What Happens When Money Becomes Morality? With Mike Brock

So this idea that we should have immutable algorithms that define the contours of our economy or law, that become things nobody can change, that to me is epistemically authoritarianism. It's basically saying there's certain conversations that are off the table, that technology has its own logic. What if we're wrong? We were wrong about the neoliberal project. What if we're wrong about 21 million bitcoins? What if that screws everything up and then we can't change it?

Thanks for having me.

I mean, I've had a lifelong affliction which has been an obsession with trying to understand the world. It's served me in my business pursuits, in my previous capacity. It took me into software engineering and out of politics. I was a business executive and now I'm a writer. But fundamentally, I've had a life that's been really focused on trying to understand the world and one where I've been in search of purpose and meaning and trying to find some sort of way to contribute to the story, as Walt Whitman said, that we can all contribute in a verse. That's what I'm trying to do. And I'm trying to understand that story that I'm contributing to.

I was born in Canada. So I guess you could say that I'm an American Canadian. I've spent most of my adult existence here, south of the Canadian US border. But I've been a, I guess you could say I'm a North American native.

Well, it's interesting, right? Growing up in Canada, I'm a somewhat, pretty much identified, I guess, now as an American political commentator, but if we're going back that far into my history, yeah, it's interesting growing up in the shadow of a superpower right across the border. It's impossible to not notice the cultural, political, and economic influence of a creature such as the United States, which is my adopted home. I'm a citizen here as well. I'm a proud citizen of this country. I fell in love with this country actually. And became a citizen and I'm a patriotic one. I have an American flag right there, right behind me. And so yeah, it's an interesting experience actually seeing the United States from the outside. It gives you a different perspective obviously. I mean, you're outside the United States yourself. And you know, when we can get into conversations about US foreign policy, adventures and misadventures, and the moral stories that we all tell about the 20th century and before that and we can go back further and talk about the foundations of this country. And some people would say that I'm remiss if I don't mention the history of slavery in this country. But yet, this project of America is something that I don't know when I fell in love with America. Maybe I did as a kid. And the promise of it, the promise of something that has a capacity to literally reach for the stars through this experiment of self-government, which obviously brings us to today, and the despair that I'm fighting against in my writings.

Where my thinking is at with the state of democracy? Yeah, man. I mean, here in the United States, we're in a crisis. I believe that what we are seeing is an attempted slow motion coup that is being perpetrated by the current occupant of the executive branch, the Article 2 branch of the United States federal government, which is currently headed by Donald J. Trump and his vice president JD Vance and assorted oligarchs around them. I would look at this current situation such as it is and I would say that these people represent an existential threat to that thing that I was telling you about earlier that I love so much.

I mean, so you know, I'm somebody who has actually been very much involved actually for some time in pro-democracy activism not just in the United States but around the world. And this has been a longtime passion of mine. Not a new thing. When I started Notes from the Circus, what I would say is that yes, the United States has a very deep democratic culture. And there's a lot of reasons for hope. There's a lot of reasons to believe that democracy will persist in the United States. Now, we should be precise here though when I say that. There's a very strong cultural current. People expect to be able to vote for their politicians. They expect their votes to be counted, the results of those elections to be respected and ratified in composing the representatives and the legislatures and offices to which those elections are held for. And I think yes, I think it would be very difficult for Donald Trump and his merry band of corrupt oligarchs, and they are corrupt oligarchs, by the way, to completely undo the cultural and institutional inertia that makes that true. However, we have to understand something though. The authoritarians understand this. They do understand that removing the expectation of free and fair elections is not something that they're going to be able to do in any short period of time. Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party in Hungary understands this too. Erdoğan in Turkey understands this. Modi in India understands this. People aren't paying much attention but like Sheinbaum and her left-wing reactionary populist post-truth forces in Mexico understand this. There's a new class of authoritarianism. It comes in both, as we see in Mexico, sort of left reactionary and right reactionary varieties. In the United States it's very much on the right side of that equation where they have sort of figured something out. They've figured out, as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán have demonstrated to the world, that the way that you can establish a dictatorship inside a democracy is by fundamentally chipping away at the process, not necessarily the process of voting but everything around that. The eligibility to run for election, the way things are counted, why they're counted, who can stand for election, capturing the courts so they can make determinations on what votes to count and which ones not to. These are the ways in which the modern more sophisticated authoritarian goes about consolidating control. This is exactly what Donald Trump and the people around him and people like this Vought guy who runs the Office of Management and Budget is laser focused on those sorts of things. Thinking about ways in which to not get rid of the ritual of voting in that strict sense because obviously that's deeply ingrained in our sense of what political legitimacy means in the modern world. But they do want to strip it of liberal values and any kind of concept of universal rule of law. They want rule by the powerful with performative elections. And so yes, there's this tension there, this truth that people culturally are very attached to that procedural democracy. And that's good. That gives us something to work with. But it doesn't change the fact that there's a formula that these fascists, these modern fascists have for wrestling the democracy to the ground by hollowing it of its content rather than actually destroying the actual process by which we legitimate our leaders. And that's their game and that's what they're doing. And so I get the perspective that says that they're not going to be able to eliminate elections, but I don't think they're going to try to eliminate elections. I think they're going to try to make the elections not matter. That's the nuanced point that has to be understood. And I'm not saying that the academic that you cited there and I'm not familiar with his work but I am familiar with the work of other people that focus on democratic decline. And I would say that most of those people in that world are very alarmed and probably more aligned with what I'm saying than the figure that you cited.

Yeah. I mean that's a big question, right? What is knowledge? What is truth? Epistemology obviously is the word that we sort of use in philosophy and in the sciences to categorize that object that you're raising here. Yeah, it's something we don't think about but it's very fundamental to us actually. The nature of our consciousness lives there, in the world of thought and information and communication. And there's a theory of consciousness which I'm partial to, this idea of the social self, that we actually exist sort of consciously in what you might think of as an intersubjective realm. Which doesn't really come intuitively to us because we want to think of ourselves as autonomous agents. I have a brain, you have a brain. I'm not suggesting that we communicate to each other through telepathy or anything but when we talk to each other we sort of exchange fragments of consciousness and when we're not talking to each other we're absorbing cultural artifacts and words and meanings and all of these idioms and all of these things around us that sort of become part of our shared context, text that sort of exists outside us that we exist in relation to. And then you get even deeper into this and you think about the theories of Girard and mimetic theory and how the things that we care about are based on sort of imitating things that exist in that space. And so yeah, epistemology is that. It's sort of maybe the most important word if you ask me in the age of AI, the sort of knowledge and science that more people should really understand because when you're thinking about questions like how will we survive the age of AI, how will humans stay human, I mean those are really epistemological challenges, right? Both in how you design the AI and how you understand how the AI works and the nature of the communication between the AI and the humans. We obviously worry about the threat of manipulation and the highly effective propaganda that AI will be able to mete out against us and manipulate us and subjugate us. Those are all epistemological challenges. And understanding how knowledge and information and truth and communication actually works is really crucial to at least having an intuitive understanding about what the risks are and what we should care about and how we should go about designing safe technology that serves humans rather than humans being enslaved by machines which is of course the thing that we all worry about as we talk about the coming AI age that we are heading head first into.

Well yeah, good question. And I write a lot about this as well. Yeah, I mean so when we think about the situation that we're in, I agree with the analysis that there's obviously the loss of faith in the establishment, the populist moment, the sort of collapse of confidence in institutions and trust in institutions is a real phenomenon and it is a product of convergent factors really. There are criticisms, we can talk about the liberal establishment, that sort of, it's still kind of hanging on in places. I'd say that like Keir Starmer in the United Kingdom is like part of the old guard liberal establishment, Macron, people like that. Surprisingly, Mark Carney in Canada who just became prime minister, former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor, is clearly a liberal establishment type figure. And that group of people, the Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, that liberal establishment has lost trust. The trust has been lost in that establishment. And I would actually extend that to the sort of what some people sometimes refer to as the neoconservatives, the sorts of people who were in power of the Republican establishment before the rise of Trump. I would consider them part of the liberal establishment, small L liberal. I use liberal in the classical sense. I would say that Ronald Reagan was a liberal, Bill Clinton was a liberal, George W. Bush was a liberal, Obama was a liberal. There were different types of liberals, right? Reagan was a right-leaning liberal and Bill Clinton was actually kind of a right-leaning liberal too in the '90s. He was kind of like an aberration who had some left-leaning views. And then you had Bush who was kind of a weird sort of mix who was like this compassionate conservatism. And Obama was pretty much as vanilla establishment liberal as, packaged in a really amazing politician and Barack Obama who was able to command a soaring message. I don't think he was as effective a president as he promised, unfortunately, but an amazing politician, an inspiring leader. But that group of people represented, I think, in the cultural ethos, a sort of a failed promise. And you get into these issues that people have with globalization. De-industrialization of the US Midwest is often discussed as being connected to the China shock in the early 2000s after China was invited into the World Trade Organization and this whole sort of architecture of political coherence has been brought into disrepute for many reasons. The 2008 financial crisis was a major catalyst for the collapse of confidence in this what sometimes people call this neoliberal project which arguably started with Reagan in the 80s and ended with the election of Donald Trump in 2016. And yes, people have lost trust in that on both the left and the right actually. The Bernie coalition and the progressive left has been trying to reject that from the left for a while. And that has now been completely rejected by the right in the United States. You've seen the right-wing liberals and the left-wing liberals have sort of come together, the Liz Cheneys of the world and the Bill Kristols of the world have basically joined forces with the left-wing liberals. And so you do have this new kind of liberal coalition that's sort of holding together. But yeah, the broader public has lost complete faith in that project and obviously I'm an apologist for that project because I am a liberal philosopher and I am very much trying to re-enchant liberalism in the eyes of people and I recognize that I'm representing an ideology that most people think has failed. People believe liberalism has failed. I think that's a mistaken conclusion based on some things that I think liberals need to take account of. I think liberals need to admit certain failures of the neoliberal project for example. They have to admit that there were costs to globalization, cultural costs to globalization even if not purely in aggregate irrational economically. There was something there that liberals sort of missed. And one of the things that happened over the last 20 years was that the liberal establishment because it was so successful, like Francis Fukuyama called it the end of history, the triumph of liberalism in the world after the fall of the Soviet Union when the Berlin Wall came down. That it was just like up until 2016, it was almost impossible if you were in that world, in that establishment, part of that elite to imagine that anyone would ever vote to bring this system down. And in 2016, Brexit and then Trump's election revealed something that I don't think people really accepted actually until now, until this moment. I think Donald Trump's reelection has been really the first time. I think in 2016 people still thought Trump was an aberration. I think now there's serious conversations happening among people who kind of recognize that liberalism is not considered, most people don't sort of think of it as an ideology that really should be governing the world anymore. For different reasons. The left thinks that liberalism failed because of globalization and capitalism run amok. The right thinks liberalism failed because of cultural issues. Cultural excess in the form of hyperidentity politics. Some people call it wokeism. And so there's this two-front attack, right? The right-wing reactionaries are saying liberalism failed for cultural reasons and the left is saying that and actually also for economic reasons and the left obviously the socialist left and the progressive left is saying liberalism failed for economic reasons and also because it failed to stand up to this fascist threat that we now stand. And so that's to me how I would sort of broadbrush talk about what I think in broad scope stroke and we can talk about other parts of the world as well but in the United States I would say that's where we find ourselves, that's our kind of quick history of the political currents.

Well, look, look here. So, I mean we need to be clear, right? When I say I'm a liberal, I'm talking about a very deep philosophical political tradition. That is fundamentally based on the idea of human dignity and self-government and universal rights, universal suffrage, these basic concepts, the basic concept that nobody is more valuable than anyone else. And so to the extent that we structure our societies, we should build institutions that protect those core inviolable ethical principles. This is the liberal idea, the enlightenment classical liberal idea. And there is where I say I am a liberal. Now from there there's a bunch of projects within the liberal tradition. You mentioned neoliberalism. There's other ways that you can describe this aspect of liberalism. Someone might call it market fundamentalism in its more extreme form like anarcho-capitalism which my philosopher friend Vlad Vexler would say is hyperneoliberalism. And those ideas are built upon that core set of bonum notions of liberalism but within liberalism there's obviously disagreements. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a liberal. He was a democratic liberal, believed that capitalism should exist but it should be regulated by the state and competition laws should exist and the market isn't an end unto itself. And those liberals are liberals too and they disagree with other liberals. The views on how much you should regulate the market or not are not things that all liberals agree upon. Like I say Reagan was a liberal in that classical sense. Everything he said is consistent with liberal values. That makes him a liberal. Margaret Thatcher was a classical liberal as well. And they took a particular view that socialism and central planning was a disaster in the 20th century which it was, it was a disaster. I mean in the case of the United Kingdom and the nationalized industries there that were super inefficient and the economy was stagnant, there was this sort of realization that the market would do a much better job at allocating resources through price discovery and a free market. And so we saw the deregulation of the 80s and 90s which led to a massive massive economic boom both in the west and around the world and that now there's this sort of what people think was sort of an overreach there. And so I mean I'm in the middle of this actual argument. I actually think that most of the regulatory reforms that happened in the 80s like in the UK for example in Thatcher's project were probably necessary, the government-run companies were like super inefficient and the country was economically stagnant. But then what we've realized is that the fact that deregulation proved that markets are better than governments at running industries didn't prove that we should get rid of all regulations. It just proved that we shouldn't have the government monopolizing sectors. That made sense. Thatcher brought an end to that. I mean I think there are some sectors that the government can probably monopolize that's probably good, like basic utilities. I live here in Los Angeles and the city of Los Angeles is responsible for all power and water here. So this is all socialist power here in Los Angeles. I think that's fine. But do we want governments making our clothing for us and our cars? I think no. I think the neoliberals were right in the 80s that that's stupid. Don't do that. That's going to make us all poor and poorly allocate resources. But then as the 2008 financial crisis showed us is that you don't necessarily let market actors do where the they want either. If they're going to create 10 layers deep crazy dark financial instruments that are all linked to each other in a way that nobody even knows what the total picture looks like, you might blow up the entire economy and maybe don't let banks do that. Maybe have some regulations against that. So I'm kind of like you maybe a little bit between the neoliberals and the more left economic views within the liberal coalition where I'm kind of like you guys are both right about some things. Maybe the real answer is here is that we should regulate things that have uncaptured externalities by the market. We should just do that. Makes sense. We shouldn't regulate things that don't have those conditions. Because that's stupid. Just let the market do its job. We should potentially ban the market from doing certain things that could get us all killed. I don't think it should be legal to create a supervirus off of a gene printer. I think if you do that and we catch you doing that, we should throw you in jail. Don't do that. So I think that, you know, I kind of come back to this conversation around how to think about liberalism in a somewhat pragmatic way there. I think we need to acknowledge the criticisms of the neoliberal project, of the downsides of globalization, which we can talk about, which I think have really distorted our political economy and have actually imperiled our democratic project, which I don't think the neoliberals ever really wanted to do, by the way. I don't think there's anything, if Milton Friedman were alive today actually I think he would be quite horrified actually because I think he would have been pretty anti-Trump from what I read about him. So, yeah. So I think that it needs to be understood that there's a conversation within the liberal project from which there's disagreement and from where I think that we can learn and move forward without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

It was everywhere. It was actually everywhere in the world, right? I mean, Tony Blair was basically a neoliberal. That's what third way socialism was basically. It was basically socialists rebranding neoliberalism for the left. And so that's how you get Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. And in Canada, you get Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin. And actually kind of in China too, right? You get Deng Xiaoping, right? And he basically creates the special economic zone in Shenzhen and the rest is history there. And so yeah, the neoliberal moment in the 80s was kind of all over the world.

Sorry. I have made, I've been very clear about this. I haven't attacked Bitcoin as a technology. I mean, if you can read all my tweets and everything I said, in fact, I think if you read the essays that I wrote, I was pretty clear that I was at least in both of them, I at least had a few sentences there making clear that I wasn't actually talking about the technology itself, but the cultural aesthetics around it with a lot of people who work in the industry. Now with the crypto though, yeah, I mean, as a general sort of sense, I'm pretty critical of the industry and very skeptical that it's not all just fraud.