What if a technology company becomes so rich, so powerful, so exploitative, and so oblivious that that the harm it's doing begins to outweigh the quality and utility of its products? What if that company happens to run the world's dominant search, advertising, email, web, and mobile platforms? This month's episode of Soonish argues that it's time to rein in Google—and that individual internet users can play a meaningful part by switching to other tools and providers. It's half stem-winder, half how-to, featuring special guest Mark Hurst of the WFMU radio show and podcast Techtonic.* * *  Back in 2019, in the episode A Future Without Facebook, I explained why I had decided that it was time to delete my Facebook account. In short, I was tired of being part of a system that amplified hateful and polarizing messages in order to keep users engaged and drive more advertising revenue for Zuckerberg & Co. I knew at the time that Google also engages in such practices at YouTube, and that the search giant's whole surveillance capitalism business model rests on tracking user's behavior and serving them targeted ads. But I continued as a customer of Google nonetheless, while keeping one eye on the company to see whether its tactics were growing more toxic, or less.The moment when Google finally exhausted my patience came in December 2020, when the company fired a prominent Black computer scientist and AI ethicist named Timnit Gebru in a dispute over a scholarly paper she'd co-written. Gebru and her co-authors argued in the paper that without better protections, racial and gender bias might seep into Google's artificial intelligence systems in areas like natural language processing and face recognition. Google executives thought the paper was too harsh and forbade Gebru from publishing it; she objected; and things went downhill from there.It was a complicated story, but it convinced me that at the upper echelons of Google, any remnant of a commitment to the company's sweeping motto—"Don't Be Evil"—had given way to bland and meaningless statements about "protecting users" and "expanding opportunity" and "including all voices." In fact, the company was doing the opposite of all of those things. It was time for me to opt out. How I went about doing that—and how other consumers can too—is what this episode is all about. I explain the Gebru case and other problems at Google, and I also speak at length with guest Mark Hurst, a technology critic who runs the product design consultancy Creative Good and hosts the radio show and podcast Techtonic at WFMU. Mark publishes an important site called Good Reports, where consumers can find the best alternatives to the services offered by today's tech giants in areas like search, social media, and mobile technology.Hurst emphasizes—and I agree—that leaving Google isn't an all-or-nothing proposition. The company is so deeply embedded in our lives that it's almost impossible to cut it out entirely. Instead, users can uncouple from Google step by step—first switching to a different search engine, then trying a browser other than Chrome, then switching from Gmail to some other email platform, and so forth."Setting a goal of getting ourselves 100 percent off of Google is is unrealistic," Mark says. "And it's I think it's a little bit of a harmful goal, because it's so hard that people are going to give up early on. But instead, let's let's have a goal of learning what's happening in the world and then making some choices for ourselves, some small choices at first, of how we want to do things differently. If enough of us make the decision to extricate ourselves from Google, we'll form a movement and other companies will see an opportunity to build less exploitative tools for us. You've got to start somewhere!"NotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Chapter Guide0:08 Soonish theme00:21 Time to Find a New Favorite Restaurant02:46 What I'm Not Saying04:01 Re-introducing Mark Hurst07:08 The Ubiquity of Google11:04 Surveillance Capitalism and YouTube Extremism12:29 The Timnit Gebru Case18:01 Hurst: "Let's shut down the entire Google enterprise"19:48 Midroll announcement: Support Soonish on Patreon20:54 10 Steps toward Reducing Your Reliance on Google29:04 Using Google Takeout30:20 The Inevitability of YouTube31:44 Be a Google Reducetarian32:20 Enmeshed in Big Tech37:04 The Value of Sacrifice40:17 End Credits and Hub & Spoke Promo for Open Source

Soonish

Goodbye, Google

Venture capital is the fuel powering most technology startups. Behind every future Google or Uber or Snapchat is a syndicate of venture firms hoping for outsize financial returns. But the vast majority of venture money goes into Internet, mobile, and software companies where consumer demand and the path to market are plain. So what happens to entrepreneurs with risky, unproven, but potentially world-changing ideas in areas like zero-carbon energy or growing replacement human organs? If it weren't for an MIT-born venture firm called The Engine and a tiny handful of other venture firms tackling "Tough Tech," they'd probably never get their ideas to market.VCs love to cultivate an image of themselves as risk-taking cowboys with a nose for great ideas and the ability to help book-smart inventors and programmers grow into savvy entrepreneurs. But in reality, the industry has spent a quarter century chasing Google-sized returns in the relatively safe, efficient, and low-cost markets such as consumer and enterprise software, mobile apps, and to some extent healthcare and drug development. Sure, smartphones and apps are fun—but how much is the next new video-sharing app or gaming platform going to contribute to human welfare?The Engine, created by MIT in 2016,  is one of the visionary counterexamples. Among the startups it backs is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, which is building a new kind of "tokamak" reactor and believes it can demonstrate the feasibility net-positive-energy fusion to power the grid within the next few years. Other portfolio companies at The Engine are tackling thorny problems like reducing food waste, replacing silicon chips with faster photonic ones, and building better batteries for grid storage of power from wind and solar installations.Such ideas have come to be known as Tough Tech because they often need more capital, more time, and more expert input to get to market. In this week's episode you'll meet Katie Rae, CEO and managing partner at The Engine, who leads us on a wide-ranging discussion of topics such asthe ways Tough Tech companies could change the worldthe causes of government and private underinvestment in these areasthe challenges of evaluating and managing Tough Tech startupsthe prospect of growing government support for high-risk innovationthe reasons why institutional investors who could just as easily put their millions into software-focused venture funds might want to consider Tough Tech instead.Rae thinks The Engine can outperform traditional software-focused VC firms—even though its companies face higher hurdles—because their chosen markets are more wide-open and the payoffs could be so enormous. "I don't think there's any reason that I should say to my investors, 'You should expect less of me.' In fact, maybe they should expect more of me," Rae says. "And they should also expect that what we invest into, they feel incredibly proud of as well—that they backed a company like that that had impact on the world."NotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Fusion! And Other Ways to Put the Adventure Back in Venture Capital

In this episode of Soonish you'll meet Stanley Crooke, the former CEO of Ionis Pharmaceuticals and the head of a new nonprofit called N-Lorem, which is working to make mutation-correcting "antisense oligonucleotide" drugs available free for life to people with uncommon genetic diseases. These are conditions so rare they often don't have a name. But while the diseases themselves are unusual, the problem isn't: as many as 350 million people worldwide are thought to carry mutations that give rise to unique "N of 1" health problems.The debut of hyper-personalized antisense medicines is a topic I covered in a March 2020 episode of the podcast Deep Tech for MIT Technology Review. Back then, N-Lorem was just getting started. So I was excited to connect with Crooke one year later and go into more depth how antisense drugs work, why they're well-suited for treating some genetic diseases, and how Crooke realized he could give some patients personalized versions of these drugs for free—and for life."It was literally impossible until just now," Crooke says. Listen to find out what changed—and what it could mean for the future of drug discovery and the way we regulate and pay for advanced therapies. For more, head to soonishpodcast.org, where we've got the full transcript and additional resources. NotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Hope for Ultra-Rare Diseases

The coronavirus pandemic has had a devastating impact on education on schools around the world, often rendering in-classroom instruction too dangerous for both students and teachers. But one reason the effects of the pandemic haven’t been even worse is that, in education as in many other fields, a few new technologies were ready for broader deployment.I’m not talking about Zoom and other forms of videoconferencing, which have by and large been a disaster for both K-12 and college students. Rather, I’m talking about massive open online courses, or MOOCs, as well as the huge body of instructional videos available at low or zero cost on YouTube and sites like Khan Academy.Coursera, the world's largest MOOC provider, added 31 million new users in 2020, compared to just 8 million new users in 2019. The second-place MOOC provider, edX, added 10 million users in 2020, twice the number of new students who joined the year before. Evidently, millions of students of all ages want to use their stuck-at-home time to learn something useful.But how effective, really, are online course materials? How do MOOCs fit in with what cognitive scientists and neuroscientists are discovering about how students learn best? And what do K-12 schools and institutions of higher education plan to do to incorporate elements of online learning into their curricula and meet the growing demand for high-quality learning experiences after the pandemic passes?This week we talk through those questions with Sanjay Sarma, vice president of open learning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. MIT is one of the founding members of edX and a supplier of hundreds of its most popular MOOCs. Together with co-author Luke Yoquinto, Sarma published a book last August called Grasp: The Science Transforming How We Learn.Though it was written before the pandemic hit, the book offers a timely look at how educators at the K-12 and university level could make smart use of technology to build a new, broader educational pipeline that's more user-friendly and open to millions more people. Sarma says that will mean implementing more of the learning tricks researchers already know about, such as spaced repetition and interleaving, and finding better ways to scale up the coaching and contextual learning that are so effective in in-person settings like MIT's famous 2.007 robot competition.For a transcript and more details and links, see our full show notes at http://www.soonishpodcast/408-technology-and-educationNotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Technology and Education After the Pandemic

In honor of the inauguration of Joseph R. Biden—a day of long-awaited endings and new beginnings—I'm republishing my Season 2 opener, "Shadows of August," which I first released a little more than three years ago. during the the fiery early months of the Trump presidency. On a road trip to southern Illinois to witness the total solar eclipse that sliced across the continent on August 21, 2017, I had a couple of other unplanned adventures. At Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, I unintentionally got conscripted as a fake Confederate soldier in a bizarre reenactment of Pickett's Charge. I also met a few of the Black residents of Future City, Illinois, who helped me understand the irony of the town's name.  I tried to wrap it all together in a way that grappled with the political moment—immediately after the deadly clashes in Charlottesville, Virginia—while still recognizing that there are moments we're granted a larger perspective, perhaps none grander than a solar eclipse.Music by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Lee Rosevere, and Tim Beek.Full episode details at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/201-shadows-of-august

"We've Needed Something to Bring Us Together"

In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker of your digital existence. But today we live, more or less, in the world Cooper conceived. So if Cooper says the wireless revolution is still just in its opening stages, and that mobile technology promises to help end poverty and disease and bring education and employment to everyone, it’s probably worth listening.In this episode of Soonish, we talk with Cooper about the themes and stories in his book, and explore why even the disasters of 2020 haven’t shaken his optimism about the future.Before the 1970s, Motorola was known mainly for making the two-way radios used by police dispatchers and the AM/FM radios in the dashboards of cars. But Cooper, head of the company’s communication systems division, was convinced that the company’s future lay in battery-powered handheld phones tied to a network of radio towers, each broadcasting to its own “cell.” Moreover, he knew it would take a spectacular demonstration of such wireless technology to keep the Federal Communications Commission from giving AT&T the huge chunks of radio spectrum it wanted to build its own network of in-dashboard car phones.Cooper convinced his bosses to let him lead a crash, 90-day program to build a prototype cellular phone that it could show off to the media and the FCC. The project to build the DynaTAC (for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was a success, and in the end AT&T never got the spectrum it wanted.It took another decade for Motorola to commercialize the technology, largely because of FCC foot-dragging over spectrum allocation for consumer cellular industry. But Cooper’s 1973 demo opened the door to the world we now know—including, many generations of devices later, the rise of podcasting.Cooper will turn 92 at the end of this month, and he still buys every new model of smartphone, just to try it out. He thinks there’s lots of room left for improvement—and that the next generation of mobile devices may not look like phones at all, but will instead go inside our ears or even inside our bodies, where they’ll help to detect and prevent disease.When someone has had had a front-seat view to so many decades of high-tech innovation, perhaps they can’t help feeling rosy about humanity’s ability to think its way out of present-day challenges like the pandemic, climate change, or inequality in educational and economic opportunities.“The problems are big enough so it's going to take some time to get them solved,” Cooper says. “But there are people around who are doing the thinking and who are addressing these problems. Pretty much the only advantage the human brain has over machine is that it keeps making mistakes. And we call those mistakes creativity. So I think that's going to save us.”NotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.For the full show notes and a transcript of this episode go to http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-407-cell-phone-futureChapter Guide00:08 Soonish theme00:24 Officer of the Deck01:42 Left-Right Confusion04:06 The Father of the Cell Phone 06:52 Geeking Out08:41 Living in the Future10:50 Disproving Technological Determinism17:19 An Alternative History of the Cell Phone  19:45 The Fate of All Monopolies23:35 Midroll Announcement from The Lonely Palette24:46 Why Phone Makers Still Don’t Have It Right31:49 The Sources of Cooper’s Optimism37:42 End Credits and Acknowledgements39:19 Promo: Subtitle’s “We Speak” Miniseries

The Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still Calling

Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to celebrate. But Cascio argues that if Republicans retain control of the Senate (a matter that now hinges on a pair of ferociously contested runoff elections in Georgia), Biden's win will amount to, at most, an "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" moment. It will give Biden and Harris the opportunity to tackle the biggest crises facing the country—the newly resurgent coronavirus pandemic and the economic havoc it's wrought. But it won't leave much room to pursue the structural reforms needed to tame white grievance, end minoritarian rule, and get government working again. But there's always 2022. In other words, this election wasn't the beginning of the end of the long fight to save democracy and protect the rights of all citizens in this country. But it might be the end of the beginning. Chapter Guide00:08 Soonish theme00:22 We Did It!01:32 Reality Sinks In04:29 Re-introducing Jamais Cascio05:28 Check-in06:31 Setting the Scene 08:48 The Troubling News10:19 The Depths of our Polarization13:01 Perpetuating Dysfunction17:01 Reviewing Wade’s Post-Election Scenarios19:49 The Pandemic and Conspiracy Theories24:57 Violence Against Democracy27:38 The Weakness of Norms30:51 Mid-roll Endorsement: Big Brains31:49 What Next for the Progressive Left?36:13 Polls Are Left-Wing Astrology37:57 Cliodynamics 40:30 Back to BANI45:34 Fighting Back Against Incomprehensibility48:49 Final Thoughts: The Real Work Is Still Ahead52:11 End Credits and Acknowledgements53:00 “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You” from IconographyFind the full show notes and a transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

The End of the Beginning

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché that he’s the symptom, not the disease. Boxed in by demographic change, the Republican party has devolved over the past half-century into a force that taps racial and economic anxieties to win elections, erodes faith in government by deliberately and cynically undermining government, and exploits Constitutional loopholes and Congressional procedure to exercise endless minoritarian rule. Democrats, of course, are beset by their own internal divisions—and by a growing thirst for revenge.To reverse this toxic dynamic, we’ll need reforms that give both parties a fair shot at legislating and lower the risk of tyranny by the minority or the majority. It’s a tall order, given that we’re more sharply divided along ideological, geographical, and economic lines than at any point in American history. Which is why the necessary reforms could end up going so deep that we come out the other side looking like a different nation—or nations.This episode draws on a range of ideas from thinkers such as journalist David A. French, political scientists Adam Przeworski and William Howell, and sociologist and science fiction author Malka Older, along with an assortment of other commentators on the topics of polarization, federalism, and the possibility of secession or breakup. And in the best Soonish tradition, there’s also a little dose of Apollo 13.You'll find the full show notes and transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.You can also read an essay version of "American Reckoning" on Medium.The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Painted face photo by Oskaras Zerbickas on Unsplash. Thanks Oskaras!

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we look at the tattered state of our democracy as the election approaches, and we assess nonviolent ways to respond to the twin threats of political polarization and President Trump's thuggish behavior. Part 2 is coming October 12.These are probably the last two pre-election episodes I’ll make, so I decided to try something a little ambitious and probably a little crazy: making sense of 2020 in all its perverse complexity. It’s a cliché at this point to say that Donald Trump isn’t the disease, he’s the symptom. But it’s true, and underneath all the name-calling and dog-whistling on the campaign trail this year, there’s a far deeper problem, which is that we’re more divided in our goals and our beliefs than at any time since the Civil War.In the series I bring together ideas from a bunch of conversations I’ve been having with smart people who think about partisanship, polarization, the duties of citizenship, and the future of democracy, including (in Part 1) Sean Eldridge of Stand Up America and Protect The Results, Erica Chenoweth at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and Robert McElvaine at Millsaps College in Jackson, MS. The episode explains why the threat of communal violence is so real right now. It also puts the current unrest in historical context, and looks at ways for citizens to usher the country through this perilous moment—for example, by mobilizing nonviolently to ensure that the election is fair and free.The prospect of a Trump win in November—whether fair or fraudulent—is horrifying. The thing is, a Trump loss would create its own set of problems. As Yoni Appelbaum wrote in a 2019 Atlantic magazine article entitled “How America Ends”:"The president’s defeat would likely only deepen the despair that fueled his rise, confirming his supporters’ fear that the demographic tide has turned against them. That fear is the single greatest threat facing American democracy, the force that is already battering down precedents, leveling norms, and demolishing guardrails. When a group that has traditionally exercised power comes to believe that its eclipse is inevitable, and that the destruction of all it holds dear will follow, it will fight to preserve what it has—whatever the cost."What form that fight might take is the unsettling and unanswered question now lingering over the nation. Armed extremists, like the participants in the Michigan kidnapping plot exposed this week, hope violent action will spark mass chaos and civil war. We can thwart extremist individuals and groups one by one. But can we stop the politicians who stoke extremism for their own cynical ends?Part 2 of this special two-part episode, coming Monday, moves beyond the election to ask how we might reconfigure our politics to defuse the kinds of tensions that got us into this mess. Because the real question isn’t how we’re going to get through the election without a violent meltdown—it’s how we’re going to get through the next decade and the next century.See the full show notes for this episode at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-404-american-reckoning-pt1The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show!Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.American flag photo by Peggy Zinn, shared on Unsplash.

American Reckoning, Part 1: Civil Wars and How to Stop Them

Donald Trump will not be president forever. Whether he leaves office in 2021 or 2025; whether he steps down peacefully or not; whether he’s replaced by a Democratic president or a Republican one—he will leave. And then the country will face the immense task of restoring democratic norms and facing up to the failings that allowed a populist, white-nationalist demagogue like Trump to reach office in the first place.In this episode, with help from University of Chicago political scientist Will Howell, we look at the leading explanations for Trump’s rise and the competing ideas about ways to move forward after Trump.Assuming Joseph R. Biden wins in November 2020—which isn’t a safe assumption, of course—should the next administration focus on structural reforms to make government more effective, so that Washington can then fix people’s real problems and take the oxygen out of populist anger? Or should it push forward with a program of cultural transformation that recognizes, and tries to root out, the deep strains of racism, xenophobia, and nihilism that fuel Trumpism and today’s Republican party?It turns out (unsurprisingly) that your preferred prescription depends on your precise diagnosis of the country’s ills. Howell makes a strong argument for a reformist approach that puts good government and pro-social policies first. Other scholars fear that a deeper reckoning with Americans’ illiberal leanings will be required. As you’ll hear in the episode, I’m still of two minds. But I also hope there’s a middle way.Chapter Guide00:00 Content Warning00:16 Soonish Opening Theme00:30 Donald Trump Barrage Montage01:13 What Is Donald Trump?02:36 Never Another Trump04:22 Disaster Response05:07 Introducing Will Howell07:30 Connecting Back to “Relic” and our Failing Constitution”09:23 Defining Populism and its Harms11:20 Once and Future Populist Demagogues13:19 The Conditions for Populism, and How to Change Them15:59 Institutional Reform or Policy Reform?17:58 Redesigning the US Presidency19:31 The F Word (Fascism)20:13 Jason Stanley on Fascist Movements21:09 Sarah Churchwell: “This Is What American Fascism Looks Like”22:12 The Party of White Grievance 23:48 Will Howell Responds: Forces Working in Tandem26:43 The Reformist Left and the Cultural Left28:01 A Middle Way28:45 Structural Reform or Detrumpification? Priorities for the Next Administration31:31 Best-Case Scenario33:33 End Credits and Acknowledgements35:12 Recommendation: The ConstantNotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes. The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Really!Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonishFollow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Trump doll photo by Max Litek, shared on Unsplash. Thanks Max!

After Trump, What Comes Next?

Voters, hold on to your hats. The U.S. election system could face an unprecedented array of challenges in November, from the coronavirus pandemic to the prospect of cyberattacks to the depradations of President Trump himself. And that means there’s a non-zero chance that the election will misfire, leaving us with the wrong president—or no president at all—come noon on January 20, 2021.At least, that’s the argument legal scholar Lawrence Douglas lays out in Will He Go? Trump and the Looming Election Meltdown in 2020, a new book that goes into extreme and eye-opening detail about the flaws that make the Electoral College system uniquely vulnerable to a disruptor like Trump.In the final presidential debate of 2016, when moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he’d accede to the outcome of the election if Hillary Clinton were to win, Trump refused to answer. “I’ll keep you in suspense,” the candidate said. Douglas tells Soonish that this intentionally subversive response raised a specter in his mind that he hasn’t been able to dispel.“Whatever damage a candidate could cause to our system by refusing to concede, imagine the kind of damage that an incumbent could cause to our system by refusing to concede,” Douglas says. “How well equipped is our system to deal with that type of eventuality? The rather alarming conclusion is it's very poorly equipped indeed.”The problem isn’t merely that the the Electoral College system is unrepresentative by design, or that its winner-take-all nature makes it possible for a candidate to assume office without winning a plurality of the popular vote (an outcome that befell the nation in 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016). It’s also that the Constitution and the laws Congress has put in place around national elections fail to specify which votes count in the not-so-rare cases where electors don’t vote as pledged, or where states nominate competing slates of electors.The opportunities for mischief multiply when an election is so close that the outcome might turn on contested ballots, such as the notorious hanging-chad punch card ballots of 2000 or the mail-in ballots that coronavirus-wary voters are likely to use in record numbers this fall and that Trump is already noisily denouncing. “At times I've described it as this Chernobyl-like defect built into our electoral system,” Douglas says. “If everything lines up the wrong way, this meltdown could occur.”Chapter Guide00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID00:08 Opening Theme00:21 "I'll Keep You in Suspense"02:05 Trump Defeats Clinton02:19 How Donald Thinks02:51 Meet Lawrence Douglas04:35 Bad Design and Total Election System Failure06:19 Dear Listeners08:07 A Warning to Americans09:24 What Makes a Victory Decisive?11:27 Trump Moves the Goalposts12:14 Faithless Electors15:26 Update: SCOTUS Rules on Faithless Electors (added July 7, 2020)16:56 SpongeBob for President20:34 Competing Slates25:54 Lies and Meta-Lies29:05 Spoiler #1: Election Day Snafus31:14 Spoiler #2: Foreign Interference33:16 Spoiler #3: Covid-1937:06 Beyond Ordinary Politics39:07 "If I Don't Win, I Don't Win"40:16 Short-term Tactics for Preventing Election Disaster41:22 Long-term Strategies for Fixing our Elections43:07 The Constitution Kinda Feels Like a Suicide Pact43:33 End Run: the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact46:08 My Simple Hope46:44 End Credits and Hub & Spoke PromoThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Follow us on Twitter and get the latest updates about the show in our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Marine One photo by Victoria Pickering, shared on Flickr under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 license

Unpeaceful Transition of Power

Futurists—who sometimes prefer to be called scenario planners or foresight thinkers—specialize in helping the rest of us understand the big trends and forces that will shape the world of tomorrow. So here’s what I really wanted to ask one: Is a cataclysm like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 the kind of event we should be able to see coming? If so, then why didn’t we do more to get ready? Why has the federal government’s response to the spread of covid-19 been so inept? And above all, what should we be doing now to get our political and economic institutions back in shape so that they can cope better with the next challenge?This April I had the opportunity to speak about all things coronavirus with my favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. Jamais is widely known for his work with the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, and he has a bit of a reputation as the “dark futures” futurist—the one who isn’t afraid to dwell on how things could go wrong. It turned out he’d been thinking about many of the same questions, and that he’d been developing a new analytical framework for just such an occasion. It’s called BANI, and it offers new insights into our strange historical moment, when institutions left brittle by years of deliberate neglect now face shattering stresses. In this episode, Jamais and and I tour the BANI concept and discuss how we could come out of pandemic with some new tools for confronting catastrophe.Chapter Guide00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID  00:08Soonish Theme00:22 Futurism in a Time of Pandemic02:03 Introducing Jamais Cascio04:12 Explaining VUCA08:32 Meet BANI10:43 How BANI Fits Our Moment. Part I: Brittleness in the Pandemic13:48 Part II: Anxiety14:17 Part III: Nonlinearity15:10 Part IV: Incomprehensibility16:01 Pandemics as Wild Cards18:48 Planning for Pandemics19:56 The War Against Expertise21:44 Responding to Brittleness and Anxiety23:50 Responding to Nonlinearity26:03 Responding to Incomprehensibility 27:46 Paths Forward: Thinking More Like Futurists30:30 Muddling Through32:36 End Credits, Acknowledgements, and Hub & Spoke Promos

Brittle, Anxious, Nonlinear, Incomprehensible: How One Futurist Frames the Pandemic

Fifty years after Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins went to the moon, it’s hard to shake off the afterimage of the Saturn V rocket rising into the sky on a column of flame, and remember that the astronauts' bold adventure was also the product of decades of work by engineers, politicians, propagandists, and even science fiction writers. That’s the gap Lillian Cunningham of the Washington Post set out to fix in her podcast, Moonrise. And she’s here with us today to talk about how the show got made, what she thinks the Apollo story can teach us about the power of imagination, and how the stories we tell help us to write the future.Cunningham has been at The Washington Post for nine years, and in addition to creating Moonrise, she produced and hosted the limited-run podcasts Presidential and Constitutional. She spoke with Soonish from the Post's studios in Washington, D.C., on October 29, 2019, and in this episode we're sharing a version of the conversation that's been edited for length and clarity.See the episode page on the Soonish website for full show notes. And for an even deeper dive, including a chat about Lillian's writing process, the music for Moonrise, and the new Apple TV+ series "For All Mankind," check out this bonus segment at our website.Chapter Guide0:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID01:31 Soonish Theme01:45 The Golden Age of Limited-Run Podcasts02:48 A World-Changing Podcast about the Moon Race05:08 Welcoming Lillian Cunningham to Soonish05:45 Lillian’s Journey to Podcasting08:53 Why Make a Show about the Moon Race?12:21 Beginnings: Why Start the Moon Story in 1933?17:58 The Role of Science Fiction and Futurism in the Moon Program20:52 The Soviet Side of the Moon Story24:10 Midroll Message: Recommending Words To That Effect26:07 What Makes an Expert an Expert?31:14 The Story Never Stops35:19 Will We Ever Go Back to the Moon?39:14 End Credits and Patreon Thank-Yous41:38 Promoting Hub & Spoke Newest Show, SubtitleThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Please check out Subtitle from Patric Cox and Kavita Pillay. It's the newest addition to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. The premiere episode Not So Anonymous is about the remarkable power of forensic linguistics software to unmask writers who'd probably rather stay unknown.

Making Moonrise

The moment in the voting booth when you put your pen to your ballot (or put your finger to the electronic touchscreen, as the case may be) is democracy distilled. It’s the act that makes America a republic. But while the casting your vote is critical, it’s everything that happens before, during, and after that moment that makes up the larger election system. And these days there are whole armies of people working to influence and disrupt that system—and opposing armies working to protect it and make it safer and more accessible.In this special Halloween 2019 edition of Soonish, we look at the scary vulnerabilities in the U.S. election system that were exposed after the 2016 presidential election, and we meet a company working to make it possible for everyone to vote securely on their smartphones. We hear from a retired U.S. Air Force major general who’s deeply worried about the lack of good “cyber hygiene” within state election agencies, and national security experts who fear the 2020 presidential vote could once again be manipulated and distorted by social media misinformation and disinformation. And we meet a science fiction author who says democracy is always a work in progress, but argues there’s an urgent need now for better media literacy and clearer thinking about how to strengthen the key beliefs, norms, and institutions behind democracy.Check out the complete show notes, including a full episode transcript, at soonishpodcast.org. Chapter Guide00:00 Hub & Spoke Sonic ID00:13 Opening Theme00:22 A Scary Story from the Senate Russia Report02:49 E-Voting Machines Without Paper Trails03:38 The Nightmare Scenario04:28 Maj. Gen. Earl Matthews on Cyber Hygiene06:33 More Money for Election Security07:23 The Big Question: Can We Achieve Fair Elections?07:52 The Anti-Sikh Riots of 198409:47 Nimit Sawhney at SXSW10:58 The Founding of Voatz13:58 How to Vote on Voatz22:03 Baby Steps and Criticisms24:19 Meet Centenal Cycle Author Malka Older27:58 Elections as Systems, and the Dangers of Disinformation30:59 Adapting to New Communications Platforms32:32 The Fragility of Legitimacy33:45 End Credits, and a Shout-Out to Open SourceNotesThe Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.Episode logo photograph by Element5 Digital on Unsplash.Sound effects / foley from Freesound.org.If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.Please check out Open Source, one of the newest additions to the Hub & Spoke audio collective. Try the episode Do we want democracy or two-day shipping? with Matt Stoller from the Open Markets Institute.

Election Dreams and Nightmares

In this short bonus episode, hear the bizarre story of a college student who scaled a New England weather tower on a dare, stole a curious scientific instrument as a trophy, and inadvertently disrupted a series of climate observations going back more than 130 years. I made this four-minute, non-narrated piece in 2018 as part of the 24-Hour Radio Race from KCRW’s Independent Producer Project. To view the show notes, a photo gallery, and a full transcript visit soonishpodcast.org/307-the-great-blue-hill-heist The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound. If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey. Give us a shout on Twitter and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

The Great Blue Hill Heist

The future is shaped by technology—but technology is shaped by us. Every month, Soonish brings you stories showing how the choices we make together forge the technological world of tomorrow. From MIT-trained technology journalist Wade Roush. Learn more at soonishpodcast.org. We're a proud member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective! See hubspokeaudio.org.