Technology, power, and political economy w/ Professor Khalid Kadir

Chapter 1: Introduction

Mike: Welcome back to the Misaligned Markets Podcast. This is the second part of my interview with Professor Khalid Kadir at the University of California, Berkeley, in the political economy department. So if you missed the first episode, this is a two-parter second part of an earlier interview where I went into Khalid's background andwhat drew him to political economy from his engineering program initially.It likely makes sense to watch the first part before diving into the second part where I talk to Khalid about contemporary issues and the particular insights that the political economy program at Cal and generally political economy more broadly can provide in terms of perspective and analysis. Without any further ado, let's get into the second part of my interview with Khalid.

Chapter 2: Progress as an ongoing social commitment
Mike:I think the reason why I fell in love with political economy and I'm still sticking with it 15 years later is being in a position to question your assumptions. But if you have that privilege, you're one of the few people who are in a place that you can actually begin nudging people or nudging the system society to think differently and actually engage with constructive critiques that build a better world, right?

Khalid Kadir: Totally. And thinking about social change that I've benefited from. If people hadn't made the fights they made in the past, neither you nor I would be sitting here today. And people gave their lives for that, and recognizing those kind of sacrifices that we are benefiting off of the struggles of other people who thought about the world and struggled to make it better, it feels like, okay, well, you got to do your part too. That's part of the, some say, rent we pay for living, whatever you want to call it. But I feel very much enriched by adopting those same struggles and trying to push that forward.

Mike: Yeah, but the other thing too is just that we're on that continuum still. Just because we have a very great narrative, especially in the United States, that the fights are over, we all won, we got our rights, the rights are

Khalid Kadir: End of history. Right

Mike: Yeah, and we're learning obviously in the current administration, the current era, that this doesn't end.

Khalid Kadir: No. And people knew that well before this administration, but I think it's become much more visible.

Mike: It's very obvious that this doesn't end.

Chapter 3: Extraction around the world

Khalid Kadir: Absolutely. Absolutely. I think about how even the precursor, I think about the 2020 and the George Floyd protests waking people up. But that's one lens. There are so many. You think about Jason Hickel's recent work on extraction from the global south, and it's like, oh, we are continuing to extract massive amounts of wealth from the poorest people in the world. This is really corrupt. And the challenge of living where we live is that that benefits us on net. That really benefits us. There's a reason why I can have as many pairs of shoes as I have, and it's because someone who made them didn't get paid much money, so I could afford to buy multiple pairs, and that makes me uncomfortable, right? That's not the way I want the world to be. I don't want to be benefiting from the enslavement or expropriation of others in any way.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and one thing that, you know, and this is not like necessarily a good thing, but I think it's sort of like um I don't want to overstate it in the terms of like creating solidarity, but like in even in the western countries, we're starting to see, you know, um relationships defined by extraction, right? You've got terms like Doctorow's enshittification, right? Um, or something like Elizabeth Anderson's uh you know, private governments, right? What are your working conditions like? Your boss is a lord who basically uh controls most of your waking life, right? So even in privileged Western uh uh conditions, you've got these same questions, you know, with a different tenor and flavor, obviously. Um, but making people question, wait, why are we doing this? Like, why is it this way?

Khalid Kadir: And I think that as we see people's loosely termed quality of life slide backwards, as they continue working as hard as they did in the past, but able to do less with the income they earn from that.

Mike: That treadmill is...

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, exactly. That's an entitlement gap. I used to work 40 hours and I could afford to do this on the weekends. Now I work 40 hours and I'm in the hole and this isn't working out anymore. You see pushes for change. Now, the fear is that push can go a lot of ways. It's not necessarily in a positive way, right? So we see the rise of white nationalism and things like that in the United States and sort of right-wing anti-immigrant rhetoric in Europe. It's sort of blame the others, blame the folks with dark skin, blame the women, blame all the other ideologies that are not central to their own personal existence. And that's a thing that if we aren't on our game, those of us who are trying to think about these things, we have to provide alternative narratives. Because otherwise, when people get frustrated, they need a story, they need a narrative. And I think it's important that we have other narratives out there to understand, no, no, the reason you're poor is directly related to the reason Elon Musk is about to be a trillionaire. Those two things are part of the exact same process. And so direct your anger that way.

Chapter 4: Pluralistic approach to political economy

Mike: So in terms of the way you think of political economy, what's your fundamental unit of analysis? Do you think about the state, social relations? I kind of-

Khalid Kadir: You're asking if I'm a Marxist? I don't know that I have a singular unit of analysis. I really appreciate, and this is the multidisciplinary focus, the ways in which the different lenses all have something to add to the story. You can't get away from Elon Musk's personality. Slobodian's new book, Muskism. You can't get away from that because he's that important. Just like Fordism is named after Ford and Taylorism named after Taylor, the personalities of these individuals were meaningful and impactful. At the same time, I'm sure as hell not gonna describe the world as a collection of individual personalities interacting with one another, because then you'd call me an economist, right? And then I would be insulted. So instead, I think social groups matter too, but there are limits to that, and institutions matter, but they aren't the only thing that matters. So I'm a little bit pluralistic around these approaches, and I think they all have something to add to the story at different moments and in different ways.

Mike: That makes sense. I think that's right. For me and my project, I do think I'm kind of drilling into something, so I kind of am-

Khalid Kadir: You have to pick a lens?

Mike: I'm picking a lens. Part of this is I have a fixation. I think there is basically a huge dissonance after taking economics through the political economy program and even doing a little bit more economics outside of school. And this lens is not complete, but I can't—I don't—I'm trying to figure out why it's not complete. And so I've been driving towards—I don't want to say an alternative explanation of competition, but effectively a secondary lens for viewing economic competition. And one that's focused mainly on the world rather than the economic logic. So if you think about the history of economics, micro is basically—I don't want to simplify it, but you could argue micro is something like economizing. So micro is basically given a unit of capital, like land, whatever. How do we-

Khalid Kadir: Do the most with it? How do you do the most with it, financially?

Mike: Yeah, And then that scaled up until the Great Depression. And then-

Khalid Kadir: That's Marx's perspective, too. That's how capital works. Grow, grow, grow. That imperative of increase.

Mike: And then the Great Depression happens. Oh, crap. There are actually other things we had to understand because simply knowing how to economize is not helping us manage-

Khalid Kadir: There's like a momentum and a structure that things that can be a time delay, and if we don't account for that, we have unemployment, that's Keynes, like all this kind of stuff. Yeah, okay.

Mike: Like the growth of the creation of GDP, right? Literally right after the Great Depression. It's like we have to manage this machine. Yeah. And then, you know, the field basically becomes stuck. You know, there's obviously I'm I'm simplifying there's there's novel economics, but I'm saying, you know, in terms of foundational um um paradigms, like that's sort of what people are building in. And then I guess you have I don't know where to slot in econometrics, but there are people who are basically doing empirical statistical research, and I guess that is actually a novel um approach, but it's not uh there's no ontology of that. That is just statistics and methods applied to-

Khalid Kadir: well, it's positivist epistemologically, and I think there is a belief that that we can know through these things. I think there is an ontological basis, but it's very similar to what folks would have.

Mike: By by ontological basis, I meant like one grounded in the ontology of the thing being studied. Okay. They're just gathering data, which like so there is method methodologically, right? There's obviously a uh like an ontology to have methods to do that, right? But that the thing they're engaging with, I don't know that they're substantially, you know, like micro is opinionated in that, you know, they think that agents are rational, and that, you know, so like that's an ontology, or macro is... Some of them, some, some do, some-

Khalid Kadir: You don't think econometrics also embraces those frameworks? And some complicate it with some irrational frames that they add to it, but they just work that into their models. They add psychology and then they call it CogSci and and you know?

Mike: I think I think econometrics is more of a buffet, but I I do agree with you in that, like there's only there's only a handful of lenses, right? Yeah. So like I do I do definitely agree with that. Um But my project is is literally just to satiate this question I had of okay, like in my life, you know, how have I observed and engaged with uh uh economic realities and and and how is it that companies actually seek profit, right? Because when you look at the way that they they behave, right, when they're operationalizing uh say tax loopholes or regulatory arbitrage or marketing, I was a marketer for most of my career. Um you know that story is different from what I was taught in economics, and in fact, the economic story is arguably irrelevant, right? Now there are maybe places where the the traditional economics lens is useful, right? But like when we talk about these questions, especially ones of of like this overwhelming uh in a country like the United States, like where Citizens United exists, overwhelming economic power translates to political power, you kind of need more lenses to describe-

Khalid Kadir: I think Galbraith might help you here

Mike: No, I know-

Khalid Kadir: And Veblen helps you here too, right? Who Galbraith builds off of.

Mike: I'm doing a, basically Veblen is not the only person I'm drawing from, but my concepts. Veblen and not Leisure Class, but the other one, Business. I forget the name of the book. Sure, sure. Because we didn't read it, I think we only read Leisure Class.

Khalid Kadir: Leisure Class is 100, yeah.

Mike: But his other book he talks about idling production, right? All these tricks that companies do.

Khalid Kadir: They engage with the real world as it exists in institutions, regulatory frameworks, all these things.

Mike: They are looking for gaps, and so economists would be scratching their head, oh, they're not maximizing marginal costs. It's like, well, they don't have to do that, they're engaging with-

Chapter 5: (Almost) everything is politics

Khalid Kadir: A different process to make money. Well, I think this is where Galbraith is really helpful—to think about the folks, the "they" that we're talking about—are people trained in business schools. Right. They're management professionals, and they're trained to do certain things in these schools, so you can look at what kinds of training you get in these curricula and how that manifests in processes of money-making in the world. I'd say, in that framework, there is a framework that I do approach all of this through. It's—and this is going to sound a little funny when I first say it—but it's politics. And I think about the ways in which we hide from politics, we depoliticize things. And I think this comes very much from my engineering background, because technical solutions are used as a way of hiding the political nature of politics.

Mike: Right... neutrality. It's like we're adjudicating not some sort of subjective issue-

Khalid Kadir: Or we don't have to go after the person who's benefiting from this harm. We don't have to go after Chevron for messing up the climate. We'll just create a market and call them carbon credits. And then no one has to be regulated and pointed to as a bad actor and fined because of that. Instead, we let markets work it out and we've avoided the politics of saying that's too much, you're hurting the planet. So this role of using technologies as a way of avoiding—we do the same thing with development. People are hungry. Let's come up with new technologies to improve the yields on their farm, as opposed to talking about land reform and why some people have very little land. It goes back to something you said earlier, that these things don't come out of nowhere. And this really struck me with water. Drinking water by itself is not innately bad for you, which sounds funny to say, but if water from a stream no people have messed with, 99% chance you can drink that water and you don't have a problem. People have dirty drinking water precisely because of the actions other people have taken that have subjected them to dirty drinking water. They weren't born in that place drinking dirty water for generations. That water was made dirty. And it's the same thing—the actions of people have created the problem, but we hide from those actions by putting these technical exercises on top of them, whether it's engineering as a technology to avoid politics, or markets as a technology to avoid politics of distribution, instead of engaging about how much is too much. Keynesians have a little more political approach, but still within the boundaries of economics. They still have expertise that tells you what is and isn't possible.

Mike: I mean Keynesianism very much so is uh, like you said, is a positivist program.

Khalid: Totally. Totally.

Mike: And... the move that they do that is you know that distinguishes them, or at least not mod modern Keynesians, but you know, the the first Keynesians is just that what made them more amenable to, I guess, you you could say, like uh uh uh you know uh uh being compatible with certain political programs, uh right, like the New Deal, whatever. Is that they saw the economy as an object. Going back to what I was saying earlier, the history of economics, the first economists were just like this econom economics is just economizing, that's all it is, right? And then they're like, No, there's an object called the economy that we should study.

Khalid: Yeah.

Mike: And that inevitably gets you to interact with the state. And-

Khalid Kadir: this is Mitchell and and and Callan and stuff like that, thinking about the performativity and the way in which economists are not scientists. They create the world that they describe, and there's a real problem in that. Right, right.

Mike: I like what you said about, you know, I mean, part of my project is not necessarily to talk about or or necessarily um uncover like a uh like describe a political program. I'm I'm really kind of drilling in on this, like I'm fixated on uh profit and how you know arbitrage enables profit, like exploiting the gap between the real what reality is and how it's being described via the systems we create. So that's my narrow focus. But even as I am pursuing this project, this notion of you know everything is politics keeps popping up in my uh my analysis because obviously, you know, politics creates the social world, it creates the rules, right? Um then you have basically uh governance structures, right, that that describe what can and can't be done, right? And and the governance structure inevitably has to draw a line somewhere saying, you know, like there are people who are disadvantaged. You can't do that. You can't you can't do this corrective action to uh improve your your position, right? Uh whereas-

Khalid Kadir: Well it doesn't have to, but in our contemporary framework it does generally, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: You know, one of the things that I, you know, was realizing is that, you know, one, I've I found I'm really happy that you asigned um Polanyi's-

Khalid: Great Transformation.

Mike: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like I keep saying double movement in all my blog posts now because it's like, I've seen most of us think we have a story that our social progress is just one of technical aptitude. Like you're saying, we have technical solutions that make the world better. Sure. But when you look at all those technical solutions, I mean, factories were horror houses, right? Where children got their hands cut off, and it wasn't until people agitated for making factories safer and better that they became this mundane part of our lives, right?

Khalid Kadir: They had to fight for that.

Mike: The same is true for cars, the same is true for trains, the same is true for pretty much any technology you could think of. It wasn't that the the benevolent you know capitalists created a technology that was perfectly suited for our lives and needs. It's that you know they created technology, sometimes, oftentimes, without the consent of the public. Yeah, it had major externalities. Yeah, there wasn't some technocrat that said, okay, using the rational you know analysis of what what the fair cost-benefit analysis is, we're gonna create the best regulation. It was like literally activists and workers, etc., yeah, kind of shaking and agitating for change. Yeah. And the fact that we don't tell this story, which I'm not saying is I mean, I to me, you know, like I don't think this is political. This is a story. This is people literally, I we we have refrigeration that's safe, we have all these things that are safe because people are asked, they they they they fought for it, right? Yeah, um, but it is interesting that we we don't tell this story, and instead we tell a story of one of just smooth, you know, like technocratic, you know, uh ingenuity and you know and like that's part of the story, of course. Like there's-

Chapter 6: What stories of progress hide

Khalid Kadir: It is the story of progress too. Like we really worship at the altar of progress in in our contemporary society, this idea that tech and and more are the two signs of progress, and I think that's part of what gets us to this place too, right? We get sold on the on the wows of these new things, and it's only later that we come to understand, like, oh, here are the problems that come with it too, right? I think about PFAS and Gore-Tex jackets and walk around in the rain, and now we realize we're all getting contaminated because of it, and can't even drink rainwater anymore because it's got PFAS in it, right? So, like I think about how we get sold on ideologies of technological progress that that are so central to the sort of dominant religion of our time in some ways. And that that gets in the way of us thinking critically about these technologies because we see them as good. It's that depoliticization, it's that that that sense of who we are, what makes us who we are, is that we're different from the people before us, right? Right. And it's uh I think that's a a real short-sighted, sort of hubris-filled thing.

Mike: It's it's funny you mentioned PFAS because uh I I think DuPont single-handedly is probably one of the worst companies to ever exist. Yeah. It's a joke among my friends. I I talk about Thomas Midgley all the time. He's the creator of Leaded Gasoline. So Midgley knew that uh lead was uh was toxic.

Khalid Kadir: It was bad, yeah.

Mike: He actually had been poisoned when he was Yeah. But um, you know, he-

Khalid Kadir: But the lesson cut one way, not the other, huh? He didn't take that lesson and be like, let's all we ought not do this stuff.

Mike: I'm hoping to interview um Bill Kovarik. He's he did um some of the research into Midgley's background because he went to GM's archives where they sanitized the archives, so a lot of the juiciest bits I think are kind of cut out because they're incriminating. Um, but from from what I can tell, Midgley may have felt guilty about what he did. Okay. If you go to his Wikipedia page, and I think Kovarik himself said it's very likely he committed suicide. Interesting. But he was a billionaire. I yeah. I mean, he I mean his bosses were everyone was happy with him, and he was a rock star. I mean, he was you know, he lived a good life. And but maybe to some extent he he did realize what he was doing what you know, and he did feel bad about it.

Khalid Kadir: I'd be curious to know the ideological foundations for why he did the things he did and how that led him to that end.

Mike: I see it as as an incentive structure. Because like like so DuPont bought GM, which is where he worked. GM owned his his little outfit. Okay. And you know, a lot a lot of his bosses were were like looking for a way to obviously increase profits and kind of they had a a partnership with Standard Oil, and so they went to the quarter oil market.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah. How can we use this substance to make make money? Yeah.

Mike: So like Midgley as I mean, if you kind of read kind of his process for um exploring this, he is a scientist. He was very curious about, you know, uh these different types of uh additives. And you know, like you kind of even hear stories of of of his um his aspiration. Some of them are kind of funny. Um he like in some ways he's just a normal guy who when he found a solution that you know at first he didn't realize was bad and gave it to his bosses and they were happy. Yeah and then he got billions of dollars. He's like, Oh, okay, you know, you know, this is no, you know, and then I guess at some point he felt guilty about it. .

Khalid Kadir: Yeah. And there's so much of this. I mean, that's DDT, yeah, right? Guy wins the Nobel Prize, and then later we're like, oh, what did we do? Right. Now we're banning it. So there is a way in which our knowledge and this gets it, progress. Like DDT, progress. Look at the we look at the amazing wow, and we never stop to ask, well, wait a second, uh there's no precautionary principle involved here, right? And part of it is the ways in which we are physically distanced from the effects of the things we're doing. I think about agriculture and how you know you spray over there, but you live over here. And so like you have a different relationship.

Mike: Have you heard of Timothy Morton's hyper objects?

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:21:56.319] Mike: Totally. The minute I saw them, like, this is what externalities are, distributed across time and space. Yeah. You can't see all their effects. There's this very-

Khalid Kadir: Combined with arrogance. To combine with the kind of secular arrogance of us are the ones with power instead of a humility, humble orientation towards what we're doing.

Mike: There's just this sense that, you know, because our our society is, you know, very technocratic, we're very solutions oriented. And so there is a there is a thinker, I can't I can't pronounce his name, I can't remember his name either, but like he talks about solutionism, right? And so when you are kind of like narrowly focused on a slice of a single uh piece of a problem, the minute you get you know uh um a a solution that has the the trappings or the the the attributes of that solve the immediate immediate piece of the problem, you just run with it, right? That's that's kind of how our society works.

Khalid Kadir: Well, this is this is methodologically baked into engineering. We draw what we call a control volume around the problem. We draw a dotted line, we solve it in that problem, but we often forget about the larger systems that are we don't think in terms of systems in that way, overwhelmingly. And I think that's that's it. Like, oh, I need to stop this insect from eating this plant. You draw a box around the insect eating the plant, you figure out how to kill it, you don't think about all the other things that are going on in there. Totally, totally.

Mike: Yep.

Khalid Kadir: Where do we go from there, right?

Mike: Yeah. I was gonna... because you brought up a precautionary principle. I mean, that's that's a that's a value, right? So to kind of put a bow on this story. So DuPont also had a toxicologist, Robert Kehoe.

Khalid Kadir: Interesting.

Mike: And so Kehoe-

Khalid Kadir: They butt Heads?

Mike: Um No Kehoe is basically defending DuPont. And so whenever DuPont's inventions, you know-

Khalid Kadir: Ran into the law

Mike: Right, like he's just like, you know, making justifications. And one of the things he did, you know, as part of lead gasoline and other some of these other toxic uh things, because they had a campaign, DuPont had a campaign to convince the public that it's fine. And you know, and at that time we didn't we weren't able to measure what like b you know lead volume and the way the precise ways we can today. Blood lead and stuff. Exactly, yeah. So, you know, like Kehoe was saying, hey, look, if you can't prove that it's harmful immediately, we should be allowed to do it. It's literally called the Kehoe principle.

Khalid Kadir And so they flip the burden.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. The burden of proof is on you if it, you know, if it's if it's really bad.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, show me it's bad. Otherwise, we're gonna roll with it.

Mike: Yeah.

Khalid Kadir: Okay. And when you think about the anything that takes a little while to kill you, then is fine, because it's gonna take a while before they can show it. That's that's a big... that's a winner.

Mike: That's a lot to control for. Totally. So when I think about the Kehoe principle, this describes much of Western culture, at least the Anglophone, utility-maximizing, engineering-minded kind. Just so short-sighted.

Khalid: It's amazing how much it lacks wisdom, right? Any bit of wisdom would tell you to slow down and think. And it's also related to principles like what's new is better, so the old is not as good. We also live in a society that disproportionately doesn't respect our elders, doesn't take them seriously, sees them as a burden on society instead of seeing them as the center of society. Well, that's precisely why we have a hard time learning from our elders, right? And I think that's a big challenge too.

Mike: The irony too is that as we've embraced this mode of being, the rate of crises has accelerated. And I don't want to mind read or psychologize, but some portions of the culture just become obsessed with doom and crisis, the whole fear of AI destroying everybody.

Khalid Kadir: Doomers and boomers. It goes one way or the other, right? It's-

Mike: It's literally a manifestation. It's like if you don't have some resolution between the Keho principle and the precautionary principle, you end up in a world where your social progress inevitably comes with this dread and anxiety because it's like, well, we're not going to control for the-

Chapter 7: AI detached from its political economy

Khalid Kadir: And these are tools that people get manipulated with too. But this is what's happening, right? Yeah, Bender and Hannah have a great book called The AI Con. It is the the I cannot more strongly recommend a book about AI. And they're like, look, there's all these folks claiming it's gonna like peace on Earth and we're all gonna live in Mars and wherever, and there's people that are like, oh, we're all gonna get shot by a killer robot and they're all gonna die. And they're like, the reality is that these are about speculative futures, and right now, people's utility bills are going up, lack of water, like let's talk about what it's actually doing rather than speculate on the future. And if we handle this, we might have a different relationship to this technology.

Mike: Yes. I wrote a uh like a 10,000-word blog post called uh what to expect when you're expecting the AI bubble. So I'm I'm uniquely kind of situated in that, you know. So I studied political economy, and then a lot of my marketing career was in tech. And so I have, you know, I'm not saying I'm a technical expert, but I have exposure to these technologies. Um, and so I, you know, when I was kind of seeing how AI was marketed, and you know, I I have friends who are in machine learning, you know, I've I've used the technology before.

Khalid Kadir: Live in the Bay?

Mike: Yeah, live in the bay, right? So it's like you know, I would I even have, you know, in my my home a a home lab, I have a server where I I've deployed local models and I'm seeing people make like kind of like insane claims. And it's like so I end up writing basically um I think last year I wrote two blog posts on on AI. Uh one of them you might find interesting, I talk about basically a lot of AI actually is um going back to social relations uh and and things like Timothy Mitchell's Carbon econ- basically AI is uh is a set of infrastructure where you are leveraging um you know the the um the talents of different people to influence the model, right? So at the ground level you've got a bunch of you know people who are data annotators who are basically labeling things for the AI, kind of helping it see the world. Yeah, right. Yeah, but even at runtime, you've got these engineers who are running systems like uh vector databases and other systems that basically allow the model to function at runtime. Because these models don't they don't learn in real time, they can't. They're actually they're they're frozen. Once you've trained a large language model, it's its weights are frozen in time. Okay. And so in order for it to get new information, you have to build tools and scaffolding for it to actually do anything. And then in order for you to verify that it's reliably using the tools you built, you had to have observability pipelines where you're actually monitoring the AI in realtime. If you start seeing behaviors that aren't aren't good, you had to start tweaking or-

Khalid Kadir: you come up with a new release. Right, right. Hence the different ChatGPT releases, so to speak.

Mike: Yeah. But not even just releases, it's like also like, you know, for example, there's something called a system prompt, which is like the instructions that are given to the model at um within every every chat. And so there's a team of engineers at OpenAI that are tweaking the system problem based off of how users are interacting with it, right? There are so many humans in the loop. There, in fact, there's a whole supply chain of humans in the loop, and the way that the model is presented to users is just here's this AI god that knows everything by itself, yeah, it thaught itself everything.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, but it's actually being engineered by people.

Mike: In this blog post, the uh um I it's a different blog post than the one I was talking about, but I I talk about the um the magic of the model is basically created or or or um you know enforced by the alienation of all these people from their labor, right? Yeah, yeah. And I I mean I'm not just I mean it's obviously a Marxian term, but I I Adam Smith talks about this when he's talking about the pin factory. Yeah. Like you have people whose only purpose is to, you know, do a single task, but in this case, is to launder the idea that the model by itself is intelligent.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: And then that's that's to putting aside questions of if the AI is capable of doing a task. Sure. It can be, right? But you're gonna need engineers, you're gonna need data labelers, you're gonna need processes and workflows-

Khalid Kadir: yeah, you're gonna need humans. The same tool of drivers cars too. Yeah.

Mike: I think about like Waymo and stuff.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah totally. With the people behind that they weren't really telling us about. Right. Even the little robots on campus. Right. Being driven by people in Columbia. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: You got remote drivers, you've got people, even when the car is moving on its own, you got people mapping the roads. You got people training on those maps. Yeah. There is a lot of people.

Khalid Kadir: So there's a lot of deception going on in how what's actually happening underneath.

Mike: It's deception in that the companies are not correcting the amount of like they're not, they're not, they don't benefit from describing it this way.

Khalid Kadir: Totally.

Mike: But that's why, you know, uh uh uh Bender like wrote her book. Because like, you know, if you if you're an engineer or you're in the field, you know that it's true. Yeah, you know that these things are a generation. Totally, totally. When Elon Musk was promising promising us, you know, self-driving cars in 2014, yeah. We're gonna go to New York, you know. Yeah, or I think it was 2016 he said that fly for or drive from LA to New York, right? He knew, you know, or his team knew that wasn't happening.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.

Mike: That's why they got taken the court. Yeah. So

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, totally. The big struggle going on today, I believe, is the big court case with Altman and Musk. This is playing out now. We're getting a look at what's happening underneath the hood there.

Chapter 8: Palestine, Sudan, and other mounting moral crises
Mike: Yep. So, what do you think is the biggest issue facing modern post-industrial societies?

Khalid Kadir: I got an answer for you. I think it's Palestine. And I say that because I think the biggest—my first instinct when you asked that question, what's the biggest issue? I was thinking, well, it's kind of a moral crisis. The representation of that moral crisis is a livestream genocide that we just look the other way. I think that represents a number of the challenges. It feels weird to even use that language, but it represents a number of the failings of Western civilization that when we get to the point of seeing a livestream genocide, we're in denial about it. We're looking the other way, while many are actually cheering it on. I think that shows you kind of where we're at and where we're not at. It's demonstrative of how much we have dehumanized parts of the planet. And it's representative; it's not the only thing. These kinds of things are happening elsewhere. I mean, Sudan, the number of people that were murdered in that conflict, funded by the UAE, funded by the United States, these are becoming clearer or more easily accessible to people to understand our complicity. And I think they give the lie to the sort of lofty goals that ostensibly embody liberal capitalism in the West. And they really show the truth to the imperial nature and the extractive and the colonial nature, and I think they have opened the doors for many to start thinking differently about the world. I think folks, after two and a half years now of seeing this play out, they're starting to think differently. You just look at popular opinion around Israel and the world, it's in the gutter because I think the illusion is gone. But you can't separate that illusion from all these other things, you can't separate that from military-industrial complex, you can't separate that from imperialism, from capitalism, from all these other things. And I think that is pushing us into that kind of crisis in a way.

Mike: I think it helps that we've all learned that the world's run by a shadowy cabal too...

Khalid Kadir: Yeah. The Epstein files. Wow, I'm wondering where that's going to end up. I wonder if Thomas Massey's going to win that fight and we're going to see those things come public in a way, because it reminds me of something we talked about earlier: that theory is helpful, social theory is important, and it tells us a lot, but the actions of individual people are also important. And so both of these fit together. Neither of them is the end-all-be-all story, and so you can't separate out the actions of Jeffrey Epstein himself from the story, nor can you separate out the ideology of neoliberalism. Both of these are important. And so this dance between the actions of powerful individuals and the ideologies that drive the things we do are both important.

Mike: Yeah, not to fixate on him, but he started out as a broker. So he worked as-

Khalid Kadir: A deceitful broker, too. Yeah. Lied on his job application, remember? He said he taught at Berkeley. You know about that? He lied. He said he taught at Berkeley. They found out later he never did teach at Berkeley, but they're like, whatever. It's so funny that Berkeley got implicated through a lie in the Epstein story. His first job in finance.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, you think the irony is, if you think about things like liberalism and the West's political economy, if it were actually the embodiment of what it professes, then these things—I'm not saying they wouldn't happen at all, but they wouldn't—I don't think they would go as far. You know what I mean? It's hard to—

Khalid Kadir: They enable these processes of extraction and destruction to last longer because people are deceived by what's really going on.

Mike: Yeah. And to some extent, when I am feeling particularly pessimistic, liberalism is a hypocrisy, right? It's only because of people fighting for those values. You said that all humans are created equal, but some of us are in chains, right?

Khalid Kadir: Yeah.

Mike: It's only because of the double movement, right? This fighting for recognition— It kind of is everything is politics, in a sense.

Khalid Kadir: Right, it's funny. I often get into a big argument with a good friend of mine. I wonder if you're going to be listening to this. His parry to this, if I understand him correctly, is that while we certainly never achieved these ideals, the constant referencing of these ideals helped move us in a more positive direction than a more negative one. It kept us away from cynicism and towards an ideal that we aspired towards, even if we never achieved it. My response is we use this as a cover to keep screwing people over, and many in power never really held these ideals. They were cynical themselves. But he would argue differently. He would argue that these put us on a trajectory that was net good, and now that we're seeing us let go of these ideals, look how messy and ugly it is. So I want to voice that possibility, even though I disagree with him. But I voice that possibility that there was some value of at least coming together as a community around ideals, even if we never quite lived up to them.

Mike: Yeah I think there's I think there's truth in both of them right there's this this this tension this juxtaposition right like both of these things could be true and it it is the the case that like people who who do take the these ideas seriously are they're the gadflies of society are pushing us to a better equilibrium. And like you know it very well might be that in the absence of these ideals that you wouldn't have that. Now unfortunately you know these champions of these values are are doing so sometimes under under duress right yeah look at the the the the actions of abolitionists and yeah people who struggled right like there's-

Khalid Kadir: and the consequences they suffered yeah, yeah.

Mike: They they lived to create a world they never would see yep I mean it's it's it's it's extremely inspiring. Like you know as someone who's you know like my dad's Nigerian my mom's African American like I know very well that you know like there's a lot of struggle to to give me the life that I had like the people who I will never meet who who made sacrifices I I will never know to make this possible because they believed in these values. And there's something about that that is you know um admirable, valiant, and even worth fighting for even if these values were professed cynically right by powerful people.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah it doesn't take away the the the value of those values so to speak yeah no I agree. Yeah.

Chapter 9: Anti-globalization and local economies
Mike: What do you think the emergence of anti-globalization means for the future of capitalism is this an opportunity to kind of reset things-?

Khalid Kadir: Well let's historize that I mean Seattle 1999 this is an old story right this is a 30 year old story in the the the the uh what's it called the um the forum in the global south... the World People's Forum this is an explicitly anti-neoliberal globalization movement that's over 30 years old now so not a new I mean the Zapatistas in 1994 right like that's this this anti and then I think about Waldenbello and what he writes about anti-globalization so to speak uh or he calls it de-globalization and he's thinking particularly around lens of agriculture uh I think that um we do need to be rooted rooted in our local we do need to be rooted locally I think that's really important. I'm a big believer in in creating strong local economies so to speak uh and I'm thinking particularly around agriculture and basic needs.

Mike: We're learning that with all of I mean COVID and now this war, right?

Khalid Kadir: We have the potential to learn it. I don't know how much we're learning it but we are seeing the effects of not being that way.

Mike: People are more openly talking about this in a way that I think media but not whether or not we act on that knowledge I don't know.

Khalid Kadir: And it does often go the way of being a prepper which is not what I'm talking about, right? But like I do think that there is a lot of power to thinking about I mean and this is a framework that when when they came together at Bretton Woods everyone understood that you don't put agriculture to free trade like that'd be a ridiculous idea. But then by the time we get to the to the the World Trade Organization being institutionalized agriculture is part of it. So I do think we we lost something that people knew. And I think hopefully we're kind of regaining that. But that's happening up against the powers of these massive agricultural institutions that are running the gamut right now. So I think there's a real challenge to it. But I do think we're realizing that, like Yeah, interdependency founds great, but that also makes you very vulnerable. Right. Right. And we're seeing those. I mean, Europe's understanding is vulnerability to Russian gas. And we see how vulnerable the whole damn world is to a tiny little strait in off the coast of Iran. Who'd who'd have thought? Some people knew, but most of us didn't really think about just how important this tiny little and it gets that like we are materially grounded, right? And there are vulnerabilities that come with these decisions to rely on things from other places. And and and the flip side of that, it also results in extraction and exploitation in these other places when we have power over them. So I think the two sort of feed each other in a way.

Mike: Yeah, totally. Yeah, there's a sense that capital wants to be free, obviously. And we we mistake this the illusion of capital being free with, you know, we're kind of unmooring ourselves from the physical world, right? Yeah, yeah. And the extreme at the extreme end obviously manifests in sort of these like cybernetic fantasies of, you know, gonna upload my mind and to cyberspace, whatever, right? TBut even in terms of the way we think of uh political economy to the extent that people do, it is sort of like you know, irrespective of these realities that that are very critically important, right? And so, you know, while we've made the world more efficient, right, efficient means, you know, more profit, um, but it doesn't necessarily mean more resilient, more you know, capable, or even the uh feasible distribution, right?

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally, totally. And it is a um it is it is you should you should have a humanities faculty member on this on this podcast, because like the things we're facing are they like I think about like the way they're wrapped into to mythologies of the past, you know, like we're flying too close to the sun, so to speak, right? And like these kinds of issues. The concern I have is that in the fossil fuel era, the ability to do harm is so much greater than it was in the pre-fossil fuel era. And the damages we can act and the consequences of those damages are so much farther reaching that like I fear our ability to get ahead of our own skis in that way, you know. Yeah,

Mike: I just think of it as industrial capitalism, right? Going back to Midgley and and going back to DuPont, right? All these chemicals, right? Being being able to produce and manufacture more efficient processes using knowledge that has distributed effects, right? Going back to Timothy Mitchell's uh hyperobjects, right? Something distributed across time and space, right? We're we're we're playing with it's not necessarily even a a power thing, but it's just like if you are going back to the engineering mindset just focused on the narrow solution, yeah, and you're using a solution that has temporal consequences, then of course, of course the effects are gonna persist for decades, centuries, whatever. So with the anti- with the anti-coalization stuff, one angle I'm kind of thinking of is like, so obviously we have people who are expressing a sentiment, you know, some are kind of you know, you know, going back to our discussion about uh you know negative populism, right? People are kind of blaming the wrong people, and and for them, anti-globalization is like, you know, no migration, no, you know.

Khalid Kadir: Yep. Oh, that's an interesting point. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike: But in another sense, what is kind of interesting to me is that now you've got states, you know, nation states kind of realizing, okay, the US is no longer the guarantor, you know-

Khalid Kadir: Rules might be changing here. Right. Yeah.

Mike: No longer the guarantor of global trade, right? Yeah. Freedom of the seas is changing, you know, especially if the US is going to start a war that prevents it's-

Khalid Kadir: Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Um, and so there's now this, like, you know, because this was originally a political question that that like you're talking about.

Chapter 10: Energy politics, agnotology, and future social relations
Mike: There are political groups in the 90s and earlier who were kind of, you know, they wanted trade on on local terms, better terms. But now we got nation states who are kind of now facing the same question because the material realities change. Yep. So, how do how do you see this playing out? I mean, you don't give me a big... just giving a big picture, not like a, you know-

Khalid Kadir: I don't know how it's going to play out because I'm always wary of where the future is going to go in this way. I will say I don't see—how do I want to say it? I think I very much agree with Mitchell that the way we meet our future energy needs is going to have a huge factor in determining our future politics. And those who control the nodes and conduits of our future energy are going to have disproportionate political power. Right. And that's Mitchell in a quick paraphrasing in that last chapter of Carbon Democracy. So I agree with that. And I'm curious to understand what our future energy needs will be, because that's what makes us different in an industrial world than the pre-industrial world: our use of energy. That's one of the major factors. And so I'm interested to understand that energy story. I think that's going to play a big part in it. I fear we'll end up in a world that's even more highly unequal. As we see squeezes come, those who have power are going to try very hard to ensure that they hold their position. And so then I think about Children of Men and movies like that.

Mike: There's a book called Windfall, which talks about the politics of climate change. Who takes it all? So there's a sense that we're at a critical juncture where there's a lot. If we have positive counterfactuals, positive visions of the future, now is the time to begin nudging us towards that trajectory. But at the same time, the forces that be, they're looking at how do we stave progress so that the future ability to act is constrained but benefits me, right? You see it with climate change, right? Oil companies are no longer doing denial. They were doing denial for the last 30 years, right? Now they've accepted it, but there's not much we could do about it, right?

Khalid Kadir: Have you seen the movie Merchants of Doubt?

Mike: Yes, Merchants of Doubt.

Khalid Kadir: It does make me—you've brought this up—it makes me think about the Merchants of Doubt way, and you're right. They've given up a little bit on some of that doubt. Now they're like, okay, climate's changing. How are we gonna deal with it, right? They've changed the story a little bit.

Mike: Yeah, as the realities change, they kind of have to. But the the whole point the entire time is to is this stonewall, right? You're kind of and if it requires you to give an inch, right? You retreat in order to refirm your your back line position, right? Yep. You keep retreating if you have to, but as you retreat, you're now firming up that new line of that new position. So the doubting obviously is giving way to sort of like, oh now it's just not too costly to do um renewables and stuff like that, right?

Khalid Kadir: You know, the one thing I think about here though that uh makes me uncertain that that common phrase uh ain't no power like the power of the people because the power of the people don't stop. I don't want to underestimate the possibilities that come from people. I do think here in the United States we're far less capable of mounting resistance than we were 50, 60, 70 years ago.

Mike: It's the stories we tell. Going back to this very kind of like solutionist-oriented view of the world, progress is sort of inevitable, right? And the double movement is not part of our our our-

Khalid Kadir: story. Our story, right, right, right, right.

Mike: It's like this is the only way progress has happened is by people fighting for it. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Khalid Kadir: You know, I'm inspired when I see what happened in Minnesota. Yeah. Like I wouldn't have expected that to get pulled off. I didn't expect that, you know? And uh so I and I think about I remember I took one of those first classes I took was Jill Hart's uh uh class on development history and theory. And uh she tells a story of her as an academic in South Africa, among many other academics like herself in South Africa, who left because they thought we're stuck. This is just this is the system's too stable. Apartheid just works and it works in a horrible way, and there's no breaking it. And and she said, what we didn't count on was social movements. We didn't understand how particularly black-led social movements would actually break this from the inside. And so, but and we they didn't understand that, and they didn't see it, and now she does see it. And so I think there is something about as much as you know the system looks structurally set up in ways that those who have power are set up to hold on to power, even if they're in retreat, they'll consolidate, whatever. I think that there's that there's there's something about people power that that is hard to predict in that way.

Mike: That's exactly why they call you know Merchants of Doubt that that that feel they call it agnotology, right? Production of ignorance. The reason why, especially in America, you've got this focus on telling stories that are deferential to power, telling stories that that deny the role of you know um uh sacrifice for social change. Yep that deny the role of you know uh civic engagement, politics.

Khalid Kadir: Even the way we learned Rosa Parks. We learned Rosa Parks as though she just one day got tired and said, "I'm not moving." She was an organizer and an activist, and that whole thing was a large part of a larger story. It wasn't just her. She didn't just do it spontaneously; she did it after years of preparing and building communities so that when that happened, they had the power to actually boycott and make an effective boycott. And people forget that. Actually, the bus boycott, she joined the NAACP 11 years before that action. And then we didn't see the Civil Rights Act until like 14 or 12 years later. Can you imagine still? Starting to work on something now, and you're not going to see a major piece of legislation for 25 years. Who has the patience these days to start a project today to refund the university that you're not going to see come to fruition for 25 years? It takes that kind of vision to bring about those kinds of changes, and I think that's what we need a little more. And it takes knowing that I just got to show up every week for the next 25 years, and a lot of those weeks are going to be boring, but that's what's going to build the power that's going to make us unstoppable once we get there.

Mike: It wouldn't be beneficial to teach a how to be an activist class?

Khalid Kadir: You know, It's kind of how to be in community at some level.

Mike: That's true too. I mean, like, the real, I think, is there's two pillars of this for me: education, obviously, not telling those stories. And even not giving people education to think critically about the world that they live in, not understanding that the assumptions that drive their world, they're assumptions. They're not immortal truths. Things don't have to be this way. Right. Being able to question that. So those two pillars are that. And then atomization is the other pillar. It's like if you're an individual, that's all that matters. You can't see yourself in relation to other people. And so you're and-

Khalid Kadir: You can't see yourself sacrificing for other people. Why would you sacrifice for other people in this world where you're your own individual entrepreneur of your own happiness? And that's like that's precisely the problem. We don't live in—we have disaggregated community. We've even blown up the family. And so the layers of community that have been destroyed, the insidious community institutions that have been destroyed and rendered obsolete, and people don't look to them anymore. Instead, they chase their own individual hero story. I do think that's a big part of our failure here.

Mike: So how do you like what do you imagine future social relations relations being like? What types of social relations could emerge from? I guess that's inherent to the energy politics of the future.

Khalid Kadir: There's also going to be some sort of we're in the short term, I fear that a lot of our relations are going to be built around collective trauma, right? About the forces we're up against, right? And that's what I think about when I think about Minnesota and I think about some of these things that are happening. About we come to find common cause around common forms of assault that are coming at us. Yeah. Which is not the way I would hope for it, but I do think that does create an opportunity. It is an opportunity, but it can also be ugly, right?

Mike: Minnesota's resistance to ICE is built out of their networks from the Floyd protests. Exactly. So I think that's like and I think this is only gonna harden that now-

Khalid Kadir: and attract people to it.

Mike: these networks can be used to do other types of social changes.

Khalid Kadir: Absolutely.

Mike: So I mean sort of like you know, this is sort of like another part of the double movement. You know, the system reacts and now you're you get a chance to the counter-reaction-

Khalid Kadir: right? Yeah.

Mike: I do agree with you though. I mean, in a better world, there would be just this intrinsic understanding and sense of building community organically. But if this is the way it happens, you know, I'm hoping we can nudge it and steer it in the right direction.

Khalid Kadir: And that's a hopeful direction I go. I do fear that for many, that's going to be a long journey to be able to be in community like that because they just don't know how. They haven't learned it. They don't. Those values aren't there, those perspectives aren't there. So I'm not sure how that works for them. I do think that there are still plenty of people and groups in the United States, and here I'm thinking about the United States particularly, who still do live in community like that. They still do live in shared mutual responsibility with family and community. And I think that those groups will be the most resilient in the face of the kinds of struggles that we're facing now and could potentially face moving forward.

Chapter 11: AI, data centers, and resistance
Mike: Right. So I reserved some time for one last contemporary topic. I wanted to talk to you about AI. I don't know if you've encountered it. In your... I know you teach a course on data politics or-

Khalid Kadir: Digital technology, yeah. But AI is a big part of it. It is some of it, partly.

Mike: I guess that's where I could—my background—so most of my marketing career was with data security companies. So I think about data all the time.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah.

Mike: How to protect it, how to aggregate it. So-

Khalid Kadir: which is getting harder and harder because the more we interface with other groups where we sign up and add personal data, and then that's all these new vulnerabilities exist out there for us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Mike: So, like, how do you what do you what do you think about AI? And then I guess tangentially, like, what kind of social relations do you see emerging? I have my own thoughts on this, and I've written about it because I've written-

Khalid Kadir: I'm deeply hopeful that we're going to see. I mean, this comes back to where we were talking about earlier about the materiality. Yeah. AI is not an immaterial technology, it is a deeply material technology. Right. And we just saw the governor of Maine override uh veto legislation to put a moratorium on data centers like the the water, energy. Data center requirements of AI could represent an Achilles heel, right? And I am I am hopeful that we are attentive to the material requirements of the digital technologies we use because that affects people and harms people, right? And so that's where I think the real battle over AI is going to play out at some level. I mean, I think about a future where sabotage and and disruption happen because of these material dependencies that make- It's already happening. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. But at a larger scale, where people because people are frustrated because they see they're frustrated by the way that they're well, I'll say a note before that. I'm surprised this didn't happen around Amazon warehouses. The way Amazon warehouses have taken over the Central Valley, for example, of California, like these small towns are just one warehouse town after another.

Mike: They work hand in hand with the local legislator.

Khalid Kadir: I'm surprised that I don't see the same. I think the requirements of data centers make it harder because they require not just changing the face of your neighborhood, but taking your water and energy, and that's made the resistance greater. But I am a little surprised. I would have expected more as Amazon puts their footprint down, we see pushback. But I do see this, largely not yet covered in the press, gigantic movement in resistance today. Every single data center in the U.S. is facing public resistance. This is unheard of. We've never seen this much public political engagement. Pretty mundane technology. And of course, by people who are no doubt also using ChatGPT. So there's some complexity playing out in there. But I see this as politicizing people in a way that, again, brings up that you hit people in their neighborhood, they don't look, they respond. And so there's a little bit of a thing going on here that I'm interested in.

Mike: In my big article, I I use the analogy of uh pissing at everyone's beer. So like you've got basically the um, you know, when AI was uh or LLMs are were a um a kind of like a a novelty, you know, people were mostly focused on you know use cases or treating it like a toy. But as the AI or may I should say tech companies, because tech companies, yeah, as they were focused on sort of like monetizing the technology, you know, then you you see moves that actually begin to poison not just communities. So this this is the interesting thing about large language models is as a technology. I prefer not using AI to do that.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, no, I don't like that term. It's a total deceptive market.

Mike: But right now, I guess the the the core driver of of the AI boom is the large language models. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um interesting about them is that you know, as they've in order to to to continue the the the um I don't want to say appearance, but like the the scale or of the technology in order to make it more capable, they've had to make uh you know various trade-offs, right? And some of those trade-offs basically are going to weaken the position of any future tech technology, right? So for example, one one very interesting example is like the open source community is kind of pivotal to software development. Um I mean it is sort of a commons, and you know, um big tech has taken from it like everyone has because-

Khalid Kadir: let alone the Mazzucato story about the state funding of a new idea. Yeah, totally, totally.

Mike: And so you've got LLMs now harassing open source maintainers, poisoning the environment by producing bad code that these open source programs are built in, right? And so you're degrading the resources for future input for technology. Yeah. Something similar is playing out. A lot of the data center growth is actually a fitness signal. So everyone's saying if I can build more data centers, I can show investors that I deserve more money. And so part of what is driving that actually is not that the technology in its current form or in its future form will even use all these data centers. It's actually just a signal to show investors that these companies are serious. And so a future might involve maybe only some portion of these data centers being used. Yeah. But all the hardware allocated to data centers, once a company guarantees production for RAM or computer chips or whatever, its production cycles are tied up.

Khalid Kadir: Yeah, for sure.

Mike: So we're now seeing, I have a home lab, we're seeing computer part prices skyrocket.

Khalid Kadir: Try buying a hard drive. Right. Yep, yep.

Mike: Yeah, and so if tech is going to continue to grow, they are cannibalizing in order to signal fitness, they are cannibalizing their own environment to actually do that. Let alone, obviously, pissing in everyone else's beer to build data centers that people don't want and put AI in products that people don't want. It's just interesting that you would think that, going back to our story of what progress is and looks like, if we were at the pinnacle of progress, the largest companies in the world wouldn't be cannibalizing their own future resources in order to build something.

Khalid Kadir: And co-investing in a way that builds a huge speculative bubble. Right. Yeah, yeah. You know, the thing that scares me most is it wasn't that long ago that a bunch of Googlers lost their jobs resisting Google working with the US military. Right. Now these large firms are all in on the US military, even under our current administration, they are all in. Okay, so Modi just says, well, but just don't spy on US citizens and have autonomous weapons, but everything else, he writes, he wants us to be the most powerful military in the world. And I'm like, wow, that's a big shift. This, the the arguably the most violent, destructive force in the world, you're all like 100% all in on that one. That concerns me a lot because that's a big shift, you know? And that brings me some some fear about how these tools will be concentrated for uses that are towards the means of domination and violence. And that and we're seeing that already with the bombing of, you know, first the bombing of Ghaza, but now the bombing of Iran, where uh large language models are being used, clawed is being used to pick targets, and schoolgirls are getting murdered. So like this challenge. On the other side, there's also like resistance, and I appreciate the humor. I came across this last night. This guy, Ken Chang, he uh he wrote on LinkedIn, AI will never be able to write like me. Why? Because I'm now inserting random sentences into every post to throw off their language learning models. Any AI emulating me will radiator freak yellow horse spout nonsense. I'll write all of my emails, that's not my baby, and reports like this to protect my data, waffle iron 40% off. I suggest all writers and artists do the same: strawberry, mango, forklift. Just the goofiness of resistance that's happening. Uh we can tuna fish, tango, foxtrot, defeat AI. You know, like just the ways in which there's almost a recognition that it's actually stupid. And it's just taking what you've done. And so we can we can mess with it, right? And confuse it in in a way. And I appreciate that that people are recognizing that there's a need for resistance. Uh going back to where we were earlier, that has to be collective, though. It's not gonna work if we're all fighting that on our own. So yeah.

Mike: Yeah. The only solace I have is, I guess, the kind of marketing and proclamations of what they say AI will do. I know it's not true.

Khalid Kadir: How many promises Elon Musk made that didn't come true? I mean, it's just like one hype game after another, right?

Mike: So it reminds me of Dan Davies. I don't know if you know Dan Davies, but he has a book called The Unaccountability Machine. Right. So a lot of modern organization is about finding ways to create accountability sinks that you can point to deflect responsibility. And we built a world. We've built a world where we have systems like this and AI is the ultimate manifestation of an accountability machine. So I think that's-

Khalid Kadir: Which is depoliticization, right? Blame the AI, blame the tool, blame this, as opposed to the people making the decisions.

Mike: Exactly. Or who deployed the AI, right?

Khalid Kadir: Totally.

Chapter 12: Teaching in the AI era and book recommendations

Mike: So I think that's it for the main questions, but I have some fun ones for wrap-up. So, is there a book across all of your courses that you thought was essential that you've actually moved out of your syllabi?

Khalid Kadir: mean it wasn't in every syllabus, but um you know, let me let me put it a different problem. The nature of the classroom is shifting, especially with AI. And especially with the pressures that students are facing are so much higher, they just have less time for classes. Faculty recognize there's a problem. I think students know there's a problem. Students have been struggling with a mental health crisis on this campus since you were here. So, like, it's not new, it's just getting worse. So it has put pressure on me to make my syllabi a little bit easier, right? Um, in that way, uh I am more reticent to teach chapters of rule of experts. Uh Timothy Mitchell's book, which is a just brilliant book about economics and markets and and and development and and post colonial Egypt. Uh but it's just it's hard for people to wrap their head around it. Right. Uh I was having a conversation with a colleague just before I came over here that I'm thinking about reworking my syllabi in a way that I have like a easy, medium, hard reading for every week. Where, like, here's the news article that anyone can digest, here's the next one, and here's the reach. It's Wendy Brown or it's Timothy Mitchell that you gotta actually sit with to make sense of, in part because uh I can't just put the reach on there and talk about it. I I feel like I'm doing a disservice because people are throwing it into an LLM, getting the the ostensibly bullet points, but they don't really understand it, you know? Yeah. And so I feel like we're in a bit of a a crisis in higher ed in that way. I I hesitate to use the word crisis, but that's how I feel. Yeah.

Mike: And the point of education, especially, you know, one like political economy or liberal arts kind of interdisciplinary philosophical field is to to to question assumptions. Yeah, it's bad if you're turning into a large language. Oh my goodness, to

Khalid Kadir: our just reproducing the same assumptions without making that clear that that's what it did. Yeah, I agree. Agreed, yeah, yeah.

Mike: Um, what what five books are kind of core then to your across all of your classes, each do you think to your core like program or way of thinking? Are there five? You can give me more if you want, but

Khalid Kadir: I don't think all of them show up in my classes. And and the the the books that are most important to me shift over time. I think that's not surprising. Right? Um uh Carbon Democracy, really important to me in many ways. That's a that's a big book. You know, I'm into really infrastructure. I have his new book and I have not read it yet. So let's see, it's about infrastructure. And uh, so I'm really eager to read his new book. It just came out. Um, that's Timothy Mitchell for for everyone else. Um uh I am eagerly right now reading one day, uh, everyone will have been against this, and that's powerful. It's about Huzzah and what happened. Yeah, you like the title. Yeah, it's a brilliant book. Just a brilliant book, and it really gets it. Like, I mean, I've been talking about this in my classes on poverty. Could you imagine if like during the civil rights era, you just watch that shit on TV and it's like, who wants to be that person? Like, your grandkids come up to you and they're like, Oh yeah, we learned about this civil rights thing, and oh yeah, I saw it happen on TV. But you're just sitting around at home on the couch on TV, you weren't taking part, you weren't at a protest, like, and it's a little bit like that. I think about this moment will be like that. Like, what were what what was your attitude about about what happened in Gaza? Did you did you call your congressperson and tell them to stop sending bombs and money to places that are killing people? Or were you just okay with that? You know, I think there's gonna be where everyone tells, oh no, I was I was there, you know, that kind of thing. So that book really stands out to me a lot. Um uh those are probably the two that are heaviest on my mind. There's a collection of essays by Langdon Winter called The Whale in the Reactor that I really, really appreciate that are really good sort of STS lectures. It's got his famous Do Artifacts Have Politics, but it's got a few others. So that's one that when I'm thinking about STS stuff that really and I think you know, I spent a lot of time thinking about STS stuff. So that's another big one that comes up. Um I'll probably leave it at three. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike: Awesome. Yeah. So-

Khalid Kadir: Poverty by America is a new one that I've that I've gotten through by Matt Desmond to add a fourth that's really powerful. Uh his his interview in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club is just brilliant. Like that man's on another level. Like, and that is a really good reading to understand what's going on with poverty in America, too. So that's another one I would add. Yeah.

Mike: Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So where can people find you? Are you online? Just or do you want to provide any any any uh communication?

Khalid Kadir: Sometimes I'll be at Ain't Normal Cafe in Rockridge. Uh often I'm on campus and otherwise I'm at home. Uh uh if I am so lucky, I am you know doing something outdoors. So uh I am I am certainly on the internet, obviously, right? Uh perhaps that's not obvious. I am. I try to really restrict my engagement on the internet. Totally. Because I'm trying to really increase my engagement with people in front of me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Over food and whatnot. Uh so I would encourage people to try to find people in person rather than to connect to find them on the class. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, come to one of my classes, sit in, you know. So yeah. If it's a big class, a small class, I'll probably be like, it's too small. Can't have strangers walking into small classes. But big class, come on, sit in, have a look, you know. So yeah.

Mike: Awesome. Thank you so much for talking to me. I really enjoyed our conversation. Learned a lot about you. I've known you for years, but mostly as my teacher.

Khalid Kadir: Quite a while ago, right? Almost 15 years now. I appreciate this conversation too. It's good. I appreciate to see where you've gone with it and how you are continuing to push me to think more about it. It's been good. I'm looking forward to following where Misaligned Markets leads you. Thanks. All right, take care.