Speaker 1: I'm Daniel James, and you're listening to seven AM. In
Speaker 1: the nineteen nineties, a small group of men in Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley imagined a world without governments or rules, a world
Speaker 1: run by code. They called themselves the cipher Punks, and
Speaker 1: they believe technology could replace politics entirely. Those ideas didn't
Speaker 1: stay online. They shaped the culture of the tech industry,
Speaker 1: which in turn has shaped Western civilization itself, and the
Speaker 1: billionaires behind it all are now trying to make democracy
Speaker 1: in their image. Today writer and contributed to the monthly
Speaker 1: Almo Keep on how Silicon Valley's most dangerous philosophy escaped
Speaker 1: the Internet and entered the real world. It's Saturday, January.
Speaker 1: Three millions of Americans on a personal computer.
Speaker 2: If you're one of them, you can now glimpse the future.
Speaker 3: With nothing more than.
Speaker 2: A modem, a phone line and a few dollars, everybody
Speaker 2: can have their own homepage. Companies are there the latest information.
Speaker 2: It's wild, what's going on. It sounds pretty grand, but
Speaker 2: it all comes down to computers communicating, and in fact,
Speaker 2: that's already happening on something called the Internet that anyone now.
Speaker 1: I take us back to the nineties, to this strange
Speaker 1: corner of the Internet called cipher punks. Who were they
Speaker 1: and what did they actually believe they were building?
Speaker 3: Well, if we go all the way back, it's a
Speaker 3: really quite obscure bunch of people who just had a
Speaker 3: private mailing list, and this was confined to a small
Speaker 3: number of Bay Area software engineers and mathematicians pretty much
Speaker 3: exclusively dudes in the early nineties.
Speaker 2: Encryption particularly is what they were very very.
Speaker 3: Passionate about and treating it as essentially like the human
Speaker 3: rights to privacy from the government being able to see
Speaker 3: what we're doing. It was a very libertarian bent to
Speaker 3: their ways of thinking, which is the government can stay
Speaker 3: completely out of every aspect of our lives.
Speaker 2: And then they.
Speaker 3: Discussed a lot of what became very influential ideas.
Speaker 2: Connected to encryption.
Speaker 3: So being able to write programs that would stop your
Speaker 3: telecommunications company from being able to intercept your email and
Speaker 3: read it. If there was pretty good encryption that no
Speaker 3: one could crack them, that was good enough. So this
Speaker 3: was like a really big thing for people to be
Speaker 3: able to feel secure online with our information being privately held,
Speaker 3: which is where the irony of when we come to today,
Speaker 3: where we have like willingly brought into this surveillance culture
Speaker 3: that has been built around us by like the descendants
Speaker 3: of those people who've been working over the last twenty
Speaker 3: years in Silicon Valley. Their nightmare would have been that
Speaker 3: you could see what they're doing all the time.
Speaker 1: What kind of people were drawn to these communities and
Speaker 1: how did their politics shape early Internet culture?
Speaker 2: You know, kind of on the fringes.
Speaker 3: They were no doubt extremely intelligent, Like these are people
Speaker 3: with like you know, PhDs in maths and physics, and
Speaker 3: they are in those ways incredibly intelligent, but also bred
Speaker 3: this real contempt of an outsider mentality where they sort
Speaker 3: of self reinforce this idea that they are so much
Speaker 3: smarter than everybody else.
Speaker 2: Everybody else is so behind on this.
Speaker 3: If you don't do what we say, all of your
Speaker 3: rights will be taken away from you. Everybody is a
Speaker 3: sheep who's blind to what's going on. So it attracted
Speaker 3: people who were on the fringes of society who wanted
Speaker 3: to live there. They wanted to be there, they didn't
Speaker 3: want to be a part of mainstream society. So there
Speaker 3: was always a very strong and shared outside of mentality,
Speaker 3: and you know, you had to be invited into the group,
Speaker 3: and the meetups where people met in real life were
Speaker 3: like quite secretive about where they were going to be held,
Speaker 3: and it was quite a coveted space to be admitted
Speaker 3: into because you know, you had to provide mathematical proofs,
Speaker 3: you had to share your work, you had to be
Speaker 3: assessed by your peers as you know, brilliant enough to
Speaker 3: be part of it. So it attracted a certain kind
Speaker 3: of person who did not care for social norms really
Speaker 3: of any kind.
Speaker 1: Tell me about the way they viewed the very idea
Speaker 1: of government.
Speaker 3: So this is the main obsession of engineering thinking. It's like,
Speaker 3: the only way for something to be valuable is for
Speaker 3: it to be efficient. That is how you program, That
Speaker 3: is how code works. Does this efficiently execute this command?
Speaker 2: When I build this branch?
Speaker 3: Is that the most mathematically sound all of those things,
Speaker 3: those are rules based systems that.
Speaker 2: Either are right or wrong.
Speaker 3: And if you then try and transpose that idea onto society,
Speaker 3: you will slowly come to realize why we had developed
Speaker 3: the enormous number of rules that we have. It's a
Speaker 3: not pro personally loved living in a world of complexity.
Speaker 3: It's because the world is complex, because we're complex, and
Speaker 3: there's so many of us. But libertarianism again and again,
Speaker 3: it's like, if we just can start our own society
Speaker 3: where all the government does is make sure that no
Speaker 3: one can kill anybody or steal anybody's stuff, those are
Speaker 3: the only two rules, then everything else will just fall
Speaker 3: into place because no one will be scared of those
Speaker 3: things happening to them, and so everything else will just
Speaker 3: figure it out ourselves. In some ways, it's this kind
Speaker 3: of utopian idea, but it's also incredibly naive.
Speaker 1: And at what point do their early ideas around the
Speaker 1: dream of total privacy of perfect efficiency start to become
Speaker 1: the DNA of the tech industry as we know it today.
Speaker 3: So when social networks first emerged, you know, a social
Speaker 3: network is what we came to call it, but that's
Speaker 3: something that was revolving around software would end up involving
Speaker 3: billions of people just as an everyday part of life
Speaker 3: that everybody became just completely normalized too. I think that
Speaker 3: that's when it went to another level of those corporations
Speaker 3: becoming so valuable to investors. The bigger they got, the
Speaker 3: more government wanted to regulate them, the more influence they.
Speaker 2: Wanted to have.
Speaker 3: So you know, you saw Facebook buying up media companies
Speaker 3: like the tech industry moving into trying to take over
Speaker 3: the media purely is about being able to influence policy
Speaker 3: decision making that isn't going to impede their efficiency, isn't
Speaker 3: going to impede their continued growth, even if they are
Speaker 3: like trampling on all of our privacy rights and consumer
Speaker 3: rights on the way to doing that.
Speaker 1: Coming up how Silicon Valley's obsession with efficiency became a
Speaker 1: weapon against democracy, You draw a line from the Cipher
Speaker 1: punks to figures like Julian Osange, Peter Thiel, and eventually
Speaker 1: Elon Musk. What connects them all?
Speaker 3: I think that you know, WikiLeaks would be probably a
Speaker 3: bit a ghast to think that they share DNA with
Speaker 3: Elon Musk, but they do because their project is the same,
Speaker 3: like these beliefs are we need to topple existing structures
Speaker 3: because these existing structures just don't work.
Speaker 2: Look at it all, look at how much.
Speaker 3: War is going on, look at all of this political corruption,
Speaker 3: and then the Emo muskway of looking at the world,
Speaker 3: it's like, well, you could just be saving so much
Speaker 3: more money if you didn't have all these public servants,
Speaker 3: which is a whole different way of having a dismantling
Speaker 3: of government, but it's also the belief that the way
Speaker 3: that things are being done is not working.
Speaker 4: The Trump administration has tapped Palenteer, the data mining company
Speaker 4: founded by the billionaire tech investor Peter Tiel, to compile
Speaker 4: data on people in the United States for a master database,
Speaker 4: including a new thirty million dollar contract with Ice to
Speaker 4: provide near real time visibility into migrant movements.
Speaker 2: As it sees.
Speaker 3: Peter til then is even beyond the right where he
Speaker 3: very infamously has said that he doesn't believe that democracy
Speaker 3: is compatible with capitalism, capitalism being the thing we need
Speaker 3: to preserve, not democracy. So he is such a hypercapitalist
Speaker 3: that he doesn't see any problem with essentially a fascist
Speaker 3: regime controlling people because they can't be trusted to make
Speaker 3: democratic decisions in their own best interests.
Speaker 5: There is a lot in this runaway science technology that's
Speaker 5: pushing us towards something like armageddon. And then there is
Speaker 5: the natural pushback on this is we will avoid armageddon
Speaker 5: by having a one world stage.
Speaker 3: And Peter Tiel has led directly into this more recently,
Speaker 3: which is it's actually a religious belief more than it
Speaker 3: is a political project. It's like he is going and
Speaker 3: delivering lectures about the Antichrist is coming.
Speaker 6: The way the Antichrist would take over the world is
Speaker 6: you talk about armageddon NonStop, you talk about existential risk NonStop,
Speaker 6: and this is what you need to regulate.
Speaker 3: The Antichrist is going to be this person who stands
Speaker 3: in the way of technological adoption that will accelerate us
Speaker 3: past this present that we've been stagnated, according to him
Speaker 3: for decades.
Speaker 2: So these are ideas.
Speaker 1: When Masque launched his Department of Government Efficiency, we saw
Speaker 1: a real world experiment in technolo libertarian politics. What did
Speaker 1: it look like?
Speaker 2: Oh, it just went great, didn't it. Would you do
Speaker 2: doge again? Knowing what you know now?
Speaker 7: I mean no, I don't think so. I mean the
Speaker 7: thing is, I think instead of doing doorge, I would
Speaker 7: have basically worked in my companies essentially, so and the
Speaker 7: cars they wouldn't have been burning the cars.
Speaker 3: This is again where this idea of efficiency is the
Speaker 3: only measure by which something is of value to society.
Speaker 3: There's a very well known phenomenon called engineer's disease, which
Speaker 3: is when people who work in these fields where they
Speaker 3: are phenomenally good at solving equations, they're phenomenally good at
Speaker 3: writing software. They've become convinced that they will therefore be
Speaker 3: phenomenally good at reorganizing society, or phenomenally good at how
Speaker 3: we should govern ourselves?
Speaker 2: Or how hard can it be to write a novel?
Speaker 3: I will just feed every novel every written into a
Speaker 3: machine and it will spit out the most statistically perfect novel.
Speaker 3: Or why do I need to pay an artist to
Speaker 3: draw cartoons when, like what just happened, Disney is giving
Speaker 3: a billion dollars to open AI, to let open AI
Speaker 3: train everything on every Disney movie ever made. So we're
Speaker 3: going to start seeing films, animated films that are made
Speaker 3: completely untouched by people because this mindset is well, I
Speaker 3: don't understand why you'd pay thousands of people when you
Speaker 3: could just get the program.
Speaker 2: To do it.
Speaker 3: That's the only way that this mindset can calculate if
Speaker 3: something is valuable or not. And if something isn't valuable
Speaker 3: in monetary terms, then it has no other value either.
Speaker 1: And finally, mate, how do you think this type of
Speaker 1: politics plays in Australia?
Speaker 8: Man?
Speaker 1: Are we set to see this type of nihilism brought
Speaker 1: here into our politics.
Speaker 3: I think absolutely not. Thankfully, I don't think that any
Speaker 3: of this flies in Australia. We have lived for since,
Speaker 3: you know, federation of the colonial state. In Australia, we
Speaker 3: have had essentially an egalitarian society where we have a
Speaker 3: strong social safety in it.
Speaker 2: And yes, these ideas at the global.
Speaker 3: Level have chipped away at that over the last two decades,
Speaker 3: but it still is something that is held dear to
Speaker 3: Australian society, the idea that you deserve to be able
Speaker 3: to be looked after if you fall into hardship.
Speaker 2: The responsibility of society is to try and not let
Speaker 2: that happen. But when it does, and it does.
Speaker 3: For that to not completely destroy you, that you have
Speaker 3: gotten cancer, like the number of people in America who
Speaker 3: survive a cancer diagnosis only to be bankrupted, even though
Speaker 3: inequality in this country is growing as badly as it
Speaker 3: is anywhere else.
Speaker 2: But also someone who lived for eight years in the.
Speaker 3: United States and coming back to Australia seeing stark difference
Speaker 3: between how much people don't let other people fall into
Speaker 3: society's cracks in quite the same way, I can't see
Speaker 3: those ideas taking hold here. And when Peter Dutton tried
Speaker 3: when he was you know, Tiamot Trump, and I can't
Speaker 3: whoever came up with that.
Speaker 1: I just Amory Makis, who are friend of the show.
Speaker 3: So perfect exactly like trying to do that just didn't
Speaker 3: work here because our culture is not their culture, thankfully,
Speaker 3: and I think that that's something that we absolutely should preserve.
Speaker 3: America is a crazy experiment that sometimes turns wonderful things
Speaker 3: out and other times just destroys people. And I don't
Speaker 3: think it is an experiment that we need to see replicated.
Speaker 1: Well, it's a fascinating READOLM. Thanks for taking the hit
Speaker 1: and running it for us, and thank you for coming
Speaker 1: on seven am.
Speaker 2: Oh it's my pleasure. Thanks so much for asking me.
Speaker 1: You can read my keep's essay Barbarians inside the Gate
Speaker 1: at the monthly dot com that are you or in
Speaker 1: the summer edition of the magazine. Before we go, we
Speaker 1: have some big news and I'm joined by my co
Speaker 1: host Ruby Jones to tell me all about it.
Speaker 8: Hey Ruby, Hey Daniel, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1: Always a pleasure. So do you want to share your
Speaker 1: news with us?
Speaker 8: So I am about to take some time off from
Speaker 8: seven am just a few months because I'm going over
Speaker 8: to the ABC to Four Corners to report out a
Speaker 8: story for them, and I'm pretty excited.
Speaker 1: Well, we're excited for you because that is thrilling news.
Speaker 1: We know that you love long form reporting and having
Speaker 1: the time to sink yourself into a story. What can
Speaker 1: you tell us about your plans?
Speaker 8: So I'm leaving the show now. Things are already underway
Speaker 8: at Four Corners. I'm getting pretty deep into it, actually,
Speaker 8: and I'll be back in March when I'll be able
Speaker 8: to tell you about everything that I've been working on
Speaker 8: and share some of the investigative leads that I've hopefully
Speaker 8: uncovered by them.
Speaker 1: And in the meantime, I'll be sharing hosting duties and
Speaker 1: we'll have more to announce about that soon. But to
Speaker 1: celebrate Ruby, we decided that next week we're going to
Speaker 1: bring you some of the most interesting episodes Ruby made
Speaker 1: over the past year, so you can get a big
Speaker 1: dose of her before she leaves for Four Corners duties.
Speaker 1: We'll be back on January twelfth with regular programming, new
Speaker 1: original episodes covering all the bigger stories Ruby, good luck.
Speaker 8: Thank you so much.
Speaker 1: I'll let you know how it goes, and we'll be
Speaker 1: back next week with fresh episodes, see you then,