SIO421: More Technological Anti-Solutions

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and this is episode 421, and this is part two. So, I know podcast players can sometimes be dumb. If you're hearing this and you somehow missed part one, go back an episode, because this is continuing my conversation with Alejandro Ruiz about tech anti -solutions. We get into more real examples in this one and it just goes so many fun places. Again, Alejandro, absolute delight to speak to. Can't wait to do it again.

Hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Please support the show at patreon.com/seriouspod. get all the goodies, you get the bonus. Oh, I'm recording the bonus tomorrow as I say this, actually. I'm really excited for that one. It's Again, I don't say things until they happen, because who knows if something, you know, a hurricane, I don't know, something might happen. But the bonus is going to be great this month. Really looking forward to it. That and ad -free shows and the other goodies at patreon.com/seriouspod. So I hope you consider supporting the show. Thanks to all who do. With that, let's get on over part two with Alejandro Ruiz, talking about the $100 billion put into self -driving car technology. So who's a hundred billion or is this like when you use that number, are you talking about like, have we put a hundred million of government taxpayer

0:01:30 Thomas: Dollars into this?

0:01:29 Alejandro: No, no, no.

0:01:31 Thomas: Or are you Talking about investor money?

0:01:31 Alejandro: This is, I think it's It's venture capital money.

0:01:34 Thomas: Okay. Well that's not going to go into that. You know what I mean? Like, is that even a valid comparison?

0:01:34 Alejandro: Yeah, yeah. No, I think it's a valid comparison because as a committed socialist, I think we should take their money.

0:01:44 Thomas: Oh, I agree with that. But like, in we need to evaluate these things. Don't mind stepping stepping back into two levels of evaluation. Like on one hand, I'm 100 % with you. I don't think there should be billionaires. Like I think it would be super cool. I think someone put it in a tweet that was fine. Have stronger views than this, but even settling at this, like once you hit 9999999, like that million before a billion, you get like a certificate that says you won capitalism and then you can't have any more money. And that's, you know, like it's something like, like I don't think there shou ld be billionaires. I think there should be massive tax, wealth tax or whatever it is to like, you know, you'd have to configure how it do all the economics of like, at what level would it reduce our tax revenue? And I'm sure there will be a bunch of bullshit about that, but there's also some level of that. Anyway, point is, get that all figured out. We have a gajillion dollars. I totally agree with you. The

0:01:52 Alejandro: Sure, yeah, yeah yeah. Yeah, I've seen this one. Yeah.

0:02:37 Alejandro: You

0:02:38 Thomas: Level of analysis of where where we are, roughly what's within our grasp somewhat, you know you don't have to say like nothing is possible. Like I get if we're talking about solutions to things we can say, hey, we can organize and make a tax happen, for example. But you have to be kind of within like what's what's achievable, roughly, you knows what's worth working toward right now. Now, because people are looking at this and saying, well, self -driving cars be might achievable within, you know, within our lifetimes within probably sooner than that. So that's something that people can grasp onto is seizing the means of production achievable within the same time. Like, I just, I don't know. I mean, I'm all for it, but like, so is that a valid comparison where we're, never going to get those investors to put that same money into something like fucking trains, You know, as much as I wish we could. So I don't that change how we look at it at all?

0:03:31 Alejandro: Take your question on its own terms, but my revolutionary in my heart, uh, no, I think I do think I change is possible. Um, you know, for example, their -driving cars require a lot of of people like me, right, people who went to fancy engineering schools, not a program or whatever, a lot of people, like me, have to work on them. And so part of the technological institutions framework, I want to put that out there and say, hey, do you work at one of these, stop, do something better with your life.

0:04:02 Thomas: Okay.

0:04:02 Alejandro: You know what, you can't stop working on it, organize it, like make a union, right? Think that there's like hegemony of these companies does sometimes create like a realism to it, but I part of my project of the Luddite and of this framework is to very like consciously push back on it and say that like I actually do think that used to work at big tech companies and now I don't and I started a cooperative and I think it is very common in the tech community to want to one day start your own company and do that and you know what, make it a worker co-op, man, be cool, make the world a little better, better, don't get on the venture capital train, you, you know, all, all of you self-driving car, uh, engineers out there, if you're listening, um, and you want to start your own self-driving car company, do it and make it a worker cooperative. Yeah.

0:04:18 Thomas: Sure. Uh-huh. Yeah.

0:04:44 Thomas: Interesting. Yeah, but do you know, that's not Substack. Is that one one of those things where you need a kajillion dollars to be able to do that research in an effective way. All right. Well, I hope your co -op is a lot of very wealthy people.

0:04:52 Alejandro: You probably do, but I think, but there are, there, know, my cooperative is actually, um, bylaws barred from raising venture capital, but that is not true of all worker cooperatives, um, there is a growing movement of you, proselytizing co-ops, um, put my socialist hat on here, but one of the, one of a co-op is, coops help coops, right? So this is actually, uh, I think it's called the Rochdale principles and they're pretty old, they're from like the 19th century, um, actually very radical, right, companies should have other companies, it's a, a pretty radical stance to take, right?

0:05:06 Thomas: Hmm. No, feel free.

0:05:23 Thomas: Yeah, for sure.

0:05:26 Alejandro: But I think part of why I started a worker cooperative and is part of my mission as the president of a worker co-operative is to help other worker cooperatives, right. One of the things that work cooperatives are trying to do is we can share capital, right, you know there are structures for worker cooperators to retain the democracy, but also allow you to raise venture capital in the more traditional sense. Whether or not you can get venture capitalists to buy into that is a different story. But there is very active, small but active movement to try to be to build that capital like among worker cooperatives. And so I say it is possible. And find the co-op folks, do it. Do you wanna start a self-driving car company? Do it, make it a worker cooperative. Email, you know what? Email me.

0:05:37 Thomas: Hmm.

0:06:05 Thomas: Let's start one. Yeah. I want to drive a train. Can Can I email you and join your company? Damn it.

0:06:09 Alejandro: No, you can't email me.

0:06:11 Thomas: Okay. Too bad. I have such a good idea for a disrupting hat. Instead of the stripes going one way, they're going to go a different way than the stripy hat normally goes. It's going to disrupt the whole train engineer.

0:06:25 Alejandro: A great idea to disrupt self -driving cars, which is trains. Which is true. It's a great idea.

0:06:28 Thomas: Yeah. Self -driving trains. Trains.

0:06:33 Alejandro: Not even.

0:06:35 Thomas: Right. So, fair enough on on the a hundred million dollars, um, definitely take most of your points there. And I do think that, yeah, it's hard because I just, I don't know how to get, I guess part of me thinks there's a little bit of false dichotomy in that it's not really the same money or people, like, even, even with your, your -op, uh, which I love, it still is fundamentally, fundamentally that's a company or a business where it should be a government solution. And I don't know, you know what I mean? Does that, make does that same category error in a sense? And we should be talking about, you funded, uh, projects.

0:06:54 Alejandro: Yeah.

0:07:11 Alejandro: Yes, I agree with you, and I think it's complicated, and I did, you kind of took a stronger stance than I, than I should have, uh, maybe just rhetorically, but I do think I, it does matter is, I think I said this earlier, but technology's never exist in vacuum, right? I think one I always advocate for, to wanna do something with a tech mission, is the of your organization should reflect your goals in some way, right. Every, it is when you, like, have started, when you know, you started a podcast, I'm sure every time you're like, mom's friends cousins buddy wants to start a podcast, like, you're you get that email, I get that for tech companies, and for me it's like people are like, oh, I want to solve education, and I'm like, great, how are you going to do that, and they're like, I'm going to start a company. It's, you want to make the world a more democratic place, don't create a mini autocracy to

0:07:43 Thomas: Oh, for sure. Yeah.

0:07:57 Alejandro: Do that, right. Think I did take a very strong stance, but what I do want to say is that your organization does affect, you know, technology isn't linear, right? It's infinitely branching and there's a lot of ways you can go. And the structure in which you develop that technology is going to affect it, at some very basic level, right, when views the technology, technology is fundamentally within capitalism, labor saving, right, and that's cost saving, saving, right, a very like specific Way.

0:07:57 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:08:22 Thomas: Hypothetically. Yeah.

0:08:23 Alejandro: And you can see, sure, but the cost saving for the capitalist to be clear, um, bad for the labor, right, you can see this in, right, the way that the tech industry thinks about technology, it's a very capitalist way of looking at technology, right, when they see people below them doing things, they think, how can we automate it, right, don't think, how can we expand their experience, just to give, like, a stupid example of, um, structure, right, like, am a laundromat, I'm a capitalist laundromat, um, we where this is the 1600s, we scrub everything with washer boards or whatever, we get a washing machine, we lay off all the people doing family does laundry, my mom does laundry, let's say if you get a watching machine, you don't get rid of mom, you know, you like figure out, like, oh wow, we have this like new time, how can we make, like, and you know, I think how is a little bit of a silly example because the washing machine was the same in both, but I think you can see, like, fundamentally how a cooperative thinks about technology is like a really different framework, you can kind of see this with, like, all, like, the LLM stuff, right, these capitalists see all their little workers talking to each other, and they're like, this can be automated, even though they've lost the plot, like, you can't automate human communication, right, like,

0:08:27 Thomas: Yeah. Mm. -hmm, okay. Right. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:09:25 Thomas: Wait.

0:09:25 Alejandro: You have fully lost the pot with that, but like, You.

0:09:27 Thomas: Which. What, what example was that you said, LL, what?

0:09:29 Alejandro: ChatGPT, yeah.

0:09:30 Thomas: Oh, oh, that I didn't. Well.

0:09:32 Alejandro: Yeah, sorry, I, pivoted super hard, I,

0:09:34 Thomas: I didn't know that.

0:09:35 Alejandro: Mean.

0:09:35 Thomas: That was the stated goal of ChatGPT? I mean, I feel like

0:09:39 Alejandro: That's how they always talk about it, right? They always talked about it. I was like, oh, we can automate everything with generative AI, and I think they see its power that way because they are capitalists, and when they look down, they're like, well, what do all my workers do all the time? Well, they fucking talk to each other. They talk all the, so, like, what if I just make a thing that can talk, and like, that's, you know, I think at this point they're so, so engorged with capital and they've so lost the plot on doing anything of value that they like forgotten that human communication is not a thing you can automate, it's like a byproduct of collaboration. You know.

0:10:09 Thomas: I. That's weird. I didn't, I never knew that, that, like, I've never, never heard that as a stated goal, like, I think ChatGPT can do many incredible things, I didn't view as, like, trying to replace workers talking to each other or something, I didn't know that, okay.

0:10:24 Alejandro: Well. An example I recently wrote, a post making fun of, uh, scientific, there's a bunch of scientific papers, but there were, like, benchmarking ChatGPT's ability to do different tasks, right, so one of them was, um, doctor, right, it's like we think that ChatGPT can replace doctors once it reaches some threshold of, like, it can answer clinical responses well enough, and me, that is, is very capitalist way of using a technology, right, like, when I'm hurt, I want to talk to a person, I don't need my doctors to be automated, automated. The, you know, this is not, like, a doctor does for me is much deeper than this, like, transactional thing. Right? I think when you

0:10:34 Thomas: All. Yeah. Sure.

0:11:00 Thomas: Interesting.

0:11:00 Alejandro: Look at technology as, like only a labor cost saving thing, you end up in this, funny, funny where you view all these things as atomic and automatable.

0:11:10 Thomas: Yeah, I'm gonna have to chew on that a sec because I also, like, if I were to think by analogy, what if the technology for the Star Star Trek thing was, was, or something, you know, and you're like, well, this is eventually, oh

0:11:22 Alejandro: Actually, I have to admit, admit, I've never seen Star Trek, okay.

0:11:25 Thomas: Yeah, I've seen barely Star Trek, you know, like, uh, well pick, pick some sort of medical marvel, like this thing is going to genuinely prevent or cure a bunch of diseases. And so therefore let's, let's say just for fun, like just to make it simple, uh sort of solution to cancer. Maybe you can say it's some tech solution, but something, and maybe it's a biotech, whatever, and this is going to cure cancer. And you might have the same objection of like, well, yeah, that's going to put a lot of cancer doctors out of work, but people want to, you know, like, but you would want that to happen. You know, there are times where you want people to be out of work because that means something good happened. Right. I mean, I guess I'm trying to out how does how does your analysis think about that?

0:11:28 Alejandro: So.

0:12:08 Alejandro: I, a very long answer, but I feel like I'm pretty far off course with the topic of our conversation, um, yeah, you know what, this is a bad example. I think it's just a whole conversation. The And LLM one is such a specific use case. There's a lot to unpack. There scholar I really like. This is the problem. This a big rabbit There's a scholar who argues that it is. The best way to think about it, I think he calls it automated Thatcherism.

0:12:18 Thomas: Right.

0:12:39 Alejandro: And what tools are, are automated austerity, because our social structure, even the way you phrased it, where to happen, I don't remember exactly how you said it, stop me if I'm putting words in your mouth, but it was like you is the best thing to happen, and I want, I, I want this good thing to happen even if it costs people their jobs, there's a little bit of reification happening there, right, like, that is that does not necessarily cost people livelihoods, that, that's like an artifact of our social structure, right, don't

0:13:06 Thomas: Well, I want to make sure let's let's get on the same page. So if actually I'm interested in this idea of looking it being a kind of a problem, I guess, to look at technology just in the sense of how will it save jobs? And that's a and let me know if I kind of have have you right what what you were saying a moment ago, looking at it necessarily in that way of saving jobs of, you know, and the that capitalism has caused us to look at it in that way. I'm actually very sympathetic to that view. And I think that's interesting. I want to explore that. But, you know, the first thing I am doing is just kind of thinking of, OK, how there exceptions to that? I'm just trying to, like, wrap my mind around it.

0:13:43 Thomas: So the first thing that, yeah, so the first thing that comes to my mind is like, well, there are definitely times where I think everyone would say that, if you we could eliminate job X, we would want to, not because of any capitalism reasons, but because that would just mean that we've made awesome progress in society. Like if we could eliminate all cancer doctors tomorrow because we snap our fingers and we have a cure to cancer completely, we would want to do that and it wouldn't be like a capitalism thing necessarily.

0:13:23 Alejandro: Yeah. Yeah. Tease out the idea sure Yeah.

0:14:10 Thomas: I'm just, you Know, I was just wondering like how How that interacts with your framework here and what you make of that. I don't know. Is there a way to balance that?

0:14:18 Alejandro: I think it's a little difficult to answer because my, think that hypothetical requires the existence of a technology as a premise versus, versus, like, my concern is with the process of making it, right? So I think it's going to be, let's pull it back to, like, a concrete example, which I think might make it clearer, right. So we talking about self -driving cars. I like self -driving cars. They're cool. They're fun. I don't like them as a public transit solution. So, because self -driven car companies are incorporated as venture capital companies, venture capital run and controlled companies, must grow. And part up happening is they're pushing it onto the streets and they're lying about the data or whatever, right?

0:14:53 Alejandro: Like, despite public disagreement, like, there's those people who are putting cones on them. Have you seen this awesome I love that, that's great, that's a... I mean, literally my blog, it's called the Luddite, I'm for the smashing of technology that you don't like, so great, based and good, but is the not an artifact of the self-driving car itself necessarily, but of the deployment procedure of that structure, right? That's sort of what I'm trying to get at. Whereas, you know, we developed some-driving car technology in a different environment, we wouldn't be deploying it like that, and the technology itself would probably look different, right? So here's a good example. One of them, the things that I think we self-driving car industry is learning is that not a self-driven car is going to necessitate modifying the environment, right?

0:14:32 Thomas: Mm -hmm. Sure. Mm -mm. Mm -hm. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure. Yeah. Hmm. Yeah. Hmm. Okay.

0:15:39 Alejandro: In, in some way, like, think that rollout, you sort of like interplay could have given a lot healthier in like a public setting, for example. So you can imagine, this is totally hypothetical, I can totally imagine that this is a solvable problem where my car is not self-driving until I get on the interstate and there's a little RFID that says you're in self-driving space now, and there are special lanes marked with whatever magic paint that make it like really easy for it to work, and only autonomous cars are allowed in those two lanes, that would, that's like a solvable problem, right?

0:15:47 Thomas: Yeah. Mm -mmm. Yeah. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah.

0:16:10 Alejandro: But it requires a sort of different social structure than the one that they have, but because capitalists can only view technology as, you know, they look at the the world as it is, they look at something that's expensive and they think, how can I replace that? They miss that sort of like larger context where they could have done actual good.

0:16:10 Thomas: They should do that.

0:16:27 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. No, that makes sense. That's a great point.

0:16:29 Alejandro: I think that's a better

0:16:30 Thomas: Yeah, for sure. No. And I I think think that's interesting, especially if, you a certain sense in which something like transportation that's going to impact everyone in that way, like you could almost argue that it is the realm of government. Like it should be the kind of thing that like, If government were sponsoring, sponsoring, uh, or we're saying like, hey, uh, billion dollar reward for anyone who solves this problem, which I think is a way of doing government that, I know I could be wrong about this, but I wish we explored that a little more, because it's sort of like, it inspires a bunch of creativity, and you only spend money if they actually solve the problem that you're saying that

0:16:30 Alejandro: Example.

0:16:43 Alejandro: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

0:17:06 Thomas: You want them to solve. I have no idea how much it would work, but it like, seen, I, I can't remember when, but if, if you look at the economics of it, it actually might work out quite well for, for the taxpayers, for, you know, like, but, but anyway, let's say something like that, where if, if the government is more involved with it, they could make a decision like, you or DOT could make a decision like, oh, this is super easy to paint some special paint on all freeways, you know, that that's actually not going to be that difficult and it would save, you you know, in my limited experience as a, as programmer, that's exactly the kind of thing that you wish you could control a lot of the time where you're like, fuck, I need this thing to work, to be able to recognize this thing.

And this thing, if these assholes could just change their forms so that both of them, you know, like this department and this department puts their fucking shit in the same spot, then this is easy. I don't even have to be doing this. It's that kind of things where you are like,

0:17:16 Alejandro: Yeah sure. Yeah absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah

0:17:59 Thomas: Yeah, if we could do the car version of that, that, which probably wouldn't be that hard. It could save literal billions in just how much effort it takes to make something that somehow recognizes all these exceptions with enough accuracy to put our lives with it, kind of thing. So no, I think that's a great point. And is interesting because I am, I'm just trying to think about, you know, there's so many good things that, and I know you, agree, you you've already said you agree. Like there's are so many cool technologies that we love or that we would love. And so how do we balance, you going to give up something or would we hypothetically give up Something by giving up, you sort of model we currently have in favor of a of a different model. I'm just kind of, you around what would what that would look like? So do you have other examples? Do you want to transition into other examples of your tech anti -solutions?

0:18:14 Alejandro: Absolutely. Yeah I do. I'm really excited to talk about these. So I've got a few, don't know how many we'll have time for, but I guess I want to start with a really simple one because because you already know about it, but I think it's illustrative of part of my framework. So I chose my examples to kind of like tease out the framework.

0:19:01 Thomas: Sure.

0:19:01 Alejandro: So that people, I want people to be able to name the demon from their home, right? So I just sent you a link. Can you open that image? Yeah, so can you read me that headline?

0:19:04 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, fusion. Okay, yeah. Oh US reaches a fusion power milestone. Will it be enough to save the planet? Hmm.

0:19:18 Alejandro: Yeah, I really talk about this example because remember, this is a context dependent analysis, right? Don't know if you remember when that happened, that was like a year ago, but all of the headlines were like that. That was like across the board, right? And I think that is what we're seeing. First of all, it's the importance of that fifth point, right? It's got to be sexy. Fusion is sexy as hell. Everybody loves fusion. It's super cool. Save the planet, all that cool stuff. But it shows the political and social context of the anti -solution, right, like I have a physics degree.

Physics research which is awesome. People should do it, right? By grabbing it and putting it that in context of will it save the planet? It can't save the climate. The climate crisis is going to be locked in by the time that we can build a cold fusion reactor, Right. So I think that is the process by which I think it's a very discreet example of the process by which something becomes an anti-solution, right, it's the same as what we saw earlier with the BECCS way back in Paris Climate Agreement part of the conversation right where there there's nothing wrong with what those researchers

0:19:23 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Mm. -hmm. Right. Right. Right, sure. Yeah.

0:20:15 Alejandro: Are doing but the existing political economy around it like twist it and warp it right that's my first example um

0:20:22 Thomas: Well, it does raise an interesting question of how much of this is necessarily how the research is being done intentionally or not by the people doing it and how much this do you think is shitty media framing or is us being like hey here's this news that seems cool and is a cool tech thing and we're like yeah hey I heard the planet's dying. Will this fix that? Like, you know what I mean? Is there is there anything there? You know, do you think any of this could be the media receiving it and wanting it to put it in that lens versus the people actually trying to save the world or essentially for lack of a better term, as you said before, about the scope and trying to pitch it as those giant things? Things.

0:21:03 Alejandro: So one of the things that I want to make sure is I lot of the people who work at anti-solutions are actually very committed to the cause that they're working on, uh, so right, in the case of cold fusion, you know, I, I have friends who do like research, I think it's great, like they should keep doing it, right. I think the thing that has failed here, I think I'm going to put a little bit of blame on the people doing the research on the one hand, but first I want to start with, you know, the media ecosystem, the venture capital ecosystem, like all these, the ecosystem in which this is being made is like turning it into an anti-solution, right.

0:21:32 Alejandro: But there's, I think, a little little bit of that blame also has to go on the people working on it. You, I think, well, let's get, let's move on to my next example because I think that will clarify that really really well. That's why I chose this one. So I want to talk about this company called Kodama.ai. Well, I think they're just called Kudama, but they're they're interesting.

0:21:32 Thomas: Sure, sure. Okay.

0:21:49 Alejandro: You might have heard about them because they were recently, um, the news for, uh, think Alex Jones learned about them, them.

0:21:47 Thomas: That sounds familiar. Is it?

0:21:58 Thomas: Oh, okay.

0:22:00 Alejandro: So And what they are, they a bunch of money from the Bill Gates Climate Fund, whatever it's called. They raised some money from that. And what what they do is they sell carbon offsets. I don't know how much detail you want to go into carbon offsets as a mechanism. Kodama.ai sells carbon offsets by burying trees.

0:22:17 Thomas: Oh, this. Okay, I think I may have heard a podcast on this. Yeah. Yes.

0:22:22 Alejandro: Ah, really? Fun.

0:22:23 Thomas: Think it could have been a Slate one or something. I can't remember.

0:22:24 Alejandro: Yeah. So think this is a really good example of, think the entire carbon credit system is kind of an edge case, right? Because remember I said they have to be profitable and like there's nothing in the world, like normally if I go outside my house and cut a tree down and bury it, no one's going to give me money, right.

0:22:41 Alejandro: It's like not profitable but because, you it's some like very real sense and anti-solutions in further climate crisis maximize GDP right let you both create the crisis and its solutions right and like and I kind of like link them and Kodama.ai raised a bunch of money, they cut down trees and they bury them in salt marshes, right, them some people do salt marshers, some people bury them, whatever, of all, just the problem with climate change is that we're burning fossil fuels. It's not that we have too many trees above ground.

0:23:08 Alejandro: Not all problems need to be attacked at their root cause, but it should be prioritized.

0:22:40 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:23:13 Alejandro: At level, it's bad engineering. If I have two cliffs from and one side to the other, I could make an air balloon or I can make a bridge, which is better. It is better engineering. This is the air balloon solution. This This is like a stupid way to go about doing this. You know what I mean? I think of it, right? Like on its face, right. I mean, imagine, just imagine this operation, right, you go down with a chainsaw, you cut a tree, you get an excavator, you dig a hole, you put, it's absurd.

0:23:26 Thomas: Yeah yeah. Well, maybe we need to go into it. Cause I'm, blanking I on the details of how, was this the case where, cause my impression of it and maybe I heard a different thing, maybe I'm misremembering, but I thought it was more product you or otherwise corrupted processes of trying to do. So let me step back. I could be wrong, but I do think that the fundamental concept of either set the entire limit of what you want.

So you say we need carbon footprint or carbon, whatever to be this, that's the cap, and setting up this market of, yeah, okay, you can buy and trade these and and offsets might be part of that, etc, etc. I think just mathematically that sound, but I, my impression was this is a question of how many ways that can go wrong, which is you either, one, um, special interests mess up the legislation so it actually doesn't do the thing that it was supposed to do, you know, like they'll, they'll carve out exceptions, it's like, oh great, you've made this, this entire thing pointless, or, um, wrong about, uh, the cap you're setting, or you're sitting too low, high of a cap.

And so it's not actually going to do the things. There's a million ways it could go wrong. My impression that was that this was some combination of that kind of weirdness, but are you telling me that this was actually something that was looked at as a technology that was going to help the problem?

0:23:45 Alejandro: I yeah.

0:25:03 Alejandro: This such a good question. So I'm going to try to break this down. And I think this is, you asked the perfect question. Burying is one of the many carbon, I think you understand the point I'm making, which is the tree burying sells carbon credits so that I can, you know, I'm an airline and I can make my flight carbon neutral or whatever right, and to address your thing about the uh principle plausibility of the system, so I'm gonna give a shout out to actually my brother, a PhD student, um, so Nani.

0:25:19 Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

0:25:31 Thomas: Cory Doctorow.

0:25:31 Alejandro: Thank you, yeah.

0:25:32 Thomas: No, that didn't work.

0:25:33 Alejandro: No, this is my brother, this is what he studies actually. Um, I would say he's a professional hater of carbon markets. Um, so that the problem, and I actually, you should, he's great, he's really wonderful, he sounds actually, when I hear a recording of myself, I hear him, so Um, he sounds just like me, so

0:25:36 Thomas: Oh, cool. Ooh. Ooh. Have to get him on the show. Okay. Maybe he hears you when he, yeah, maybe you can listen to each other's.

0:25:50 Alejandro: Yeah. So It'll be, it'll just be like a continuation, for we don't actually, we can be the same person for the purposes of audio

0:25:55 Thomas: Maybe you switched out partway through this and we don't even know.

0:25:56 Alejandro: Yeah yeah Cut all that, yeah, um, but so, that, you know, the, the, with again go back to like the, you know, what is a good engineering solution, right, like, like the markets system, while fine in principle, so is also fine in principal to, you, a bridge, give every single person like a little drone that carries them across, right? It's just, it's a very silly and overly complicated and dangerous way of doing it. So that's first level of a thing I wanna say about it. Second level is I would agree with what you said about the loopholes and policies and bureaucratic failures and all that, But I would also argue that they're actually innate to that structure, right?

0:26:17 Thomas: Yeah.

0:26:32 Thomas: Could be. Yeah, for sure.

0:26:33 Alejandro: Because a for lot of reasons, some of them I think as, you know, your standard leftist, like, you know, it's what you think I'm going to say, right, like capital has the money, they have the influence. But then another one I think you're not expecting probably, which is the process of science is necessarily uncertain, right. So like, my brother works a lot in blue carbon, which which is ocean stuff, seagrass, stuff like that, right? So you do an offset, first of all, there's the structure of carbon offsets is a little silly on their face. So they do avoided emissions. Are you familiar with that?

0:26:40 Thomas: Yeah? Hmm. Okay?

0:27:04 Thomas: Why don't you explain it just because Because even if I am, who knows if the audience is.

0:27:06 Alejandro: Yeah. So you sell a carbon offsETs, the way we've decided to do it, and this goes back to this being, I think, structural, is don't actually say, exactly, exactly, Exactly.

0:27:15 Thomas: You're like, I was going to burn an entire forest tomorrow, but I won't. So I've

0:27:20 Alejandro: This was going to be destroyed, but now that it isn't going to be destroyed.

0:27:21 Thomas: Now saved us. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's ridiculous.

0:27:24 Alejandro: And obvious moral hazard there, right? And that goes back to the thing I said before, which I think it's a little bit innate to the structure of, you know, your standard leftist critique. But then there's also, okay, even if we take that on its face, let's know, let'S say we did the ideal paper math, like everything is, we actually are accounting properly.

0:27:25 Thomas: Yeah.

0:27:37 Thomas: Well, yeah. And let me just pause to say that everything I said a second ago does not include that bullshit. So I would look at that as like, that is not part of the legitimate process of this.

0:27:44 Alejandro: Totally, totally. Right. I 100% agree. So let'S say that this is a proper implementation, We still have to figure figure out how much carbon is in that seagrass, and is a right answer in some like abstract sense, but in like, in some material, like, like sense, this is like pretty difficult to measure. The science comes with uncertainty, right? Sometimes the uncertainty be like quite big. So one thing my brother likes to say is, one thing the carpet markets do is, can only go so far in answering the question. And And then there's an extra bureaucratic step where we let the market dictate, you know, we can get a range, right? We can say, we think in this patch, there's between this amount and this amount of carbon. But then we need to have an actual answer, right, by the end of the day. And that of making it exact is error prone, right.

0:27:47 Thomas: Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Of

0:28:30 Alejandro: That's the point of the error bars, right! And we all know, like, okay, how do you go about that? Do you guess it's the middle? Do you do the conservative? And now we're guessing, but that's a big gamble to take. It's, you're, are its solutions to like one of the biggest crises on earth. On science is one thing, but banking it on science and then making guesses on top of that through like a market process, right, is a pretty different thing. Do

0:28:31 Thomas: Course. Yeah, sure.

0:28:50 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah, I think the term I remembered that I don't hear used anymore is actually just cap and trade. And I'm realizing that might be a different thing than these offsets, I'm thinking. Thinking, because a cap and trade Is a pretty basic arithmetic of we capping the shit at this. That's it. No one can do any more. But you can trade amongst yourselves, which actually might make sense if it's like, well, yeah, we're a company that, you thing we make is good and we can't get under that limit. But maybe we can buy the ability to do that from somebody else who had it before and doesn't need it or something like that.

But either way, you've capped the thing at the number that you think is what you need, assuming And that that number is well chosen, then that everything's enforced, obviously, and all that, that I think has to work on some level. But I guess I think maybe over the years we've gotten so far away from that, perhaps because of the very things you're talking about. You know, like we've got, we've added all these other things. Well, what about an offset?

Well, if I promise I won't burn down my house tomorrow, which I was going to do, and that'll add to the, you know. And so, yeah, I mean, that might have just gotten so far away from the original concept I that thought was pretty much sound that it's not even anything anymore.

0:29:00 Alejandro: And trade, totally. Yeah. Yeah. So Is It They did, I think part of the carbon offset vision is that, what if we use, instead of only capping and trading, we can say, okay, we can use this money to preserve ecosystems, because You know, the climate crisis is more than just like, it's also ecosystem collapse. Right. So we can say, like, you, we can fund this, like, seagrasses, you know, there's some effort that has to be undertaken to, like, be able to, you know, whatever. And then, but there is some carbon that it's storing and it was going to be destroyed, so What if we say we can offset someone else's carbon by, like, selling that, that ecosystem that? And I think that that brings us around really nicely, because that's my, my fourth point, right? It further entrenches existing power structures.

0:30:14 Thomas: Right. Yeah, sure. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah.

0:30:42 Alejandro: So if you look at who a lot of research into like some ecosystems now, it's like polluters, right? And that's sinister, right, like it's now all of these, totally, and when you fund something, even if you don't have editorial thing over, you do get to guide the direction it goes, right. Right.

0:30:53 Thomas: So they're kind of giving us the data that, you are allegedly going to use to make some of these decisions, you're saying? Sure. Yeah.

0:31:06 Alejandro: If it's I suddenly all these scientists who want to study, I don't know, mangrove swamps or whatever. Right. Looking for the next grant. Suddenly there's a lot of grants to figure out how much carbon is in them. Think, you Know, I suspect I don't know if anyone's done this research, but I suspect that we're going to see a bias towards higher carbon counts.

0:31:16 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:25 Alejandro: Right. I don''t think I don'T think it's a I DON'T think that's a stretch. Can see on many levels why these anti -solutions are problematic. It's silly.

0:31:25 Thomas: That makes sense Yeah, but How did we get to burying a tree? I don't, I don't even understand

0:31:36 Alejandro: How did we get to burying a tree? Isn't that

0:31:38 Thomas: Do you know that I forget, I can't, I, what

0:31:39 Alejandro: Wild? I think it's because when you look... I think as straightforward as I make money on carbon offsets, I look around, there's a bunch of trees around me right now. There's a ton of carbon. Been, I can bury them. Like we need a lot of indulgences to sell.

0:31:52 Thomas: How does that help? Yeah, it is. It is kind of like that.

0:31:57 Alejandro: It is that. Yeah. And I think it helps because that burying it and preserving the carbon and doesn't end up in the air and a new tree goes in its place. So I think the idea is that carbon comes out of the air, but how did we get there, actually, is like, it's a stupid idea, it's a stupid idea that can let people make money off assets.

0:32:14 Thomas: Okay, I Guess, and maybe this isn't that important, but I was trying to, I was trying to understand if this was an intentional thing or a byproduct of some bullshit that got twisted up, you know what I mean, because there was one, I might be thinking of a different one, and there was one involving, I think it was landfills or some shit. Like there was something like that. I thought it was the same thing, but maybe it's not. So the point is something counted that clearly should not be counted toward offsetting carbon. And yeah, once any of that goes wrong, then the whole concept gets ruined.

0:32:15 Alejandro: Yeah.

0:32:46 Alejandro: What you said, yeah, doing things and mitigating them is always going to be higher risk than not doing them, right? Um, to keep pulling on the carbon offsets for a little bit, because it's just like a little, it's perennial, but during recently I'm going to to send you another article. One. I

0:32:56 Thomas: Sure. Oh, Sorry, I was still trying to figure out the the bearing the trees thing, so it's, sorry, I couldn't help but look up the bearing the tree thing, it's literary that there's carbon stored in there and so you're burying it to slow down how it would come out, okay, so I guess so it is a thing that actually does something, but it's just one of those, are we in the same ballpark as the you crate of tomatoes where it's like, yeah, okay, but that's barely gonna solve anything, like it's not scalable, or it's not, you

0:33:10 Alejandro: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, yeah yeah, yeah yeah. It's Yeah, and also to go back to the framework of imagine the ideal world. Is the ideal one where we're constantly deforesting ourselves and burying the trees such that we can keep burning oil, that's like a shitty world, right, like

0:33:35 Thomas: A berry tree. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Right, let'S read this headline. Corporate carbon offset company accidentally starts devastating wildfire. Yeah sure, sure.

0:33:48 Alejandro: Just want to give you the headline, because you just, you know, like I just said, like mitigating things is always riskier than, and we, like we literally already have examples, right? One more, want you to read about carbon capture. This is the first ever contract for carbon. So this is a little bit different. This is carbon capture, so these are all related concepts.

0:33:55 Thomas: Yeah oh for sure. Okay, talked about it on the show a little little bit recently, but

0:34:10 Alejandro: Okay, so, these are related concepts, but like, you know, the idea is we talked about a little bit with BCCS, right, and these are related concepts but the idea is you carbon capture it and you either do it to your facility or you do it's another one it's all the offsets like whatever so the bag administration recently signed a deal with do carbon capture and can you tell me read me that headline and tell me uh who the deal is with yeah

0:34:21 Thomas: Sure. Sure. The big new ExxonMobil climate change deal that got an assist from Joe Biden is the headline.

0:34:35 Alejandro: So that's the, that's the further entrenching existing power structures, right? Like, and if you read if you you read the it's

0:34:38 Thomas: Yeah. And this, this is a year, year old or so. What's, what are the, what Are the details there?

0:34:45 Alejandro: A couple of quotes here. I, this is Peter McNally, um, says, a the global sector leader for industrial materials or whatever that is, um, says carbon capture is a big boy's game, these are billion dollar projects, it's big companies capturing large amounts of carbon, and big oil and gas companies are where the expertise is. I think, without realizing it, that person has like very nicely articulated why the carbon offset market is like the anti-solution growing petri dish that it is, right? Like, because this problem is so big, and because this going to be able to solve it, the scale of it is so huge that the only people who possibly have the resource to do with it are the people who are causing the problem in the first place.

0:35:00 Thomas: Hmm.

0:35:23 Thomas: Yeah, I think a lot would depend on the details for me. I mean, I, I Think that if you looked at it a different way or maybe Maybe not a different way and said, all right, these people are the people ruining the planet. So they're going to be the ones who have to stop ruining the planet. This was a viable way to stop ruining the plan, then I actually don't have a problem with them being the ones to stop doing it. I don't know. Maybe that's not what's going on here. So I'm just saying like the details kind of.

0:35:28 Alejandro: Sure. Oh, no, me neither. Yeah. I problem with it isn't that they've and they're going to clean it. My problem is they want to make the mess and clean the mess, and then make money for both of them, right? I think that's the problem here, right, that's of solving the problem, but it is maximizing their on the world, right. They're profiting off their own disaster. Yeah.

0:35:59 Thomas: Yeah.

0:36:09 Thomas: No, I know. I don't know what the alternative is in a way that's practical, so would it take, I actually don't know legally what would hetake to just say, okay, no more this, like, you know what I mean? Like, can we, would, is the alternative that we need to say you cannot produce above this amount of of whatever, carbon into the air, whatever the thing we're talking about, if it's pollution, if it's climate change, and then just fucking figure it out, right? I mean, is that the thing that is the real solution? Similar to the food desert thing, what's the actual real solution in your mind that we need to be doing here?

0:36:50 Alejandro: Think I, I'm here to say is that the right solution isn't allowing oil companies to develop technologies, right? Think that's the, it's a little bit of a weasell. I do have opinions about it, but I do feel like like a little out of my depth for like, like You know, like it's a question, you know, the one, like, I'm happy to talk revolutionary strategy, but it's also Well,

0:37:02 Thomas: Sure. Well, I guess I would say that in order to be able to identify a tech anti-solution, I feel like you would need some amount of information on what the real solution is, or at the very least, why something isn't a solution. If, I don't know, like if this technology is something that actually could be a solution, I do not know, because I am not really an expert in it, then it really does not matter who does it. I mean, mean I don't love if an oil company is making money off of it, but like if, if they have the button that's like the fix the problem button, then fucking whoever has it needs to push it. Sure.

0:37:43 Alejandro: I don't agree with that, because the it's a context framework, so if they have the button that says this can fix the problem, they should push it, but also they can hold us hostage with their button, right? And that's sort of what I'm getting at, right, I think the, you know, I have no problem with people figuring out, just like I had no problem BCCS, I had problem figuring out fun ways waste to carbon capture or useful waste to carbon capture. What I have a problem with is this like, you shouldn't allow these power -entrenching social technological to form, right?

0:37:53 Thomas: Yeah, yeah. Mm. -hmm. Mm. -Huh, sure. Yeah.

0:38:12 Alejandro: That's the anti, that's what makes it an anti -solution. The one thing I really want to leave people with is, you know, I talked a lot about the technologies I don't like, but I technology. And, you know the I

0:38:23 Thomas: Sure you do. He's wearing a tinfoil hat right now. Now.

0:38:25 Alejandro: Like Technology, I mean I am using the laptop equivalent with tinfoil hat, my laptop is from like 2011. But anyway, I do like technology, and the reason, you know, people probably caught that my website is called the Luddite, and that's not actually like a tongue-in-cheek joke about like Luddites, I think, since I named it that. Um, think it's come, you know, Brian Merchant released a book about the Luddites, and it's come a little more into like social consciousness, but the Liddites weren't anti-technology necessarily. They were anti-capitalist control of technology, right? They were actually quite sophisticated people. They were like loomers, they used machines.

And if you read like what they had to say about it, what they said was that the owners were using these machines, I forgot exactly how they said it, but to defraud them of their living in a deceitful manner, right. And I think the reason I called my blog the Luddite is because I want people, when you evaluate a technology, be a Ludditer. Look at the technology and say, if of this technology you are going to be hungry or out of a job, smash it. Don't worry about it. Smash it in the moment. That's a question of context.

Had the Luddites been granted democratic control, just like you you don't lay off mom with a washing machine, right? Those factories been under democratic control of the workers, then their wouldn't have been at risk, right, I think that sort of a of the things I write about are sort of doing a similar evaluation, the technologies, you can't talk about them for the sake of argument, like they're in vacuum and in principle, and they do this and do that, but at the end of the day, technologies are, know, social you things that live in the world.

And that is how you should decide how you feel about it. You know, I'm not against technology. I'm against stupid and harmful technology. And technologies often become stupid and horrible when they're deployed by bad people or

0:38:56 Thomas: Really? Really? Yeah.

0:40:10 Alejandro: When they're controlled by bad People. And if you forgot the five things or whatever, fine. But what I really want to hammer home is not to make a pun on bloodite smashing things, but I really want to hammer home is that the point of technologists is to make our lives better, right? They have to have no intrinsic value in and of themselves. And if technology is making our lives worse, then we should destroy them. We should stop them. They're bad.

0:40:26 Thomas: Yeah. Okay. All right. And I'll say, you know, maybe we can, we could do that by, by shifting funds. I don't know that you need to get a hammer out, but you know different approaches. That's okay. Different, different tactics.

0:40:42 Alejandro: Yeah, no, the threat of the hammer matters just as much as the hammer.

0:40:44 Thomas: Sure. Oh yeah. Yeah, I believe, I agree with that. No, this has been a lot of fun. Alejandro, thank you so much. And oh, as always, I want to give you a chance to plug anything you want to plug. You've mentioned a few of your projects, but if you wanted to send listeners anywhere, where would it be?

0:40:58 Alejandro: Well, I write about technology at theluddite.org. Go there. It out. And organize your workplaces, everyone should organize their workplaces. I

0:41:07 Thomas: Excellent. I love it. Thank you so Much for giving me so much of your time. And for real, maybe we should talk to your brother, maybe see if he wants to do an interview.

0:41:15 Alejandro: Would be happy he would love

0:41:16 Thomas: That'd be super fun.

0:41:16 Alejandro: To talk he hates carbon markets and he would like to talk about it. Thank you behind are so stupid sounds

0:41:20 Thomas: All right. Well, this Has been a Lot of Fun, a to Think About, and thank you So Much.