It has come to my attention that the noted political scientist Henry Farrell has been writing some very testy responses to me.
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scientist → come → me
The first two, in 2024, totally slipped by unnoticed:
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two → slip → 2024
Thanks to the rise of Substack Notes, however, I was able to see the most recent installment in the sequence, which is mostly a repost of the first installment:
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which → see → installment
I apologize for missing the first two when they came out, and I’ll try to respond to these as well.
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I → apologize → these
But first let me note that all three of Henry’s blog posts are responses to my review of the book Power and Progress, by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, which I first wrote in 2024 and then republished recently:
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I → let → 2024
Power and Progress was a strong contender for the worst nonfiction book I’ve ever read all the way through,1 though of course that ranking suffers from selection bias, since I’ve quit many worse books before finishing.
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I → read → books
I feel an irrational need to somehow make up all the hours I spent reading this ultimately unenlightening tome, which is probably why I took the time to write a 7,000-word critical review.
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I → feel → review
At the very least, I was able to have some fun critiquing some abstruse arguments by some highly influential authors.
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I → have → authors
And thanks to Henry, I get to have even more fun arguing about someone else’s arguments about my arguments!
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I → get → arguments
I’m getting steadily less regretful about making myself finish that book.
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myself → get → book
At this point, if you’re still reading this post, you’re probably asking “Why is this interesting to me, someone who has not read Power and Progress and have never heard anyone bring it up?”.
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anyone → read → it
Well, the honest answer is that it’s probably not interesting, and you should probably be taking care of a pet rabbit instead of reading this post.
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you → ’ → post
But I suppose there’s one reason it might be interesting, which is that over the past decade or so, a fairly large portion of the left-leaning intellectual class in America has become fairly-to-very resentful of the American tech industry, and has spent an enormous amount of intellectual effort on criticizing that industry.
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portion → suppose → industry
Both Power and Progress itself, and Henry’s defense of the book, channel those ideas and appeal to that sentiment.
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Power → channel → sentiment
The core conceit of anti-tech thought is that a class of wealthy industrialists — the “techbros”, if you will — is hurting society by building and investing in technologies that have major negative side effects, and that the solution is to bring these industries under greater democratic control.
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solution → hurt → control
Regular readers will know that I actually agree with that idea, in some form.
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I → know → form
I’ve written at length about how the combination of smartphone and social media technology has broken many things about our society.
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combination → write → society
I’ve expressed concern about the catastrophic risks associated with AI technology, and devoted a fair amount of thought to AI’s potential to cause radical inequality.
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I → express → inequality
And I’ve advocated for all of those risks and harms to be addressed with policy — policy enacted by a democratically elected government.
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all → advocate → government
Yet despite this, Henry thinks of me as a panglossian techno-optimist:
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Henry → think → optimist
Dr. Pangloss is the parodic Enlightenment thinker who keeps on insisting that everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, as disaster and catastrophe unfold around him…
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disaster → keep → him
Noah’s style of economics has a blind spot about panopticons.
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style → have → panopticons
As far as I can tell, there are two reasons that Henry thinks this.
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Henry → tell → this
One is that he thinks I discount the political and social downsides of ubiquitous digital surveillance:
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I → think → surveillance
The panopticon may indeed have efficiency benefits.
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panopticon → have → benefits
People can get away with far less slacking, if it works as advertised.
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it → get → slacking
But it also comes with profound costs to human freedom.
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it → come → freedom
And the technologies that are at the heart of the book’s argument - machine learning and related algorithms - bear a strong and unfortunate resemblance to Bentham’s panopticon.
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that → relate → panopticon
They too, enable automated surveillance at scale, perhaps making hierarchy and intrusive surveillance much, much easier and cheaper than they used to be…
Nobody particularly wants to work in an environment where algorithms are perpetually surveilling them, deciding whether they are hired or fired, with little or no recourse to human decision makers.
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they → enable → makers
It costs less, and is much less of a pain in the ass.
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It → cost → ass
And if drivers have to piss into bottles in their vans because they fear being punished by the algorithms, then so be it.
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it → have → algorithms
This is a cost that they pay, not investors, nor managers, nor customers.
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they → pay → investors
Of course, human beings who care about fairness and dignity and such are likely to have a different sets of responses.
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who → care → responses
Henry is chiefly worried not about the death of privacy in and of itself, but about how ubiquitous digital surveillance could enable greater political and social control.
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surveillance → enable → control
Harsher monitoring of workers is one example of that, but it’s certainly not the only example — already, in China, we can see ubiquitous monitoring being used as a tool of social control, and it’s not good.
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it → ’ → control
To be fair to Henry, he’s got me here.
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he → get → me
I do sometimes worry about the advent of ubiquitous surveillance, but I’ve never really thought systematically about it, or written about it in detail.
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I → worry → detail
This was partly because actually creating privacy in the modern age seems like a hopeless task; to a rounding error, all of American society has welcomed Big Brother into their pockets, turned on “track location”, accepted cookies, uploaded their nudes to Snapchat, poured out their deepest emotions over Gmail and Microsoft Teams and Zoom, installed Chinese webcams in their houses, and in general exposed every bit of their lives to a vast, impersonal machine that at some level is owned by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.
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that → create → Musk
What can I say or do that would alter this brute fact — that humanity has once again chosen to give their lives over to the machine?
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humanity → say → machine
Progressives have been howling about tech company surveillance for over a decade, but they all still have The iPhone in their pockets.
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they → howl → pockets
…and 180 more, not listed.
The Aporia
