Show Notes
On the slowing rate of technological progress. Alex, George and contributing editor (and science writer) Leigh Phillips discuss David Graeber's 2012 essay, Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit. This builds on two of this year's themes: state capitalism (how planning and growth – or their absence – intersect with technology) and the pre-political (how technology shapes • Were we right to expect jetpacks? And are we looking in the right place for technological advances today? • Has technical progress actually slowed in the way Graeber says? • Are the explanations he gives for slowdown correct? • What political tasks does this reality impose on us? • What is the role of geopolitics and war in the rate of technological development? Links:
Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit, David Graeber, The Baffler
Science Is Getting Less Bang for Its Buck, Patrick Collison & Michael Nielsen, The Atlantic
/59/ Übermenschen of Capital Pt. 3 ft. Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworski
Progress is in the balance between innovation and implementation, Phil Bell, LSE
Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction (On Robert C. Allen)
Engels’s Second Theory: Technology, Warfare and the Growth of the State
More from Bungacast
On infrastructure – who owns and who controls it. Scholar Joscha Abels talks to Lee and Alex about global infrastructure, from satellites to cloud computing to undersea cables. --> For the full episode, subscribe at patreon.com/bungacast
On migration, monarchy, and legitimacy. Merouan Mekouar, professor of development studies at York University in Toronto, gives Alex and Lee an in-depth view of a country at the centre of multiple tendencies. –> Subscribe for more like this, at patreon.com/bungacast
On dead ends and new beginnings. Socialist writers, teachers and podcasters, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn, talk to Alex and George about their pamphlet, The People Are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism, which came out this year.
On sovereignty and Brazil's election. Juliano Fiori, Alameda Institute director, talks to Alex about Lula versus (Flávio) Bolsonaro through the lens of internal and external threats to sovereignty.
A docu-series from Bungacast. This sequence of interviews, conversations and meetings were recorded mostly in New York – the capital of the 20th century – in order to ask what the future of place is in the 21st century. In part four, we finish off by digging into New York itself to look at the great contradictions of modernism. We conclude by asking what the capital of the 21st century is, and who, if anyone, is planning it. This fourth episode features: