THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING Podcast

Mark Kingsley on AI as a Condition & Belonging

Mark Kingsley [https://www.linkedin.com/in/markingsley/] is a brand strategist and designer, the founder of the brand studio Malcontent [https://malcontent.com/], and an instructor in the School of Visual Arts Masters in Branding program. Earlier in his career, he designed album packages for John Coltrane, Pat Metheny, Quincy Jones, Ginger Baker, and Jewel at Blue Note Records, earning a 2001 Grammy nomination. He moved into brand strategy, serving as global creative lead on Citi at Landor and Executive Strategy Director at Collins. He is the author of Universal Principles of Branding (2023) and Brands in the Age of AI [https://malcontent.com/] (2025). He also has a great substack [https://markingsley.substack.com/]. So I start all these conversations the same way with this question that I borrowed from a friend of mine who helps people tell their story. It’s a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it’s kind of big, so I kind of over explain it the way that I’m doing now. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. The question is, where do you come from? Well, there’s the geographical, obviously. So I was born in Pittsburgh, but grew up in Western New York, which is kind of a magical place. And I was born and grew up in the 1970s. So Western New York in the 1970s was the recipient of an embarrassment of riches. The school that I went to, the elementary school and high school that I went to, is exactly between Rochester and Buffalo. So what that did is it attracted some of the better candidates for teachers from both of those areas. So I had a really good intellectual foundation. My father was a college professor. My mother was a math teacher at the school for the blind, at the New York State School for the Blind. So I had educators as parents and as guides. And it’s also across the lake from Toronto. So I had access to Canadian TV, which meant Monty Python and curling. And also Rochester and Buffalo were like highlights on the concert tour for bands and musicians in the 1970s and 80s. And then on top of that, New York State in the 1980s had some really wonderful arts funding. So I went to school in Rochester and the musicians that I saw come through Rochester were absolutely astounding. I saw Jack DeJohnette, Anthony Braxton, Muhal Richard Abrams, Steve Reich, David Von Teegum. The harmonic choir, which is a group of musicians who sing in overtones. It was just incredible. An incredibly rich experience. And I got to meet and I took a class with Allen Ginsberg. I took two classes with Allen Ginsberg. I got to meet Ed Sanders from the Lower East Side Fugs. It was just incredible what came through all because of New York State arts funding, which is now gone. And it’s kind of a tragedy. So I come from abundance and live in tragedy. What was the town that you grew up in? I grew up outside of Rochester, so I’m excited to hear you talk about Western New York is a magical place. So tell me more about what made it so magical. Well, I grew up in a town called Oakfield. At the time, it had one stoplight. I think now it has two, and five miles north of a town called Batavia. So if you drive the New York State’s railway between Buffalo and Rochester, there’s a thing right next to it that says Batavia Turf Farms. It’s basically they grow grass. And so there’s a sign that says Batavia Turf Farms. So that’s the wonder, I guess, of that. But also, the other advantage of growing up between Buffalo and Rochester is I got CBC radio out of Toronto. And at the time there was a radio program called Brave New Waves that was begun by a magical person named Augusta LaPay. And this thing would go from midnight till six in the morning. And she would have all night conversations on the Dow or an all night interview with Philip Glass. And then at like five o’clock in the morning, they would start playing music and you would hear a segue from John Cage to Charlie Parker to John Zorn. And this was normal. And then Rochester had an obscure little radio station called WSAY that was out of like Greece, New York, which is a suburb of Rochester. And then Buffalo had WUWU, W-U-W-U, out of East Aurora, New York, where the Roycrofters were. And that also was just anarchic, free form, anything that comes to your mind kind of radio. So the inspiration of not really anarchy, but just do it yourself and allow yourself to be yourself. Because this is before algorithms, because right now algorithms funnel us into a certain sort of generic beige-ness. So this was the opportunity for you to really be distinctive, individual, and not feel any shame about that. It just was all accepted. So that’s part of that magic. And also, you’re outside of New York, you’re outside of any kind of major metropolitan area. So you could do your thing and no one really cared. Because no one was watching. No one paid attention. I love that. I wanted to go back to that first list of musicians that you were marveling that you had access to. I didn’t recognize a single one of those names. What kind of music are you talking about? And were you... Everything from avant-garde music, like new music, what they would call kind of a pejorative term, to jazz, free jazz, members of the AACM, the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, which was a group of black musicians out of Chicago who had this... The group that you would know would be the Art Ensemble of Chicago, had a great tagline, which is great black music from the past to the future. That’s beautiful. Yeah. I was a big Sun Ra fan. I saw Sonny play maybe 40 times when I moved to New York. And I first saw Sonny up in... There’s a place near Niagara Falls called Art Park, which was another beneficiary of New York State’s arts funding, where they took a toxic waste dump along the Niagara River, just down the river from Niagara Falls, and they converted it into an open air performance art and art installation place where like Vito Acconci would do an installation. That’s where Chris Burden did his original beam dropper. He took I-beams off a crane and lifted them maybe 60 feet in the air and then dropped them into a puddle of wet cement. So I was there for the beam drop, right? But it’s also at Art Park where I saw the North American premiere of Philip Glass’s Satyagraha, or where I saw Sun Ra, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. I saw Oregon. All these great improvised music groups, jazz musicians, Cecil Taylor. It was incredible, really, what came through. Where did this begin, this love of or appreciation or interest in music? Where did that begin for you? The radio, the radio that was available. And you just hear this weird thing. My parents were open-minded and didn’t necessarily say that you had to follow a certain kind of program other than educate yourself, learn about the world, read, write, the basics that we want from our children. My parents were very individualistic also. She worked for the state as an educator, but she also was a union person. And my father was briefly in seminar before he met my mother. So a friend of mine says that I have a certain Jesuitical kind of attitude, and I think I got that from my father. So I would ask him questions, and he would respond with that kind of Jesuitical response. It was basically like me responding to the world. Like, for example, I’m watching Johnny Carson one night, and Johnny Carson tells a joke where he says, don’t trust a proctologist who wears wax lips. It was this strange, surreal sentence. And I said to my father the next day, I said, what does that mean? What is a proctologist? And he goes, it’s the study of the anus, right? As opposed to, don’t talk about it. It was, here, this is what this is. So it was a matter of fact, openness and acceptance to the world. And I’m curious about your setup with the radio. Where were you listening to the radio, and where were you with the radio listening to getting the CBC? Well, the CBC was powerful, and it would come across Lake Ontario. So I would get it. And I first started listening to Brave New Waves when I was in college in Rochester. And I was in art school. And when you’re in art school, you stay up all night. That’s what you do. And that’s my chronotype, I guess. And so that’s basically what you do. And this was the thing. And all the other radio, for me, was a bit common. I like Led Zeppelin, but I don’t need to listen to Led Zeppelin all day. So it’s just WCMF, 96.5. It’s garbage. It’s absolute garbage. And for a brief time, I did work in college radio at WITR, and I was the jazz program director of WITR when we had maybe a hundred Watts or something like that. That’s how powerful that station was. What do you recall? As young Mark, what did you want to be when you grew up? As a kid, you remember? I didn’t know this until I heard Santana. So for me, that formative moment is watching television and seeing Santana on television. I think it was California Jam. It was a concert series in a Speedway out in California that was on ABC. And this band came out and he was touring the worst Santana record, which is Festival, but I didn’t know any better. Right. And so here’s this man who doesn’t look like me with a band playing instruments that I hadn’t seen before, congas and timbales and stuff. And with rhythms I hadn’t quite heard. And he was an amazing guitar player. It was like, what the. And so from there, I was like, I needed to find everything out that I could about Santana. So I would ride my bike around Batavia and Oakfield going to garage sales and buying for like $2 a piece or $3 a piece, because I had a job and all that, I would buy a used Santana vinyl. And then from Santana, I look on the back cover and like, who, he did a record. Who’s this guy? John McLaughlin. And why does he have this weird first name? Mahavishnu. What does that mean? So of course I have to buy some Mahavishnu Orchestra records. And then they both talk about how much they love John Coltrane. I’m like, who’s John Coltrane? Okay. And then boom, you’re in the deep water. Yeah. It’s amazing. It’s just one television show. And that’s the other thing, Peter. At this moment in the seventies when there was an openness and corporate control of media and all that, but it wasn’t as tight as it was, because I’m a late night guy. I’m watching Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert or The Midnight Special. And who did they have on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and The Midnight Special? Jeff Beck with Billy Preston, Kraftwerk, Parliament Funkadelic. It’s like, what is this poor white boy going to do? Yeah. And I saw an interview just yesterday with, I’m going to forget his name. He’s a comedy writer. And we were talking about the end of late night TV. And the hypothesis was that it’s just dead. The format’s dead right now. And he talked about how when it came up, it was dangerous. It was risky and reckless. It was all very experimental. And I remember turning it on and Letterman was sort of crazy. It was sort of crazy what was going on there. But there’s no craziness in late night now. But Letterman started as a daytime talk show. He started in the middle of the day. And I saw that as a kid. I was like, this man is insane. Or late night with Tom Snyder, who would have the great Harlan Ellison, the great science fiction writer. And Harlan Ellison was a dangerous person. He was a crank, but he was brilliant. And he saw through pretense. I have people like that on television. This is better than Dick Cavett for me. Yes. So catch us up. Tell us, where are you now? What is the work that you do? So I have my own small branding firm called Malcontent. I named it because that’s basically my approach to standard practices. I’m always trying to find a different way of doing things. And nothing kills me more than to sit in a meeting and listen to someone talk about how they’re going to leverage these assets. We say things like, I can’t boil the ocean. This kind of professionalist jargon, which is meaningless. And so I have that. And I have a few clients, small clients. I have designed logos for multi-billion dollar corporations, but I’m not doing that now. I also teach at the School of Visual Arts, Master’s in Branding Program. And I started during COVID. We all had to find a place for ourselves during COVID. So I found myself with an endowed professorship at RIT. And in the School of Design, where I went to school. So I basically was on the other side of the lectern. And I was there briefly, just for a couple of years. But when I arrived, I got this email out of the blue from the acquisitions editor at Quarto Rockport out of a town near Boston, asking me if I would be interested in writing a book called The Universal Principles of Branding. And I’m a fool, so I’ll step in. I’m like, yeah, why not? And he goes, OK, well, what are your list of the principles? And I came up with about 60 of them. And he’s like, you need 100. I’m like, who says? Well, the series is 100. I’m like, OK. So I wrote 100. And then from that book, which did relatively well, I got to travel a little bit and do some speaking engagements, like in Dublin. So after that, they came back to me and shared with me a series of books done by Stanford at the D School. And said, what do you think? And I said, are you asking me if I would be interested in working on a series on branding? And he goes, yes, exactly. So I pulled together a 16-page proposal, working off the syllabuses from my colleagues, and pitched 16 books. They selected three. First one that came out was A History of Brands by my colleague Richard Scheer. And then The Meaning of Branded Objects by my colleague Dr. Tom Guariello. And I proposed, because I was concerned that I didn’t want the series to be too didactic, I proposed a book called Brands in the Age of AI, which I was going to write. And they chose that as the third one. So I became the series editor, and basically bringing my colleagues kicking and screaming into the world of narrative text as opposed to bulleted PowerPoint slides. So it was a great education for all of us. And then the book Brands in the Age of AI came out in December. I’ve been doing the occasional talk about it, interviews with it. And then last month in May, I was asked to speak at the NYC Design Festival on their first, what they called the AI Summit. It was the first day dedicated to artificial intelligence. And that basically fueled my thoughts. The book Brands in the Age of AI gets relatively good reviews, but it also gets some, like people on Amazon will say, well, this didn’t teach me how to work my small business with AI. And it’s like, no book can do that for you. Because artificial intelligence is a domain that once you type a word, it’s obsolete five minutes later. And so you have to approach it from a different direction. Instead of the tactical, you have to approach it from the more philosophical, the more meditative, the more contextual. Which is my yoke, because that’s basically the class that I teach at the School of Visual Arts. I teach a class that applies Western philosophy and critical theory, and applies it to brand strategy. All right. I want to pause you there. We’re going to get into the book and then your Substack, because I really love the way you’re writing about, thinking about AI. But I want to connect you with brand. You came in, all this talk about music, and I know that’s where you started. When did you first encounter brand? And when did it become this, that you could make a living with this thing called brand? Making a living, it’s like that feels a little too tactical and a little too mercenary, I guess. So, I love music, as you can probably guess. And the thing that I want, oh, I forgot to tell you. Yeah. So, I’m watching Santana and I realized what I want to be is a music album cover designer, because I was kind of artistic. I was always drawing and doing posters for friends. They pay me $5. I draw a picture of like Gene Simmons from Kiss off the Kiss Destroyer. I draw that picture and give it to them for five bucks. So, I wanted to be a record cover designer. And that’s what I went to school for, not record cover design, but graphic design. And bang my head against the wall for a few years and then started doing record covers. Well, there’s a well-known record cover designer named Mike Mills, who’s also a film director. And he once said this great line. He said, the quickest way to the poorhouse is to design record covers. So, I kept at it. But the MP3 basically destroyed the industry. And then the industry ate itself with all the mergers that have happened and this corporatization of music. So, I had to find something else. And through a dear friend of mine, a designer named Alan Horry, who was working at a division of Ogilvy called BIG, the Brand Innovation Group, asked me to come in and help out on a project. And I ended up staying like a couple of years or something like that, working on big pitches, like pitches for Walmart, work for American Express, some online interface design. That’s where I did my first billion-dollar logo, the logo for DoubleClick, before they got acquired by Google. So, projects like that. And did that for a while. Ended up getting a gig at Landor, which is the world’s largest corporate identity and branding firm. And got a gig with them in the San Francisco office. I was basically the global creative lead on the Citi accounts. So, they were in San Francisco, but the main office was Citi in New York. And so, they had some Californians serving that client, but there was a sensibility difference. So, they hired a New Yorker to move to San Francisco to deal with the New York client, which was great. Landor was my graduate school on brands and how people think about brand. Landor is a huge company. They’re the ones who did the Levi’s logo. They did the San Francisco Muni logo. They did the FedEx logo. So, this is a huge firm with, at the time, 22 offices around the globe, several thousand employees. It was really a great opportunity. And because Citi was a global client and I had to travel the world, I have friends all over the world. And so, I’m about to have a conversation with a friend of mine in Singapore, right? So, there’s a beauty to that. I have these connections. But I was working on Citi at the height of the global financial crisis. So, there was inevitably layoffs that happened. So, at the height of the financial crisis, they ended up moving the center of gravity of the account back to New York. I moved with them to New York. The New York office basically gave up the account. Because they wanted to bill it differently. There’s a whole way in which you bill large clients like that. And they went on a per project basis. They weren’t making the money that they needed to. And so, they basically let go of the whole team. So, there I was, again, what am I doing? And that’s why I said, let’s do this thing Malcontent. And so, I started it out very slowly. Was working on it for a while. And I would be invited to do pitches and write scopes of work. And so, I found myself writing scopes of work, which I was writing it for the same amount of money and then find out that I would lose it to a company like Lippincott. Which is another large corporate identity and branding firm. And so, that became a little frustrating. Because the truth of the matter is, in branding, the teams that work on the very large projects, the teams are never more than like five people. Because the greatest expenditure in branding is labor, or the employees. So, you need to keep your labor down. So, your teams are very lean. And that’s just the nature of the thing. And so, me working by myself, I pull together teams of four to five people. And I would have teams of four to five people in this large corporate. But people feel more comfortable going to a firm with a long list and a conference room. So, that was a little frustrating. And then, the person who ran the brand innovation group at Ogilvy ended up having his own place, a place called Collins. And so, he invited me to come in for a project on the Equinox Hotel, taking Equinox the gym and expanding them into a hotel. And the reason they did that is that they were owned by a development firm that basically built Hudson Yards. So, they were going to build this hotel in Hudson Yards. And so, I ended up doing the upfront work. It did well. We won the accounts. And I stayed there for a couple of years and got to work on some really great things, including repositioning Ogilvy for what they called their global refounding. So, that was some exhilarating, very heady activity. So, I came into branding because there was a vacuum in the world with the music industry. And branding is, the interesting thing about my approach to design is that I don’t design because I have an aesthetic agenda that I need to follow. I began in design because I love music and I love musicians deeply and profoundly. And I wanted to do anything I could to hang around with musicians. I wanted to meet great musicians. And I have, right? So, you get to shake the hand of Wayne Shorter, that kind of stuff, right? So, I’ve had these moments, I’ve had conversations with Santana’s drummer, Michael Shrieve, talking about weird drum instruments out of Southeast Asia. I’ll have like a 10-minute conversation with them on that. So, that vacuum, but also that ability to speak with people and try and meet people in a middle place, I was able to pivot that into branding. Because my work specifically with Citi, I’m not an expert in financial services. I’m a bit more of one now, but to be able to sit in a room and begin to unravel what people are talking about was really the education. So, it wasn’t about the procedural process of building brands or analyzing brands or doing brand audits or anything like that. It was the capacity for listening and spending time with people and then trying to understand what their goals were within a certain time. Yeah. What, I mean, you’ve just sort of given a clue, but I always love to ask this question of what do you love about the work when you think about all of it and the projects that you have now? Where’s the joy in this work for you? Well, I realized that, a bit of a callback, because I realized that my ability and my opportunity to speak with musicians, I was there because I had a chip that I could bring to the table. The ante that I had was my capacity as a designer. So, the ante that I have in branding is my work as a designer and then on top of it, I’ve been writing for like 40 years on and off, often badly. When I was in college, because I love music, I started writing music reviews. And then when I was working, I had my own design studio doing music packaging, I would write articles and posts for one of the first design blogs, a blog called Speak Up. So, I always had a certain critical approach to it. And luckily, when I was in college, another great thing about being in school in the 80s is that I got to study under Dr. Mihai Nadin, who was a semiologist out of Brown University. And so, I had my first deep dive into semiotics and linguistics. And then from there, I met Michael Steranko, who was the editor-in-chief of Afterimage magazine, which was a very heady intellectual photography magazine out of the visual studies workshop. And I wrote some really, really bad reviews for him. But then I got to study under Michael. He taught a summer course out of the State University of New York at Brockport on postmodern theory. So, I got to read with him. So, I had this dog’s breakfast of a background that I could bring to the writing that I did at Speak Up. And that dog’s breakfast of an approach is something that I could bring into brands, because most people think of brands in that very operational instrumental way. Okay, you’re going to do the logo here, and you’re going to have the tagline here, and that kind of thing. And I was much more interested in the context. So, my capacity for being in a room and knowing that the ante that I have is my design work, but on top of it, the ante that I had was also a certain nascent critical capacity to consider the context in a larger context, like thinking of the design work. But then I also have to think of it within an economic context when I was working at Citi. And then I also had to think of it in a governmental context and a societal context. And then when I’m doing work in other countries, I have to think about those regional contexts and understand the differences in behavior from Japan, the way they do banking in Japan versus the way they do banking in China and Hong Kong versus the way they do banking in San Francisco. So, it’s like all of that. Literally, it’s a dog’s breakfast coming together into a certain capacity. You can’t program this. This is like you stumble upon it, right? So, my love of brand is really the openness and the available opportunities it gives me to meet people. How do you, maybe, I don’t know how you’re going to feel about this question. How do you explain brand to somebody that’s not in it? So, most people think brands are logos and taglines and stuff like that. And that’s a very trivial description. So, in the class that I teach, I say brands are an association. So, I approach it from the phenomenological sense. A brand is the association that one holds in their mind. So, the association that I have in my mind about Nike is different than the one that you have. I don’t play pickup basketball, right? So, my relationship to Nike is, occasionally, there’s a sneaker that I like to hang out and go to the bar. While you may play pickup basketball, and for you, Nike is the shoe I got to have. I got to have this kind of shoe from this kind of line because it makes my feet feel comfortable. So, it’s the same brand, but different associations. And so, branding is navigating that world of different associations and being open to it and having the capacity to listen to what your audience is telling you, what society is telling you, what the brand user or even adjacent stakeholders may have about it. You used one of my favorite words, listen. And I’m curious, how do you learn and listen upfront? Like, everybody’s got their own way of getting their feet underneath them on a project. But how do you listen or learn? And selfishly, I’m always curious about qualitative research or ethnography and the role that those things play and how you work if they play a role. Yeah. I tend to be, my personality is more qualitative than quantitative, I’m sorry. Because when you look at data, data only tells you what happened yesterday. But qualitative is an opportunity to dive into ideas as they’re forming or this affect that things have. And that’s actually a thing that I’m very interested in recently, especially with AI. And people speak about consciousness. And they think about consciousness in this mechanical computational manner. But for me, consciousness is also this bringing together of all these vectors together. And consciousness is also very much influenced by the affect, the physical affect of being in a room next to someone, the smells, the pheromones, what they call volatile organic compounds that we emit in rooms as we have emotions. Our emotional responses, this is why dogs can sense how we’re feeling much more sensitively than maybe a human being can. It’s because they have that olfactory capacity to sense changes in your volatile organic compounds that you’re emitting. So I’m very much interested in that. So when you talk about listening, it’s spending time. It is tending, right, to use a Heideggerian term. Like, how do I tend to attend to this moment and slow down and try and find a way to remove my taste, because my taste is a filter that I have, that I interpret the world. And so how do I combat my taste or how do I understand that my taste is coloring my impression of things? And so it’s a meditation, I guess, to overuse a word badly, but it’s kind of like that. So the process is just being open and the process is slowing down. The process is also not doing the research the way that people tell you to do the research, right? Just as a principle. Can you tell me a story about that? That’s fantastic. For example, I’m working on a project for a copper mining project. It’s a weird project. I can’t talk too much about it because I’m about to go into it. But because I’m talking about copper and I’m talking about mining and I’m talking about the environment and I’m talking about governments and various community stakeholders, my mind is open to things that I may hear. And I have to allow those things to come in and bump around. So the other night I’m watching cable TV. I like to have cable TV on when I work, right? I heard that at Warhol, that’s how we worked. I want to work like Warhol. And because I’m a man of a certain age and also a grownup, a teenage boy with arrested development, I love watching the Heroes and Icons channel, which is Star Trek, Highlander, Renegade, Walker, Texas Ranger. I love all that overly macho b******t. I love it because that’s what I grew up on. So I’m watching this and this is like a fringe cable network. I wouldn’t even call it a network, right? It’s just like they license a bunch of shows and they put them on to have commercials for diuretics and old people medicine and that kind of stuff. But I’m listening, I just have it on, and I hear this guy talking about antimony. He’s like, all the bullets that are fired need antimony. I’m like, what? And then he talks about it as a natural, vital resource. And I was like, oh, this is interesting because there’s an adjacency here with copper. So then I reached out to the client. I’m like, we have a conversation about that. And so that’s what I mean about not doing the research, because if I was really doing the research the way I should be, I’d sit here with Wikipedia and I’d open up the Internet and I’d use Claude or ChatGPT to do some research, like tell me what you can about copper. Tell me what you can about copper, the copper industry, the copper market, what is copper cathode and all that kind of stuff. That’s the proper way that you do research, right? And that’s the way that we’re taught. And that’s the way that our junior strategists and all of our branding firms will do this, right? That is what we call donkey work, right? But the donkey work only gets you so far. You need to be open to hearing other things, adjacencies, for example, for me, the antimony with copper. And that’s just a recent thing that happened in the last week. Yeah, it’s amazing. I’m curious. We’ve got, I want to manage time on the back end of this conversation. I want to get to the piece that you wrote, but maybe tell us a little bit about how you got into teaching and then philosophy, right? You teach brand through the lens of philosophy. And now it seems to be the right time to be talking about the value of philosophy, especially in light of brand. So how did you get into that position and what does that mean to do that? I’ve always been interested, and I guess that’s part of that Jesuitical streak that I take from my father. So my early foundation in semiotics led to this early foundation in postmodern theory. And it was the 1980s. And there was a publisher named Semiotext that was pretty popular, had very thin, little, beautiful books. They would publish translations of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, all the great contemporary French Marxist philosophers. And then Baudrillard would come to New York and speak. And I’d sit in the audience and listen to Baudrillard speak with a translator. So it was a very heady and beautiful moment. And this was also pre-iPhone. So you’d see people on the subway reading Baudrillard. And it was this little signal to other people, like, I’m a smart person, like I’m sexy, I’m smart, and I have a brain. So I was reading a lot of this stuff, but it wasn’t guided. I didn’t have the proper guidance that I needed. So at one point, about seven, eight years ago, I started teaching at SVA and basically doing it out of my semiotics background and building from there, doing reading and building a syllabus out of that. And it was OK. And then about seven or eight years ago, I started getting really serious and started doing seminars with philosophy PhDs. And so I’d sit in these seminars, I’d read, OK, we’re going to read Heidegger’s Being and Time as much as we can. Right. Or we’re going to read all of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We’re going to read, I’ve read Zizek. I’ve read all the Hannah Arendt. A lot of Nietzsche, tons of Nietzsche. All the foundational stuff that you need. And what’s beautiful is having someone whose life has been committed to that intellectual pursuit guide you through and make the connections for you. So you’re speaking like, I now understand the role of Nietzsche in Foucault’s thinking. And I understand the role of Brentano in Heidegger’s thinking, that kind of stuff. So I’m able to make these connections. And from these connections, you understand how it’s all a large conversation building upon, what about this? What about that? It’s like a big improv game. So as I got serious, my syllabus at SVA got tighter and tighter. And I’m very, very proud of the syllabus. And I’m always developing the syllabus, too. And so I have certain bugbears that I want to pursue, that I want to kill. And one of them is in brands, a lot of people use history. And they feel very strongly about history. And then when they do brand research, they’ll look at the history of the brands. But the reality is, what you need to do is look at the genealogy of the brand, which is a bit more rigorous because the genealogy of a brand is to be open to adjacencies and other things that may emerge out of it, as opposed to the official told story. You need to do your research and build a different story. Because if I can build a different genealogy, then I have a different approach to the brand, then I can offer a different solution to my client. And so that’s how I take it and apply it. That’s one thing. Another idea is when people say, well, this is what Nike stands for. Nike stands for athleticism. I’m like, not necessarily, right? And from there, I take a clue from queer studies, who say that the body that you’re born into is not necessarily the gender that you behave as, because that gender is regulated by society. Well, if I just swap out the word gender with the word brand, I have a different understanding of brand. Yeah. We’ve got 15 minutes left, and I want to get into your observations on AI. You have this piece on Substack, which maybe I’ll just let you introduce. I read it, and I think the last time we talked, you said the same thing too. And you make this declaration that, and I love where you go with it, and I’m dying to hear you talk about it, but this idea that AI is a condition. And just as an intro, what do you mean when you say AI is a condition? And how is that different? It’s just such a different angle on the conversation that everybody’s having now about what AI is and all that stuff? Well, this is also a result of that being open to other things, open to adjacencies. So the greatest live action role-playing game for men in their 50s is LinkedIn, right? I’m going to come back to that personally, Mark. Hey, I’m all over it too. I’m all over it, like white on rice. So LinkedIn is the place where experts, and I’m using that in scary quotes, go on and on about how AI slop is bad, AI is stealing from artists and all that. And the reality of the thing is, when I was in design school and in art school, I learned how to be a designer by copying other designers. So I do exactly what AI does, not as efficiently, but I do it, that’s exactly that. So to stand on that moral ground is duplicitous. I have a problem with that, people tell me what is morally correct about that position. And so from there, I’m like, okay, what is going on here? And so part of my class that I teach, I do Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction, where we talk about a thing called the optical unconscious. And the optical unconscious is the result that I have a different relationship to the world because of photography and film. Because I can slow film down, I could speed it up, I know how the body moves in a different way than just the way that I move my body. And so that affects the way in which I see the world. It makes me, as Benjamin says, it makes me more of a critic when I look at film, because I am judging like action scenes. I am judging the action of the action scene, as opposed to like, wow, that’s kind of cool, what’s going on? My relationship to photography is removed, and I am analyzing things in a different way where I become a critic. Now what’s happened over time is social media has embraced the visual, Instagram. And we now perform our lives. It’s like we are auditioning for perfection. We have commoditized our lives in such a way where it’s only if I have a beautiful vacation that makes everyone jealous. If I have a beautiful piece of latte art, I have the perfect latte every morning, or I have a great meal. And I can show you, I was at this obscure little tasting menu in this obscure little pizzeria in Brooklyn. I can prove my extreme value. I’m basically auditioning for perfection. And I’ve commoditized my life where I can enjoy my life. I only enjoy it if it satisfies that neurosis that social media has instilled in me. And so you realize then that the optical unconscious, there’s also a relationship to the branded unconscious. We see the world through brands. We understand the world through brands, right? And so this is an expanse of concepts. So if I look at AI, this is basically a hop, skip and a jump from computation. Computers change the way in which we go through the world. We think about the world in a different way. We live in a computational world and computers are this condition that is imposed upon us that we have to work within. And so I realized then that AI is equally a condition, much like modernism is a condition, right? Because we live in a modern society, a modernity, not modernist, but a modernity, which modernity is our relationship to authority, our relationship to institutions, our relationship to even ourselves. We see ourselves as individuals who can be enlightened, right? Or urbanization. Urbanization is a way in which we understand the built world around us. Instead of me living in Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber shack out with no running water, I live in a structure, in a system where water is delivered to me, electricity is delivered to me. I have a parking garage, all that stuff, right? That’s urbanism. And then you expand, you keep going on. Like literacy is a condition that we live in, right? Because I can only be an effective member of society if I am literate. And so that is a condition that I exist within, and that allows me to interrelate with other people. So from there, it’s a hop, skip, and a jump to AI, because AI is now this condition. Whether you say, I am pro-AI, I love using AI tools, and I love it like Donald Trump and the pictures that he comes out with. Or I hate AI slop because heaven forbid, here’s another image of somebody with six fingers out of hands. And I find that to be too binary, and I find that to be too simplistic. But if I understand AI as a condition, then I operate within that condition differently. I see AI potentially as the framing for why things are the way they are. And I also see it as a framing for how things can be, which means that I have a structural approach to AI, as opposed to an instrumental approach. So instead of me looking at AI as like, how am I going to make my life more efficient? I’m a junior strategist. I need to do customer research. I’ll just type it into AI, and it’ll give it to me. That’ll do a relatively good job. I have to check it, but it’ll do a quick, relatively good job. And my billings are falling through the floor, unfortunately, because clients are waking up to that reality. So I can look at AI that way, but I’m more interested in what the infrastructure of AI can allow us. So the infrastructure of urbanism allows us a different political mode, right? It allows us the opportunity to interact with people who aren’t necessarily like us. And so we have things like all the marches that happened after George Floyd in 2020, right? That is a result of modernity, and those marches were also a result of urbanization. And so the opportunity for AI to create a system where I can look at people, and the way that I’m articulating it is it’s either assumed belonging or earned belonging. So right now, everything that we do is earned belonging. I have to have a credit score. I have to do the little tab with my watch or the tab with my card. I have to show a credential when I go into an airport. That’s earned belonging to a space, earned belonging to an interaction. But assumed belonging is an infrastructure thing, right? Because our faces are in every computer system around the world. A couple of years ago, we’re going through Heathrow Airport from Shannon, and it does a little face zoom. It goes, oh, hi, Mark. My real first name, David. It goes, hello, welcome, that kind of thing. I was like, I hadn’t been to the UK since the development of facial recognition technology, but you already have it. You already know who I am, and you’ve let me in. This is kind of amazing. So the data is out there. How do we use this data in such a way to remove friction? And in removing that friction, potentially, this is the opportunity to also remove other aspects of earned belonging, which are about our bodies. Our race, our gender. Yeah. I see this as an opportunity. Now, granted, there have been nascent attempts to control this information, right? Through HIPAA, the GDPR in Europe, that kind of stuff. And they’re beginning steps, and there needs to be greater governance. There also needs to be greater intention for why we’re designing these systems. But I see it as an opportunity. And the reason why I find this an interesting opportunity is there’s a historian named Lynn Hunt who wrote a couple books on the French Revolution. And she proposed that the French Revolution happened because of an emerging subjectivity, a collective subjectivity that happened in France through the proliferation of prints and books, and printing allowed this to happen, and also certain plays that were performed. And tea parties where men and women gathered instead of just beer halls or coffee shops, which were predominantly male, opportunity for both genders, both sexes to get together and speak. And this created a potential subjectivity, which then allowed for the French Revolution. And this is an idea that I originally got from an Italian Marxist named Maurizio Lazzarato. And he begins a book on the creation of the subject within capitalism. He proposes that Germany and Japan after the first, second world war, within 20 years were economic powerhouses. What is it that created that? So yes, we did have American aid, but also collectively the Germans and the Japanese developed a whole new subjectivity that allowed them to exercise economic dominance in the world, where Germany very quickly became one of the economic powerhouses on the planet. Size-wise, they punched above their weight. So I’m intrigued because I see, if we can build a system where there’s an assumed belonging, that then opens the door for a different kind of subjectivity, a collective subjectivity. Now, I see this. Can you describe what it means, the distinction between the assumed belonging and the earned belonging? Because this stuff intuitively, it feels really right, and I’m really attracted to it, but there’s pieces of it mechanically that I’m not totally tracking. So when you say assumed belonging as the result of AI as a condition, what are you pointing at? What’s an example of what that means? Maybe it’s an example of what I’m pointing away from. So social media has deeply fractured our collective subjectivity into individuality. The only powerful, the strongest subjectivity that exists in the United States right now, I think, is MAGA. Because that subjectivity of, world’s not working for me, things aren’t right, everything’s broken. Make America Great Again is an inchoate way of describing it, but it does capture that feeling, right? It captures that subjective feeling. Otherwise, I drill down deep into whether or not I am queer, whether or not I am black, whether or not I am a Boy Scout, this amplification of our own individuality, we need to do that, right? We need to find ourselves. But there’s also a collective quality to it, which is a result of urbanization. There’s a collective quality that we are as a political group, right? And we occasionally just wink, tip our head over the edge of the wall here, like with the 99% idea during the financial crisis. So there’s a potential here. And the fact that people are beginning to wake up to the inherent danger of data centers, which are placed willy-nilly without attention to environment and location and all that, this for me are all nascent rumblings of a potential new subjectivity, which can be enhanced. Now, as designers, we have the opportunity to design and create a system that allows for people to see themselves as part of a different subjectivity. Instead of drilling down into each individuality, which is what happens with brands, what happens with a lot of design work, right? What it does is it just reifies or it confirms or underlines your own sense of individuality. What would happen if we didn’t design to make people feel more like themselves, but design in such a way where people felt that there was a larger connectivity, right? It just comes down to intention. Yeah. We’ve got just a couple of minutes left. And so I want to try to close this up in a way that’s coherent. And one of the things that I love about this piece, this way of thinking about AI, is that it tries to get away from the binary, right? That we’re really trapped in this. And it’s so hard to get away from the tool. Basically, you know that AI is the worst thing that’s ever happened or the best thing, the boomers versus the doomers. So how would you talk about AI as a condition, or what do we lose when we think about AI as one of these two poles? As we talked about it, as if it’s either good or bad, what are we missing? Well, we are rewarded. This is basically the effect of Rene Descartes and this whole mind body separation and this dualism, subject object. And so when I look at AI as an object, as a tool, I am operating in that binary. But the thing is, we don’t operate in the binary all day. When I walk across a floor, I don’t think with every step is the floor solid. I just walk across the floor, right? And this is an idea that Heidegger calls transparency or the ready at hand. So he describes a carpenter with a hammer. And when I’m using it, if I’m a really good carpenter and I’m using a hammer, I’m thinking about what I’m having for lunch. I’m not thinking about the fact that I’m holding a hammer made by Stanley, right? I am not holding that hammer in that kind of binary subject object relationship. I’m just using it and I am being part of, I am existing within that thing. And so for people to think of AI in that subject object dualism, they’re not realizing that they exist within the condition of AI, right? Because it’s freaking everywhere, right? There’s the little cameras that when I go park my car at the long-term parking lot of JFK, I make a reservation. I show up, there’s no one at the gate, but there’s a little camera that reads my license plate and says, oh, hi Mark, come on in, right? So it’s that potential for recognition within a system where I don’t have to worry about, there’s no one here, how am I going to get a ticket to put on the dashboard of my car so they won’t tow my car in a week, because I’m going on vacation. So it removes all of these things. And we already live in this world. We live in this world where, when I drive on the thruway, if I don’t have an EZ Pass, it’s reading my license plate and sending me a bill. So we already behave in this way. So why are we removing ourselves in that subject object manner? And instead, let’s think about the condition. So when I’m on the thruway, I’m not worried about how I’m paying the tolls. I’m on the thruway. I’m worried about whether the idiot next to me is on the phone, or the person in the left lane, who’s in the left lane without left lane ambition, right? That kind of stuff. I’m worrying about the stuff that I should be worried about, as opposed to the stuff that AI takes care of. Beautiful. Well, Mark, I want to thank you so much. It’s been great talking with you. I appreciate you accepting the invitation. And yeah, thank you so much. My pleasure. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

27 Jul 2026 - 57 min

Gideon Lichfield on Fairness & Storytelling

Gideon Lichfield [https://www.linkedin.com/in/gideonlichfield/] is a journalist and Policy Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, affiliated with the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation. He writes Futurepolis [https://futurepolis.substack.com/], a Substack on reinventing democracy, governance, and government for the 21st century. He was previously Global Editorial Director and Editor-in-Chief of WIRED; Editor-in-Chief of MIT Technology Review; a founding editor at Quartz, and a foreign correspondent and science writer at The Economist. He lives in Berkeley, California. I start all these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine, who’s also a neighbor, and she helps people tell their stories. And it’s this big, beautiful question, which is why I use it. But it’s so big, I tend to over explain it the way I’m doing right now before I ask it. So I want you to know that you’re in absolute control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? And again, you’re in absolute control. That’s a very tricky question to answer. I think physically, I come from the UK. Ancestrally, I come from Jewish communities in Eastern Europe. Philosophically, I come from just a belief in fairness and desire to see fairness in the world. Which I think is why I’m interested in democracy, because someone asked me the other day, if you had to describe the point of democracy in one word, what would it be? And I said, fairness. It’s the system where the bullies don’t get to win. That’s beautiful. And do you have a recollection as a kid? Do you have an idea of what you wanted to be when you grew up? Do you remember? I mean, the usual things, astronaut, writer. I can’t remember the others, but nothing very unusual. Yeah. And where was most of your childhood? Where did you spend your childhood? I grew up in London, and I was born and raised almost all my childhood in exactly the same district in Northwest London. Nice. And catch us up. Where are you now? And what is the work that you do? So right now, I live in the Bay Area in Berkeley. I’ve bounced around the world a lot. I was a journalist in Mexico City, Moscow, Jerusalem, came to the US, lived in New York for several years, moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a while for another job, became bi-coastal New York Bay Area, and now I’m full-time Bay Area. And the thing I work on now is what could the future of democracy look like? How would it look if we were trying to invent that system today instead of three centuries ago? And what could come after the current period of, I could say authoritarianism, but I think even more broadly just institutional fracturing, the clear inadequacy of the governing institutions that we have. I appreciate that distinction. I think a lot of conversations get captivated by the authoritarian bit, and we don’t end up actually looking at the degree to which the institutions that we currently have aren’t functioning or aren’t functional or aren’t fit for purpose. Can you say more about that, just the diagnosis of the current state? I mean, I think as you said, we don’t talk enough about that. We focus on the authoritarian lens, and that’s one of the things that frustrates me a little right now about the conversation about democracy in the U.S., because it is very focused on the Democratic Party winning back power. And there is this unspoken assumption that if the Democrats retake Congress or the White House, then, in quotes, democracy will be restored, and things will go back to some degree to where they were. And I think that that misses both the amount of dismantling of institutions that has gone on under the Trump administration, but also just the uselessness, the increasing uselessness of those institutions over the past, I would say, at least couple of decades, probably longer. And so what I mean by that is we have these systems of governance and representation that were created in the 18th century before we even had railways and the telegraph. Information moved much more slowly, goods moved more slowly, the world was less globalized, change just happened at a much slower pace. Just if we take the electoral system, it was designed to enable people to delegate decision-making to a small group of people, because any kind of broader national level decision-making in which citizens had participation simply wasn’t practical, obviously. And we also have to remember that even though we call this country a democracy and we call other countries democracies, the systems, the electoral systems that were created there were not intended to be democratic. They were intended to allow a fairly small number of privileged male people, people who were men, educated, relatively prosperous, to make the decisions because they were considered the people who were competent to make the decisions. So everything that we have now that we call democracy is this kludge. It’s been, bits and pieces that have been added onto that system that was designed for this very different era. And so some of the ways in which it falls short are that it gives people notionally a voice in the form of votes, but it doesn’t involve them in decision-making in a meaningful way, and it doesn’t create a feeling of citizenship in a meaningful way, at least certainly not at the national level. Systems of government, systems of lawmaking respond very, very slowly to technological change. Lawmaking especially, we take ages to draft laws, we take ages to pass them, and then we don’t revise them for the most part as time goes by, and they don’t update to the reality of the world. We also, our systems of information, of the information environment, were created in an era when information was fairly sparse and expensive to produce, and so free speech laws were in part designed to make sure that interesting ideas and useful thoughts could be expressed and could not be suppressed. And today we have the opposite problem where misinformation lies and general slop crowds out the stuff that is useful and worthwhile. And so while we don’t want to abolish the idea of free speech, we have to think differently about what the goal of that principle is and how we create an informed citizenry and how we inform good decision-making. So there are all these assumptions and structures that date from that time, from centuries ago, that don’t function very well in this new world. And so this is even leaving aside the problem of political polarization that we have today, which has created all this deadlock. Even if you did not have that, the structures that we have are still pretty inadequate to the task of governing the 21st century and do not take advantage of the tools and methods that we could have today for making citizens more engaged and making government more responsive. That’s amazing. What you just said, I don’t think it really occurred to me that, again, you’re peeling apart these pieces that, again, we can get really distracted by polarization. And again, forget to look at just structurally how the system is either counterproductive or doesn’t help us do the work. Can you speak? And maybe this is relevant, but the degree to which this plays out at a local level versus a national level, is there a difference in the way that the institutions are working or not working in that way? Yes. I mean, I think so at one level, the polarization, I think is probably worse at the national level. In other words, in local communities, there is at least the opportunity to bring people together around the problems that their community shares. And I think for me, I said that democracy for me means fairness, but I think it also as a process, maybe fairness is the outcome that we want. But as a process to me, democracy just means shared problem solving. You have a bunch of people, there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t agree with, but they face a problem that they need to solve because they live together in the same community. And so there is a process for bringing them together and creating a system or a process for reaching an agreement on the solution, even if not everybody likes it, or even if nobody likes it completely, and trusting that process and being willing to accept the results of it. That’s what democracy is. So at a local level, there is at least the potential to do that more. And the obstacles there, I think, are number one, well, in the US specifically, we have the decline of local news, which makes it difficult for everybody to be on the same page about what’s happening. And we also have the fact that local authorities are under-resourced, particularly when it comes to using technology. And so it makes it very difficult for them to be responsive and keep up to date with the changes that are happening. At the national level, you have government theoretically more capable, but in fact, very sclerotic, so much institutional cruft that has developed and very polarized because at a national level, we’re not a community in the same way as we are in a town. And so it is easy for the polarizing voices to have more sway in the media and for that to drive the sense of national divide. So what does it mean to work in this space? What are the things that you’re doing? What are you following? Just paint a picture of where you spend your time and what you’re learning and discovering. So I’m still figuring out what it is to work in this space for me. I keep my thumb or try to keep my thumb on the pulse of many different things that I think count as part of this problem of how you govern democratically. And I already sketched out some of the broad pillars. There are methods of civic participation that aren’t just voting and also aren’t just turning up to town hall meetings, which are a very time consuming thing that only a few people can really allow themselves to do. So there are technological innovations and social innovations around deliberative democracy and participatory democracy of various kinds. So I keep an eye on those. I keep an eye on work in improving state capacity and reforming the way government works and making its processes less clunky. And that can include everything from just bureaucratic management and process reform to procurement. These are very, very dull things, but they actually clog up the works of government enormously. I obviously, as a journalist, pay a lot of attention to what I mentioned about the information environment and how do you create informational spaces that are less toxic, less polarizing. Some of that is about what is the business model for news media in this world of AI. Some of that is can you build social platforms that create more coming together of community and less polarization. So those are some of the pillars and there’s interesting work going on in all of those areas. I think the challenge is that you can come up with a scenario, and I’ve come up with scenarios where you bring all of these innovations together and you have a form of democracy that works much better, where people are more informed, they have more civic engagement, government is more responsive, it all works better. But getting from here to there, of course, is the really difficult part. And the chief obstacles that I think I see to that are, number one, as we said earlier, everyone is talking about democracy or restoring democracy as getting the Democratic Party back in power, not deeper institutional reform. Number two, a lot of these changes simply mean going against incentives that a lot of people have to keep the current system the same. Politicians, no matter of what party, have an incentive to keep things as they are because they have learned the game of political fundraising and voter mobilization and manipulating the message and so forth. And if you create structures that give citizens more of a say in day-to-day governance, that threatens their control. And so you’ve seen a lot of experiments in the U.S. and elsewhere with things like citizen assemblies, where you give a particularly thorny problem to a group of randomly selected citizens and they hash it out and come to a consensus. And in some places that works, but it doesn’t work unless you get the politicians to buy into the process and say, yes, we will take the recommendation seriously. And often that is the hardest work and often that is the work that is not done. Or one administration, one mayor may be open to that kind of civic participation, the next one who comes along is not interested. And so those things don’t get institutionalized. Similarly with government reform, process reform, there are a lot of government bureaucrats who have an interest in keeping the system the way it is because of the control they have. There are a lot of private contractors who benefit from the way the procurement happens and don’t really want to upset the apple cart. So it’s this challenging thing where I know a lot of people who work in democratic innovation in one or another of these areas and they have fantastic ideas, but connecting those ideas to how to bring those ideas about is difficult. And I think connecting the conversation that the democratic innovators have to the conversation that the people involved in mainstream politics and movement building and campaigning have, that’s a very difficult gap to bridge as well. Can you say more about that gap? So I’ve been to gatherings where you have people who are veteran campaign organizers and they are thinking, how do we win the next election? They’re thinking, how do we improve voter registration? They may be thinking about slightly more out there things like how do you change, how do you combat gerrymandering? How do you change a state to having open primaries? Or how do you change the electoral college? Those kinds of systems, those kinds of changes, those are basically changes to the electoral system, to the voting, the way that we do voting. That feels like stuff that they are working on, that is relevant to them, that has measurable outcomes, which are who gets into office. That’s where the funding is. And for those people, for those people, a citizens assembly or a government process reform is not really relevant to the goals that they have. So how do you bring about, how do you tie a conversation about deep institutional change or deep democratic process change to the very real imperatives that the people who actually occupy most of politics and most of organizing and most of what we would call the democracy industry, if you like, how do you tie that to what their needs are? So I was in Athens last week and for a House of Beautiful Business for this event and I had a walking tour. Have you been there at all? Have you visited any of these sites? I imagine you have. I have. Yes. I’ve walked around the Agora and all of those things. So I’m going to test this on you. Please correct me if I’m wrong. But I had a walking tour of the Pnyx, which is not a site that I had ever really heard of. But my understanding is that it was the site where they built a stage for citizens to stand upon and address an assembly and they met regularly. And it was where it was sort of the birth of deliberation. Right. And that was the deliberation before the vote that was the real innovation of Athenian democracy. Is that fair? Yes. I think that’s right. I visited that site, too, and there’s not much you can see right now, but there is this stone platform, right? Where the speaker could stand and then there’s this area all around it where potentially thousands of people could sit and listen. That’s right. So, yes, I think obviously that is seen as a precursor. It’s seen as a democracy and it’s still a modern democracy and that it’s seen as an inspiration to the deliberative process that the people talk about today. And it worked very well for its time and place and for the size of the population and the kind of place that it was. So I think the question is always, all right, what is it that you can take from that and apply today? Yeah. It seemed to me, what brought it to mind was this sense that we’re sort of obsessed with voting and we’ve sort of abandoned or forgotten how central deliberation was to begin with. And also, and I’m wondering, my experience here in Hudson, I think this is how you and I first sort of engaged is that I became interested in Citizens Assembly because I encountered it at Bard and I had experienced what I felt in Hudson, this feeling that the way that we gather in the public meetings, in the spaces where we come together, they simply have been overwhelmed by social media and the impact of technology on everything that we do. And I wonder, I guess I’m just sort of presenting that to you, the degree to which, and this is where we started, that these institutions, these habits, these rituals of democratic and civic engagement, we keep doing the same thing, even though the world has transformed radically in terms of how we share information, how we interact with each other, and we pretend that everything is fine and that we’re doing everything right. And this gets to, I know I’m rambling a little bit, but I’ve had conversations recently with people who say, listen, this is how it’s supposed to work. Everything’s fine. But I guess my question to you is, does that resonate with you, this diagnosis that so much of the technological change that’s happened in the last 15, 20 years with social media has really, really changed the role of just the public meeting, the town hall, and the degree to which that’s a piece of the argument for these deliberative processes? I don’t know if it has changed the role of the traditional town hall, because I think for the most part, those town halls still operate the way they did. A thing that comes to mind with this, when you raise that question, is there’s a film that is making the rounds now, and it’s going to be, I think, on public release in December, made by Carolyn Lukensmeyer, who is one of the doyennes of deliberative processes here in the US. And it’s about how after 9-11, after the Twin Towers fell, the city of New York decided to try to involve people in the process of deciding what to build in their place. They held a number of town hall meetings, traditional-style town hall meetings. There was a theater, there were some guys on the stage, and then hundreds of people in the audience. And they were a mess. And they were a mess because it just became an opportunity for grandstanding, and people threw ideas back and forth, but there was no process for getting to a consensus. And so Carolyn was brought in to run a deliberative process where they invited 5,000 people. They filled the Javits Center in New York, that giant convention center with tables, and they had a bunch of technology, which was very advanced to its day. And they had this process by which people were brought to a consensus on what they wanted for the site. And famously, this process led to, the city came in with six proposals from different developers on what to do with the World Trade Center site. And this assembly overwhelmingly rejected them all and forced the city to go back to the drawing board. So that’s a long preamble by way of saying, I don’t think the town hall meetings in their traditional form have changed much. There is some work going on in places I think like Massachusetts to try to broaden access to the town hall, give people ways to take part in it remotely and so forth. But again, it’s clunky. It doesn’t necessarily work very well. But at least those town hall, the benefit those town hall meetings have is that they’re already an accepted part of the political process. Politicians understand them. They understand this is a thing that you do when you want to interact with the public. And this is a way that the public is seen to have a voice. And so a more, better run deliberative process like a assembly is probably much better for achieving an outcome. But as I said, institutionalizing it, fitting it into the way politicians work is the hard part. Yes, absolutely. And I feel I didn’t communicate very well. I think I’m completely aligned with what you said that somehow because the world has changed around the town halls, what’s asked of them or how they’re used has been sort of warped to your point, the story you told where we come in really well-informed or we’ve done all the deliberation on social media with our people and we come in and it’s this performance of something that’s not, it’s not deliberation meaningfully, it doesn’t seem to me. And I wonder, yes, I love the story that you just told. But also, you just said we come in well-informed in the deliberation on social media, or we don’t. In some cases, people come in with extreme views fanned by what they’ve seen on social media and that can make the town halls even more fractious. Yes, yes, yes, you’re exactly right. I think that we just had, excuse me for being a little rambly here a little bit, we had a vote on the budget here in Hudson, and it was a yes-no vote. And it’s just all the heat and all the energy that happens in this zero-sum vote in a small town where the stakes are really high. Things get really emotional and they get really complicated. And it’s quite intense to see decisions like this just divide a town, and get in between relationships between neighbors. And everybody can say that the district created the spaces for the meetings, they had public meetings, they had the town, they had the budget workshops, they did all those things, but people don’t show up because nobody can find time to show up. And so the spaces that we create for this stuff aren’t utilized, it seems to me. Yeah, I’m just sort of, and this is what for me makes the call for new forms of democratic participation so urgent, but I’ve also experienced the obstacle that people have a hard time recognizing the problem, and then they really don’t understand the solution. They’re struggling on both sides of this thing where they think this is fine, this is supposed to happen, this is how it is supposed to be. And then the solution seems so strange, they can’t quite wrap their head around it. Yes, yes. Where have you seen it work, and where are the shining lights, what are the kinds of things that you’re seeing that you’re most excited about that represent possibility in this space? There’s a handful of examples that people point to around the world of where this has really worked, and the one that is always cited is Ireland, which used a Citizens’ Assembly to decide really tricky issues like abortion and same-sex marriage, and it has become an institution. The Irish Citizens’ Assembly is now almost a branch of government. Every year it convenes, every year they tackle difficult issues, and a bunch of factors came together to make that work that were very specific, and it succeeded because it was seen as having achieved consensus on these issues which were incredibly politically divisive, that the politicians themselves couldn’t solve, and also because it was run in such a way that people were able to see the process, there was a lot of transparency, there were some good stories that came out of it about people who started on very different sides of the fence coming to see each other’s point of view. So it is a lot about the perception and the initial success, and whenever you see these poster child cases, then the question arises, well, why doesn’t that happen here, or why doesn’t it happen there? And again, it is because it’s so dependent on certain things going well. I made a list recently of deliberative processes in the US, and actually what I found to my surprise was that if you go back about six years, there have been one, maybe two deliberative processes in American cities per year between 2019 and 2024, and for 2026, I count probably half a dozen. Oh my gosh. And this is still small. These are small towns or cities that are debating quite small scale local issues. Fort Collins, Colorado, last year, deliberated on how to redevelop a local stadium. Lexington, Kentucky, this spring, did something on council members’ pay and review of the local charter. Connecticut is doing something on property taxes. Akron, Ohio, is doing something on housing. So it’s hopeful that these are happening, and the question is always going to be what does it make an impact? And the question around impact is, first of all, do people actually feel, the citizens actually feel like they knew about the process, that it reached a result? Did the local politicians pay attention to it? Did they adopt the recommendations? And then if it did work out well, is there some structure in place for it to be repeated? And we don’t have the answers yet in any of those places. So yeah, I think, again, going back to Ireland and other places where it’s worked, I think the key thing has been there is a really thorny problem that everybody agrees is a problem, and everybody agrees the politicians are not solving. There is political buy-in. The politicians agree to take notice of this process. There is public awareness about the process and how it works and what makes it better than other things. And then there is a successful outcome, a consensus that they reach, that the politicians adopt, and that actually demonstrates the proof of concept. You have to have all of those things for it to really take hold. I’m curious where you first encountered these ideas. I have my experience where I really can point at a time and place where I encountered this idea, I saw it as something that was beautiful, and it is new to everybody else. So I’m wondering, what was your moment of discovery where you encountered this? You were doing work in other territories, I think, or maybe as a journalist. When did you see democratic reform or citizens’ assembly or these processes? What was your first experience? And what did that mean? I can’t remember specifically. I remember that about 15 years ago, when I was working for The Economist, and I was in New York City, and I had a beat that allowed me to range quite widely. And so I focused it somewhat on technology and society. And that was where I became aware of some participatory processes happening in other parts of the world. And I went to meeting something called the Open Government Partnership, which was this gathering from different countries of people trying to figure out different ways to make government more transparent and more participatory. And so I gradually started to build the awareness of those processes then, and started to ask the question of that basic animating question. All right, if we were doing democracy, if we were inventing a democracy today, what are the things we would do? And these seemed to be some of the answers. Yeah. What do you love about it? What’s the joy in the work that you’re doing for you? For me, the joy is talking to interesting people who are really, really dedicated to the cause. I constantly meet people who are fighting these really difficult battles where the outcome is not at all guaranteed. And if it does work out well, it’s probably going to take years. And it can be incredibly frustrating. And they’re just such dedicated souls. And that is very inspiring. And then some of the more, I suppose, conceptual stuff, thinking about questioning all our assumptions that we’re raised with about what is a democracy? Why is it good? Who does it benefit? And peeling away all these things that we’re educated on and never really questioned. Which also then, I think, makes you see more clearly why the current system has failed so badly. See the blind spots of the, even the people who defend the system and the democracy campaigners and the politicians, see all of the assumptions that are baked into it. So for, one of those assumptions, for example, you brought up Athens. The founders of the U.S. did not like the word democracy. For them, it was associated with mob rule and tyranny of the majority. They consciously created a republic, not a democracy, that was premised on this idea that you delegated your decisions to a small group of people who were somehow mentally equipped to take them. And so even getting the majority of people to question the meaning of the word democracy in that context and think about what it could be, as opposed to what they think it is. I think that’s a fascinating problem and part of, I suppose, what I have been trying to do, and I’m not sure with much success yet, is storytelling around it. How do you tell a story about what democracy could be that breaks people’s conceptions of it as this broken, useless, unresponsive system that we have today and gives them a sense of it being potentially something else? Yeah, that’s beautiful. I was, well, it’s funny, you’re reminding me, Democracy Next is now, they’ve embraced this elected oligarchy. They’re taking this same approach. They’re saying, we think we have a democracy, but what we actually have is this elected oligarchy. And what we really need is a true democracy, a deliberative democracy. And so I thought that was an interesting example of them also trying to find ways of communicating this issue. Yeah, and what’s interesting, sorry, just sorry to interrupt, but the elected oligarchy frame, what’s interesting to me is it resonates right across the political spectrum. And so Noam Chomsky, the famous political thinker, has been saying some variants of that for decades. In the 1960s, he wrote about how essentially corporate power has captured political institutions. Curtis Yavin, who is this theorist of the neo-reactionary dark enlightenment, very right wing, believes that democracy should be dismantled and the country should be ruled by a monarch, makes essentially a similar diagnosis that what we have is not really democracy. It is a thing he calls the cathedral, but elected oligarchy would be another decent phrase for it. I do think that there is an issue here that this is particularly true of the US. And I think because of the structure of the political system, because of the role that big money plays in politics, and because of the degree to which capitalism is less regulated here than it is elsewhere, it creates that elected oligarchy much more strongly than it does in some other countries in Europe. Yeah. I’ve had the experience, and I’m curious what your take on this is, where I feel like citizens’ assembly has been picked up in some places as a way of going around the institution. I feel like the climate activism world has taken it as a way of just trying to take shortcuts around the actual democratic institutions, whereas I never really felt like that was my attraction. My attraction was more about as a supplement or a way of reforming the current one. And so there’s a way in which this stuff can be, feel more, I guess, is there a reformist view of this versus a more radical view, and that those are different ways of picking up the same tool? I think that that is generally true of social movements. There is always a reformist view and a radicalist view. There’s a reformist wing and there’s a radicalist wing. There’s Martin Luther King and there’s the Black Panthers. When I was growing up in the UK, there were two key organisations that were campaigning for gay rights. And one was very much about trying to work inside institutions and talk to politicians and push from the inside. Another one was about activism and demonstrations. And I actually think in any social movement, these things work together. Often they seem like they’re fighting each other, but actually they’re both necessary. And so when people talk about introducing deliberative democracy, I similarly hear two strands. And I hear the people who say, in order for this to work, you have to start by getting the political buy-in. You have to convince the politicians it’s in their interests to listen to this. And then there’s another strand that says, if you can build enough of a social movement around a deliberative democracy project, around holding a citizens’ assembly on some issue, then you can pressure the politicians to take it seriously. So I think both approaches maybe can be suitable for different contexts. Yeah, that’s awesome. Thank you for that. I had never really considered it that way. You said something earlier that I wanted to follow up on. You talked about, I can’t remember what the... You talked about the feeling of citizenship, that some of these things can imbue that feeling of citizenship and some maybe don’t. Do you know what I’m referring to and what does it mean to have the feeling of citizenship? I suppose I would say it’s to have a sense of, number one, agency. I can influence the processes. It’s having a sense of community. I share something in common with all of these people around me, even though we disagree on a whole bunch of things. Maybe it’s also a sense of responsibility. A friend of mine, a guy called Jon Alexander, who’s a very big deliberative democracy guy and one of the, I think, co-founders of Democracy Next, has this framework. He talks about people as subjects, consumers, or citizens. Subjects was when we were all ruled by kings and really had no say in anything. Consumers is how a lot of people relate to democracy and to government in the 20th century. They’re expecting government to just provide good services and for them to be able to push back if it doesn’t. Citizens is the mindset in which you actually see yourself as an active participant who has a responsibility to make it work yourself. You have agency, you have responsibility, and you have a sense of community. His question, his animating question is, can we move from most people seeing themselves as consumers to most people seeing themselves as citizens? That’s probably my answer to what you asked. It’s beautiful. I met Jon. He was there at the event in Athens. His story is really powerful. He makes it very clear that we are, in some respect, trapped in a consumer story about what we expect, what we think is expected of us. Trying to invite people into a citizen story seems to be... Would you say that that’s part of your project too? Your project fits into that, is how to invite people into a citizen’s mindset where they have a different relationship instead of expectations about what’s available to them and what’s asked of them. Yeah, very much so. I think maybe the distinction for me is that I’m trying to think about all the pieces of the puzzle as well. John, for example, I know is very strong on the idea that there’s no deliverism, which is if only government delivered services better, people would trust it more. He’s very skeptical of that. I am more inclined to say, well, you need both. You need the civic engagement that gets people a sense of participation and a feeling of agency. You also need the government to deliver services better and be more responsive so that they feel they’re getting something that works for them. Then you also need, as I said, the media, the communication information environment part so that they feel that they’re informed and so they don’t feel completely separated and polarized from their fellow citizens. To me, all of these things fit together and you can’t really... I don’t think one can really advance without the other. Yeah. I’m trying to think of... I guess I’m curious more about the fairness... I haven’t really... Yeah. Can you say more about fairness and your feelings about it? I think this is probably just my childhood psychology, but I hate unfairness and I hate it when people get to abuse their power. I think of democratic governance as an inoculation against that, simply by virtue of the fact that it causes alternations in power and makes it hard for people to consolidate power to the extent that a dictator or a monarch does. Ideally, it gives people voice and it enables those who are being discriminated against or oppressed or just left out or impoverished. It gives those people agency and a voice to campaign for or agitate for better treatment for themselves. That ideally should be the outcome. I don’t believe in a utopian socialist paradise where everybody has equal wealth and is equal in every way, but I do believe in a society where everybody is treated fairly. Obviously, certain basic rights and processes, an ability to advance, but an ability to defend themselves against abuse by the powerful. To me, that’s... Why else do we have this? Yeah. I’ve stumbled on a good question, I hope. If you were to design a role for yourself, either at the national level or maybe in a city, what would it be and what would you do? If you had the power and the budget and if you were given the license to implement some of these ideas, what kinds of changes do you think you would want to make? That’s a great question. Because I go in different directions. One of them is trying to do what I do now, which is be a storyteller and help change people’s minds. And so that might be a role where if you’re working for a city or a government, your job is to go around and be the explainer to people, whether it’s in local communities, whether it’s in the bureaucracy, whether it’s in the media. And all of these different sectors explain to them what a democracy could look like and how their piece of it fits together with the other pieces and why they have to work together. So that storyteller would be the most obvious thing, since that’s what I’ve done as a profession. I also sometimes think maybe it would be nice to actually be a facilitator of processes, deliberative processes, conflict resolution, and help people bridge those divides. Another potentially could be focused more on the process side of things. What does it take to get a bureaucracy to move faster? What does it take to get a legislature to do lawmaking differently and to move and to be more responsive to technological change? That’s more, that’s less my area of expertise. But I think that could also be a valuable thing where I think there’s a lot of, in bureaucracy and in legislatures, they’re just not very good understanding of technology and what its implications are and how it’s changing things they do and also of how they could do things differently. And so just creating some space, some opening, some vision around what is possible and how you might change things, how you might change those processes, that could also be something good to do. Yeah. I love the explainer or the storyteller as the first, as that. I think very often, obviously, I’m just thinking my own experience in Hudson where a lot of these, they don’t really take a lot of responsibility for telling that story. One of the biggest troubles is that just the city or the place that you live in very often is incoherent, I think. Incoherence is almost the first level of complication. There’s this woman, Fiona McNae, who’s a British semiotician, and she did a TED talk and the title was Taking Responsibility for Being Understood. And I’ve always felt that phrase, especially when applied to government or civic stuff, is really powerful because they don’t often do that work. Maybe this is related to that deliverism critique. I mean, people said Biden delivered a lot of stuff, but if you’re not telling people that stuff has been delivered, nobody really knows that it’s been delivered in a way that so that these things come together. Do you know what I mean? That you have to take responsibility for making sure that the delivery has been understood or has been received. Yes. And that then, again, becomes a problem in the information environment. The Biden administration, one of the biggest complaints of the people who worked in it was, we did all this great stuff. We passed the Inflation Reduction Act. We passed the CHIPS Act. We created all this investment and nobody knows about it. And some of that may have been poor storytelling. A lot of it was probably the media environment, which meant that those stories didn’t surface. Some of it was that inflation eclipsed those achievements. And I think this is, in fact, one of the critiques of deliverism is that, is precisely that, that you can deliver, but that people don’t necessarily know you delivered because, maybe because the storytelling is inadequate. But yes, you’re right. Ideally, a government would be able to say, here are the good things we did. And people would appreciate them, but people also need to see the bad things that it did or the ways in which it fell short. In some ways, I think that perhaps the more useful way, I’m thinking out loud, but a more useful way to show people that a government is responsive is not, here are all the great things we did that you should be grateful for, but you have a complaint, here’s how we’re responding to it. And make it really about the citizen’s individual interaction over the thing that they particularly care about, rather than the program that maybe has some broad effect on the economy, but that doesn’t necessarily touch them. Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, what you just, for whatever reason, the arrival of AI into all of this just popped into my consciousness. You’ve been in this space for a long time. What has that done to the work? What’s exciting about it? What’s challenging about it? What does it do to this issue of democratic reform? It complicates it hugely. Again, it accelerates the pace of change even further, which means that government institutions are that much more incapable of keeping up with things. So there’s that aspect. It probably upends the economy, which is another thing that government is not good at responding to. What is a new economic structure, policy compact that we can have in the age of AI? It creates all sorts of possibilities. There’s a book by Bruce Schneier and Nathan Schneider called Rewiring Democracy, where they list all of the ways in which AI could be used to help things like the judicial system, the bureaucracy, the electoral system, political campaigning, and all of the ways in which it could blow those things up and create problems. It’s a long list, but the takeaway really is that what the technology will do is a function of how we use it and what choices we make about how it’s used. We can make choices in which it benefits things and makes processes smoother and eliminates unnecessary bureaucracy and improves people’s interactions with government and makes it more responsive. There’s also uses in which it gums up the works, creates all kinds of slop, or enables more authoritarian surveillance, for instance. So we have just a few minutes left, but I wanted to point to the work you’re currently doing. You’re on Substack, obviously, and you have this Protopian Prize. Do you want to talk about that? Yeah, so the Protopian Prize, it’s a speculative fiction prize, which I’m co-judging with a science fiction writer, Ruth Anna Emrys. The idea is it’s run by a couple of organizations, MetaGov and the Public AI Network. The first one is about a confederation of people who work on new forms of governance and what governance could look like in the 21st century. The second is about imagining forms of AI that are not owned by big corporations and serving their interests, but are actually designed and developed and controlled in the public interest. So that could mean AI that is designed to solve specific social problems, or is based on data that is really relevant to a particular locality instead of all being just scraped randomly from the English-language internet, or is not based on data that was copyrighted and stolen, or has various safety guardrails to make sure that it’s not doing socially bad things. So these organizations have created this prize, and the idea is for people to write about what could better forms of democracy look like, and what could better forms of AI that serves people look like. And our idea is simply, and it’s what I am trying to do, people have these notions of what democracy is that they can’t see beyond, and they can’t imagine a form of it that looks better because the stories are not there. People have this notion of what AI is, they can’t imagine a world in which it is not controlled by these big tech companies, and so helping that imagination, helping people see possibilities of how the world could look different, that is a first step towards actually bringing about that world. Obviously, a hell of a lot more than that, but at least sets you on the path, because it gives people a sense of what they should be demanding from their leaders, and what they could agitate for, and what they could try building themselves. Are you familiar with Helen and Dave Edwards? They have the Artificiality Institute. I do, I even worked with them at one point. Oh, wonderful. Well, I love them, and I’m really their language and their framework is stuff that really informs, it’s how I think about things, which I think is the great gift they’ve given us, and they talk about this cognitive sovereignty, and this language of sovereignty being a way of describing the relationship that we have with AI somehow, that we need to create these boundaries, because we are living alongside this intelligence, and so we have to manage these boundaries, and so my question is, when I think about AI, I’ve thought that, well, there’s cognitive sovereignty at the individual level, but is there sovereignty at the local level too, or at the municipal level? Is sovereignty something that needs to be defined all over the place, that that’s part of this disruption of AI, is that we’re all defining our own boundaries, and are there examples of local AI, whatever that means, that municipalities take ownership of, or have a space? I run out of language to describe it, but to your point, it’s coming from the billionaire platforms up there, what examples are there of localities maybe taking control, or defining their own way of being in this, with AI? I don’t, I’ve never actually heard this on cognitive sovereignty before, can you say a couple more words about what it is? Oh yeah, so it’s her description of saying that it’s because AI is a cognitive technology, when we work with it, it changes us, as much as we’re changing it, and the boundaries between what’s us and what’s it are really blurry, and so she has a, if she talks about that, that it’s almost like a discipline of being aware of what role am I in, what role am I putting AI in, with regards to the idea, or the work, or the output, and so just being very disciplined about the boundary, and I think of sovereignty as this drawing hard boundaries around control, and that’s what she sees, it’s almost like a practice, but then we hear people working with AI, and they, what do they call it, AI psychosis, or things get really blurry, it gets very confusing, so anyway, the question really was, how are there examples of municipalities, or places, or defining their own relationship with AI? Not that I know of. I feel like this is the problem everyone is struggling with. There’s, I guess the parallel term cognitive offloading, which is when you surrender your decision making, or your mental processing to an AI, and it is also related to the question we have about whether AI will replace workers, or augment them. You can make choices as a company, for example, as an employer, about whether you’re going to use AI just to do the same work with fewer people, or whether you’re going to keep the same number of people, and use AI to empower them to do more things, because some of the more routine aspects of their work can now be automated. That is related to the cognitive sovereignty, to the extent that if you use AI, if you identify the things that are actually not a good use of your time, and use AI to do those, you’re empowering yourself to take cognitive sovereignty, to identify where your human mind is actually at its most useful, and ensure that you are the person in charge, that you are using AI in those ways that supplement and empower you. We’re seeing the question of cognitive sovereignty in education, and whether if students are just turning in papers that are AI written, they’re surrendering their cognitive faculties to it. One of the distinctions that someone I know has also used in this context is that you can use AI in summative and formative ways, he calls it, and apparently this is also a distinction that comes from education theory. Summative is basically about the output, you use AI to produce a spreadsheet, or something, or write an email, or create a business plan. Formative is where using the, formative is where it is helping you, where the point is the process itself, it’s the learning, it’s the gathering of, it’s the creating of a network, let’s say, or it’s something that develops you, and AI can be used to help with formative processes too. So I think I’m just using different words for similar things here, where there is this notion that we’re all struggling with, how do we be disciplined about ensuring that AI doesn’t replace us, doesn’t substitute for our thinking, but instead gives us more power. I think very few people are actually in a position, or have the luxury to be disciplined about that, and to think about it in a very clear way. In most people, many people’s, perhaps most people’s cases, that choice is out of their hands, because it’s in the hands of their employer, or simply the thing is moving too fast, and it’s too complex for us to even be aware that our cognitive sovereignty is eroding. So I think we’re really just at the very beginning of that journey of figuring out whether we will retain our cognitive sovereignty or lose it. Do you want to end before we say goodbye on a positive thought for the future of democracy? I think the positive thing is that as scary as things are, this is also the moment when anything is possible, there’s an open space for innovation. I think about this in the context of journalism as well. AI is going to disrupt the business models of an awful lot of publications, because when you get your information through ChatGPT, you’re much less likely to go to the website of the publication and read its stories, and so a lot of the traffic it depends on is going away already. There is an open space to experiment with what new forms of journalism might arise, what new business models might arise, and I think there is an open space to experiment with in many other areas too. And one of the things that AI does, it allows us to code, so it allows us to prototype ideas and try out solutions to things much more easily than we could before. So that is the optimism, is that there is the space for experimentation. Whether those experiments succeed in producing a better world also depends on whether we organize to undercut the existing power structures that have kept the institutions that we have going for so long. So it’s not, I always want to emphasize this because I hear so many people talking about how a technology will solve this or that problem, and it’s never about the technology. The technology is always just a tool. It’s about the choices we make on how to use it, and about the power structures in which it exists and who can take, who benefits from those or who can direct them in a different way. Beautiful. Gideon, I want to thank you so much for accepting the invitation. This has been really great. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Great to talk. Get full access to THAT BUSINESS OF MEANING at thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe [https://thatbusinessofmeaning.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

20 Jul 2026 - 58 min

Choose your subscription