Davos, free speech , the FBI, Control, conversation in a decade of fear

[Joseph Tracy]

I think this is a remarkable read. (I am posting it without permission, but I do have a subscription to Matts substack)

   I subscribe to Matt Taibbi and found this most recent conversation between him and Walter Kirin to be a particulalrly relevant, intelligent, bold and thoughtful discussion of those larger events and trends in the world and the questions they pose. 

   Please don’t read it as a justification of my own opinions on any specific issue but rather as what it is, which seems to me a  witty probe into some dystopian trends that are at war with best aspects of the American revolution and constitution. 


Matt Taibbi: Welcome to America This Week. I’m Matt Taibbi.

Walter Kirn: I’m Walter Kirn.

Matt: And once again, I’m on the road. There’s some more Twitter File stuff coming, and so we’re in transit. But I think the setup seems to work, right Walter?

Walter: Oh, yeah. I like it. I like the idea that we’re roving correspondents and one holds down the home seat and the other goes out and pierces the veil in the world. Yeah.

Matt: But usually, you’re the one reporting from the front lines of white nationalism.

Walter: Well, I think I did my best to fight back on behalf of Montana’s honor last week. We’ll see if Hollywood abandoned ship here and troops arrived to calm the situation.

Matt: Yeah, that’s a lot of borders to defend. I don’t envy that task, but all eyes this week are on a place far, far away. I love everything about the Davos story, and I’ve never been there. I’ve always wanted to go. And I question now whether I’ll ever be allowed to go because that’s part of what’s funny about Davos is they hold it in a small skiing resort in Switzerland that only very wealthy people go to. And it’s a safe space for the architects of global government where they show up and they speak openly about things that we only speculate about most of the rest of the year. And what’s amazing about it is that they do two things that are extremely clever.

One is that they hold the conference in a place that’s far away, that’s too expensive for poor journalists to get too easily. And then they just don’t deny you, they don’t give you credentials if you come from the wrong organization and you can’t cover the thing. So you get bits and pieces of what they say out of it and what they say there is just incredible. It’s the kind of stuff that will start revolutions eventually. But at Davos where these people meet, they say the most extraordinary things, and this week was yet another example of it.


Walter: Well, let’s give a couple of those examples. I noticed that our FBI director, for some reason, is in Davos. I didn’t know that he was concerned with international business or anything other than fighting crime here in the US. But he talked broadly about the merger of technological and law enforcement power and corporate and private sector power and governmental law enforcement power, which I found breathtaking. I mean who needs conspiracy theories when they’re out there saying it?

Matt: Should we listen to the clip? Here’s Christopher Wray director of the FBI, who, again, as you note, they do have a counter-intelligence remit, but really there’s no reason for this person to be at Davos. But he’s there anyway. And here he’s speaking at Davos in front of the World Economic Forum sponsored by Wired for some reason.

Christopher Wray: I think the sophistication of the private sector is improving and in particular important, the level of collaboration between the private sector and the government, especially the FBI has, I think made significant strides. Pretty much every technology we could talk about today, we see both great opportunity, but great dangers in the wrong hand.

Walter: His voice disconcerts me. You see pictures of Wray, he’s got a kind of photogenic well coiffed quality, but I’d not heard his voice until recently. And it’s deeper and more self-satisfied and a little more threatening in a way than I would’ve expected. But let’s look at the content. They’re making great strides in what exactly?

Matt: In cooperation with the private sector.

Walter: Isn’t that what you’ve been reporting on at Twitter?

Matt: Yeah, and is, so the timing of that statement is a little curious given that they’ve been outed recently for basically having a sweeping program of content moderation that’s organized and involves regular meetings with companies as diverse as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Wikipedia, iCloud, God knows what else. Right?

Walter: But Matt, weren’t you specifically called on Twitter by the FBI on their official account a conspiracy theorist? Right?

Matt: That’s right.

Walter: For revealing this business.

Matt: That was such a classic non-denial. Denial. Yeah. And then they come out and they talk about their cooperation with the private sector. Now what does he mean by that exactly? Because they were already getting basically everything they wanted from the private sector through high-handed tactics. Right? So for instance back in 2006, 7, 8 the Inspector General of the Justice Department, they did reports about the FBI’s extravagant use of national security letters. So they would send tens of thousands of these national security letters every year to tech companies and companies would be obliged to turn over private user information without a warrant. It could be about anything from medical records to your surfing history on the internet. And the companies had a gag, or it was like a standing gag order. They were not allowed to inform customers that they had received these letters and that they were turning over this information.

And it wasn’t for a long time that there was even a test case about this, because they couldn’t get around the gag order to even make legal challenges to this. So between operation Stellar wind or whatever else the Snowden revelations were called, the NSA programs were using FA which is administered through the FBI to access data through private companies. They were getting this stuff. What I think is different is that now it’s open cooperation with these companies. The companies have stopped putting up any semblance of a fight.

Walter: Right? Well, isn’t that what you’re saying? It’s from coercion to cooperation. I said on Twitter, I think that the tech companies have learned to love the bomb because as I have read your Twitter files reporting, there was some nominal resistance to this relationship with power, and then it seemed to turn into just exhausted submission. And then they also moved into a state of actually trying to give them what they want, even when they couldn’t find what they wanted. Seeing some of those in-house communications showed me that even if they can’t find evidence, their willingness to maybe even create it is greater than one would’ve hoped.

Matt: You would’ve thought there would’ve been a little bit more pushback on behalf of the customer. If you’re in a business that depends on customer trust and you’re fulfilling tens of thousands of requests from the FBI for private user information and you’re probably selling bulk information out the back door to subcontractors like Dataminr, which work with the CIA and other government agencies, I feel like there has to be some kind of capitalist impulse to not screw the customer that much. But maybe I’m wrong about that.

Walter: Is this capitalism anymore? Really? I mean we’ve been told for decades, really by the left, that corporate power is riding on top of political power. But that doesn’t seem to be what we’ve found. What we’ve found is that the bureaucrats and the law enforcement people, and the intelligence people and so on, even the party people have the ability to really command the direction of these private companies. They’re not in fact taking orders from them. They are overriding what one would think is the capitalist interest in serving the customer with a political interest in maintaining narratives and pro-government attitudes and so on.

Matt: Yeah. And, I think there was a key moment in 2017 where you have the Silicon Valley culture that’s led by people like Mark Zuckerberg who are nerds who spend their lives coding and in front of a computer screen. And that culture I think leaned in a libertarian direction for a long time. It grew out of hacker agriculture. I think they don’t have a strong natural pull towards cooperation with the government. And then Trump got elected, and these companies started to be hauled before Congress, and people like Mark Zuckerberg, who had been very valuable in saying things like I don’t want to be editor-in-chief of the universe, like, we’re not in the news business. We’re a tech company and blah, blah, blah. They very quickly changed their tune. And this is one of the things that bothered me about this recent hit piece that the Washington Post did, trying to take a swipe at the Twitter files in this oblique way where they were saying that the January 6th committee held back valuable evidence that would’ve incriminated the tech companies out of fear of confronting powerful tech companies, which is all they’ve done since 2017.

They’ve had hearing, after hearing where they drag these people in front of the Hill and demand that they come up with solutions for ending the sewing of discord. You have Republicans like Tom Cotton even telling Twitter, well, I hope that you’ll reconsider your stance about working with Dataminr and quote, unquote friendly intelligence services like the United States. I think they did change their tune a little bit, right then, in 2017 they just gave up their independence, and it’s been this cooperative relationship ever since. It’s no longer really a private industry. I think you’re right about that. It’s some kind of hybrid something or other. Where the only utility of the fact that they’re even private businesses is that they can run around the First Amendment, I guess.

Walter: Well, and also they can run around our defenses in the sense that we think we are using some communication service, some social media platform on which we’re sharing cat photos and talking to grandma or ordering books, food, doing internet searches and so on. We think we’re conducting daily life when in fact, we are providing data at the very least, the opportunity to be manipulated at the most.

The hallmarks of private business are competition. They don’t seem to compete. These companies seem to all sing to the same tune of customer service. They may be serving their customers outwardly, but inside they’re narcing on their customers.

Matt: That was another shocking thing about these. I mean, not to go back to the files too much, but you have these industry meetings where all these companies are sitting in on briefings headed by the FBI and the DHS where they’re going to tell them what’s what? And here’s how we’re going to send you content moderation requests. You would think one of the companies would say what? We’re going to do a commercial saying we’re not going to do this, and our competitors do. That would be the smart thing to do if you were just trying to make money and win market share.

Walter: Apple did that. Apple has an ongoing branding theme that goes up and down in visibility, that they are the privacy company, that your privacy is everything to the Apple Company, Apple Corporation. I don’t trust it and see no reason to believe it, but as recently as yesterday, I was doing something on Apple adjusting some setting, and I got some propaganda about how much they cared about my privacy. But here’s the question. Why is Christopher Wray going to Switzerland to report that the FBI’s cooperation with private industry is making great strides? Who in Davos, or what about the international gathering there needs to hear that or wants to hear it? It’s like he’s going to report to the boss. Are they the boss? Why is he so confident that this represents good news to them?

Matt: It did sound a little bit like a progress report. The United States had been a little bit of a holdout on this front. On the speech front, on their resistance to cooperation with government front. There was a, I’ll have to look up what it’s called again, but all of the companies signed an agreement with the EU in early 2016 in the wake of bombings in Brussels and Paris ISIS bombings that basically gave the government of the European Union more of a say in content moderation. And the United States lagged behind. They didn’t have a formal agreement like that. We also don’t have hate speech laws, which we’re going to get to in a minute, because that’s another thing. So maybe the United States was the outlier, or maybe we were the country that hadn’t yet secured a formal agreement with all of its tech subsidiaries.

Walter: Well, we are a country with a bill of rights, after all, those pesky first 10 amendments to the Constitution. And so, I guess that might slow our progress toward total Borg diversification. But Chris Wray is happy to report that seems to be dealt with. And as you say, there was another person at the conference, the European Commission Vice President, I believe she was or is. And she had something to report about our future in the United States too, even though she doesn’t speak English all that well. But she was glad to report that quote unquote illegal hate crime or hate speech laws, I guess she meant, are coming to the US soon.

Matt: Yeah. Let’s listen to this clip because this one actually was scary to me. I had a physiological fright reaction to this. This is European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova at the World Economic Forum in Davos. And she’s speaking to, of course, the illustrious moderator Brian Stelter.

Vera Jourova: We need the people who understand the language and the case law in the country because what qualifies as hate speech, as illegal hate speech, which you will have soon also in US, I think that we have a strong reason why we have this in the criminal law. We need the platforms to simply work with special language and to identify such cases the AI would be too dangerous.

Matt: We have to find out who that other person was at that conference, because there’s a moment where she puts her hand on the knee of someone sitting to her left when she mentions hate speech laws, and she says, which you will have soon in America.

Walter: Right. And she mentioned, I believe just before that something called peace law, which you have to understand peace law in the country. Is that right?

Matt: Peace law? I thought, I thought maybe she went case law. It could be peace law.

Walter: I thought she said peace as opposed to hate so to speak. hmm. First, could she sound more like a Dresden brothel dominatrix than this? And when she laughs to assure the person next to her, which suggests that the person next to her is an American, it will soon be coming to your country, you get a sense that our democratic processes don’t really exist at all. That some VP of the European Union can promise the delivery of new laws to the United States. Ha ha.

Matt: Yeah, the laugh was really disturbing. It was like when you’re tripping when you see somebody laugh.

Walter: I feel like I’m tripping watching Davos. I have a general observation about Davos. They never disagree about anything. You’d think that while discussing the most allegedly important topics in the universe, the future of the planet -- which is their self-image, they think of themselves as somehow guaranteeing and guiding the future of the planet -- You’d think that they’d argue once in a while, you’d think they’d have a debate or two, but apparently all matters are settled. Maybe behind closed doors or up on the slopes at the top of the chairlift. And the face that they present is one of complete agreement. They each bring their little dish to the buffet. I’m going to get illegal hate speech laws in the United States. I’m going to bring greater cooperation between law enforcement and the private sector. I’m going to do X. And then they all like their opening presence go, oh, this is wonderful, beautiful. It’s just what I wanted. Medieval ecclesiastical conferences on the nature of the Trinity and so on had far more argument than you see at this thing. It’s like a trade fair for cars or something, it’s a trade fair for political power. They just stroke each other’s new models. It’s really disconcerting.

Matt: But this is, this is the pattern of everything. And modern western life. The only argument we ever are allowed to see is the stage-managed, left-right thing that they have on television. Again, going back to this, the thing about the Twitter files that I think strikes people is that this is the unvarnished discussion that people have before it’s processed through public relations professionals and before it’s smoothed over and made presentable to the public. This is how powerful people talk to each other in private. We never get to see it. You’ve mentioned before how much we Americans would admire the British parliamentary system, which could be so argumentative and wild in its back and forth.

But we don’t really have that in the states anymore, anywhere. We present this united front of opinion in the press. This has been a huge factor in how the media’s evolved in the last six or seven years. They have this new ethos of if you agree with one person about one thing, you are agreeing with them about everything. So you must not agree. You must not step off the reservation to agree with somebody who’s not on the right team, and which just gradually creates big herds of people who all agree about everything. And that’s not natural, is it?

Walter: Well, it makes you think that left-right political disagreement is a coliseum show for the people, but has very little to do with what goes on up at the top. And the other thing that it causes one to wonder is how they came to this agreement about how to run society. You’ll notice that this woman we just heard speak, talks about language as though it’s the great programming tool for society. They seem to agree on a cybernetic model for society. That if our programming is done correctly, and if illicit inputs are kept out of the process, the people will all helplessly move as a group in the direction they wish us to. They’re always talking about misinformation, disinformation, hate speech this and that. And it suggests that they see language as the preeminent tool for programming society in a manner which they find amenable. And it is odd to be part of this group, this great mass whose words and ideas are being adjudicated at the very top. They never ask writers, people who know the most about the languages spoken in different nations, what they think of this process. The experts aren’t consulted. Journalists aren’t consulted about the uses of language. We’re having the very instruments of thought and discovery, intellectual discovery crafted, sometimes confiscated from us.

Matt: By people who don’t know or don’t know the value of language

Walter: By people who speak bureaucratese, by people who don’t only not know language, but use it rather poorly and in fact, in a fashion,

Matt: Do violence to it.

Walter: Do absolute violence to it. We have things like a few weeks ago, Stanford University listing a long group of banned words or words they hope will be banned, at least in discourse at universities and so on.

Matt: It’s straight out of Orwell.

Walter: It’s obvious that Orwell created a document that they, in their inverted way, saw as a blueprint and as an owner’s manual for future society, because they couldn’t duplicate the findings of 1984 more perfectly than they do. But once again, I think they see themselves ultimately not as political actors, but as reality programmers. And they’re going to Davos to report on their successes so far on their plans for the future, and to give progress reports on the various enterprises they’re engaged in. And when they’re together, whether they’re an FBI director or a billionaire -- an FBI director doesn’t make that much money compared to a guy who flies in on his own private jet rather than ours, which Wray uses -- but they have a comedy, a fraternity, sorority that’s really striking. They seem to think they come from the same club, and I guess they do.

Matt: But they do, right? Christopher Wray has more of a guest pass, I guess, but politicians get to be in that club, and if they’re very good at it, they get to become permanent members like the Clintons, right? Or the Obamas. You eventually get to cash in on a grand scale if you stay in the game long enough. And then you become one of those aristocrats.

Walter: Basically. I noticed Joe Manchin is there, who I thought of as this bloody-minded representative of West Virginia populist sentiment, but wow, has he leapfrogged that role into that of senator of the world. Maybe his specifically political career is ending, and he’s going to become some kind of consultant in the great territory.

Matt: Yeah. He’ll go to work for BP or whatever it is, and become the VP of Global Communications or something, right? Or even sit on the board, or God knows what else. The playbook for this was mapped out years ago. Remember Billy Tauzin?

Walter: No, not a name I’m familiar with.

Matt: So he was a Democratic congressman from Louisiana mm-hmm. And he was one of the decisive votes in George W. Bush’s Prescription Drug Benefit Bill, which was a huge handout to the pharmaceutical industry. And he basically put together the bill, left Congress, and two weeks later became the head of the pharmaceutical lobbying arm for $2 million a year. And that’s the model. You do a little service in government, you leave and you get your NBA contract after that. It’s promised one way or the other. If you work in the SEC as the head of enforcement, then you go to Wilmer Hale or some law firm like that, Brown Rudnick, Sullivan Cromwell. What’s the one where both Holder and Lenny Brewer worked? It’s driving me crazy. I’ll remember it.

Walter: We’re going to need law firm trading cards if we’re to understand our future.

Matt: Perkins co, all these companies, right? You go and you get your $4 million a year partnership after you’ve done your tour as associate Attorney general or Attorney General. I mean, Eric Holder, they even kept his chair for him while he was Attorney General. The entire time he served.

Walter: Like MacArthur. They knew he’d be back. One person I saw at Davos was the head of Pfizer, Bourla. He was complaining about vaccine adoption and saying that the big problem with the vaccine endeavor worldwide is that it had become politicized. So why the hell, if he doesn’t want things politicized, why does he go to the premier political gathering on Earth? If he wants to be perceived as just a sincere avatar of health and wellness for the world, why would he go be among these people? It seems to be prima facia evidence that there’s something political about the vaccine. Now I might hesitate to say that, but he doesn’t hesitate to show it. And they’re all there. And I think that the maybe discouraging, or even awe-inspiring in a terrible way, nature of this spectacle for the average person is to see that they all get along. It’s us who don’t get along. It’s we who are fighting, and it’s we who are on the verge of Civil War III or whatever, Civil War II, but they just sit down and draw up a chair and slap each other’s knees. And they come from, whether it’s pharma, law enforcement, finance, green energy, the European Parliament, the British government, the American government, the whatever. My gosh, they get along. How much time have they been spending together? Do they ask after each other’s kids? I’m sure.

Matt: That’s a good point. When do they do that schmoozing? How do they do that schmoozing?

Walter: Yeah. They’re all old friends and there’s a sense of being excluded. I mean, people talk about populous resentment as the populous resentment as though it’s a disease. But is it not the logical consequence of having the velvet rope thrown down and having to stare in awe at these jet setters annually as they talk blithely about our fate? Another thing that a lot of the doom and gloomers on the internet picked up on from Davos was someone’s prediction -- and I did see it, so I can faithfully attest that it happened -- of a major large-scale cyber outage across the world that is coming in the next couple of years. It was faithfully predicted. You’re sitting at home, about to go to work and provide for your family or yourself. And you’re doing it against the headwind of the knowledge that a large-scale cyber outage is coming for the globe. Why not just quit now? The whole thing achieves, if this is its purpose, a sense of powerlessness in its audience, and it’s hard to believe that they’re not aware of that.

Matt: Also, how can they not be aware of the optics of it? Maybe they just think that not many people are paying attention to it, which I guess is true. But as an American, I listen to Vera Jourova talking about how, oh, you’re going to have hate speech laws in the US too soon. And my first reaction, I’m a relatively civilized person, I’ve never committed a crime, and I want to reach for an illegal slugger and go smash everything on that stage. And they’re surprised that there’s a populist reaction to this kind of dialogue.

Walter: Of course, Matt, those reactions are very convenient for them because what you sir hate, speech laws, unless they get some hate speech that allows them to enforce them and gain power from them, what good is a private-public partnership over the communication that happens on technology, unless a lot of it can be redlined and maybe even prosecuted someday. They really do thrive on the misbehavior of the peons. What they’re talking about is new tools for identifying and disciplining that misbehavior. So it’s not like disorder doesn’t feed them to some extent. So what should they care about? The optics? They’re not in the business of making a more peaceful, just, world except on paper. What they seem really interested in is figuring out how to leverage dissent and conflict in society.

Matt: Walter, if somebody came to you and said, why shouldn’t we have hate speech laws? What would your response to that be?

Walter: Well, I would say that they’ve got two words there, hate and speech, which are about as general and vague as can be. It’s like saying that they’re going to legislate against bad actions. Well what are bad? What’s bad, and what are actions? So, I wonder about the definition of the terms and their broadness. Secondly, I don’t know that speech itself as I define it, is the thing that we should be policing in the world. Speech does a lot of things for a novelist, it’s a way of describing reality. So, if I have characters conducting a conversation in a novel in which one is being hateful, or one is even a terrible villain say, and I make that villain charismatic, will I have a problem? A lot of speech is just the venting of internal mental pressure.

Should that be a problem for the person who vents? Should there not be some accommodation for when somebody feels in a bad mood or angry, they might talk differently? Then the whole thing simplifies human behavior to a point that is almost idiotic, and then it purports to want to change or abolish this behavior through some legal means as yet unspecified when they talk about hate speech laws as well. Are they going to be like speeding tickets, or are they going to be things that land you in solitary confinement? That too is left unaddressed. And finally, there’s the, as I said, the pesky problem of the First Amendment. I’m right now working on a screenplay about the founding Fathers, as it were, about the Revolutionary War, about 1776, and the press back then.

The press back then, and the newspapers, they were scurrilous. They were full of all kinds of often unsubstantiated charges against politicians and enemies of various kinds. They certainly had a lot of hate speech toward the King of England. In a society that may be dissatisfied with its situation, how do you express discontent without a certain amount of quote hate? So the reason I’m against it is that it all seems like a not very well-concealed attempt to govern the thoughts and behavior and expression and political beings of people. And hate will be defined by each microgeneration as it sees it. It’s a very different matter today than it was 10 years ago.

It will also probably be prosecuted retroactively because now that we have a permanent record, as it were of our utterances on computers and in the archives of social media and so on, and we’re seeing this now, we can be retroactively punished for things that offended codes of the moment that weren’t codes at the time the utterance took place. So the paralyzing self-consciousness for the human being of wondering, not only if something I say today will give offense to someone today, but will it ever possibly potentially give offense in the future, pretty much eliminates any spontaneity, any real candor in self-expression.

Matt: Yeah. Absolutely. And you’ve talked a lot about stochastic terrorism and the insidious and creepy line of thought that goes into this theory. Which is this idea that a person can be responsible for actions for inciting actions that are statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable, right? This is the way they define that. The significance of things like the banning of Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter and other platforms, was that they had to expand the definition of what a violation was to make it all about the context, what they call the context surrounding at Twitter. So it’s not just what you say in the moment. It’s not just the individual tweet or Facebook post that might be offensive. It’s the entire context of who you are. Are you an influential political leader? Do you have lots of people listening to your words? Might they do something that is violent or crazy in response to your words? Might they do it after listening to you over the course of years? And so, even small things that you said five years ago might, when added to 5,000 other things you said subsequently might add up to a case,

Walter: Or this is the theory of collective guilt cubed. Because in collective guilt, we’re punished for the behavior of our neighbors. You come into a town where someone has done something bad and you shoot all of them, and you put all of them in jail. But, this is collective guilt over time and across society to a collective that you don’t even feel you belong to, merely by speaking and having your words broadcast, you are responsible for the behavior of people you’ve never met on into the future. I mean, this basically takes the concept of guilt and dissolves it completely in any normal sense of jurisprudence. Notice to whom it doesn’t apply. Hollywood could make a show called Dahmer and do the most graphic recreations of horrible crimes. And yet it seems to not fall under the purview of stochastic criminality.

I went to a movie the other night, and there were four previews, and in every one of those previews, there was a body count, every single one, right? But apparently the notion of stochastic culpability doesn’t apply to them. It doesn’t apply to video game makers. It doesn’t apply to fine artists who maybe reproduce terrible scenes or extreme states. It only seems to apply to those they want to prosecute anyway. And when you have a theory as vague as stochastic terrorism, well, in some sense, all of us in some moment of injudicious speech have said something angry, violent, or threatening. Even I jest, but we can’t all be prosecuted, right?

So there’s going to have to be a threshold for stochastic guilt. And then the whole thing enters their realm of absurdity. Tucker Carlson is a broadcaster who is always accused of fomenting stochastic violence. Well, can they give us numbers? When Tucker does five minutes on a certain topic, can we then say down the line, there’s going to be a distribution of these kinds of events over this amount of time, et cetera? No, they can’t experimentally. This is probably impossible to prove, nor would you want to run the experiments. We’ll see if we get a US president to talk about spying on your neighbor, and then we’ll see how many people do it. It’s the basis for the most selective sorts of prosecution you can imagine.

Matt: To me, it’s also totally un-American. It’s frustrating that there isn’t more of a backlash to this casual acceptance of ideas that we’ve specifically rebelled against at the beginning of our history. We have always fought for the right to speak our minds. We’ve always thought of that as a virtue. We’ve always thought of social mobility as being something that was important. That people shouldn’t be excluded from trying to change the world, change the government. We have an elastic clause in the Constitution specifically for that. This idea of government by the people. We’re supposed to agitate for changing things, sometimes in a dramatic way, if we feel like it.

Walter: But with one swipe of a keyboard, all language groups could be included in these hate speech laws. They could do to the society at large, what they did to Twitter, for example. And you would have whole criminal classes emerge overnight. And one of the reasons there’s not a backlash, I think, is that not enough people feel threatened by it. We have a society in which so many people are convinced that they’re in the right, that they’re somehow on the safe side of every question. And it tends to be the ornery, maybe even less attractive people right now, perhaps on the right, who feel most threatened by these laws and these notions and these theories. But, I have a conspiracy theory of a conspiracy theory that’s actually a literary theory, that all the tools that have been put in place with the ascent of the left to suppress the right could easily be toggled into a total suppression of the left.

And sometimes I wonder if that’s not the plan. If there’s going to be a secret plan, maybe it’s to get all the people who think of themselves as dissenters and class crusaders and so on, to sign on to a regime to assist them, which will absolutely eliminate the moment it’s turned on. And what continually surprises me is to see the cohort of people who’ve always been the questioners, always been the hippies and the kooks and who’ve been quite proud of that conform to this new model. Because should the winds change or should a certain charismatic figure arise, it will be used in an instant to decimate their variability to resist that thing that they have been so traditionally proud of.

Matt: It’s so true. And there are no Abbey Hoffmans now. That figure is absent from American culture. They’re on the right, if they exist.

Walter: There’s no Abbey Hoffmans, and there’re no lawyers for Abbey Hoffman.

Matt: Well, that’s true too.

Walter: There’s no William Kunstler’s. Back in the sixties and seventies and even into the eighties, we had these civil rights lawyers who were practically celebrities in their circle, but even to the larger society. People who stood up. They had long hair, maybe they wore unkempt clothing, and they were firebrands in court for the right of some of the most somewhat clownish people sometimes to speak their minds. And, they were heroes. But I can’t even find a minimal version of that on the scene now.

Matt: There’s one person I can think of who fits that description. It’s Shahid Buttar, who is the, he ran against Nancy Pelosi in San Francisco. He’s a civil rights lawyer. He’s got long hair and a ponytail. He clearly watched all those movies

Walter: Ron Kuby. Remember Big Lebowski? I want Ron Kuby said Jeff Bridges.

Matt: James Woods starred in one of them, and they put hair extensions on James Woods. That was pretty funny.

But Shahid, he’s an old school speech advocate, a hardcore civil rights lawyer, but he’s the only person I can think of who is a public figure of that sort, who’s on the left. And of course, they tried to cancel him over some personal thing.

Walter: Well, you have a character like Lin Wood who attempted to be something of like the William Kunstler of the right.

Matt: Bob Driscoll is another who in the old days, would’ve represented Maria Butina.

Walter: Right? Exactly. Right.

Matt: It would’ve been one of those lawyers.

Walter: To speak about speech generally, to make a defense of it. I think transcends the small partisan defenses. The reason for me that I want speech to be as unrestrained as possible, consistent with good order, I guess, is that every idea, every sentence, every utterance of a human being represents a thought. And the diversity of speech is directly proportionate to the diversity of thought. And that means all the problems in the world are getting looked at from as many angles as possible. And when there’s a multiplication of ideas and solutions and theories, you would seem to have a better chance of solving your problems. Anybody who’s ever worked in a very confined or restrictive organization where only a few ideas are ever ventured in meetings, knows that the whole organization can fall down for want of anybody having the guts to stand up and say, we can fix it this way, because they might fear giving offense. So this lack of giving offense that seems to be the direction these people want to move us toward, is also going to be a lack of creativity about solving problems. We may get a state of perfect inoffensive, peaceful, non-hateful speech, but we will be living in huts because we can’t get there to the necessary solutions, the necessary resolutions, the necessary creative ideas

Matt: Engine. Right.

Walter: It’s like taking your engine and saying, my engine’s too powerful. It’s 300 horsepower, I could go off a cliff in this thing. I might speed into the rear end of another car. It should be 80 horsepower, and that way I’ll be safe. Well, you will be, but you also won’t get anywhere. You’ll also move quietly and irresistibly inertia. I doubt very much that the people at Davos and so on will have their speech scrutinized when they go to dinner, or they ride up the chair lift together. They seem to be able to discuss the most outlandish possibilities in peace.

Matt: Right.

Walter: I fear that worse than hate speech is sedentary cold, rigid lack of progress and dynamism in society, because history hasn’t stopped. It’s presenting us with new predicaments and new situations all the time. And yet we seem to be voluntarily limiting our ability to think about them, react to them, and discuss them.

Matt: You know, it’s funny, I lived through the end of what it looked like when you turn off creativity. I went to school in the Soviet Union in its waning days, and that was an experiment in basically what they’re thinking of doing, right? They took this society, Tsarist Russia, that was cruel and unfair and full of all kinds of abuses, but was filled with mad geniuses and unbelievable artists, brilliant novelists, poets, composers. And then they went through the process of banning all sorts of words. And there was a verbal style that developed, and over the course of the Soviet period, in Russia, they call it Sovok.

It’s a play on words between like Soviet person and the word for dustbin, which is like the dustbin of history. And a Sovok is like a good Soviet person. And that person learned over the course of decades of Soviet rule that the only defense against being thrown in the camps was to talk nonstop nonsense in stale proverbs and give constant pledges of support for whatever the current thing was in Soviet society. And they phased out all this amazing creativity in this population and left people unable to do simple things like farming or transportation. They squeezed all the vitality out of the country. And I’ve always been struck by that. They created this kind of person who couldn’t shut up but never had anything to say.

Walter: That may be the definition of the people that we see on TikTok now. I mean the constant display without any real significance. We can change our hair, we can change our looks, we can change our clothing. We can do this metaverse-oriented image variation, but without any real substance to it.

The thing is that any speech of any vigor or any charisma is always attractive and is always powerful. And, as power becomes distributed more and more to the top, one of the great ways to make sure it goes on in that fashion is to prevent people from when doing one of the few things that we can all do well at times, which is say the right thing or say the vivid thing. It’s a much more predictable society. It’s also a much deader one.

Matt: But that’s why it freaks me out so much that they’re moving in this direction of having everybody speak in the same kinds of words. Eliminating the variability of language. Obviously, again, this is straight out of 1984. We want to reduce the vocabulary because if people stop reading, if they’re no longer.. the other night I read, because I hadn’t read it in a long time, I read Ulalume, the Edgar Allen Poe poem. And I just thought, my God, people do not speak like this anymore. They don’t have the vocabulary for this, and it’s so beautiful. Why would we not want to read things like this? We’ve raised a culture that is incapable because the new technology makes it very difficult to read.

It makes it even harder to read poetry, because that requires visualization and sensitivity that is driven out of you if you’re a heavy consumer of the internet. And so already people are at a disadvantage because they don’t have the tools that they used to have just from writing letters and reading books and doing all those things. And then you want to impose on top of that superficial controls on what people can say, and you want to impose an ethos of conformity and conformism on those folks. You’re going to prevent people from even privately having the ability to have an inner world that’s important, that’s interesting. And that’s very worrisome.

Walter: At the risk of just sounding grumpy and pessimistic in general I’ve noted that in private conversations with maybe people who I’ve just met, or people I’ve met a couple of times, people who don’t have absolute trust among them, that is conversation these days, tends to be recapitulation of attitudes and even sound bites gathered from the media, because one service the media now provides is it gives us a sense of what is permissible to say. And so if you quote it and if you quote, especially mainstream media, you can be assured that you’re saying nothing that hasn’t already been textured and combed through. And I was reading the other day about Samuel Johnson, Dr. Johnson, the British essayist of the 18th, or

Matt: Photographer

Walter: Yeah. And Lexicographer. And I saw that he was deemed the greatest conversational speaker of all time, that it was pretty much known during his lifetime and assented to afterwards, that he was the most brilliant talker in the history of the English language. We don’t know if Shakespeare was at all entertaining at the table. We imagine he was, but we know that Johnson was so much so that he inspired a biographer to follow him around and write down everything he said. Boswell and the achievement of conversation as a literary form, which is I think a rather salutary ambition, is not going to be possible. Great conversationalists are not being generated by this current system, nor will they be allowed, I imagine, because there’s something about conversation, great conversation that’s surprising. It rides the edge of giving offense. It comes back. Funny wit in general always has something of the subversive about it, or usually does.

Matt: By nature, isn’t it? Humor by nature has to be subversive a little bit, because what you’re doing when you’re laughing is you’re releasing tension about something that you held in.

Walter: Well to get really heady in literary studies, Matt you outpaced me by thousand miles on the reporting front, but I have to prove my own value here. I’ve done a lot of reading in libraries, and armchairs, and it’s my theory that language itself is an expression of tension. When everything’s fine, when you’re full when you’ve just made love, when you’re not worried about money, there’s really no reason to speak. Even ancient man as he walked along through the Savannah having just made a kill and it’s good weather and it looks like we’re going to make another kill tomorrow, probably didn’t have much reason to speak. But when things get stressful, we start to talk and talk is, in a way, an expression of, and a relief of stress.

And life is growing more stressful every day. I think we can all agree on that. Planes don’t take off, money disappears from your Zelle account like it did yesterday at Bank of America, pandemics descend. And if there were ever a time where we needed to talk a lot, and in an unrestrained, edgy way, it would be under the current regime of nonstop crisis and stress. But instead, the speech and the thoughts that are engendered by all this stress are going to be tamped down. That’s the worst of both worlds.

Matt: Yeah, that’s true. And, I don’t see that it’s going to change anytime soon. I remember reading the picture of Dorian Gray and thinking that that convention of people who would sit around a table and speak in these beautiful epigrams and try to outdo one another that’s certainly not part of our culture anymore. I mean, Americans have their own history of the tall tale, and they can be funny in their own way. And we have standup comedy, but conversation as an art, has that ever been a thing for us?

Walter: Well Mark Twain, and I’m what they call a Twainiac, thrived between the Civil War and about 1900 in a time of depressions, currency panics, reconstruction from the war, and he was there during the war itself, to some extent. The late 19th century was one of the most stressful times in American history. Everything was changing, everything was up for grabs. And he was incredibly famous at the time. It’s not like we go back and see Mark Twain as a bigger figure than he was. In fact, we probably don’t appreciate how big a figure he was because this is before TV and before Twain’s lectures, books, stories, et cetera. His personality was a one-man stress reliever for society, and his remarks... Twain would be invited to speak at every honorary dinner, and he loved doing it to give the opening remarks at all kinds of conventions and birthday parties and this and that. America hungered for that vivid, irreverent expression, and never was it so needed, I think in our history. And we had not just him, but some other lesser-known figures.

Matt: Ambrose Bierce is another one

Walter: Yeah. We’re going to need some great language to get through all this. So why deny us, in our hour of need, with no eggs on the shelves? We’ve got to crack jokes about something.

Matt: Do you see that they’re now starting to wrap egg cartons with those security anti-shoplifting devices?

Walter: Dude, I was just in New York City, and every time I go to New York City, having to buy toothpaste becomes more arduous. Now toothpaste is behind locked things and toothbrushes, my Lord, try to get a sales associate on aisle four to unlock the toothbrush dispenser for you at rush hour.

Matt: Right. For the enormous salary she’s being paid to do that. I’m sure she’s going to hurry, right?

Walter: Well, yeah. I mean, nobody’s hurrying to do anything right now. But to get to the point, frustration, which I think if there’s a frustration index in society, it’s got to be a pretty high level right now, breeds the need to express oneself. And it’s exactly the wrong time to start getting the lid on speech. We’ve never needed it more.

Matt: And there’s also, there’s also the idea that when you make certain kinds of ideas too transgressive and forbidden, and authors or artists are not, are not encouraged to delve into that material, then it just is driven further underground, and you never know where is it going to surface it’s going. It’s only going to surface in something like violence, right? You have books that are great books, but they are built around ideas that are criminal or, at least subversive. Everything from the autobiography of Malcolm X to Lolita to even Catch 22. You have to let people air out their fantasies and thoughts and anger toward the system.

I was talking about Russia before, Master and Margarita was written in 1937 while Bulgakov hid in a room while murderers were happening, raging all around him. And he sat in his room and he composed this incredible fantasy about the devil coming to Moscow. And what would that person have done if it didn’t even occur to him or her to sit down and fight through and struggle to write that? I just think we have a whole lot of people who don’t have an outlet for forbidden thoughts now.

Walter: And what’s so crazy about the quote-unquote left is that a lot of the books which allowed it in some sense succeed socially, books about, hmm, let’s say alternate sexual behavior let’s say a crazy book like Last Exit to Brooklyn, or books about various underground movements, allowed it to become as powerful as it has in some ways. And yet it wants to make illicit the publication of the new version of those books. In other words, it’s cutting itself off at the root even according to its own self-interest, because today’s accepted ideas were once outlandish and they went through a process of digestion and acceptance and proliferation, and they spawned perhaps even a consensus. And now the consensus rules that people doing the kind of thing that allowed us to exist in the first place should be stopped before they even make the attempt.

Matt: Yep. Yep. And especially if those rules are, are created by Vera Jourova and other EU bureaucrats I’m not going to be very happy about this at the end.

Walter: Well, we have to go to Davos, next year in Davos, dude. I mean, they’ll have the facial, they’ll have the biometric warning scans that will probably catch us at the border and we’ll never get in. But we could wear clown masks or something.

Matt: It’ll be like the scene in Brazil. The instant the retinal scan figures out who we are, we’ll be housed in a rubber suit for prisoners, and we’ll try to escape and just run straight into a wall or something like that. You can’t get into Davos unless you’re associated with some organization they think is legitimate. But I bet we could pull that off.

Walter: See, to going to Davos I’ve ever been, is going to Sundance, the Sundance Festival. Which actually happens at the same time as Davos down in Park City. Skiers run the world or people who like to wear ski clothes at least. And when I went to Sundance for the first time, it was with the movie of my novel Thumbsucker, and the movie had yet to get a distributor, but it had a little premiere there and so on. And when I found myself at Sundance, the home of independent film and Kookiness, supposedly, I found out that all these Hollywood clothing stores had closed pop-up stores at Sundance, and that there was this colored pass system that allowed you to go into various levels of closed social gatherings.

As the author of the book that was premiering at Sundance, I had the worst pass they gave. The one that allowed you to take the bus, to walk down the street. And every once in a while I got into the closed gatherings by some machination, and I saw Hollywood stars picking up whole computers as swag. I mean, I’m talking like they were putting laptop computers in their damn bags and rich Hollywood stars who apparently have as much of an appetite for free stuff

Matt: That is a thing I’ve never understood because that’s a big ritual at Hollywood openings and shows and stuff like that. I just never understood that. Anyway, go on.

Walter: There was a Baldwin there with his girlfriend and I won’t say which Baldwin, giving us a choice of a hundred, and to see this guy go down like a fricking Hoover vacuum cleaner along this set of tables stuffing laptops

It wasn’t just like they were getting little bags of caramel corn or something. but I wonder what the swag scene at Davos is. That’s where I’m going. Maybe it’s not even corporeal physical swag at Davos. Like you get a county in Ireland or something.

Matt: You get a title to 27% of the surface of Venus or something like that.

Walter: Exactly, exactly. Some asteroid mining rights in 2073. But Davos swag and listen, I know enough about human nature to know that actually there is physical swag probably, I mean, I’m sure British Petroleum has something to bring home to the kids for the big hedge fund manager or whoever.

So if we go, I’m going to be the swag reporter, I’m going to get into all the weird halls and convention areas and just see what they’re giving away. It’s probably VR headsets or neuro lace. They probably are already doing things that we can’t imagine. Maybe they get little flying saucers for the backyard that they can launch.

Matt: But all right, well, let’s make a deal today that we’re going to do that.

Walter: We’re going to get there. Do you know how much it costs as an individual to go to Davos?

From what I saw, it’s $250,000. There’s always these things that I think I would buy if I got rich. And one is one of those round-the-world unrestricted airline tickets where for two months you can take as many flights as you want and take any path around the world that you want. They don’t cost that, I don’t think $250,000. And no wonder they like each other because they’ve all passed through the great filter of people who are willing to pay $250,000 to say pre-digested stuff and hang out with Christopher Wray. In other words, they’ve made such an investment, they’re not going to get there and be unhappier, have arguments when you overpay for a plane ticket for a show, you damn well enjoy the show.

Matt: Well, we got to go. I guess we should pledge to behave because otherwise, they won’t let us in, but there’s going to be a strong urge not to behave. I remember somebody wants to describe Hunter Thompson’s writing as being, you have a sympathy for him the way you would for a streaker at Queen Victoria’s funeral.

And I think there should be a streaker on that list, but I guess it wouldn’t be us.

Walter: Sure. Yeah. I mean, there’s no real reporting you can do, I don’t think. It’s not like any of these people probably talk off the record. I don’t see any stories coming out of Davos where an anonymous source at Davos tells me they’re secretly fermenting a revolution in X country. There seems to be a real barrier to talking off the record at Davos because as I say, it’s not generating a lot of gossip.

Matt: I think the only reporting you could do is you’d have to kidnap four of them and bring them into an old Soviet Yak 21 airplane that loads out the back and fly them to an undisclosed location, I don’t know, Malta somewhere, and then over the course of months get the real story out of them.

Walter: Well, his year they have 5,000 troops or police of some kind. It’s been reported. I’ve seen various shaggy reporters from Canadian Rebel News, et cetera chasing people down the street trying to get them to answer questions. There’s been some footage of the evasiveness, of the Davos people. But as yet, no stories have been broken. Mine will be on the sick orgiastic hunger for swag, that is shown by even the richest hedge fund managers.

Matt: The swag factor would be fun. If we could catch the moment where Jamie Diamond grabs the swag at Davos, that would be a real feather in one’s cap. That would be great. Let’s do it.

Walter: Okay. Next year in Davos.

Matt: All right. Thanks everybody for hanging in. Next week should be interesting on multiple fronts. So Walter, look forward to seeing you next week.

Walter: Come hell or high water when you, Matt Taibbi, master of the discovered secret, tell me that next week’s going to be interesting. I’m going to be there.

Matt: All right. Excellent. Thanks Walter. Talk to you soon.

Walter: Good luck out there. Bye.

Matt: Thanks.