Doomscroll: Daniel Keller
Added 2024-11-19 22:00:09 +0000 UTCWelcome to Doomscroll. This is episode #12 with artist Daniel Keller. In the last few weeks we’ve seen an historic shift in American politics and culture. This conversation might help us to zoom out and see the larger timeline we’re now on.
If you appreciate this series, you can show your support by subscribing. This helps me to keep doing the show and to build a platform for these important conversations. We don’t have any billionaire backers or Russian oligarchs (I’m spreading the disinformation for free):
***
This week, my guest is Daniel Keller, an artist whose work and research has inspired me for over a decade. Daniel Keller is the co-director, along with Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman, of The Seasteaders (2018). The documentary investigates the Thiel funded libertarian utopia that seeks to exit from all state control and to build a new floating society on international waters. We discuss:
Tech monopolies and their cozy relationship to state power. Sometimes its hard to tell who is leading who?
The artificial intelligence race, the chips war and geopolitical competition between the US and China. This could be the defining conflict of the 21st century.
The absolute last person whose backpack you would expect to be in an art museum. Hint: a math professor who did not like technology and mailed numerous packages to universities and airlines (literally, the Unabomber)
Daniel and I are on different sides of some issues. But we share the same frame for what historical, economic and technological process is now unfolding in the 21st century. We have an abundance of shared cultural references and I find that my understanding of these topics is always enriched by his input.
In episode 1 of the podcast, way back in January of 2020, my advice to listeners was to “step off the take treadmill”. Today, many of us are still furiously scrolling our newsfeeds, searching for the latest update and spewing our hot takes. History does not unfold on a four year timespan (from election cycle to election cycle). To understand where we are, we need to zoom out and look at the past forty years of neoliberalism. Beyond that, we may go even further back, all the way to the 1940’s, when this grand reimagining of liberalism took place. The explicit goal of neoliberalism, has been to create an economic patchwork of tax havens that facilitate capital flight and slowly drain the social democratic countries of resources. This political program has been incredibly successful. Knowing this terrain will tell you a lot more than refreshing your newsfeed every 5 seconds and will help you to understand where we are soon heading.
Doomscroll isn’t the podcast for your wine aunt to get her nightly panic attack about whatever bad thing the Republicans are up to this week. We’re here to explore the culture and politics of the 21st century. We find ourselves in the middle of a great ideological shift that is occurring at a global scale. Corporations, states, technology and capital are being reconfigured in new and important ways. Its time to take these things seriously and focus our vision on what comes next.
Watch the full episode here. If you follow this newsletter, I encourage you to subscribe to the YouTube channel. Likes and comments help to boost our reach and keep the show going!
Doomscroll #12: Daniel Keller: Politics in the 21st Century
