? Here's one: Jenny Lee's conversation focused heavily on local media and its power to address local components of national and global problems. Ethan approaches the same issue from the opposite direction, looking first at global awareness and its positive local implications. Jenny also mentioned the problem of excess information and her reliance on social networking as a filter, an issue that Ethan responds to (and remedies?) with his serendipity paradigm.

Lawrence Torcello's discussion of liberalism and comprehensive doctrines will be on your mind as Ethan shares a story about a series of conversations he had with a college roommate. Unsurprisingly, Micah and I conclude the episode by getting caught (again) in the traffic jam of conversation, fundamentalism, and the difference between rationality and reason.

Artwork by Eleanor Davis.

Chuck Collins directs the Institute of Policy Studies Program on Inequality and the Common Good. He has also co-founder of United for a Fair Economy and Wealth for the Common Good, a network of wealthy individuals who embrace fair taxation to support the broader good. He is also the author of 99 to 1: How Wealth Inequality is Wrecking the World and What We Can Do About It and joined Bill Gates, Sr. to co-author Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes. I learned about Chuck through David Korten, only to realize that I already had Resilience Circles—another project he is affiliated with—on my list of potential episode themes.

At this point you have probably guessed that Chuck and I spent a lot of time talking about wealth and class, but it's hard to cover those issues without digging into assumptions about human nature. Are we individualistic and selfish? Social and communal? All of the above? Chuck gives us a glimpse into how he pitches economic equality to the 1%, a pitch that involves the importance of the social and ecological commons while recognizing the importance of individual determination. Education makes an appearance and Chuck stresses that, in addition to the social/civic education Lawrence Torcello discussed, we need to remember that we are embedded in an ecological system. Resilience Circles make a brief appearance and new economies come up towards the end of the conversation.

You'll probably notice more commonalities and contrasts with plenty of other thinkers. Obviously there are a fair number of similarities between Chuck and David Korten, though our conversations focused on very different themes. Equally interesting, how do Chuck's assertions about human nature and brain science pair with Colin Camerer? Priscilla Grim and Cameron Whitten have discussed class without sharing the environmental concerns of other thinkers in the project, but Chuck suggests that an awareness of the ecological commons is key to encouraging a robust sense of the social commons. It is easy to find contrasts between Chuck and libertarian-leaning thinkers like Max More and Ariel Waldman, but he also shares their appreciation of individual agency.

Among other things, Douglas Rushkoff is a media theorist, author, and documentarian. His books include Life, Inc. and Program or be Programmed, while his documentaries include Frontline's The Merchants of Cool and The Persuaders.

Our conversation started with Rushkoff's concept of "present-shock" and moved into a larger discussion of the relationship between market thinking, quantification, and what is ultimately measurable and knowable.

Connections, you ask? There are lots, especially with Timothy Morton, Wes Jackson, and Frances Whitehead. We also talk about transhumanism a fair bit, so expect some contrasts with Max More and Tim Cannon. Equally important, albeit less obvious, are the nuanced differences between Rushkoff and thinkers like Chris McKay. But to quote LeVar Burton, you don't have to take my word for it.

Priscilla Grim is one of Occupy Wall Street's organizers, co-founder of the website We Are the 99 Percent, and co-editor of The Occupied Wall Street Journal.

We talk about her politicization, the current economic system, and the tension between class and environmental concerns. There are predictably strong contrasts with the libertarian philosophies of David Miller and Max More but, in one of the more unexpected connections in the project, Grim takes an attitude towards natural resources that is close to Robert Zubrin and far from Jan Lundberg and Wes Jackson.

Micah and I have been talking about a new interstitial episode for several weeks but, with the election last night, we decided to pick up our microphones and talk about the relationship between the political conversation and The Conversation. Relationship is probably the wrong word there—rupture might be more accurate.

Long before we devised this project, both of us were concerned that the American political conversation was divorced from substantive issues, especially the interconnected tangle of economy and environment. In fact, this lack of political substance was one of the concerns that caused us to undertake The Conversation in the first place. Given that, we're going to take this opportunity to revisit these ideas and sharpen our definition of what is (and isn't) The Conversation. We'll also interpret the current political conversation through the lens of systems thought, which featured in my conversations with Morton, Korten, Jackson, and Whitehead.

Claire Evans is half of YACHT, a "band, business, and belief system" started by Jona Bechtolt in 2002. In addition to her musical/artistic adventures, she's also a writer and regular science blogger. Unlike most bands, YACHT has a developed a detailed and public philosophy (read their FAQ or visit the YACHT Trust for more details) and they regularly explore ideas about the future in their work. I was especially intrigued by the themes of utopia and dystopia which tie together their album ​Shangri-La​.

Dr. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr. is the Director for the Center for Urban Studies at the University of Buffalo and the Project Coordinator for the Perry Choice Neighborhood Initiative. His work has focused on the intersection of urban planning, regional development, and history in both the United States and Cuba. Dr. Taylor also studies the relationship between urban planning, race, and class.

Our conversation focuses on inequality, racism, reconfiguring government institutions, and the physical structure of neighborhoods—several large, tangible issues that have been inadequately discussed or completely ignored by earlier interviewees. American exceptionalism is an early theme that leads into the mental frameworks that distort how we view the world. Dr. Taylor offers some concrete ideas about refocusing policy to foster stronger neighborhoods and ends musing on humanity's slow march towards the light.

For both Micah and myself, listening to the final edit of Dr. Taylor's conversation was a good, if unsettling experience: we're almost half a year into production and this will be the first time race has been seriously discussed. As a result, this conversation has remarkably few explicit connections to the rest of the project because Dr. Taylor has had to build a new wing of the conversation from scratch. We find this embarrassing because it reflects the whiteness of the project back at us, from our choices of interviewees to the priorities of the interviewees themselves. Micah and I have been talking about race and our own perspectives a lot recently and we're going to dedicate the next interstitial episode to putting some of those thoughts down in audio.

Dr. Lawrence Torcello is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Micah and I learned about him through his article "Is The State Endorsement of Any Marriage Justifiable?" in Public Affairs Quarterly. Having said that, we barely touched the idea of marriage privatization. Lawrence had listened to the entirety of The Conversation before we spoke, so this is the first meta-conversation in the project: we spend a lot of our time discussing how one can bring conversation about in a pluralistic world. To tackle the idea, Lawrence takes us through the thought of John Rawls, Enlightenment liberalism, and a good dose of his own thinking.

This was an incredibly fun conversation to record and a tremendously frustrating one to edit—because Lawrence knew the project so well, our conversation covered more diverse themes than I could fluidly integrate into a single episode. To keep the discussion manageable, I have focused his conversation narrowly on liberalism and education. I made this choice for obvious reasons: liberalism hasn't appeared in the series yet and it opens up new ideas about managing diversity, while education has been woefully under discussed. Listen for a memorable response to Andrew Keen.

While I feel that this episode works as a coherent unit, there is more I want to include and I may post a few short MP3s on the site for those of you curious to hear our discussion of scientism, transhumanism, and climate-denialism. There's no shame to geeking out.

Tim Cannon is a co-founder of Grindhouse Wetware, a group of open-source biohackers in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania. What does that sentence mean, you ask? Biohacking is the process of augmenting the human body to do new things, whether with technology or biology. Max More introduced the theme of transhumanism back in Episode 2, but Tim is going to take the idea and run with it—the Grindhouse crew are actively developing and implanting technologies in themselves now. 

Tim and I don't dwell on current augmentation technologies for long. Instead, we plunge into a conversation about the nature of humanity and why he wants to leave biology behind. As always, questions of value crop up and we oscillate between nihilism and iterative, socially constructed moralities. Determinism, inevitability, and collective versus individual rights are also major themes.

You'll hear lots of connections with other conversations. Tim directly responds to the neoprimitivism of John Zerzan, but he also offers an indirect critique of Max More by discussing the political (and classist) implications of human augmentation.

If all that makes you feel like your head is about to explode, may we suggest Grindhouse's Thinking Cap to over-clock your brain?