Abundance for Whom? - Episode 656 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast

Sascha Meinrath (00:07):
And we are awash in corporate sponsored craptacular methodologies that do yield data. They do yield evidence. It's just blatantly and very obviously false. And you can see this because of course we lived through trickle down economics.

Christopher Mitchell (00:30):
[00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of the Community Broadband Bits podcast. I'm Christopher Mitchell. I'm at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and I'm interviewing today a favorite of mine, and I'm going to start by introducing him and then I'm going to have a little bit of an explanation here. We got Sascha Meinrath back who is the Palmer Chair of Telecommunications at Penn State University, as well as the Founder and Chief Bottle Washer at X-Lab. Is that right, Sascha? Did I miss anything important?

Sascha Meinrath (01:00):
[00:01:00] No, I definitely wash dishes as well, but yes. Yeah, I'm the Director at X-Lab and I wear a number of hats in and around the public interest space around telecom as well.

Christopher Mitchell (01:11):
Yes, and we are, this is the first of what I think might be a few summer recordings. Sascha is in a public location and has a little bit of background noise, and this show is the beginning of kind of in a regular schedule. We didn't have a show last week, I'll [00:01:30] say. I've been pushing myself pretty hard between all my different endeavors and I just don't have it in me to necessarily do a show every week, let alone do one where we have perfect sound and everything else. Not that we do, but we try our best and our editors work really hard. So this summer I think we're going to be spending a little bit more time on different kinds of conversations at times, and Sascha and I were talking yesterday about the book Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, and we wanted to talk about it a little bit on this show.

(02:00):
[00:02:00] This is going to be grounded somewhat in Internet access policy, but we're going to wander around a little bit and talk about wider things. And if that's not your jam, I don't know, maybe check on another show or wait till September when hopefully I have my head screwed back on tighter. But this is going to be a little bit loose, and that's what I really enjoy with Sascha is wide ranging conversations. And so if you're not familiar with the book Abundance, I'll say that you could listen to any one podcast about it and you get pretty much the gist of it. It's really not a lot more in the pages [00:02:30] of it. I'm finding it useful to read, but not because I'm taking its conclusions too seriously. So Sascha and I are going to come about, I think we have slightly different viewpoints on some parts of it. So the best conversations with Sascha are where I push his buttons some and he tweaks me. So let's launch into it. Sascha. Sounds good. Let me just start by asking you why is it important to talk? We're not talking about other books. We never talked about Freakonomics. Why are we going to talk about

Sascha Meinrath (02:59):
Abundance? [00:03:00] Oh, man, I love talking about books. I, for many years helped run the tech policy sci-fi book club in Washington DC and that was like, books are lovely because you get the opportunity to go into depth into a lot of these things. But the reason why we're talking about Abundance is because it has become the new poster child for the neoliberal elite.

Christopher Mitchell (03:20):
This is the savior of the Democratic Party. The Democratic party has face planted over and over again in this popular telling and Abundance: will [00:03:30] Abundance save The Democratic Party is like a headline that op-ed pages love to throw around.

Sascha Meinrath (03:35):
That's right. It's such an easy notion, right? It's basically this, it plays into the argumentation that anything the government touches gets screwed up and therefore the answer is get the government out of the way, which again, the neoliberal love, the corporatists love. So it plays into that while sidestepping how we got to where we are. And while sidestepping, [00:04:00] what I think is maybe a place where you and I will agree, which is that this critique is insufficient, the recommendations stemming from our problematic, and we can dive into over the next few minutes here as to exactly why that is. But what I will say is I don't think they're 100% wrong either. No, I think there's some gems to be gleaned from this book that are also worth talking about. And I should say after Ezra [00:04:30] Klein went onto the John Stewart's show, I got to spend an hour with him on the phone talking him down from some of the critiques over the broadband, the telecommunications part of it, and we had really a wide ranging and lovely conversation.

(04:42):
I think his op-ed walking back some of the overstatements from that podcast were indicative of the conversation that we were having. I think he wants to learn about these areas and I think we have this opportunity to provide a useful resource [00:05:00] for a more perhaps thoughtful or in-depth critique that again, I think he would and Thompson would possibly agree with some of what we have to say. I kind of felt like this book was fast and loose with a lot of the facts and incomplete and really walking them through to the obvious conclusions if you followed these strands that they lay down and they didn't do it. And so maybe there's a volume two, maybe there's a Maya culpa still to come. I don't know. But [00:05:30] certainly this book has captured a lot of attention,

Christopher Mitchell (05:36):
So there's a little bit of context before you get into two useful critiques. So don't forget that I was totally set off by the John Stewart and Ezra Klein interview and I've had people send it to me and be like, this is so good. And I'm just like, I couldn't even finish it. It was so bad. It was so just inaccurate and missing key information that Ezra Klein is someone that I have really enjoyed. I am a podcast fanatic. [00:06:00] I've listened to every one of his podcasts when he was at Vox, and I've listened to every one of his podcasts except for just a couple when he was at the New York Times, that's like, I don't know, hundreds of hours of content that I've listened to of his. I really enjoyed a recent story that just came out two days ago as we're recording this. So last week as you're listening to it, and perhaps the Washington Monthly wrote a story, the broadband story, Abundance liberals like Ezra Klein Got Wrong by Paul Glastris, and I'm going to say Kainoa Lowman. [00:06:30] And I think it is a wonderful background that I recommend to people if they would like to get a fuller picture of,

Sascha Meinrath (06:37):
Is that because I worked on that story and I'm quoted in it? Is that

Christopher Mitchell (06:41):
What made

Sascha Meinrath (06:41):
It so great?

Christopher Mitchell (06:42):
I did see some fingerprints in what I saw there. I mean definitely it was quite good, but it was deeply researched in ways that I feel like it was an article I wished I had written, but there's a bunch of stuff I wouldn't have known exactly what sausage was traded around when they were making the [00:07:00] bill and stuff like that. So anyway, I wanted to put that out. And the second piece of context that I wanted to have is that this is not new. And so for some people who are listening myself a number of years ago before I had a chance to learn a lot more about some of the history of the progressive era, this time feels very much like a time in a hundred years ago, in fact, a little bit more than a hundred years ago perhaps, when we thought it was that these corporations like AT&T [00:07:30] were so great, we should just entrust vital strategic interest like the entire telephone system to them and they could be trusted to run it.

(07:38):
And we learned that that was not the best policy, but it's not because there was bad people necessarily who were saying, let's just have AT&T run our lives is because they were people who said the science, the big corporations would have these benefits of scale. And they had these reasons that were reasoned out as to why they thought Rockefeller [00:08:00] should own all the oil and AT&T should own all the telegraphs and telephone and whatnot. And so it's important to understand that history. I think because coming back to that where there's this question of should these decisions be accountable and flawed perhaps, or should they be, I would say even more flawed and unaccountable, although some people might think that the companies can make better decisions. So I see all of this in terms of this cyclical thing that we come back to of [00:08:30] wouldn't it be easier if we just let some unaccountable company run our lives?

Sascha Meinrath (08:34):
That's right. And it's important to ground this Abundance theory in that historical context like Battlestar Galactica, this is all happened before and the solutions we put in place that failed are the ones that Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson are positioning as the ones that we should use now. And it's like you guys clearly are not attending to this rich historical [00:09:00] context where we tried that and it burned up, fell down and sack into the swamp, and that was not a good solution. In this particular case, in the telecommunications case, the notion of creating this quid pro quo with at t is actually enshrined in something called the Kingsbury commitment in 1913 where we basically gave the keys for telephony to AT&T and they promised to do the right thing in [00:09:30] K. They did not, and it took us 70, 80 years to come to terms with that. It took us 70 years to break it up,

Christopher Mitchell (09:40):
But which is not to say it was a disaster, and I think that's important. Prices were higher than they should have been. Perhaps the service was more reliable than we might've expected from a different system. It was incredibly reliable. We paid for that, but it was very reliable, but there was no innovation.

Sascha Meinrath (09:57):
The reliability came via government [00:10:00] mandates. That was when, and the universality or quasi universality of telephony came via government mandates.

Christopher Mitchell (10:07):
I think the government mandates worked because there was enough money there. It was basically like you are going to do what we tell you and in return you can overcharge us to your heart's delight.

Sascha Meinrath (10:17):
That's exactly it. And at t figured out ways to overcharge us in new and exciting and expensive ways throughout its run there leading to divestiture 1984 that in essence it got [00:10:30] so green and ran so amuck that we broke it up and then instead of one big monopoly, we created multiple small monopolies and called it done. Right.

Christopher Mitchell (10:40):
There would've been better ways to break it up a hundred percent. That's right. That's

Sascha Meinrath (10:43):
Right. Again, we could talk about these failures. So in essence, what Ezra Klein is saying in this Abundance theory is, look, we've got this complicated interplay between corporate desires and public interests. What he avoids talking about is that [00:11:00] this complexity is in fact a corporate disposition. So the number one thing that corporations want or nothing else is total laissez faire. Leave it to us. We got this government's completely out of my market sector. I can just do whatever I want, but the hedge, the fallback, if I can't get the government to not pay attention to me, I'm going back to the jungle meat packers that are like, whatever, we do whatever we want and you're going to eat it, right? That's what they want first. [00:11:30] If they can't get that, they want a bureaucratic solution that's so complex that a defacto act erects a barrier to entry for competitors, and that is where we are today, which is to say, and that is epitomized by the bead program. What Stewart and RA Klein completely miss is that these complexities were not like public interest, affection, autos putting in place complexity for the public good. No. This was an interplay between what the public interest wanted [00:12:00] and what corporations wanted. And corporations wanted complexity. They wanted barriers. They wanted to ensure that they would not face a competitive market sector, and Democrats and Republicans fell over themselves to create that

Christopher Mitchell (12:15):
Complexity. No. Okay, I'm going to push back there. I do feel like I think Democrats in the majority, I think would've preferred to have a better program. The Democrats that you needed on the edge for the majority vote were the ones that fell over themselves. I mean, this gets back [00:12:30] to in other contexts, Chris dod negotiating against himself in key legislation during Obama. This was not like him being forced to accept Republican adjustments to, I think it was the consumer finance bill. I'm not remembering exactly. I think this was something that was covered in Jeff Coffin's book about the corruption under, actually it touches on Biden as a senator, but talking about how some Democrats will blame poor policy on Republicans [00:13:00] while they are doing it for their donors and they're inserting it on their own. And the broadband bill, I don't think that's what it was. I mean, I think there's a few democrats toward the middle that didn't want to have a very good program. They wanted to make sure Comcast was protected, but I think most Democrats would've liked to have had a program that was more effective. But there's one other thing that I wanted to

Sascha Meinrath (13:19):
Sort of, okay, go ahead.

Christopher Mitchell (13:20):
Go ahead. Then I

Sascha Meinrath (13:20):
Try to back Democrats were the ones, and I was in the middle that sausage making, when we proposed originally, and I mean 2009 originally [00:13:30] the need it was 430 billion, and that was working directly with the CTOs, multiple CTOs as it turns out, office in the then Obama White House, and there was no interest in doing that. We ended up with 7 billion. I wasn't

Christopher Mitchell (13:46):
Going back that far. I mean, so that's when Larry Summers is one the shots.

Sascha Meinrath (13:50):
The history matters because these people show up again and again and again. So then we finally get through and it's like we floated several different policies from various senatorial offices of, [00:14:00] okay, let's do 85 billion. And then the Biden White House was like, we'll do a hundred billion, but they weren't serious about that, so they didn't whip for that. And so you end up within these, but how did we end up with 42 billion? That was Democrats negotiating themselves down, and that's pretty bad.

Christopher Mitchell (14:16):
That's not what the article says in the Washington Monthly. I'll just put out, so I don't don't want to get lost in this point. One of the things that I think is interesting in this is that you described the way that corporations [00:14:30] want to have this maze impenetrable thicket of regulations to prevent competition. And there's multiple things I want to come back to this on. One of them is that one of the interesting shows I've listened to recently said that this is why you get Mamdani in New York City is you have people, the Democrats have gotten to the point where they can only promise a loaf and not even deliver it. And so you have someone that pops up and says, look, we're going to take the whole loaf. And yeah, you get wild support for [00:15:00] that. I have deep concerns about an ability to deliver, but I do think that's an accurate representation of where we are and where we have been recently.

Sascha Meinrath (15:09):
Correct. And Mamdani is a great example of somebody that's taken the Abundance notion and turning it on head. He's like, yeah, we should have Abundance, but it should be Abundance for the people. It should be abundant healthcare, abundant housing, abundant food, abundant shelter. These to me are, this is again, nothing new, a chicken in every pot. Well, it's got a very long history. [00:15:30] 40 acres of mules got a very long history, Abundance has a very long history. My concern is what Ezra Klein is really pushing, and Thompson, I don't want to forget his co-author and lead author is a corporatist Abundance, and frankly, we are suffering under an egregious level of corporate Abundance, a corporate Abundance that is taking from the Abundance of the people. And Ani is sort of like [00:16:00] he exemplifies a realignment, which is to say, look, we're thinking about this all wrong. We need to be thinking about Abundance for the people. And that's missing.

Christopher Mitchell (16:13):
And I think as we're talking about this, I want to be clear, I have concerns about Mamdani based on the promises he's making in recent things that we've seen in other large cities where people have had very bold progressive agendas and they have resulted in, [00:16:30] for whatever reason, the quest to enact them has left them very unpopular, the people who are pushing them. So our framing of where we think Mamdani's coming from and where he's framing is not you and me saying We think this is the right way to go, but we're trying to explain to some extent where it's going, even if we may agree with some parts of it or disagree with others.

Sascha Meinrath (16:49):
Yeah, I mean I do think it's where we should go. I think he's spot on to highlight this, and I think he's facing, he's basically rushing the machine guns nest, and if you want [00:17:00] to see what this looks like mean, so Waleed Shahied in the nation this last month must be June, 2025, has a great piece where he talks about, look, what's really happening here is this interesing battle within the Democratic party between progressives and kind of the centrist and what the battle is really over.

Christopher Mitchell (17:22):
Don't call it centrist, they're not centris, they're corporatists doesn't be very clear

Sascha Meinrath (17:27):
About this. Well, that's exactly where I was going. The real battle is [00:17:30] over corporate control, over politics

Christopher Mitchell (17:33):
Because

Sascha Meinrath (17:33):
When you actually map on sort of laissez fire policies, well, that's the Republican party bureaucratic complexity. Well, that's the Democratic party, and by that I don't mean the whole party, I mean the corporatist arm of the Democratic party, which is also the leadership of the Democratic party. So if I have to choose a solution, if I want to position Abundance, what does it need to look like? It is neither the corporatist republican position [00:18:00] nor the corporatist democratic position. It has to be a meaningful defacto anti corporatist position, not because we don't believe in corporations, but because the power of corporations, the Abundance of corporations has grown so big that it must be trimmed back in order to make room for Abundance for the people

Christopher Mitchell (18:22):
At the end of the show. I want to share something in a fiction book I'm reading right now. I think it's fairly famous called The Conspiracy of Paper, and [00:18:30] it's relevant to that point, but I'm not going to delay to pull it up right now. I think Derek and Ezra, if they were sitting here with us, would say, dude, you're missing the point, corporate just or not. What we want is a market solution. We don't want AT&T to run the telephone system. We want competition. We want markets, we want not just that. We want government policy to actually shape markets, and I think that's an accurate sense of what they think they are doing. I don't think you think that's where we're going to end up if we follow their prescriptions

Sascha Meinrath (19:00):
[00:19:00] 100%. No. And again, I draw from,

Christopher Mitchell (19:03):
But you think I'm right in the framing. You just think they're wrong. You're agreeing with me that they're wrong.

Sascha Meinrath (19:07):
Yeah, I'm agreeing with you that if as you say, they believe that somehow laissez faire leads to market competition, I think we have adequate overwhelming evidence that that's not true.

Christopher Mitchell (19:19):
I don't think so unless I Fair is traditionally used with Republican wing of no regulations. I feel like Ezra and Derek are like, yeah, regulations that make sense, [00:19:30] and so that's their position.

Sascha Meinrath (19:32):
Correct. But to do that without taking on corporations,

Christopher Mitchell (19:35):
You cannot do without taking on corporations and they dont have, it's a dang word about it,

Sascha Meinrath (19:40):
Right? So if you want abundant housing for the people, I vociferously agree with Thomson and Klein, that is an absolute necessity just leaving the markets to the equity firms that are gobbling up single family homes. That is not the solution.

Christopher Mitchell (19:57):
Sascha, there is research from places [00:20:00] that get money from the equity firms or from their aligned interests that that is not a problem.

Sascha Meinrath (20:05):
That's right. There's all this research telling Americans that their lived lives is actually not true. It's true.

Christopher Mitchell (20:13):
It is interesting. If you want to live in an evidence-based world right now, I think it would be true to say most of the evidence that has been collected suggests that private equity gobbling up tons of homes is not a major problem. I think that's because the wrong people are collecting evidence [00:20:30] for a specific ideology. But as a person who's driven by evidence as I know you are, I do have to say that you're right. It is lived experience versus evidence right now, which is one of the problems that we face is that evidence is asymmetrical.

Sascha Meinrath (20:44):
Yeah. Well also there's evidence derived and data derived from scientifically sound methodologies, and there's the mythological evidentiary trail that's created via corrupted science, and we are awash [00:21:00] in corporate sponsored craptacular methodologies that do yield data. They do yield evidence. It's just blatantly and very obviously false. And you can see this because of course we lived through trickle down economics and here we are, the outcome from a trickle down economic generation is the largest [00:21:30] wealth divide since the Robert Baron era in the United States, which is to say it doesn't matter what your models show your corrupt scientifically unsound models show. We actually have this living laboratory, which is the US economy and the wealth divide that demonstrate that all of those models were wrong verifiably,

Christopher Mitchell (21:52):
Right? They made predictions. Those predictions have come out opposite.

Sascha Meinrath (21:55):
That's right. And at the time we had the same argument that people were like, I don't see [00:22:00] how just getting rid of taxes is going to lead to rich people having less wealth and poor people having more wealth. It's obviously a falsity, but the same argumentation was made the same overwhelming preponderance of evidence showed that trickle down economics would lead to wealth equality magically, and people bought it for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. And so here we are with a massive wealth divide. [00:22:30] The outcome of that, and again, when we consistently disregard scientifically sound methodologies, that's how we end up with generations long arguments. Do cigarettes cause cancer? Is global warming a thing?

Christopher Mitchell (22:45):
Is lead tasty? It

Sascha Meinrath (22:47):
Does Abundance theory work. It's all the same argumentation, it's all the same reliance on bad research, bad output from that bad research, and [00:23:00] it causes grave and lasting and intergenerational harms to the people that are forced to live under these regimes.

Christopher Mitchell (23:08):
I think the part that I find valuable about this book, and to bring it back to broadband at some point, which they don't do because they don't know anything about Internet access or technology in general, which is, that's one of the things if you follow it, Ezra closely that he talks about how he doesn't know anything about tech. He is very anti, not anti-tech, but it's not a thing that he gets the way that you and I are interested in how things work [00:23:30] and stuff like that. We get tech, not an expert necessarily, but it's not something that intimidates me. The point I'm trying to make is that I think this book is important as a canary in the coal mine in some ways, and I think you're going to agree and tell me that we didn't need it and there's other canaries we should be paying attention to.

(23:48):
But when I look at things like for instance, the way the federal government wants to try to give money out and then make sure that people are not getting substandard wages with it in a broadband project, but [00:24:00] they don't actually know what people in rural Illinois make and Southern Illinois make for broadband projects. And so we'll pay 'em what they get in Chicago. And that is terrible policy. Not because we shouldn't want people to make more money, but because it upsets the entire way these ISPs do business. Many of them do it in a way that is quite fair and people are compensated fairly well. Right? So there's this sense and they document it in housing over and over again is that it is the people running cities are mostly Democrats and the housing [00:24:30] is ridiculous. Everyone wants to live there, which is great. Hey, hooray for the Democrats, but nobody can afford to live there.

(24:36):
And not only that, but increasingly with the market driven approach, you have these housing units that are unoccupied most of the time. Well, people can't find homes at an affordable rate. And so one of the things that I think is important about this book is that there's a sense that we don't have to worry about that. And I think that is wrong. The work that [00:25:00] I have done in trying to better understand, I focus on broadband, but I try to understand a variety of issues. And I came to the conclusion that at a certain point, you can't solve Internet access for everyone if 5% of the population is changing homes multiple times a month because they don't have stable housing. When I got into education policy a little bit related to Internet access, I came to understanding part through also my experiences with local education in Minnesota, which overall is fairly good, but we still have poverty and schools that are challenged [00:25:30] is that trying to improve education by trying to focus on the four walls of the school and the policy and the teachers and the unions or whatever within that is a fool's errand.

(25:39):
The problem with education is the stuff that happens when the kids aren't in school, it's going home to not having Internet access and not having stable housing. And so for me, I feel like whether it's that and also transportation, and I've said this to other people and I'm a little bit far afield, but I want to share this. If he wants to make buses free, he'll find the same problem that we had in the Twin Cities when we made the trains free during [00:26:00] the pandemic, which is that a lot of people that don't have housing will go there because it is a safe place for them to be. And then other people won't want to go there. They're not comfortable around those folks. And so again, you have a lack of a solution on housing that then corrupts our transportation policy. And this book, I feel like is should be a giant warning sign to Democrats even if they don't take the conclusion seriously, which we're begging them not to take the warning seriously, we got to solve these freaking problems. We can't just keep [00:26:30] being like, Hey, let's just pretend this isn't a problem.

Sascha Meinrath (26:33):
That's right. And this is where Ezra Klein and Thompson do a superb job. They lay out a good half dozen facets of society that are all broken housing amongst them. And if you don't fix that, then your other solutions have a giant drag shoot deployed behind them that is so large, so over encompassing that it becomes very difficult to address one of these solutions about the other. And what we are currently living through is an era whereby we [00:27:00] have papered over real solutions to consistent, perplexing gargantuan problems, whether it's education or healthcare or telecommunications. Our solutions are not even half ass quarter asks in how they are implemented, and Klein and Thompson are rightfully shining a light on these and saying, this is not sufficient. In [00:27:30] fact, this is going to cause indefinite growing harm to society and they're spot on that it's only when we get into, and therefore what should we do about it that now we bifurcate that they go into a direction that I just cannot follow and I can't follow because I'm like, well, I'm an expert in the history of what happens when we follow that kind of solution.

(27:58):
And it is even Bleecker [00:28:00] than we are today. Now, as a professor, I have a lot of students and a lot of students that were huge Trump supporters and had the opportunity to have some round table discussions with my students.

Christopher Mitchell (28:14):
I assume you just failed them all automatically, what universities do with anyone that disagrees with their feelings?

Sascha Meinrath (28:20):
Yeah. No, I think they all passed with flying colors. But here's the thing, one of the consistent themes as to why they voted for Trump is because they wanted change. [00:28:30] And Trump ran as a change agent. Kamala and Biden before that was running as a status quois. And the cautionary tale is that change trump's status quo. Now, the mistake, the error as it were that both my students and Klein fall into is to say those changes are by definition going to be better. And as it turns out, no, you can actually screw this up even more. [00:29:00] And that is also the catalyzing, I hope, the catalyst, the crucible that we now have to live through.

Christopher Mitchell (29:08):
Well, I think when it comes to the changes that are proposed, earlier you said insufficient. I think that's right. I don't think Ezra and Derek are going in the wrong direction. I think they're simply not going far enough, which is to say that it's not enough to change zoning. I bring this back to Internet access with something that I recall [00:29:30] from years ago looking at Santa Cruz County and Santa Cruz County, a bunch of areas that were not well connected, varying economic statuses, and a company was a national company was like, Hey, if you just change these permitting rules to make it easier on us, we'll totally invest. And the county was like, well, we'd like more investment and it's not that big of a change. So they changed the rules and that company was basically like, cool, we're going to connect the well income neighborhoods and a few of the middle income neighborhoods and good luck with everyone else. And [00:30:00] that's what I think happens. And now it's actually less economic to connect those other places because you cannot mix it. You cannot balance,

Sascha Meinrath (30:08):
When you allow cherry picking, you actually create a greater divide and you also create a more expensive divide to fix than if you had universal. And again, this is where the US was a global leader on universality, universal free public education, universal highway system,

Christopher Mitchell (30:26):
The libraries

Sascha Meinrath (30:27):
Universal service for telephony.

Christopher Mitchell (30:29):
The libraries [00:30:30] were not universal, but I use that in part because it's a private commitment. It was Carnegie in part who after devastating millions of lives, decided to build this library system that was really quite amazing and really helped the United States

Sascha Meinrath (30:43):
It's blood money. And my office used to be in the Carnegie building. Yes.

Christopher Mitchell (30:50):
But yeah, so the universal solutions that were focused on, not how do we help a company make more money and hope that that trickles down to tie back something else in, but [00:31:00] rather a solution that says, you know what? If we think about this rather than just doing what someone asked us to do, if we can come up with a solution that is elegant with some level of expertise, which is not to say someone that necessarily has a college education and an elite background in credentials from the Ivy League, but people that actually are experts in what they are doing because they have done it and taken it seriously and have a track record.

Sascha Meinrath (31:24):
Correct. So when you look at things like universality of telecommunications, [00:31:30] for example, right? There's an altruistic version, the digital equity kind of play where you say, look, we should do this because it's just and right? And I fully agree with that, but there's also an economic play which is say, we should do this because it's actually efficient and because it generates income and it generates tax revenue and it costs us less. And those are both true. And unfortunately, we choose solutions that are both unjust and more expensive again and again and again. And it's not just telecommunications because that's exactly [00:32:00] what we do with us healthcare, a system that costs the most of any country on the planet for the worst outcome of any highly industrialized country on the planet. That is a remarkable feat of self blinding to a remarkable, a remarkably dysfunctional system that honestly would kind of be almost like what Klein would ask for because he'd be like, look, we just leave it to the markets and that will somehow deliver an optimal solution. And that's in the face of overwhelming evidence that no, [00:32:30] it will produce the profit maximizing solution, which sometimes but very rarely aligns with the optimal solution for society as all.

Christopher Mitchell (32:41):
So I want to leave us on a more positive note than that, and I'll just note that twice in that last point that you made, you said on this planet as a fan of science fiction and a person that I dunno often finds things out before other people, is there a reason to think that there's things that are better off of this planet?

Sascha Meinrath (33:00):
[00:33:00] I mean clean environments where I think there's widespread agreement between, say the two of us, number one and us and client and Thompson is like this current status quo is not working, it's not working for people, it's not working for society. This is a bad situation that we're in. And my argument would be, well, the way to solve [00:33:30] these problems is a radical rebalancing of power, but also a radical reconceptualization of the world of government. This notion that government exists to balance the needs of the population with the desires of corporations is just fundamentally foreign. The government exists solely to assist the people, and sometimes that means doing right by corporations and sometimes it doesn't. But we have to be willing to [00:34:00] push to say, look, corporations exist in service to society. They don't get to define what society is or what's in the best interest of the people.

Christopher Mitchell (34:11):
There's a natural catastrophes among people to be like, this is the worst of all times. We've never had anything like this. And then you look back and you're like, well, actually we've experienced this in these other ways.

Sascha Meinrath (34:21):
All those people should spend a week during the dark ages. That's all I got to say.

Christopher Mitchell (34:26):
But the interesting thing is, I'm always trying to figure this out, where are things [00:34:30] really different and what has changed them? And one of the things that I've always been interested in is money and just the idea of, oh, the paper doesn't have value. We believe it has value, and it's really kind of amazing human thing. And in this book, conspiracy of Paper, which a friend of mine had recommended I read decades ago, one of the plot points has to do with the switchover from money kind of being a one-to-one with silver in a secure area [00:35:00] owned by the government or the king in that case. And gold backed, the dollar is backed by a certain amount of money to it just being a paper and people believing it has a certain value. And one of the things that they say, and I am not saying this because I'm like a peronian socialist that thinks that we shouldn't be able to own land, which is an argument that some have made, but argue that when people could be wealthy and own a lot of land, there were certain economies of scale and that you couldn't own too much land because it was difficult to maintain.

(35:29):
And [00:35:30] that led to there being more land for more people. But as we switched to money being just pieces of paper that we agree upon and value, you have Elon Musk being able to have more money than 40% of the Earth or whatever that is. And it is interesting how the money system allows for concentrations of wealth because of how it is designed. And I'm just throwing that out there. I think there's no point. I think it's interesting to think about, and it would be interesting to think about whether in a cryptocurrency system you would basically [00:36:00] be able to say, if you wanted to do an experiment to say no wallet could hold more than X percent of the money or something like that. So we are not at the end stage of humanity, right? We're going to go on and right now we're in a particular place that enables for the most fantastic of wealth disparity that humankind has ever had, more or less. I mean, the kings might've come close, but I don't even think when you look back, the disparity was as great as we do see it today. And that's just something for people to think about is [00:36:30] that this is, there's some things that are a little bit new and the way that we have designed our economic system allows for that in ways that previous economic systems did not allow for.

Sascha Meinrath (36:40):
Yeah, we certainly have never had an era where the flight or the mobility of capital and capital lists has been as great as it is today,

Christopher Mitchell (36:48):
Right? King Louis was crazy, but he couldn't take his king, his castle across the channel.

Sascha Meinrath (36:53):
That's right. People were grounded in this West Fon nation state you couldn't get out of, and [00:37:00] that had a certain effect. You did have to worry about the guillotines coming out. You couldn't just alight to another country or another planet or what have you. And that meant that some of the most egregious successes might have been a bit less. And I do agree that, but it also meant that during revolution, during revolution, you would have the breakup of that wealth. But if you had revolution [00:37:30] today, it's not clear to me that the top 0.1% would actually have their wealth broken up. I am not convinced of that, and that's a very big danger because all of a sudden this natural check-in balance on wealth accumulation ceases to defacto exist.

Christopher Mitchell (37:52):
Right? We're out of time, but I'll just say that we could be heading the direction of that Matt Damon movie where the rich people lived in space with awesome healthcare [00:38:00] and that wasn't a great movie, so we should not try to do that.

Sascha Meinrath (38:03):
I'm currently reading a book called Service Model of Adrian Kosky, and I would recommend it as just this kind of post-capitalist dark questioning of the trajectory that kind of we're on, frankly.

Christopher Mitchell (38:17):
Thank you, Sascha. I'll just throw out there one of my favorite book recommendations you gave me, which is related to what people have turned into this show are often interested in is the Nexus Trilogy by Ramez Naam, NAAM. Fantastic.

Sascha Meinrath (38:30):
[00:38:30] That's a wonderful series.

Christopher Mitchell (38:32):
Good summary read.

Sascha Meinrath (38:33):
And he also has great social commentary on this issue for anyone that wants to check his social media

Christopher Mitchell (38:38):
And also renewable energy topics as well. Yeah. Thank you, Sascha. I'm sure we'll be back with you again at some point this summer. Have a good one.

Ry Marcattilio (38:46):
We have transcripts for this and other podcasts available @communitynetworks.org/broadbandbits. Email us at [email protected] with your ideas for the show. Follow Chris on BlueSky: his handles @SportsShotChris. [00:39:00] Follow Community Networks stories on BlueSky: the handles @communitynets. Subscribe to this and other podcasts from ILSR, including Building Local Power, Local Energy Rules, and the Composting for Community Podcast. You can access them anywhere you get your podcasts. Catch the latest important research from all of our initiatives if you subscribe to our monthly newsletter @ILSR.org. While you're there, please take a moment to donate your support in any amount. Keeps us going. Thank you to Arnie Hesby for the song Warm Duck Shuffle, licensed through Creative Commons.