The End of the Beginning

11/15/20 • 55 min

Soonish's six-month detour into electoral politics finishes where it started, with a conversation with our favorite futurist, Jamais Cascio. We talked late on November 6—when it was already clear that Joseph R. Biden would win the presidential race, but before the networks had officially called it—and we explored what Biden's unexpectedly narrow win will mean for progress against the pandemic; for the fortunes of the progressive left; and for the future of democracy in the United States.

Turning Donald Trump out of office was an enormous and crucial accomplishment, and Biden voters should take a moment to celebrate. But Cascio argues that if Republicans retain control of the Senate (a matter that now hinges on a pair of ferociously contested runoff elections in Georgia), Biden's win will amount to, at most, an "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging" moment. It will give Biden and Harris the opportunity to tackle the biggest crises facing the country—the newly resurgent coronavirus pandemic and the economic havoc it's wrought. But it won't leave much room to pursue the structural reforms needed to tame white grievance, end minoritarian rule, and get government working again.

But there's always 2022. In other words, this election wasn't the beginning of the end of the long fight to save democracy and protect the rights of all citizens in this country. But it might be the end of the beginning.

Chapter Guide

00:08 Soonish theme

00:22 We Did It!

01:32 Reality Sinks In

04:29 Re-introducing Jamais Cascio

05:28 Check-in

06:31 Setting the Scene

08:48 The Troubling News

10:19 The Depths of our Polarization

13:01 Perpetuating Dysfunction

17:01 Reviewing Wade’s Post-Election Scenarios

19:49 The Pandemic and Conspiracy Theories

24:57 Violence Against Democracy

27:38 The Weakness of Norms

30:51 Mid-roll Endorsement: Big Brains

31:49 What Next for the Progressive Left?

36:13 Polls Are Left-Wing Astrology

37:57 Cliodynamics

40:30 Back to BANI

45:34 Fighting Back Against Incomprehensibility

48:49 Final Thoughts: The Real Work Is Still Ahead

52:11 End Credits and Acknowledgements

53:00 “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You” from Iconography

Find the full show notes and a transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Chapter Guide

00:08 Soonish theme

00:22 We Did It!

01:32 Reality Sinks In

04:29 Re-introducing Jamais Cascio

05:28 Check-in

06:31 Setting the Scene

08:48 The Troubling News

10:19 The Depths of our Polarization

13:01 Perpetuating Dysfunction

17:01 Reviewing Wade’s Post-Election Scenarios

19:49 The Pandemic and Conspiracy Theories

24:57 Violence Against Democracy

27:38 The Weakness of Norms

30:51 Mid-roll Endorsement: Big Brains

31:49 What Next for the Progressive Left?

36:13 Polls Are Left-Wing Astrology

37:57 Cliodynamics

40:30 Back to BANI

45:34 Fighting Back Against Incomprehensibility

48:49 Final Thoughts: The Real Work Is Still Ahead

52:11 End Credits and Acknowledgements

53:00 “Jaws: Amity Island Welcomes You” from Iconography

Find the full show notes and a transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Previous Episode

American Reckoning, Part 2: A New Kind of Nation

Welcome to a special two-part series about the looming clash over the future of America. In Part 1, we looked at the tattered state of our democracy and searched for peaceful ways through an election season in which one candidate—Trump—has threatened violence and disruption if he doesn’t win. Here in Part 2, we look at the work waiting for us after the election: fixing the way we govern ourselves so that we’ll never have another president like Trump or another year like 2020.

The real breakdowns in our system go much deeper than Trump—hence the cliché that he’s the symptom, not the disease. Boxed in by demographic change, the Republican party has devolved over the past half-century into a force that taps racial and economic anxieties to win elections, erodes faith in government by deliberately and cynically undermining government, and exploits Constitutional loopholes and Congressional procedure to exercise endless minoritarian rule. Democrats, of course, are beset by their own internal divisions—and by a growing thirst for revenge.

To reverse this toxic dynamic, we’ll need reforms that give both parties a fair shot at legislating and lower the risk of tyranny by the minority or the majority. It’s a tall order, given that we’re more sharply divided along ideological, geographical, and economic lines than at any point in American history. Which is why the necessary reforms could end up going so deep that we come out the other side looking like a different nation—or nations.

This episode draws on a range of ideas from thinkers such as journalist David A. French, political scientists Adam Przeworski and William Howell, and sociologist and science fiction author Malka Older, along with an assortment of other commentators on the topics of polarization, federalism, and the possibility of secession or breakup. And in the best Soonish tradition, there’s also a little dose of Apollo 13.

You'll find the full show notes and transcript for this episode at soonishpodcast.org.

You can also read an essay version of "American Reckoning" on Medium.

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay.

Additional music is from Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you like the show, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps this whole ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

Painted face photo by Oskaras Zerbickas on Unsplash. Thanks Oskaras!

Next Episode

The Inventor of the Cell Phone Says the Future Is Still Calling

In 1973, there was only one man who believed everyone on Earth would want and need a cell phone. That man was a Motorola engineer named Martin Cooper.

“I had a science fiction prediction,” Cooper recounts in his new memoir, Cutting the Cord: The Inventor of the Cell Phone Speaks Out. “I told anyone who would listen that, someday, every person would be issued a phone number at birth. If someone called and you didn’t answer, that would mean you had died.”

Your email address or Facebook profile may have displaced your phone number as the marker of your digital existence. But today we live, more or less, in the world Cooper conceived. So if Cooper says the wireless revolution is still just in its opening stages, and that mobile technology promises to help end poverty and disease and bring education and employment to everyone, it’s probably worth listening.

In this episode of Soonish, we talk with Cooper about the themes and stories in his book, and explore why even the disasters of 2020 haven’t shaken his optimism about the future.

Before the 1970s, Motorola was known mainly for making the two-way radios used by police dispatchers and the AM/FM radios in the dashboards of cars. But Cooper, head of the company’s communication systems division, was convinced that the company’s future lay in battery-powered handheld phones tied to a network of radio towers, each broadcasting to its own “cell.” Moreover, he knew it would take a spectacular demonstration of such wireless technology to keep the Federal Communications Commission from giving AT&T the huge chunks of radio spectrum it wanted to build its own network of in-dashboard car phones.

Cooper convinced his bosses to let him lead a crash, 90-day program to build a prototype cellular phone that it could show off to the media and the FCC. The project to build the DynaTAC (for Dynamic Adaptive Total Area Coverage) was a success, and in the end AT&T never got the spectrum it wanted.

It took another decade for Motorola to commercialize the technology, largely because of FCC foot-dragging over spectrum allocation for consumer cellular industry. But Cooper’s 1973 demo opened the door to the world we now know—including, many generations of devices later, the rise of podcasting.

Cooper will turn 92 at the end of this month, and he still buys every new model of smartphone, just to try it out. He thinks there’s lots of room left for improvement—and that the next generation of mobile devices may not look like phones at all, but will instead go inside our ears or even inside our bodies, where they’ll help to detect and prevent disease.

When someone has had had a front-seat view to so many decades of high-tech innovation, perhaps they can’t help feeling rosy about humanity’s ability to think its way out of present-day challenges like the pandemic, climate change, or inequality in educational and economic opportunities.

“The problems are big enough so it's going to take some time to get them solved,” Cooper says. “But there are people around who are doing the thinking and who are addressing these problems. Pretty much the only advantage the human brain has over machine is that it keeps making mistakes. And we call those mistakes creativity. So I think that's going to save us.”

Notes

The Soonish opening theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music by Titlecard Music and Sound.

If you enjoy Soonish, please rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts. Every additional rating makes it easier for other listeners to find the show.

Listener support is the rocket fuel that keeps our little ship going! You can pitch in with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish.

For the full show notes and a transcript of this episode go to http://www.soonishpodcast.org/soonish-407-cell-phone-future

Chapter Guide

00:08 Soonish theme

00:24 Officer of the Deck

01:42 Left-Right Confusion

04:06 The Father of the Cell Phone

06:52 Geeking Out

08:41 Living in the Future

10:50 Disproving Technological Determinism

17:19 An Alternative History of the Cell Phone

19:45 The Fate of All Monopolies