So everything that is happening is happening because of political choices.

And the political choices are related because we live in a democracy to our decision.

We are the voters and we put those people in place and those people

do certain things. So at the end of the day it's not technology the problem

the problem is us.

Welcome to GeekWire.

I'm GeekWire co-founder Todd Bishop.

Today on the show, we're featuring a conversation with Loretta Napoleoni, an economist and

journalist whose books include rogue economics and insurgent Iraq.

Her newest book is Technocapitalism, The Rise of the New Robber Barrens and The Fight for the Common Good.

She spoke with moderator and interviewer Ross Reynolds, the longtime public radio host and occasional

GeekWire Podcast guest host in an interview

presented by Town Hall Seattle on April 18th, 2024.

Let's start out with some of your big ideas here right from the introduction. You're right, we're in a disorienting era. You call it the present future, characterized by a pace of change so rapid and so disconcerting that we're in a pandemic of anxiety. Now it's not

the first time we've had rapid change. In fact when I read that I was thinking of

Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell's book, Future Shock, which was also an era when there was so much technology changing.

So talk a little bit about what you mean by present future and compare it to other panics we've had about the speed of innovation and change.

Well thank you. This is a really good question because the original title of the book was Present Future. And then we decided that maybe it was too

esoteric and too difficult for people to grasp right away so technical capitalism is more concrete.

The book became technical capitalism.

But the present future is a central concept of the book because in reality what it means is that we're living in the present of course but we're already living in the future and this is because technology moves so fast

that it is almost unbearable for the human being to keep pace with the speed of change, especially technological innovation.

...