25: Reggie James - Our Infinite Mirrors (Live at FWB Fest)

0:00Welcome to Dialectic Episode 25 with Reggie James. This is a fun one. It was my first ever live episode done on stage at FWB Fest in Idlewild, California. FWB is a crypto thing, a DAO, a Discord, a center of cultural production, and lots more. And every year they throw a fest, one part crypto conference, one part music festival, in a really special place in California called the Idlewild Arts Academy. I've been to fest all four years, and FWB is important to me in part because it was started by my friend Trevor McFedries and run for a long time by friend and dialectic guest Alex Zhang. This year I was given the opportunity to do dialectic on stage, which was quite a treat.

0:41And there was nobody better than my friend Reggie James to both be the guinea pig for a live episode and cover just a wide range of topics that felt relevant for FWB, whether that be technology, hardware, culture, brand, crypto, and more. I introduced Reggie in the live recording. So with that, here's my conversation with Reggie live on stage in Idlewild. As always, if you enjoy dialectic, please share it with a friend. Okay, let's kick things off. Maybe you can share what dialectic is. First things first. I'm Jackson. I host a podcast called Dialectic. I think what I'm aiming for with dialectic, or at least my tagline for it, is conversational portraits of original people.

1:25And people ask me what my podcast is about. I basically just say I find people who are interesting to me and I interview them or have conversations with them. I think another way to think about it maybe that would set the stage for today is like getting to know people by way of their ideas. And that sort of is a selection criteria for who I talk to. And so with that in mind, I'm not really going to do the thing where you ask people for their background and their life story and so on. We're going to kind of jump straight into the ideas. That being said, I think it probably is worth giving Reggie a proper introduction.

2:01If you don't know him or you missed his talk earlier, I'm fortunate to call Reggie a friend, but also I'm inspired by him and his writing. He's a designer, a writer, an investor, an entrepreneur, a former founder and CEO of Eternal, which was recently acquired. And when I found out I was going to be doing this, the podcast live for the very first time, especially at FWB Fest, my frame for it is like I kind of want to try to find somebody who can capture a bunch of the essences of what makes this place important to me. I've been to four of these somehow and it's this weird blend of technology and also culture and art and also crypto and all the things that come with that and also like other weird esoteric internet things and philosophy and so on and so I'm probably talking more now than I will for most of the rest of the next hour.

2:51But Reggie really encaptures so much of that. And that's why I'm excited to have a conversation with him today. I'm excited to be in conversation with you as a long-time listener. I appreciate that. Cool. Well, we're going to start the conversation today. There is an excerpt at the beginning of a book Reggie just published that he worked on called Hardware 2024, where he's referencing Kevin Kelly and Kevin's book, What Technology Wants. You say, technology itself has an aim and that we are the facilitators of that aim. This is very different than thinking of technology as a derivative of ourselves, that our aims are its aims.

3:35And then you go on to say, the mirror was the final product. Once we had the mirror, we simply continued to produce them. This is how technology convinces us. It has an uncanny ability to reflect, and that reflection creates an inescapable human urge to tinker. And then finally, at the end of that excerpt, you go on to say, as you sort of theorize, what does technology actually want? You say, perfect ubiquity and mutualism with humanity. And so my first question is, what does that actually mean? Those are some big words. And maybe as a part of that, why do you think so much of our technology converges on this metaphorical mirror?

4:14Yeah, I'll actually use the mirror as the way to answer the other part of the sort of ubiquity and mutualism. So I think that we can look through our culture and like beyond just like object oriented technology, but cultural technologies as well to understand that we're kind of always searching for higher purposes of meaning. and because we live life through this sort of embodied first person perspective a lot of that has to do with kind of how does this come back to me and my lived experience right and so if I'm sitting around the fire and hearing a myth in my tribal village then it's not so much that I'm engaging with this story but it's that this myth is telling me something about myself that I'm going to further embody in some set of actions, right?

5:08So it's acting as this mirror to what I can be, right? The mirror isn't like static in time necessarily. And so when I sort of keep extending that out, right, there's some things that act as amazing mirrors, right? So just to talk about the previous talk, like the iPhone is probably like one of the best mirrors. The internet is this like global mirror. And so then to get to the, like the ubiquity and mutualism thing, you know, I think we can all look at sort of networks in particular as this really interesting mirror that's kind of like constantly flexing and prompting us to like contribute to it.

5:48So then it becomes well contributed towards what ends. And I think we're starting to see those ends really, really clearly. And it's about, I don't want to like use tokenization but i think like this sort of sense of embodiment around reflective intelligence right it's like it's using our inputs it's flexing that across the network in order to give it directly back to us and i think that that's kind of it's it's a little like cerebral and can be hard to grok but i think like when you sort of see it distorted it becomes really uncomfortable so like sycophantic ai is like that's when the mirror gets distorted and it becomes a little bit uncomfortable, right?

6:31But then I think when mirrors get sort of exciting is like Ethereum is like a really interesting mirror, isolated to like value and sort of like more economic senses of our participation, but a really fun one and one that people here probably grok really well. And the mutualism, I think, is really about like a sense of closeness. Like technology just tends to get closer and closer to us. Like it starts off as these sort of cold and like large machines and like these factories and it gets, you know, like, I mean, our phone is so intimate that it literally vibrates near our most private sections of our body.

7:08I think about that a lot. Like we've actually taken like this thing and really put it as close as possible. And now, you know, with some of our most edge companies like Neuralink, you know, that that's as close as it gets, It's like embedded in the brain. And if you use, again, if you go back towards like forms of mysticism, like is the brain where your consciousness live? In some cultures it is, right? Some cultures, the heart is where the consciousness lives. And so it's interesting to think about sort of like these embedded technologies and its sort of closeness. But that's what, it's this other animal kingdom that's really tightly wedded to us.

7:46Yeah, it's this perpetually increasing intimacy, which can be great or can be haunting. It's always both, sacred and profane. Right. We're going to talk a bunch about different technologies. You already gave a talk about hardware today, and we'll talk a bit about that. Before we jump in, in this broader theme of technological determinism and sort of what tech wants, there's a phrase you've used, I think a few times in different ways, where you say, you talk about defanging loaded technologies. Yeah. What draws you to loaded technologies? Yeah, well, I'm not like really big on identity politics, but I do think that some communities across all identities have really funky relationships to technology.

8:35And I think that as technology sort of increases in its power, you know, in the sort of not going to make it idea, you know, what happens if like a community gets like a six month delay? What happens when a community gets a two year delay? So I think it's really important. And also, you know, just the Silicon Valley-ism of, like, the future's here, so it's not evenly distributed, right? Like, to defang a technology is actually to expand and bring the future forward to communities that might be on the lagging tail of that. And I think that's really, really powerful. I think for me in like the current phase of my life, that's always been sort of in areas of like communication and brand design and to make things more approachable and to take away that language of you're not going to make it because I think that's actually disgusting language.

9:27But I think in the future, what I would love for it to be for myself is like, what are the policy paths that get Waymo into more cities faster? right like i think another one is like i think all of japan runs off of like 20 to like 25 building codes or something like that and in new york alone there's just like an absurd amount which stops us from building like the housing that we need and so like there's all these policy things that are sort of like secret and in the background but it's actually making the the technology further fanged because it can't yes get to the people and so now they have this sort of to reference Nick Zuse's talk, like they have this external perspective of what's happening.

10:09And so they're probably seeing the most extreme versions of it, which always tends to be like in the sort of like negative, hyper sensory attacking, you know, perspective. Yeah. Yeah, I think there's an element too that like the fear doesn't, maybe it buys you a little bit more time, but it actually probably makes the like coming impact worse. And I think it, going back to the earlier thing and determinism, like there's a notion that we can slow these things down or stop them. And I think it's probably closer to bending them than altogether stopping. And I think so much of what defanging feels like to me and why I find so much of your philosophy around technology to be so appealing is just like it broadly is about pulling it, not only pulling it forward, but pulling it to the other end of that quote, evenly distributing it, making it actually accessible.

10:56Yeah. And I think the important thing to talk about when it comes to like fear is like, who does that fear benefit? Right. And I mean, not to be on like some Bill Gurley regulatory capture vibe, although with the recent Figma IPO, it was great to see him in full form. I think like that fear does, it is being weaponized to reassert self-authority. authority, right? So if I can wield the technology and then like poke at, this is why it's dangerous to society, but don't worry because I'm the only one that can wield it and I will protect you. There's, what's his name? Adam Curtis has this great documentary basically around how like politicians stopped promising better futures and then reverted to just promising to people bad things won't happen.

11:48And when they reverted to saying bad things won't happen, they were able to just paint boogeyman's around the world for the US this might look like terrorists in the Middle East and make them appear so much bigger and so much scarier than they were and the eligibility of those people made it feel scary because now you can even really do your own research you're just relying on intelligence reports and we do the same thing with technology it's just like behind this AI black box is this scary like ghoul and it's just like but we put a smiley face on it and it gives you deep research and so you know there uh i think like we have to really deconstruct these sort of notions of fear as we try to distribute technology just so that it creates this sort of manufactured consent on like who has the authority yes versus uh the classic computing alan k idea of like popping open the hood and actually introducing the complexity to people exactly exactly i want to talk a bit about design um you've reiterated many places in many ways that design is a realization of values.

12:50And I think in many ways you are first and foremost a designer, but you're also a writer. And you've said that your design process typically starts with writing. Why is that? Yeah, I think it helps me to not waste energy visualizing things that maybe don't need to be visualized, right? So if I work through an idea and on the other end of that idea is like oh I actually think this is really harmful in this way why am I going to move forward towards the visualization of that harm um whereas and I'm and I'm not judging people whose like first mode of thinking is visual but I think that's just my process and so yeah I I designed through writing and it helps me sort of like filter out some of the things that I'm less excited to put further energy towards and then and it also helps me understand like what i really believe you know which which is really important like i think um uh joan didion talks about like the reason why she writes is so that she can actually figure out what she thinks um and i know that's super true for me like i don't i don't ever retract anything that i've written but i don't know if i would necessarily stand by every essay that's on the sub stack um your writing is certainly your voice in writing is one of it sort of embodies the garage door being open yeah it's like i'm working through this in real time i'm working through this in real time and every single newsletter ends with i don't do edits and if you unfollow this sub stack like i won't be hurt by it because time is you know finite so using it somewhere you don't want to use it is rough but yeah to get back to like design as as a sort of embodiment of values you know that is directly from neo to fukizawa who at the start of covid David Saleo gave me that book, Embodiment.

14:38He gave me kind of like a stack of books. He's like, this is going to get you through COVID, basically. And he's a really good gift giver like that. And I just remember it really rocked my world at a time where I was trying to figure out my values while my environment, like, while all of our environments changed so heavily. And, you know, I kind of, one bit just talks about chairs. Like, he's designed a lot of chairs and how a chair and the values you put in it give certain affordances, right? So like this chair, you know, has a certain importance of kind of how strictly I have to sit. And I can't even like go that wide.

15:10So I can't even like man spread that much. And, you know, I'm a little clammy. So my butt gets a little sweaty. Like it has all of these sort of like features, right? I can't like, it would be weird if I had someone else with me here. And so it sets a tone for how you're going to behave. And I think that like something that designers recognize, I think pretty well, is that what they do is really a set of behaviors that they're sort of putting forth as things that you should be doing, right? And that's a level of cultural programming that I think is, didn't really get the love that it deserved.

15:45I think maybe earlier in technology's life because I think, or software technology of like the 2000s, because I think we're really trying to figure out what all this interaction stuff was with the phone, which is why, you know, critical theorists are important. But yeah, I mean, that's a zag. You have a line in a podcast where you talked about your aims chair being about being locked in, which I love, which captures that kind of embedded value aspect of affordances really well. You brought up software. I think, like, the computers we use, and particularly the iPhone, are so ubiquitous and so sort of, like, almost unopinionated that it feels, at least to me, maybe I'm just numb to it, it feels that it lacks affordances.

16:28Where are the affordances in software? excuse me in technology today is it is it purely in software can software even provide the same types of affordances that objects can yeah that's a good question so i think the first thing i'd push back on is that the iphone is very opinionated um you know immediately right there's sort of all these things even if you just like look in your like pulled pull down quick settings right where the default is sort of let's let's just look at the defaults right like the defaults when you receive your phone is that the ringer is on. The default is that there's no focus mode on, right?

17:06Everything is about this sort of instantaneous ability for another hand to reach out and interact with you. And what's really interesting about that is that you then have to go in and set all of these barriers to protect your own attention, which is really, really interesting, right? So the number, I would say the number one value of the phone after like the sense of sort of like self-importance of like, I have this phone and now it's giving me these abilities is sort of instant reachability, right? Which is a really like, especially as a New Yorker, right? Like the last thing you want anyone to do in New York is touch you, you know, but the iPhone tells you that's the first thing.

17:48It goes back to intimacy at the top of the conversation, right? Yeah, a hundred percent, you know? So I think, so that's, so I would just push back that I think the phone is like extremely opinionated. So then the thing about software and its affordances is that it has to stack on top of the values of the hardware. And this is why I say like hardware exists in our environment layer of, you know, Stuart Brand pace layering, which means that software is a culture that is derivative of our hardware layer, of our environment. And so if the, let's say the number one value of this, right, is this sense of reachability.

18:26It's no coincidence that our killer apps are social media, which is all about reachability and spreading your identity, right? And so the affordances sort of stack from its root all the way up. So I think we can push back. I think software is beautifully flexible. I think what we get stuck in, in venture mindset, is a sense of scale, right? And so we kind of have perfect flexibility of affordances. Whether or not those things scale is a separate question, but we get stuck on good means scale, like good design is scaled design. And I don't believe that's true anymore. And if we want to reach out with new affordances, I think the joy of AI is going to be being able to spread the affordance landscape without worrying about scale because it'll be so cheap to produce said interaction points.

19:18Affordances are also sort of fundamentally trade-offs, to your point. 100%. 100%. And it's about restacking your own sort of like value pyramid, right? Like if every value pyramid starts with like reachability, that's a really weird way to live. But if like, if your value pyramid starts with maybe prayer or contemplation, that's going to inherently produce a whole new set of values that you would even want to stack on that. Because if your first value is prayer, then the next thing you want is not going to be reachability because you're going to want to honor the value of prayer. Right. And so I think it's really fun to play with sort of how these things stack on top of each other.

19:56Yeah. A couple of lines on the last note that I love from you. One, the image of our hardware is the image of all of our technologies. And two, we are fascinated by the functionality of objects. But in reality, their function is subordinate to their signification. you gave a talk earlier on hardware which was great and you started to talk about it briefly can you just talk a little bit about your frame around how these software cultures are actually sort of reached by way of the hardware we get so you've you referenced pc and mobile but also video games like can you talk a little bit about where we've been and and then maybe speak a little bit more to you gave the example of prayer other value sets but like what what other types of affordances or hardware we might actually allow us to get software-wise?

20:42Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So I think we've all probably just like have matured in a very dominant iPhone plus AWS landscape. Like the way we think about software is like I'm programming for this interface and that interface is going to live sort of remotely in US East 1, you know? Now, what's been interesting about that is as we've scaled the requirement for all of these data centers and the maturity of these data centers what that did was build up all of this background compute which has been really fascinating and then what has happened as a result of that and as I always think about video gaming as sort of like the mushroom kingdom of like because it's like it's really weird it's like a little psychedelic and it's like the people that work in video games rarely cross over to other parts of tech.

21:34Well, also, it's like mushrooms that I'm not sure it was always taken as a third thing. Right. But now we know. Yeah, we know. That's definitely its own thing. Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. And especially video game consoles, which are downstream of their hardware. Exactly. And as I think pretty much everyone in this room knows, you know, like, NVIDIA and the focus on, like, these graphic chips, like, open the door not only to really great video games and this, like, subculture of software, but mining, right? And like Bitcoin, Ethereum, what have you. And it's just so funny that these same exact chips is what we use in these data centers to train large language models.

22:14And so I think what we see is like, we had this sort of like parallel development of a technology that was somewhat undervalued and underappreciated. And it became the root of our two newest software cultures of crypto and AI. And so I think like, I mean, I think that's kind of all there is to say about it. And it's, you know, it's always interesting when you see something take off in a sort of secondary or tertiary path and how it can come back to being like the most dominant sort of piece of hardware today. And naturally, Jensen and NVIDIA shareholders have really benefited from that. You have a piece I like on universal luxuries.

22:57classic examples being this is sort of a warholian idea coca-cola but but certainly the iphone and you you nod at this notion that maybe others are possible um one example you give what would happen if there was a hi-fi speaker in every single residence in america yeah do you have a sense of other types of either products or categories or domains where like luxury is there's potential for luxury and it's not yet happened or it's underserved yeah for sure i mean I mean, I love kind of going back to Neyo Tofukizawa here. In his book, he has this example of designing public utilities as if they're for a luxury client.

23:32And I think that's such a beautiful idea. It's like Tokyo toilet, a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Like, when I'm in Tokyo and I'm going to the restroom, I can sit on that thing straight, you know? Perfect days, by the way, if you guys haven't. Amazing. And so, you know, I love this idea of giving, like, luxury treatment to public utilities. I think there is no reason other than our dilapidated state capacity that this isn't happening. Not to really zag on conversation. But, you know, like the example, you know, the president and the homeless person drinks the same exact Coca-Cola. The president and the immigrant coming to New York has the same exact iPhone.

24:08I think these are really powerful ideas. the ones that I'm really interested in right now is sort of around intelligence, around transportation. You know, I really, this actually kind of has like a reformed theological view on common grace, which is like God's mercy given to everyone through things happening in the world that are positive. To me, I remember writing in a Waymo for the first time and being like, oh, this is like proof God loves us because because growing growing up in the Poconos you know it's the woods you know kids are drinking every year some kid like wraps their car around a tree and they die and it's like every high school has to deal with this my Poconos accent almost came out um and I remember writing in a Waymo and being like when this is scaled like no kid has to live that story no parent has to live that story.

25:01No school has to live that story. And it really, really affected me. And so like, it's things like that, right? Like beautiful transportation, you know, that I think is also going to have a really deep psychological or societal effect because it's like, I want to live in the city, but I also want to go to the Poconos, but driving that far sucks, you know? And it's like, when that becomes automated, something really beautiful happens. And so So I think that and sort of, you know, intelligence are the two main ones I think about. But intelligence has to be put on the right rails because I think it's dicey right now.

25:36Yeah. I mean, I think my experience with the first Waymo ride, it's like a childlike magic. Like, whoa. And obviously that one's complex too, but that's funny. One last note on hardware. There are a couple of quotes I really loved from this essay you have at the back of the hardware book from Bruno Schillinger. on Soulful Technology. He says, electronic hardware seems to be the prisoner of its own utility. And then goes on to say, we should be getting into the habit of creating form from material that is not just a container for experience, but entirely in service of it. A friend of mine has an idea, he's an art guy, and he has this idea that art isn't about understanding the intention behind a piece or even what a piece is trying to communicate.

26:20Art is a prompt for an experience. This feels similar. similar, I should say. There's a notion that obviously technology is great for utility, but it can also be soulful. It can also be playful. It can also cause us to feel. I'm curious how you think about how technology objects specifically can make us feel. Yeah. It's a great, it's a great probe. That's, yeah, that's a great, I really, when we were like organizing the book and we were trying to be like, where are we going to end this thing? And there were so many like, we're like, maybe it could be a hero's journey, But we ended up on this really weird story structure.

26:55But I was really happy when it ended with Soulful Technology. So, God, not to keep referencing Tokyo, but I remember my first trip to Tokyo when I went to Team Lab Planet. And there's this one moment where you have to, like, literally climb up a kind of, like, thin waterfall. Like, you are in water. Like, you are barefoot in water. and then you have to go into like this pool that has like lily pads projected and you can like play with it. And I was having this realization that I was like, if that payoff wasn't worth it, I would have been so upset at the friction. But it sort of existed on this, like what is asked of me on this and then what I receive experientially here.

27:42And this to me is like the perfect, I just call it like a friction corridor of like payoff, right? So it's like the experience has to match the friction or input, and then you are sublime. If the friction is too high and the experience is too low, you're rage quitting. By the way, this applies to parties. Oh, my God. I mean, nothing is worse than putting in so much effort for a party that is buns. But meanwhile, a party where you have to drive two hours, Burning Man even, to take an extreme example, if it's a ton of friction and it pays off, it's the best party ever. Yeah, best party ever. And the funny thing, and I think the environment we're in now, is when something has no friction, but the experience is really high.

28:26That's called addiction. There is no friction to consuming drugs. It's a digital life. That is our digital lives. That's our digital lives, though. There is no friction to consuming drugs, and the experience is incredible. And that's why people can't break out of it. In the same way, there's no friction to consuming our phones, our current digital lives. And the experience is incredible. but that dopamine crash is really, really real, you know? And so I think about that a lot. I kind of like did a meta on the experience piece, but what was the core question? Well, the question was how can technology objects make us feel?

28:59But I think your friction corridor is an interesting step towards that. Yeah. At the very least. Yeah, exactly. I think I've been kind of giving him compliments all day, but something I loved about Yatu and Norm's USB club is that the friction created an environment for intentionality. That intentionality then got shared. And that feeling is very different than just like trying to find the good in Twitter. You know, because of the initial friction that everyone had to go through, the entire quality of the network was improved. Now, it might not feel good for everyone, but the end result is like a network that feels significantly better, which I think is really interesting, right?