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We’ve now received and published all the contributions in our online seminar on David Graeber’s _Debt: The First 5000 Years_ . For those wanting a handy index the posts are:
Chris Bertram, “Introduction”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/seminar-on-david-graebers-debt-the-first-5000-years-introduction/
John Quiggin, “The unmourned death of the double coincidence”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/the-unmourned-death-of-the-double-coincidence/
Henry Farrell: “The world economy is not a tribute system”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/the-world-economy-is-not-a-tribute-system/
Barry Finger “Debt jubilee or global deleveraging”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/debt-jubilee-or-global-deleveraging/
John Quiggin (slight return): “The end of debt”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/the-end-of-debt/
Neville Morley: “The return of grand narrative in the human sciences”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/22/the-return-of-grand-narrative-in-the-human-sciences/
Malcolm Harris: “The dangers of pricing the infinite”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/23/the-dangers-of-pricing-the-infinite/
Daniel Davies “Too big to fail: the first 5000 years”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/25/too-big-to-fail-the-first-5000-years/
Lou Brown: “Good to think with”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/26/good-to-think-with/
Richard Ashcroft: “Money out of place: ‘debt’ and incentives”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/26/money-out-of-place-debt-and-incentives/
Rob Horning: “Debt on the 12th planet”:https://crookedtimber.org/2012/02/28/debt-on-the-12th-planet/
Stay tuned, as we’re hoping that David Graeber will be able to write a response to some of this soon, but that won’t happen for at least a week or so.
David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years begins with a conversation in a London churchyard about debt and morality and takes us all the way from ancient Sumeria, through Roman slavery, the vast empires of the “Axial age”, medieval monasteries, New World conquest and slavery to the 2008 financial collapse. The breadth of material Graeber covers is extraordinarily impressive and, though anchored in the perspective of social anthropology, he also draws on economics and finance, law, history, classics, sociology and the history of ideas. I’m guessing that most of us can’t keep up and that we lack, to some degree, his erudition and multidisciplinary competence. Anyway, I do. But I hope that a Crooked Timber symposium can draw on experts and scholars from enough of these different disciplines to provide some critical perspective. My own background is in political philosophy and the history of political thought: so that naturally informs my own reactions as do my political engagements and sympathies. So mine is merely one take on some of the book’s themes.
There is a great gap between the overthrow of authority and the creation of a substitute. That gap is called liberalism: a period of drift and doubt. We are in it today.
I think that the pace of technological change is intolerable, that it denies humans the dignity of continuity, states the competence to govern, and social scientists a society about which to accumulate knowledge.
But we’ve had technological change before! some object. And things turned out fine!
As Chris suggests, one of the most memorable disasters at Crooked Timber was the seminar on David Graeber’s book, Debt. Timothy Burke described it at the time as conveying:
that feeling of grad school as Hobbesean nightmare, of small arguments quickly and casually intensified into thermonuclear exchanges, losing all potentially meaningful disagreements along the way.
Crooked Timber is twenty years old today, which is an awfully long time for a website, never mind a blog, never mind one that is strictly non-commercial and run on volunteer labour. So here’s to us, and here’s to all those who have been on board at various times during our journey. To quote the Grateful Dead: what a long, strange trip it’s been.
We started the blog shortly after the Iraq war started and in a world that was still shaped by the immediate aftermath of 9/11. A bunch of people who had blogs of their own came together to form our collective after a period of email back-and-forth. It might have been quite a different blog: Norman Geras a strong supporter of the war, had been involved in the emailing, but it became clear that we couldn’t have both him and Dan Davies, so we settled for Dan, and what a good choice that was. Matt Yglesias was invited, but never replied, and has gone on to a rather successful online career.
The initial crew was Chris Bertram, Harry Brighouse, Daniel Davies, Henry Farrell, Maria Farrell, Kieran Healy, Jon Mandle and Brian Weatherson. Four out of nine survivors isn’t bad, but I miss the contributions of those who have moved on, who wrote some of the great posts of the early years. Within a few months we had added Ted Barlow, Eszter Hargittai, John Holbo, John Quiggin, Tom Runnacles, Micah Schwartzman and Belle Waring, and then Ingrid Robeyns and Scott McLemee joined us a couple of years later, followed soon after by Michael Bérubé. By 2008, the Guardian was listing us in its top 50 most powerful blogs, but I think we missed the moment to cash in and become tech zillionaires. Niamh Hardiman became a member around 2011, followed later by Tedra Osell, Eric Rauchway and Corey Robin, then Rich Yeselson. In 2018 we were joined by Serene Khader, Miriam Ronzoni, Gina Schouten and Astra Taylor and then this past year by Chris Armstrong, Elizabeth Anderson, Eric Schliesser, Kevin Munger, Macarena Marey, Paul Segal and Speranta Dumitru. Throughout we tried to keep a mix of people of different experiences, backgrounds, genders and locations, though I’m sure we could have done better. One person, who sadly has left us, deserves special thanks: Kieran Healy was not only an intellectual force behind Crooked Timber, but also, long after he ceased posting, kept us on the road with his technical expertise. The site would have long since fallen over without him.
This is the second post on MacAskill’s book. (The first one is here; it lists some qualities about the book that I admire.)
Two ground-rules about what follows:
- I ignore all the good non-longtermist, effective altruism (EA) has done. It’s mostly wonderful stuff, and no cynicism about it is warranted.
- I ignore MacAskill’s association with SBF/FTX. I have said what I want to say about it (here), although if any longtermists associated with the EA movement come to comment here, I hope they remember that the EA community directly benefitted from fraud (and that there is an interesting question to what degree it was facilitated by the relentless mutual backscratching of the intellectual side of the EA community and SBF); and perhaps focus on helping the victims of SBF.
- Perhaps, for some consequentialists (1) and (2) cancel each other out?
There’s been a lot of excitement about Artificial Intelligence (AI) lately, much of focused on long-standing “big questions” like “is AI really intelligent” (short answer, no)
I don’t have an answer to that, so I’ll stick to the easier questions like “will a robot take my job”. I’ve argued before that this isn’t a good way to think about the issue. New technology has been changing the way we work for centuries, and will continue to do so. But for particular jobs being transformed by technological change, it is certainly relevant.
One area that’s moved ahead very rapidly is the generation of human-like text. The cutting edge here is a program called GPT-3, launched in 2020, which can produce impressive looking philosophical discussions. The underlying research has already been commercialised with products like Jasper, which has the much more prosaic (literally!) goal of producing advertising copy, blog posts and so on.
Jasper clearly won’t pass a Turing test if you ask for anything complex, but it is very good for its intended purpose: turning out text that looks as if a human wrote it. This has big implications for a large category of jobs, notably including many that the late David Graeber called “bullsh*t jobs”.
As an example, a fair bit of the content of a typical newspaper consists of press releases that have been lightly edited and perhaps spiced up a bit. With Jasper, the time taken for this task goes from an hour or so to a few minutes. For that matter, the press release itself can be generated from a few prompts in a similarly short time.
As with previous tech advances, that’s not likely to create mass unemployment any time soon. But it will mean that this kind of routine copywriting will be done much faster, by writers who have the skills to give programs like Jasper the right prompts, and then to touch up the final output. And this will extend to lots of admin jobs that have previously been immune from technical change.
Lots of middle management jobs, for example, involve writing memos and reports justifying one corporate decision or another. After you read a few, they all seem the same. AI can distil the essence well enough to mimic the style. After that, it’s just a matter of fitting the verbiage around the desired conclusion.
Over the fold, a few examples.
So, I had promised a Part 2, and here it is. As I anticipated in Part 1, Graeber and Wengrow suggest that we should look at early Modern and Modern exchanges between, especially, Europeans and native North-Americans in a different way. If we take seriously what European intellectuals, missionaries and explorers of the time report, the story they tell us is one of encounters characterised by muscular, vibrant debates about the merits of different social arrangements and life-styles. Crucially, in these debates, both parties were active, passionate participants, and indigenous intellectuals had very sharp criticisms to make to western political structures, as they were getting to know them. This is not the central thesis of the book (which is about early humans, recall), but it is put forward as a clue to the fact that we might have a tendency to stubbornly deny certain pieces of evidence – even when they lie in front of us, in plain sight. [click to continue…]
I recently finished reading* The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow; I enjoyed it very much indeed. I thought I’d write a two parts review for CT, and here’s the first – I will publish the second in a few days. It is a very long, sprawling (in a good way) book, and there are (at least) two main themes in it, so addressing each separately feels right. This post is mainly about the book’s attempt to dismantle the myth of “agriculture as the source of social inequality.” The next post will be about Graeber’s and Wengrow’s startling claim that European Enlightenment can be seen, to a large extent, as the result of a conversation with indigenous, non-western intellectuals and societies – indeed, as inspired by them. [click to continue…]
If the world is burning, and the walls of western civilization are collapsing around our ears, what exactly is the point of devoting time not only to reading speculative fiction – that might be understood, if not necessarily excused, as a temporary escape from contemporary horrors – but to discussing it in a learned manner? Surely our intellectual energies should be focused on the real problems that confront us, not on the imaginary problems of an imagined future? But, the answer may come, of course these are really our problems; extrapolated and magnified and taken to extremes, but still recognisably versions of the issues we face. Still, time is short; surely a more direct engagement with this world is what’s needed, to have any hope of real solutions? [click to continue…]
From a Laurie Penny piece last month for The Baffler, “The Slow Confiscation of Everything: How To Think About Climate Apocalypse”: “As David Graeber notes in Debt: The First 5,000 Years, the ideal psychological culture for the current form of calamity capitalism is an apprehension of coming collapse mated bluntly with the possibility of individual escape.”
That’s a Cory Doctorow thought. More specifically, how can humanity defeat the distinctive sorts of bullshit moral self-delusion that are the bastard progeny of that blunt mating? Evil snowcrash of snowflakes, melting, each trying to be The One. Cory credits Graeber (among others) right there on his acknowledgement page. And I might add: Penny immediately mentions Annalee Newitz’ new book, Scatter, Adapt, And Remember: How Humans Will Survive A Mass Extinction – which bears an effusive Doctorow blurb: “… balanced on the knife-edge of disaster and delirious hope.”
Call it the one-body problem. I’ve only got the one, you see …
Meanwhile, what matters is: you know, humanity. [click to continue…]
No spoilers because I’m just talking in generalities. Read away.
Walkaway is a book in which important issues about how we should live, and how we can live, are discussed and hashed out very thoroughly. Not anywhere near the level of Kim Stanley Robinson, when in the course of reading you are inclined to ask, “did I just read 160 pages of minutes from an anarcho-syndicalist collective meeting? Yes, yes I did. Huh. Why I am I finishing this trilogy? Oh right, I have a compulsive need to finish any book.” Nonetheless, the discussions are full and mostly quite satisfying even as they treat difficult issues. What do we owe one another in society? How should we distribute resources? (I will note in passing that there is a certain tension between the post-scarcity economy that seems to be available and the widespread poverty of the “default” world, but we can hardly expect a smooth transition from the one to the other; perhaps this is realism rather than inconsistency.)
However there is one topic which does not get as much of this treatment, in my opinion, even as it is a very live issue in the plot, namely, is a copy of you really you? If your consciousness could be uploaded to a computer and successfully simulated, would this represent a continuation of your actual self, or merely the creation of a copy of you, like an animated xerox? Would you “go on living” in some meaningful sense? What if these new copies of you were drafted as servants, to use the way we use machines now, but a thousand times more useful? [click to continue…]
It’s Nazi week at Crooked Timber! Do you love thrilling stories about Nazis? Great! [click to continue…]
I was rereading David Graeber’s Debt over the weekend. The intervening two years, since our book event, have not caused it to be the case that Graeber doesn’t owe Henry an apology, after all. But the life of the mind goes on. We do not freeze intellectual accounts due to outstanding personal debts. That is to say, the free market of ideas is baseline communist, in Graeber’s sense. If I have a bright idea, I do not expect to be paid back, by those who receive it, in the form of two half-insights – or 100 comments, each containing but a grote’s worth of thought; none of that. (I expect intellectual credit, of course.)
My bright idea for the day is that I have no idea what the difference is between reciprocity and baseline communism. [click to continue…]
My travelogue continues … By the way, check out friend-o-the-blog Sam Bikinoraion‘s blog – he is also going round the world this year, and seems to be visiting a load of my favourite places, which I didn’t fancy taking the kids to. This episode takes me through Greece, and is posted a bit in arrears, as I headed off to the desert after the events described herein …