Episode 4: Reactionary Futurism, with Dave Karpf

[upbeat music] Hi, I'm Adam Becker, and this is Dreaming Against the Machine. Today, I'm really excited about our guest. But before I talk about him, I wanna give you a little bit of background about why I brought him on. So I wrote a book called More Everything Forever, and it's about the horrible ideas that tech billionaires have about the future and why they don't work and the weird places that they got those ideas. But that's not the true name of the book. The true name of the book in, like, the sort of, you know, fantasy novel, Ursula Le Guin, like names have power sense, is not More Everything Forever. It's These Fucking People. Because I would work on the book every day for years, and at the end of the day, I would call a friend or text a friend and say, "These fucking people. You cannot believe what these fucking people wanna do, what they believe. It's crazy, and it's driving me nuts." And there's a reason that this podcast is not just, you know, these fucking people or about these fucking people. I thought about it, but I decided that that would be bad for me and bad for my mental health because I don't want to have to keep texting and calling my friends at the end of the day and say, "Oh my God, these fucking people." In fact, the question that I get the most often about the book is, how, how do I stay sane writing about these fucking people? And the answer that I usually give is literally touching grass. I go hiking. I go outside. I play with my cat. I spend time with human beings face to face without a screen or a microphone involved, and that keeps me sane. But that also brings us to today's guest, Dave Karp. Uh, Dave has an appetite for the work of these fucking people that somehow exceeds my own. Uh, I don't know how he does that, but he will read what these guys write, and then he will write long social media threads about them and post reviews on his website about their work, and that's actually how I met Dave. I met Dave because I needed to find a reviewer for my book manuscript for a grant that I got from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Fancy. Uh, very NPR of me, I know. But they wanted me to find reviewers for the book, academic experts, and Dave is a professor at George Washington University. And I came across his posts about the same people that I was writing about and said, "Oh, this guy is perfect for this." And so I asked him if he would review the manuscript, and he did, and he wrote back saying how much he liked it. And we became friends, and he is a delight. And I am very excited for all of you to hear the conversation that we had. And also, that is another answer to the question of how I stay sane, which is I talk about this stuff with people like Dave. And I think that in doing that, in talking about these fucking people, we can build community, and we can talk not just about bad ideas about the future but also what a good future might look like, which is what this podcast is about. And so while a lot of this episode is Dave and I talking about terrible ideas, we also had a really good time, and we had a lot of fun. And I think that you can feel and hear that we have a lot of hope, and I certainly hope that you