The Conversation

Finally, formally, this is where The Conversation ends. If you've been a contemporaneous listener, thanks for joining on this epic trip. If you're just discovering The Conversation, welcome! This might be a more interesting place to begin than the beginning.

Rebecca Solnit is an author, activist, and geographer, among other things. Her books include A Paradise Built in Hell, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, and Men Explain Things to Me. She's also a regular contributor to Harpers, The Nation, and The Guardian.

Kim Stanley Robinson is one of the biggest names in current science fiction. His most famous work is, arguably, the Mars Trilogy, but he is the author of seventeen novels and several collections of short stories. I could easily overburden you with biographical details and lists of his accolades, but I'll leave that to this very comprehensive fan page. I learned about Stan through my interview with Tim Morton in 2012—they are friends and, at the time, both lived in Davis. It took a year but, when I next passed through Davis, I was fortunate enough to get three hours to sit down with Stan and talk about the future. I was especially interested in Stan's work because he is a thorough researcher and regularly uses his fiction to explore a variety of plausible economic, scientific, ecological, and social futures. In other words, he uses fiction to ask many of the same questions that we have been asking our interviewees throughout the project. The result, I think, is one of the strongest and most wide-ranging interviews in The Conversation.

Rainey Reitman is the Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and a co-founder of both the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Chelsea Manning Support Network. My conversation with Rainey is, in many ways, the logical extension of my conversation with James Bamford about digital surveillance and privacy. But while Bamford discussed the extent and mechanisms of surveillance, that conversation didn't get into the nuts and bolts of how to cure the problem he diagnosed. Enter Rainey, who spends her days trying to make issues of digital liberties comprehensible and relevant. We only had an hour for our interview, so I wasn't able to pivot from digital liberties towards the bigger picture issues that I usually aim for, but there's still a ton of good material in here. Neil and I were especially interested in analogies between physical and digital space and questions of public versus private ownership.

Charles Hugh Smith is an economics writer, former builder, and general renaissance man who blogs at oftwominds.com, a site CNBC ranked as one of their top alternative economics blogs. We talk about (comparatively) rosy collapse scenerios, parallel economies, the possibilities and limits of desktop fabrication, and why you should be out paving a bike lane. There are lots of interesting connections in Charles' interview, notably with Joseph Tainter and Douglass Rushkoff.

Joan Blades is the co-founder of Living Room Conversations, a movement dedicated to fostering meaningful dialogue between Americans of different political ideologies. In addition to her work with Living Room Conversations, Joan was also a co-founder of MoveOn.org and MomsRising. She's also partly to thank for the After Dark screensaver and flying toasters, which isn't germane, but is damn cool. I learned about Joan through Mark Mykleby and she immediately found a place on our "Must Interview" list because she was actually creating the very types of discussions Micah, Neil, and I had hoped to spark with The Conversation. Unsurprisingly, Joan and I talk extensively about the value of conversation, where it is (and isn't) possible, and its limits. You'll also hear a lot about American politics—a little more tangible than we usually get in The Conversation—and the role of media and corporate money in shaping thought. Before jumping into the episode, Micah, Neil, and I would like to say hello and welcome back to all our listeners. I was derailed by a variety of things over the past year but I've returned to the land of the living and will, hopefully, be editing the final ten episodes over the next several months. After that, we're going to discuss The Conversation's future more seriously—which could involve sending the project out to sea in a burning longship, continuing it in a limited form, or something less predictable.

Ed Finn is the Director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. The Center was conceived as a place where people from radically different intellectual backgrounds come together to dream about the future—to "reignite humanity’s grand ambitions for innovation and discovery," in their words. To this end, they sponsor everything from collaborative science fiction projects to big conferences about the future. We learned about the Center through this article and, if you want to dig a little deeper into their history, it's a good place to start. My conversation with Ed focuses on two interrelated subjects: dreams and narratives. Are we, as a society, adequately dreaming about the future or have we outsourced our dreams to distant experts? Do we have adequate time for dreaming? Has increasing specialization made it difficult for the kind of interdisciplinary thinking needed for the creation of radical new ideas? Ed advocates "thoughtful optimism" as he segues from dreams into narratives, suggesting that our more ambitious hopes can be realized through the right collective narrative. You will hear echoes of David Korten and Mark Mykleby, but I think one of the most interesting moments of the conversation comes when we talk about Lawrence Torcello and ask whether ambiguous narratives can get us further than a reasonable conversation. Neil and I conclude the episode by discussing Douglas Rushkoff, Ethan Zuckerman, and whether a fragmented media landscape makes it harder (or impossible) to develop a unifying narrative. We also explore the idea of an ambiguous narrative in more detail, asking if a vague narrative is more or less likely to bring people together than an Enlightenment-style conversation about the Good.

Carlos Perez de Alejo is a the co-founder and Executive Director of Cooperation Texas, an Austin-based nonprofit that helps organize and raise awareness of worker-owned cooperatives. Economics has been a regular theme in The Conversation but, from David Korten to John Fullerton, many of our discussions have focused on systemic issues and top-down reform. While we at The Conversation love big theories and grand visions, we're equally interested in projects. Worker-owned cooperatives fall in this latter category and, while they are hardly new, the changing economic landscape and success of Spain's Mondragon Corporation have raised their prominence considerably. In this episode, Carlos and I talk about how cooperatives critique our current economic paradigm, even as they function within it. That theme leads into a discussion of whether cooperatives will ever be able to grow large enough to meaningfully change the economic paradigm or if they will always be overshadowed by the competition of traditional corporations. In our concluding discussion of Walter Block, Neil suggested that conversation isn't always possible. Carlos agrees, but also points to situations where people abandon old ideologies without conversation. Micah and I kick these ideas around a bit more in our conclusion.

Phyllis Tickle founded Publishers Weekly's Religion Department and has written numerous books about modern American Christianity, including "The Great Emergence: How Christianity is Changing and Why." Phyllis begins our conversation by describing 500-year social, cultural, and religious cycles in parts of the world influenced by Abrahamic faiths. Building upon that, she asserts that our current historical moment lies at the edge of two such cycles. The upshot of this is a breakdown in traditional understandings of authority and a period of chaotic exploration. Emergence Christianity, like other emergent faiths, is developing as a response to this period of transition. Though religion has been a regular theme in the background of The Conversation, this is our first episode dedicated entirely to it. As a result, we introduce a lot of new themes and you will hear fewer explicit connections to earlier episodes. Having said that, there are some interesting ties between Emergence Christianity and the income gap which harken back to Chuck Collins, Francione-like questions of purity versus pragmatism, and more Tim Cannon and Max More-style transhumanism than you'd ever expect.

Scott Douglas, III, is the Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, an interfaith organization in Birmingham, Alabama. GBM provides poverty relief, lobbies to reform Alabama's state constitution, and has recently been active in opposing self-deportation laws. My conversation with Scott is a powerful reminder that status quo ideas vary deeply based on location and that equality—or equity, as Scott prefers—remains just as cutting-edge of an idea today as it did fifty years ago. Like Roberta Francis, Henry Louis Taylor, and Carolyn Raffensperger, Scott takes us into the legal structures undergirding our society to find discriminatory systems that are felt more often than seen. History plays a major role in this episode and Scott offers a great account of how people perceive historical moments in the present and in retrospect. You'll hear strong connections with Chuck Collins and Mark Mykleby about wealth and security. Elsewhere, listen for a John Fife-style spiritual critique of the individualism prized by thinkers like Oliver Porter, Richard Saul Wurman, and David Miller.

Oliver Porter designs and implements partnerships between municipalities and corporations, allowing cities to privatize virtually all of their functions. Since his central role in incorporating Sandy Springs, Georgia in 2005, Oliver his moved on to advising numerous other American and Japanese cities through his consultancy firm PPP Associates and has authored two books, Creating the New City of Sandy Springs and Public/Private Partnerships for Local Governments. Before his work in urban privatization, he was an executive at AT&T. Our conversation telescopes from micro to macro, beginning with the story of Sandy Springs' incorporation and ending with an extended back-and-forth about the role of government, human nature, and American decline. You'll want to keep Lawrence Torcello's discussion of John Rawls in mind as Oliver and I discuss the biological and social lotteries—which segues into a contrast with Chuck Collins regarding safety nets and opportunity. Happiness and satisfaction come up as well and we discover a resonance between Laura Musikanski's work and Oliver's interest in making government more responsive to the electorate. Finally, we'll revisit the question nagging at James Bamford: what is democracy good for if it chooses to undermine itself? Let's be honest, nobody's going to answer that question more succinctly than Winston Churchill. Micah and I conclude the episode with a discussion of how Oliver's themes relate to local/central and individual/collective tensions we've seen elsewhere in The Conversation. We'll also touch upon declension narratives, opportunity and historical context, and return (twice) to Mark Mykleby's aphorism that "our assumptions have become our truths."

James Bamford is an author and journalist who has written extensively about the National Security Agency. His books include The Puzzle Palace, Body of Secrets, and The Shadow Factory. He has also produced a documentary for NOVA on PBS. We learned about James last year through a Wired article about the NSA's new data center in Bluffdale, Utah. My conversation with James covers several topics that have been missing from The Conversation thus far: privacy, surveillance, and the threat of totalitarian government. As a result, this episode has few overt connections to the rest of the project, but there are underlying commonalities. From Chuck Collins to David Korten, we have heard thinkers concerned with hyperindividualism in its economic and social manifestations. On the other end of the spectrum, we have David Miller and Robert Zubrin who are worried about the possibility for collective regulation to dampen individual creativity and enterprise. James departs from all of these conversations and examines how the individual/community tension plays out in the realm of security and personal liberty. Micah, Neil, and I conclude the episode with an attempt to better integrate James into the rest of the project. Somehow, this leads us into a discussion of what government is for and if an apathetic democracy is worth preserving.

Roberta Francis has been advocating for the Equal Rights Amendment for over thirty years, chairs the ERA Taskforce for the National Council of Women's Organizations and administers equalrightsamendment.org. She has also been active with the New Jersey League of Women Voters. There's something ridiculous about needing to include the ERA in a project about the future—why didn't we take care of this ninety years ago? If the ERA reminds us of anything, it's that old ideas can remain new and common sense can be remarkably controversial. I will revisit this theme in my upcoming conversation with Scott Douglas of Greater Birmingham Ministries. Roberta and I talk about what the ERA is, why it failed, and why it's still necessary to a population that, largely, believes it already passed. We conclude by talking about the tension between individual and collective good, the role of government, and compromise. You will hear echos of Peter Warren, Lawrence Torcello and, in the last coda, John Fife.