A couple months ago, I found myself in the office of Richard Morrison, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

I'd met and got to know Richard on Twitter.

So our budding friendship is entirely a product of social media,

a point worth bearing in mind as you listen to the discussion that follows.

As I'm sure I'm not the first to discover,

Richard is one very smart and articulate guy.

In his office, he talked to me about books, culture, campus radicals, the Powell memo,

the electoral politics of the later 20th century, and much else besides.

I think there was some discussion of the Oxford English Dictionary in there.

That conversation is unrecorded and lost to history.

The Richard and I decided to do the next one as a podcast.

So, welcome back to the tech policy podcast with me, your host, Corbin Barthold.

Richard hosts the Free the Economy podcast for CEI.

This is a crossover episode for both shows.

What follows is a little more focused, but only just. We kept things loosely organized around

technology's effect on politics. Richard had the host hat on for purposes of Q&A, but in keeping

with his also being the guest on this show, he gamely started us off with a summary of the tech

history behind the rise of the podcast.

We then got into technology and the rise of micrometia, the bipartisan trend toward

angry, merely performative, I think, tech-dumerism,

the idleness of romanticizing the dirty, deadly past,

the quest for online community,

...