Can Europe Chart Its Own Path on Tech?

Paris Marx: Hello and welcome to Tech Won’t Save Us here at Republica in Berlin. I’m joined by tante, European, sociotechnologist, writer, speaker, and Luddite, working on tech and its social impact. But obviously we’ve known each other online for well beyond that. Welcome to the show, Tante.

tante: Thanks. It’s a great pleasure to be here. Long-time listener; long-time fan; first time sitting in front of the microphone.

PM: Even in a special recording environment where we can even see one another in person instead of over a screen, which is always nice.

t: Throw stuff at one another and all that good stuff!

PM: You’ll throw that preamp you have in your hands. I didn’t know I was in for a physical threat here by recording in person with people, but here we go. This is new territory. Now, since we are here in Europe, I figured we would talk a bit about European approaches to technology to get us started. And then we’ll get into some bigger questions because obviously the show, because I am North American, and because Silicon Valley is located in the United States, often deals with North American issues. Certainly we do episodes sometimes talking about the gig economy, French tech, things like that that are happening in Europe, but generally the show tends to look at what happens on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

So, I thought it would be a good opportunity to dig a bit more into Europe, since we’re here, since I’m talking to you. And as I say, you happen to be European. So that means you’re an expert on all subjects Europe. But I feel like increasingly it feels like tech is torn between two poles. We have the United States on one side, and we have China on the other. And there’s this big competition between the two. The United States seems to expect Europe to play along with its vision for what it wants to do, be in its camp and just kind of follow the American rules. But not everyone in Europe is on board with that plan. How would you describe the European thinking on technology at this time?

t: I mean, Europe is a big place. It’s like almost 500 million people and many different states that form the European Union and all those states work a bit differently. So it’s really hard to argue for a real European strategy and thinking.

PM: I thought you are all one under the European Union. Don’t you all agree on everything? [laughs].

t: Of course, we do. But that’s why my perception, of course, is colored a bit by me living in Germany, being German, and being very closely informed about German politics. But, the European apparatus, so to speak, has a certain, logic to it. And as you described, it’s true. It’s closer related to the US than it is to, for example, China. In the EU and in Germany and many other countries, there have been moves to, for example, ban Chinese companies from building infrastructure, like telecommunications infrastructure. Huawei was a big thing. Are they allowed to build a 5G network here or not? And under which conditions and that kind of stuff? A conversation we never have with American companies; they are just there. We might not like them, but they are kind of just in the environment, so to speak.

But there is always this push of Europe to kind of try to guard rail, even the American companies a little bit like many people, even outside of the EU know the GDPR legislation that was passed a few years ago that did have some impact. I think not always the impact that was intended, but it does have impact on big platform providers. For example, in order to comply, Microsoft actually put their Office 365 things into European providers. In Germany, you can get a German-hosted Microsoft 365 installation. So it’s easier to legally deploy that kind of stuff. Whether it’s fully legal is still up for debate, but it has impact just because Europe is such a big economic space. It’s a very wealthy environment; big corporations are also active in Europe.

It does have some impact and the EU tries to harness that impact. We see sometimes they try to hand out fees to Meta or whoever they don’t like at that specific time. But it’s really hard to say there’s a really targeted strategy. I’d say there’s not a real big master plan of: Okay, how, how are we going to do this? It’s very reactive because the legislative processes in Europe takes so long because it’s not, we vote for a European Parliament, the Parliament decides stuff like there’s the Parliament and there’s the Council, which is formed by the governments of the local states.

And then there’s the Commission, which is also kind of defined by this government of the different states and they all have to agree. And it takes ages to get anything passed. And if anything was passed, that topic is not going to be touched for 10 years. So, it’s very hard for Europe to really be as agile as they might need to be when they really want to form how digital spaces work. They did the AI Act recently, which also was very hard to do. And we might get into that later, but they tried to structure new areas, new, usually markets because the EU is still largely is an economic alliance. It’s not so much a political alliance, but it just takes so long. And there are so many different goals of the different countries of the different member states, that it’s sometimes hard to get anything that has actual teeth.

PM: Obviously it sounds like a very easy legislative protest process and things just slide through the European Union. But you talk about how it’s very distinct. There’s not one kind of European opinion, one European view that is guiding technology. And I feel like one of the things that I have noticed is that on the one hand, there seems to be this approach where you’re thinking about how you can get more tech investment in Europe, what that is going to look like, whether you can build some independent companies and that approach that’s just like: Okay, let’s try to get more investment; let’s try to kind of level up here so we can try to get on more of a level playing field with these other big players.

But then there also seems to be, I guess, a more distinct, very specific approach, that’s kind of like: Okay, we need to be the third pole in this axis and Europe needs to be technologically sovereign and build up its own technological champions or, its own kind of technological capacities that is separate from what is happening in China and the United States. Can you talk about the distinctions between those two approaches and how you see them?

t: So the idea of digital sovereignty is very important in Europe right now. Different groups understand very different things when that term is used, when you look at the NGO space, things like Wikimedia or the open source community. When they think digital sovereignty, they very much think about you being able to run your own email server, having access to the software you need to run your life.

PM: On more of an individual level.

t: Maybe even a community that is allowed to run their own software or whatever. Very much in empowerment of people to do a thing without maybe corporate influence without depending on corporate overlords, basically. But if you look at it from the political standpoint, when they use this framing, what they usually mean is not Chinese and not American. It’s really about we need to be a power. Europe has been a colonial, the colonial center of the world for the longest time. And it’s really hard for them to no longer be that. Decisions are made in Shenzhen and Shanghai and Beijing, whatever. And that’s hard for Europe because they can only react.

And that’s very frustrating on the other hand, because there are so, so many different ideas of how things should be. And, the French want to push the French companies; the Germans want to push the German companies, and they are in competition. So it’s really hard for them to build up that kind of capacity. And with a lot of stuff that actually existed in Europe, capacities for, there was some chip manufacturing, there were also interesting tech companies in the 80s. And they were different than the approaches that the US took. They were promising, but after the reunification, the Eastern States kind of collapsed. The Block collapsed, everything was just run over by the American way like: Okay, this is how things are done; this is how we’re gonna do it.

And that gave Europe a blank slate. We could import American tech very easily, very cheaply. And now and it was there, and we build everything on top of it. You’re in Germany, right now; Germany runs on WhatsApp. That’s the thing. You need to have a WhatsApp account to be able to talk to your community, to the daycare of your kids. Everything is organized through WhatsApp, and everyone realized this is maybe not great, but on the other hand, we don’t have anything else to do. What else are you going to do? Go to Signal that people can’t use, or don’t want to use, or that has weird features that people don’t understand.

So for Europe, they kind of want to be a power, as you said, but I don’t feel there’s actually a meaningful strategy of how to do it. They have one tool in their arsenal and that is to kind of direct funds somewhere. And we’ve seen that, in the last decades, Europe tried to build its own Google, their own search index, spent a lot of money on that. And it never got anywhere for a whole bunch of reasons, but one corporation is always going to move faster. It’s always going to have the better experience. There have been very successful European projects like Airbus. That’s the kind of plane that doesn’t fall down, which is cool.

PM: Some people even specifically look for them now when they go to book flights.

t: I don’t fly a lot, but when I fly, I try not to fly Boeing just because…

PM: Yeah, the Americans are really falling down on that one.

t: It’s kind of fucked up. But many of the other big projects — I don’t know if outside of Europe, people have heard about Gaia-X, which was a huge endeavor, and they threw billions at it to build a hyperscaler infrastructure, open source standards of interoperability, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s a dud. No one used it; it’s bad. And when they couldn’t get adoption, they also integrated Amazon into the consortium. What the fuck! Either you want to be sovereign, and then Amazon can be part of it? Or you’re just dicking around? And okay, then tell me you’re dicking around, then I don’t have to deal with it. But that is the kind of struggle that Europe is really facing. They want to do something, but they don’t know how. They don’t really have an in.

There are European, very relevant European digital companies. But in very specific domains, when it’s about enterprise resource planning. There’s SAP, which is huge. It’s a huge company, huge profits, very relevant, like half the globe runs on it. But that’s very unsexy tech. It’s also kind of annoying. And, how many of those systems can you sell? There’s a limitation to what you can do. You don’t have these explosive, here’s a unicorn, here’s an Uber, here’s a whatever. Those things don’t happen for maybe even good reasons, but I think there’s this problem for them to to face reality. If we have these specific companies and we could just focus on these specific things we’re good at; we maybe have an in we might build upon.

But everyone wants to have these sexy projects, the sexy app, the thing that everyone uses on the planet. We want to have the next Google, the next Facebook, the next whatever. And that’s just something that you can’t manufacture. If you could manufacture it, even China would probably do it. And even different American investors will try to do it, but it’s always catching lightning in a bottle and that’s that just doesn’t happen here.

PM: And I feel you also see, even when those projects can be undertaken, as you were saying, you can see the American companies or some other companies get in on it, too. So then is it really necessarily European in the way that we would expect? And I feel one place to expand on what you’re saying and to make it even more concrete is I know that Europe is trying to work on an alternative to Starlink, so it’s own low Earth orbit satellite system, and I know there’s divisions on that. I believe, if I’m right, Germany is more opposed to it, whereas France is more pushing it.

And I wanted to ask more about that division, because I feel like Germany and France represent two distinct approaches to this potential issue, problem — however we want to frame it — where on the one side, France seems to be really strongly pushing this idea of digital technological sovereignty for Europe, really investing in that and Germany seems maybe a bit more on the fence I saw just yesterday that chancellor Olaf Schultz and President Macron wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times together where they talked about a number of kind of shared european priorities because President Macron is visiting Germany at the moment, of course, trying to shore up relations there.

And one of the things they called for was: “we call for strengthening the EU’s technological capacities by promoting cutting edge research and innovation and necessary infrastructures, including those regarding artificial intelligence and health.” And of course, somewhere else, they talked about a number of other technologies like AI, quantum technology, space, 5G, 6G, biotechnology, net-zero technologies, mobility and chemicals.

t: I’ve got bingo now.

PM: [laughs] But all the technologies they want to do! And I feel like one of the things that we see very clearly is Macron seems to be pushing this big time. In France, you do have all of these kind of new AI startups that seem to be doing quite well. Mistral is one of the key ones that is getting a lot of attention, but there are a number of other ones too. And they really put that on display recently at the Viva tech conference that they held. Whereas I feel like in Germany. One of the stories I’ve seen recently is kind of Germany competing for an Intel plant, to build the chips here.

And of course we have the Tesla plant here in Berlin, but it doesn’t seem to be so focused on pushing that idea of European tech, but rather, again, whatever tech investment we can get here. And I recognize there are a lot of other countries in Europe beyond France and Germany, but France and Germany are two of the main power players. So how do you see that relationship and those kind of divided priorities in terms of how things move forward?

t: No, I don’t live in France, so I have an outsider’s view.

PM: Of course.

t: Macron — I think he was at McKinsey; he has this consulting background and very much like we need startups. And that has been his policy for a while now. And I think it’s starting to, whether you think financing startups is such a good investment or not, but it seems to work at least to a certain degree, as you said, especially in the AI space, France has had some interesting development and Germany would love to have some, but really who outside of Germany knows Aleph Alpha, which is like the German thing that no one uses because it’s bad.

PM: I know France is now trying to position itself as the third pole in the AI fight between the United States and China, not even Europe, but France specifically in its kind of companies.

t: Because like the rest of Europe really isn’t following up on that kind of stuff because Germany and tech is a very complex issue. On the one hand, Germany sees itself as the country of engineers. We built the cars and the machines that build the cars and all that kind of stuff. But on the other end, there’s always like a very, tech is a bit icky. We don’t like it. It’s rotting our brains and all that. It’s not like we follow up on it, but it’s a vibe. You can make a comfortable living just telling people that tech is ruining their brains.

PM: Hey, I make a comfortable living doing that! [laughs].

t: Yeah, yeah. But your criticism has substance.

PM: Okay. Thank you. Thank you.

t: So Germany is kind of like: Yeah, we kind of want them, but we also kind of don’t. But then you have on the political level, everyone kind of wants to fund these things. But a key difference between Germany and France is France is a very centralized structure. France is run from Paris. That’s how France runs.

PM: Paris makes the decisions and that’s how everything’s going to go. Even if you’re as far away as New Caledonia, Paris is making the decision.

t: And Germany is a federal state with many decisions having to include the federal states having to like agree on things. So that makes it hard because like, okay, Aleph Alpha is sitting in Baden Württemberg is one of the Southern big states. They also have a lot of car manufacturing, whatever. Baden Württemberg pushes for a certain agenda and wants that and others don’t want that. And so Germany is always kind of hindered by this whole federal process of having to agree and different parties rule the different states and, it’s a whole thing that makes Germany very, very passive. It looks very passive from the outside, just because there’s so many conflicts of interest going on. And everyone wants to push the company that is close to your party, as it’s everywhere. You try to get the money into your region, because that’s what your job as a politician kind of is.

So, Germany wants to have this whole AI stuff going, but really, my impression is that they really don’t have any idea how. They fund a lot of research; there’s calls and you can get a lot of funding for AI. Germany has a center for artificial intelligence. Every university has a center for artificial intelligence these days. But a lot of the stuff you see is like they also installed the open source libraries that everyone else uses. And, there’s not so much going on. Also, because it’s just so, so expensive. Stable Diffusion, the idea of stable diffusion was developed in Munich. That’s a team from Munich, but they couldn’t really get it done because they didn’t have the hardware. And then Stability AI, the company came in that we have all the Nvidia cards you need, like go through it. So Germany has people who want to do things, but we don’t have infrastructure for it. We don’t have data centers that could work in this AI race that everyone’s going through.

And that’s not just a German problem. Even American universities, if you don’t partner with Google or Microsoft or Meta, you don’t have access to enough compute. You can’t do research in that regard. You can toy around with little systems, but not really in competitive environments. So, that’s a big problem for Germany to build up any form of capacity. And because Germany is most of the time following, okay, everyone’s doing AI, we’re going to do AI as well. Before when blockchain was kind of done everywhere else, Germany was still talking about it in the parliament. If blockchains may be the future of anything. We’re always a bit behind because we’re following, because we don’t really have an idea of what to do as a society.

We have corporate interests who want to push. We also have to do AI because we might be able to sell it, or we need to digitize everything because there might be a bug in there. But on a societal level, there’s no vision for how does that fit in with how Germany sees itself. The German economy is very proud of being strongly defined by SMEs, small and medium enterprises, not big corporations that control everything. Of course, we have them as well. We have Volkswagen, the big car manufacturers, whatever. But a car is usually built, not by the big company that prints the logo on it, but they have all their suppliers and the suppliers are companies that have between a hundred and maybe, maybe a thousand people working for them.

Medium enterprises, sometimes still family-led, and Germany is very proud of that. But this setup of smaller companies that are super focused on a specific thing that they do very well, maybe even the best on the planet, doesn’t fit in with how digital tech is developed. Because that is scale and running everything for everyone, as fast as you can, burning through money. And that’s not how most German companies see themselves. They want, okay, I built a small thing and I sell it and then I make some money and then I build it up, and I want to build this reliable thing, which doesn’t work well.

A few years ago, I was as an expert in the German Ministry of Economy, and some guy stood up in that meeting. It was about innovation and what topics would be interesting and relevant for Germany in the future. And he said: The problem we have is people here in Germany, they build interesting digital tools and digital products, and then they grow to like a hundred people and then they stop growing because they just want to run their company and everyone makes a comfortable living and everyone’s happy.

PM: How dare they?

t: And I really ask like: You think this is a problem? You build responsible companies that feed a hundred families. That is a problem? But they don’t become unicorns. Who gives a shit? You don’t get these very marketable things. We got a Tesla Factory here. It’s not in Berlin, it’s in Brandenburg, which is the area around Berlin. But there was so many protests against it and even the official of the water management organizations said that we can’t have that here; they take too much water. We don’t have the water.

Actually, a friend of mine lives nearby and they couldn’t build a school there because the water supply said: We don’t have the water to build a school, I’m sorry. It’s not there. And people brought it, but everyone wanted to open a Tesla factory. They threw so much money at Elon Musk to build the thing there, even though everyone told them like: No, this doesn’t make sense. And that was before Elon Musk, ruined his image by running basically everything into the ground.

PM: But, but they still gave him the expansion recently.

t: Of course, because now Tesla still makes you look like: Oh yeah, they are the future. Self-driving cars in Germany is like guns in the US. It’s a very, very emotional relationship. But that is like the challenge that Germany has. There’s a tradition of how business is supposed to work. And of course, you have young people, especially here in Berlin, who try to do the whole startup and venture capital and just have something explode, sell it and then do whatever else. But there’s still a tradition and a way to see the economy, and I think that’s a bit in conflict with how to scale up digital things and I think that France just chose a different path, has a bit of a different tradition that makes it a bit easier for France to to do that well and they doing it well. They’re doing way better than Germany is.

PM: This is really interesting, especially that point about how when you have an economy focused on small and medium enterprise that’s working for a lot of people. But of course, when you look at this tech economy, that is not only about scale within a country, but global scale and needing to dominate so many markets just to be on a level where you’re maybe somewhat competitive. And then still not even with these American giants who have so dominated the world of technology. It makes it so difficult to do that.

And I feel like one of the good things about being in Europe the past couple of weeks and getting into being able to talk to people in a number of countries about how things are going in European tech and how Europeans are feeling about technology, in a way that I don’t always get to do because I’m on the other side of the Atlantic, has been this real kind of anxiety about Europe’s ability to innovate and what that looks like, who is doing that innovation and whether Europe can keep up with everybody else or at least the United States and China.

And I feel like one of the paths that Europe is very much carved out has been being this regulator. This government or, or this governing body that figures out the regulations for what these tech companies should be, setting a model for a number of other countries to follow through. And on the one hand, there seems to be a certain pride in doing that because it is moving this forward. It is kind of holding some of these companies to account. But then on the other hand, there’s this concern that, like, maybe it holds Europe back from being able to compete in this space with these other major companies. So I wonder how you see that regulatory effort, what you think ultimately the goal behind it is and how I guess European lawmakers in particular, but just in general, how people are feeling about how this regulatory push is going?

t: When like the AI act was released a few weeks ago, no, no, it’s a month ago, the interesting thing is how Europe and the European organizations framed it. I understand that they were relieved because it was a very hard. It’s called a trilogue, like the three big parties in the European Union have to agree on a thing, and it takes agents, but I understand that they were very happy. But the way they framed it was: this is the first comprehensive AI legislation in the world. And it’s interesting, it’s the first. As a politician, it’s very hard to innovate. You’re not building shit; you’re writing legislation that everyone’s pissed off about. But the EU kind of sees itself as an innovator in legislation. It’s like: We are so creative with legislation, we understand all the things. And like, it’s a very interesting framing of politics that sees itself as we need to innovate as well. and communicate that they see themselves that way, which I found a bit revealing, to be honest, but they try that.

And of course there’s like a rift in European companies. One half says: yeah, this is a problem. We can’t do stuff. The Americans can do all this stuff; the Chinese can do all this stuff; we can’t do all this stuff. We’re just limping along. We can’t, we can never do anything. And they’ll say: This is a big advantage for us, because we do tech based on European values. It’s always European values. It’s a very important statement that one can talk for like three hours about here, but it’s

PM: Certainly the question of what those European values actually are, yeah.

t: Having kids drown in the Mediterranean seems to be European values because that’s what we’re doing. But when we look at how different legislations played out, like GDPR, for example, it’s also like: Yeah, but we built this thing and European companies will be the first to adapt it because they’re forced. But if other companies want to go to the EU, which they will, because 450 million people, huge market they will then have to adapt it. And it slows them down. So then European companies have the advantage. And when other legislations introduce privacy laws or whatever, the European union always has it. They’ve tried to frame it as an advantage for companies, but that’s really not what we see in the in the real world.

If you look at, for example, digital advertising as a market, people say, you have GDPR and now Google can’t do what they are doing, but they’re still doing it. They are compliant. And because the burden of compliance was so big, all the smaller platforms kind of died. It led to more centralization because every regulatory burden, of course, helps the big players who are already in the market. Google can hire a thousand more lawyers — who gives a shit. But 10,000? How many do you need?

PM: Who are the American companies that are already dominant?

t: Of course, exactly. They have the money and they can hire people. And I mean, they spend a lot of lobbying. Like they don’t, they make sure that the EU, European Union doesn’t pass laws that they can’t comply with. Like it’s not the conversation in the US right now with forcing ByteDance to a deinvest of TikTok. Like that’s not what the EU does. It’s like, okay. Yeah. You can still be in, can all be Meta and Google and whatever. If you comply to these rules, we’re fine because the EU, as I said, it’s an economic system and they are a lot about like free trade and a free market and fair playing ground for everyone on the market.

PM: They’re not going to tell Meta to divest from WhatsApp because Germany is very dependent on it.

t: Exactly. We’re going to regulate it and then it’s going to be fine. And I think that that approach, while it’s interesting and it is being received like when GDPR came out, I think many people on the outside didn’t read it very closely. I think it’s idealized. I see it a lot in the US when people say Europe has this GDPR, and it’s so amazing. And I think that story is a bit overblown.

PM: I think you see it a little bit less so now, but there is this narrative of look what Europe can do. Look at how it’s protecting data rights. Why aren’t we doing that here? In the discussion about even having a federal privacy bill in the United States is still pretty much dead on arrival.

t: Exactly. And it’s not like there’s nothing and it was a big undertaking. It took a long time to get done. And there’s a few good ideas in there, a few less good ideas in there. But yes, you can regulate these companies and it showed that they will try to comply, sometimes maliciously. Apple is very, very well known to comply only very maliciously. But it is kind of a success story, but it’s not a success story that gives any velocity to European activities. We don’t see this as something that enables European companies to do anything malicious. If you see bigger European companies, usually the complaint is either yeah, but we have this legislation. It’s kind of annoying. And then they move out so they don’t have to obey the legislation or they try to get exceptions carved out.

The German AI company that I mentioned, Aleph Alpha is very well connected to the German federal government. They basically wrote the German position on the AI Act. And like they got a lot of like legal loopholes into German legislation. So like you can scrape as much as you want if it’s for scientific and blah, blah data purposes. So they can claim we were under the EU law and all this. They are very well regulated, but basically they still can do whatever they want. So I think that it’s a replacement action. We’re doing legislation, and doing legislation is good.

I’m not saying it’s not good to build legislation. Yes, every legislation has its issues and not everything is perfect. That’s fine. But, I think it’s very much the focus right now because, what? They don’t know what else to do. You can’t throw enough money at this AI space to quickly enough catch up. You can’t. Soon you will catch up because the whole AI development thing is slowing down. Yes, we can catch up to the level that everyone else is at, but like, that’s a very expensive catching up for something that you can just download on GitHub. Why?

PM: And I know we also see with a lot of that European regulation, the ability of companies, whether they are European or even American, to get in and, try to shape those regulations to serve what they ultimately want to see right — whether it’s with the AI act and OpenAI and Sam Altman kind of coming over and making sure that their products have a lower level of scrutiny and regulatory compliance that’s necessary versus other types of AI models or whatever we want to call it. Or of course, we saw more recently with the Platform Work Directive where these major gig companies— whether American or European or, wherever else they’re from — being able to very effectively lobby to ensure that the ultimate rules that are supporting the gig workers and ensuring their rights have been incredibly watered down and are now basically thrown back to the national level to figure out what governments are going to do.

t: Absolutely. And I think that Sam Altman is a great example for like, when he did his tour through Europe, his PR tour. And OpenAI, they’re very good at lobbying. Interestingly, good for how young that company is. In Europe, the member state that leads certain things changes that every few years. Okay, then next time it’s going to be blah. And OpenAI understood that Spain would be the next one to lead the AI Act’s negotiations to the final phase. So they started lobbying Spain way before Spain was in that position, so they were already massaged and properly prepared. They offered an office in Madrid and all that kind of stuff. They were really good about being there before the puck was there, being there before they needed to be there.

And that was very well. And even if you see the European Commission says: Yeah, we need to build up sovereignty, European capacity. When Sam Altman comes in, Ursula von der Leyen, the Commission President, she does the whole: Let’s take a selfie with another, and smile to the camera. Sam Altman is coming to us and talking to us. Europe wants to be its own thing, but it’s still very much when a big corporation from the US comes in, they are treated like a head of state. And that shows really how much of their own ideas they have how comfortable they are with themselves because they still want big daddy to come and tell them: You’re doing good. Sundar Pichai has to come in and tell us: You’re doing good. And that’s kind of where we are right now.

PM: And in some cases they almost are like heads of state with the power that they have in the infrastructures that can control especially someone like Elon Musk in the space infrastructures. But I wanted to pivot a little bit because we’re talking to a certain degree about innovation and ideas that we have about what innovation is and what different countries or different players should be pursuing when it comes to innovation. And here at Republica, you gave a talk about innovation. It’s a term we often use to talk about technology, but you gave a broader definition of how you understand what that actually means. Can you talk a bit about how you understand the term innovation and how it’s been reframed or even poisoned by these tech billionaires to serve their own interests?

t: I think innovation is very much a defining term of this age. As I said, even the European Union innovates in legislation. Everyone has to be innovative. It’s not just a tech thing coming up with new technologies. Everyone needs to be innovative. Everyone has their workshops and they are posted events and whatever. It’s just a thing you need to do, but I think many people associate innovation just with technological inventions, like coming up with a new technology that is, that does a new thing or that is interesting or, I don’t know, smaller, bigger, whatever. But I think that’s misunderstanding what innovation is actually is about.

Innovation isn’t about a new thing. Innovation is about changing how things are. The assembly line wasn’t so much a technical innovation. Of course, some things needed to be figured out, but it was a different way of structuring work, a way of reducing labor power, of course, as well. But it’s a thing that isn’t really depending on a new thing. It’s a way of changing how things are done or how things are seen. And I think that that is what innovation means — change. Change is always a very political thing. If we, especially if we live in democracies, we want to be able to influence change. We want to have a say in how to change and where change leads. What are the values that guide the change that we are moving towards?

And I think in the last decades, we’ve been really focusing on we need to innovate; we build; we’re building new stuff. But especially in the last years, like in the last two years, I gave talks here about cryptocurrency and AI and like all the hype things. And there’s a pattern of we’re building these new things and claim them to be very innovative. And the innovators like Sam Altman and CZ and all these very innovative people that are very trustworthy. It’s interesting that they’re all compulsory liars. They frame this, as things are moving forward, like, look how we’re moving forward. But then when we actually look at the things, like AI is still telling us to put glue on pizza. It’s obviously not really there yet. It’s a cute thing. It’s a cute invention.

And it does a few interesting things and there are use cases, but the narrative doesn’t fit to it. The narrative is it changes everything. The world’s going to be different and everyone’s going to do yada yada, have a Humane AI pin on their lapel because that works so well. We’ve kind of adapted to talking about innovation with the new tech that we get, a thinner iPad, a smaller iPhone or a bigger iPhone or at least a more expensive iPhone.

PM: Definitely a more expensive iPhone.

t: Of course, because number needs to go up. And we kind of this gives us this feeling of progress, like new things are happening all the time. Every month there’s this new thing, a new AI model that can do whatever. And this gives us a feeling of progress that’s not really there because we’re actually not changing things. We’re claiming to live in an age of innovation with new things coming out, but in the end, what does it do? It gives Apple more money. Apple already has all the money. When it was about crypto, Andreessen Horowitz was invested in all of it and made all the money. Yes, we can do AI now. We can decide to give the money to OpenAI /Microsoft or to Google or to Meta or maybe to Amazon. So nothing changes, but we have this constant feeling of change.

I think that that’s a way that innovation has changed from it’s ideal where it was people come up with interesting ideas and then it gets tested maybe in production or in some, some other process. And then people who writes: This is a better way of doing things. And then the whole circle starts again. And it’s this constant idea of improvement. Everything gets better because we’re innovating. To the same people are selling us something that doesn’t mean anything. But that they can keep selling us every few months a new iPhone that no one really cares about it. There’s a reason we don’t care about new smartphones It’s not just iPhones and red phones are the same.

Nothing changes, but still like they do the whole event thing and it all looks very fancy. They try to frame it as this new huge leap about things that no one gives a shit about. And I think for them, that’s a very useful narrative because everyone feels like everything’s moving. Yeah, we’re moving and we have problems like we have the climate crisis. We have so many issues and inequality everywhere on the planet, but we’re moving. We’re doing things. Things will get better because we’re still in this innovation circle, but we’re not moving, we’re doing the same thing over and over again, buying the same iPhone every year renting from the same companies, having the same people making the decisions for us.

And I think that that’s a way that the idea of innovation change, and we’re still clinging to it as a way for us to manifest a future, a way for us to feel like we are in charge and we’re making decisions that lead us anywhere, but we’re not moving, we’re spinning in circles and we need to get moving. The problem is that a lot of the things that, if we look at climate change as an, as an example. I’m an old man, I’m in the middle of my 40s. I see the end coming. But like when I was in school, people told us CO2 is a big thing, like this needs to stop. We’ve known that for decades, for many, many, and not in research papers, no one reads, like mainstream stuff. School books had that, and we’re not doing things. It’s obviously not a problem of innovation, of coming up with new things. We know that solar panels work. And of course, engineers can maybe tweak them and make them more efficient or easier to produce. All cool, but the general thing is done.

We’re just not doing them because they are not benefiting the right people, basically. And I think that that is a very problematic shift, not just because it keeps the rich people rich, which also is a big problem, but because it keeps the population in this a in this constant feeling of anxiety of new things are coming out that I need to adapt to. What is my content creation strategy now that the new model is out and whatever? And we’re always running. And have this feeling of being pushed around and needing to adapt, which also is, as I said yesterday, it also is a bit relieving because we feel we’re moving, but nothing is really moving. And I think that that is a very problematic turn that this whole innovation speak has given us and kind of locks us in place.

PM: I think that was a really compelling framing that I found in listening to your talk, in the sense that the companies keep up this feeling of change or this feeling of momentum, right? This, this feeling that. Things are getting better because they’re the these new technologies being out there because now we have crypto and then there’s the metaverse and then there’s AI and there’s always something new that they’re kind of putting in the window to keep us entertained or distracted or, at least like dunking on their stupid ideas on Twitter to give us something to do, whereas at the same time, it increasingly feels like we’re not really moving anywhere when we think of the big problems that we face, the crises that we face and even I would say increasingly technologically.

Sure, there’s the new iPhone; there’s the new iPad; there’s some AI tech or whatever, but it feels like rather than really moving forward. It feels like that technological push is increasingly stagnant, as well. And on top of that, of course, is the idea that we can’t seem to figure out how to make housing cheaper. We can’t seem to figure out how to reduce our emissions to the degree that we need to. Obviously, Europe is better on that than we are in North America. But there’s still challenges there. And it feels like increasingly that these companies use this narrative to help their business purposes.

But in doing so, they also work to distract us from the real things that we would need to do to address these real problems and even see the type of technological progress or innovation or whatever word you want to use that would be socially beneficial to people and not just drive the next wave of tech investment in Silicon Valley or whatever other tech hub we’re talking about.

t: I think that as I framed it yesterday, we kind of have taken all the political values and meaning out of innovation. It used to be you innovate for a certain purpose. Of course, as a company, you innovate to cut down costs or be more productive or, I don’t know, fire a bunch of people, whatever. You try to do something that increases your bottom line, which at least that’s the purpose of a capitalist corporation. I understand that.

PM: That’s how they’re set up.

t: That makes sense like it’s and you could innovate even as but as a non corporation you could innovate based on your values like the world you want to see that’s what you try to work towards and current tech feels very much like it’s lost that it’s just doing a thing like the vision pro, it it’s it’s a VR headset okay but who was asking for that?

PM: You mean you’re not working every day in your Vision Pro headset, loving the world that is around you now?

t: Exactly.

PM: And getting a real neck workout because of the weight of it on your head?

t: I’m actually one of the few people who sometimes works in VR because of the job I have. But a lot of the stuff lost its meaning and it’s very, very hollow. Yeah, there’s a new thing; I remember when people were excited when a new phone would come out because there would be something new and these days, okay, whatever. And yeah, the fans will buy a new thing. But most of the time, it’s like: Who gives a shit? Because that thing has been kind of played out. We’ve done it. It’s fine.

PM: Totally. There’s a new color. The camera’s a little better. Maybe the processor has a new number on it.

t: But the camera has been great before. The camera is fine. It’s fine. Maybe we can direct all that energy and all that creative power of people towards something else. But of course, a corporation can’t. And maybe that’s okay. But as a society, we need ideas of how to push forward, of how to manifest our, not just European, our values. What do we want?

How do we change our economy to be more climate compatible? How do we fight the climate crisis? Because there’s a lot of talk. It’s not that we don’t know what to do. We can only buy dinosaurs. No, no, we know what to do, where to get energy from. Just have to organize it. And maybe there’s even some tech around managing the grid in a smart way to harness the sun where it is and then transfer the energy somewhere like, and battery tech is still a thing that we can develop a lot on, but like, we have most of it there.

But now it’s about, okay, how do we organize that? And if we need innovation, that space is probably about organizational innovation and probably about, that’s my personal opinion, just reducing markets a lot of the time and saying, maybe these are infrastructures that shouldn’t be privately owned and maybe we need to get them back into our public control and manage them in a way that they do things in a way that we need. Maybe even data centers shouldn’t be privately owned. Maybe they should be, maybe not set up as a government, but as like public entities that the public owns and can decide, okay, this data center, when there is no sun and when there’s no water, this data center doesn’t run because no, because our value is that we want to save this planet where we keep all our stuff.

PM: That’s the important point where we keep our stuff.

t: Yeah. But that is the kind of innovation that we actually need right now, which is based on, on political values. And yes, not everyone has my political values because other people are wrong, but that is what politics is about: presenting your values, your demands and talking about it and like figuring out a way to build, if not consensus, at least like, okay, then it’s not fully what I want, but at least it’s getting us somewhere and then do the next step and do the next step. And I think we’ve, we’ve kind of lost that because we’ve outsourced this idea of innovation to corporations whose only plan is like, okay, we need for next fiscal year, we need something to sell you because the bottom line needs to go up because again, you can’t just, you can’t keep making money. You have to keep making more money. And that only works if you keep selling stuff.

Also in Europe, this whole idea of that we need to build green growth. No. growth isn’t green. If you grow, you require more resources. And that is problematic right now, we haven’t figured out a different way. Right now, we don’t need more, we need less. You also had that in your presentation yesterday. How much compute do we need, and then organize how to organize who has access to it? And then I’m not saying no corporation should have access to compute. That’s not the point. The point is, we need to structure this thing that it corresponds to how we want to shape our communities, our societies and the world. And that’s not something that the market very obviously can do. And that is a space where a lot of innovation can happen and where especially governments could have a very strong hand and pushing for certain things in.

Of course, I’m always very open to socializing things, but also like, even if it’s just about funding certain trajectories and saying we’re going to do this. And this is how we see the world. And this is where we want to go, because that is according to our actual values.

PM: Yeah. I’m of course also open to socializing things, but even when you describe this idea that these major companies, they need to have the line keep going up. So there always needs to be something new, whether it’s this new thinner iPad, or they need to like, Tear their platforms, their successful platforms like Google search or something apart, just to try to extract a bit more ad revenue from it to show investors that they can make a bit more money. It really seems to be in contrast to me with what you were talking about before where, okay, maybe you have all these small and medium enterprises who are able to feed a hundred families or whatever, because that’s, The number of employees that they have and like, that’s just fine. Even then there’s two very different ideas of like what capitalism is.

And the thing that really kind of brought home your points for me was when you were talking in your presentation about this idea that we have of the future, right. And how we think about the future and the tech industry really wants us to think about the future in a very particular way that they are in control of and that they are trying to shape, ultimately, for their own ends right because the future is brought into being by creating new technologies that they say that they are going to create for us right and that is how we build a better world but you noted how in the past, when we were off and thinking about what a better world would look like, it wasn’t about the technologies that made it up, it was about the social progress that we were actually able to achieve, whether that is going back to Thomas More’s utopia in the 1500s, or even a property that all of these tech billionaires or most of them are pretty obsessed with in Star Trek. And you quoted Captain Jean Luc Picard, of course, one of the best Star Trek captains.

t: Yeah, second best “Star Trek” captain.

PM: I would tend to agree. I love Deep Space Nine.

t: Sisko all the way.

PM: Totally. So, he said: the acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity when he was explaining what the federation was about, what the society was about. And I feel like when we hear the tech billionaires talk about “Star Trek” people like Jeff Bezos, it’s not about this idea of what “Star Trek” is, where material wealth is gone, where we’re working to better ourselves and humanity.

It’s about how can we go to space, how can we have these new technologies that we see in “Star Trek?” It’s the technological vision of what a property like that is, rather than the social vision that they are not super concerned of. And that seemed to me to be a very clear dividing line between what we should be going for and what Silicon Valley and the larger tech industry, whether it’s in Europe or anywhere else, is trying to push us toward.

t: It’s an ongoing joke that all these tech entrepreneurs can’t read. Also, Sam Altman, who complained that “Oppenheimer” was not a movie that motivated people to become physicists. “Oppenheimer” is not an uplifting story. Who would have thought? But they keep reading this thing and not understanding it. There’s also this joke where science fiction writers write about the torment, “Don’t [Create] the Torment Nexus.”

And then the corporation comes out: Hey, we built the Torment Nexus from the story, “Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.” And that’s a lot of what we see, yeah, Star Trek, the replicator in Star Trek that just creates everything out of thin air, out of energy. And you have free energy everywhere. That’s a storytelling device. That’s a thing you need so you don’t have to deal with how is stuff produced because you want to talk about interesting things. That’s not what the story is about. In “Star Trek,” even the starship doesn’t matter. It’s about confronting different ideas. A different planet is just a different idea. It’s a different chapter and story to talk about something, but they don’t understand reading, really.

And that’s really tragic because we have this wealth of thinking and not just in Western science fiction. There’s so much science fiction and thinking about the future. all over the planet that comes from different traditions, different values that could be very enlightening. And that could also be integrated in technological progress. It’s not like, yeah, tech never matters. No, of course, sometimes you need technologies to make something happen. And yes, the replicator is there. So no one is hungry. So people can express themselves and develop themselves and all this kind of stuff. So, if someone comes up with a replicator, cool.

But we all know if Elon Musk came up with a replicator, it would be A) it would explode when you order the wrong thing, and B) it would be so expensive that most people can’t have it. And I think that, again, that science fiction is by definition a political medium. Like, yeah, you write about tech, yadda yadda, but you’re trying to present visions of how criticisms of how the world is, and there’s always a vision of how the world should be. If you say this is bad, that means you want something different. Usually you show what the difference should be and they don’t get that. And that’s really impoverishing our discourse in our societies.

It’s very hard these days to present a vision. That’s not tech, and then everyone will have this even sometimes science fiction movies these days that they feel a bit more hollow like because it’s Everyone will have this device and that device and this magic thing that you can talk to and yeah, okay whatever ambient computing is interesting, but it’s very rarely a compelling social vision where it’s like, okay, what is interesting here? Star Trek is space communism That’s what it is. And that’s why it’s interesting because you see, okay, if everyone’s basic needs are met, what happens? Interesting stuff happens. And that’s something that’s still so hard to, to communicate these days. Even if you, and it’s not just American tech people, many people kind of don’t understand what stories are about, and that’s very sad. And it shows us we need more liberal arts education and teaching engineers how to read a science fiction story, so they understand what the actual meaning of it is. That would be very helpful, I think.

PM: And even when the Ferengi come in contact with the Federation, over time, they start to change and change their kind of capitalist ways.

t: At least a bit.

PM: A bit, exactly, not completely. To end off our conversation, we have a few minutes left, we’ve been talking about this idea of innovation and also how Europe sees how it approaches innovation and how it wants to try to be more innovative. I’m wondering, how do you think we challenge this idea of innovation that the tech industry has foisted on us and then I feel like a lot of European countries are trying to emulate and catch up to when they look at the United States and Europe and the economic success that those kind of tech monopolies that come out of those countries have achieved? How do we challenge that broader idea and how does that play into or how does it hopefully try to animate how Europe sees its own technological future?

t: I think the most important, as you said, Europe tries to emulate a lot of what the US is doing because it sees numbers are very big there. But what is often overlooked — we want an Uber. I think they made a bit of money in a few quarters, but that was basically bookkeeping tricks, trying to get, and this is a thing that maybe works at some point, and you’re trying to get back to: Okay, what’s a reasonable way of running an economy, and even a capitalist economy? Okay, the idea is people make a profit, and that leads to profit somewhere. Uber doesn’t make a profit. What it does is it tries to destroy public transportation. That’s what it does. That’s what it’s for. It’s actual goal to get rid of that.

And I think making more of a case like, yeah, we could build these things. But they are not really reasonable. A) They don’t solve a social problem. If you look at these things, they’re from Uber’s promise, people would just use their cars that are all parked all the day. And that is just magic and everything’s cool. And then people are like: No, no, this just creates more cars on the streets. That’s what this thing does. And it makes the work of driving people more precarious, and focusing more on these kinds of things and actually trying. Whenever I talk to European politicians, which sometimes happens, I try, okay, explain to me what European values are and how what you do aligns with that.

Because I think there could be a story about European values that is based on a more sustainable kind of economy, even a capitalist economy. It’s kind of a buzzword, but in Germany, after the second world war, the economy was called soziale Marktwirtschaft, like social market economy. The history of the term is very complex and was a bit of a bullshit buzzword. But the idea was the economy has to serve certain social goals. Back then unions were a lot stronger than they are these days. It was like okay the economy grows and everyone should feel that to a certain degree and looking back at that tradition and trying to say this could be constructed as a European value, saying yes that even in digital spaces, how do we build that?

And maybe American companies will have higher stock value, but who gives a shit? It doesn’t matter. Stock market is gambling, so that shouldn’t be relevant. And we can build a different way of building the world, even within a capitalist hellhole. But it could be a better hellhole. It could be a less shitty hellhole. And I think that that is a path for Europe to actually be innovative, to build an economy that has a lot of things that people might even want and not just access to healthcare, which also is common. You’re in Canada. You also have healthcare, which is good, but many people in the US —

PM: To a certain degree, yeah.

t: Many people in the US don’t. This would be a path for Europe to show that there is actually a different way in comparison to the US and to China. Not saying it’s necessarily always a better way. It’s not, but a different approach to things where you can show this is how we do things here. And this is what we ask. European government or institutions, that’s what we put money in. That’s how we structure legislation. That’s what we want to see more in the world. And that could be like that. We want many small companies that all do their thing and maybe a hundred of them do the same thing in a slightly different, but that is cool. And everyone can find their thing. Everyone can go home at five and be with their kids and friends and have hobbies and all those kinds of things.

That is, I think, a vision that many people, not just in the EU, but if you are the EU, of course you’re caring mostly about the system. That is a vision that many people could get behind This is where we want to be. Because feeling like, okay, the stock market value of whatever corporation just exploded, like no one feels that, like no one has anything. Yes, Jeff Bezos is even richer. Congratulations. We don’t care. Building a world where people feel that political change has brought them actual change in their life that they appreciate is important, especially in the face of Europe having a growing fascist movements in all countries, in France, in Germany, in Italy. In Italy, they’re actually governing.

And I think that is a large part of what makes that growth of fascist movements possible, is the promise of progress no longer working. The promise of progress was your life will be better. You have a better life, and that doesn’t always mean you’re richer. Sometimes you can just ask, there’s a number for every society. How much money do you need to make a year where more money doesn’t make you happier? And it’s way lower than people think. I think in the US it’s like $60,000 bucks a year or whatever. If you have that you have housing, you have all the food you need, you have entertainment and you can do whatever the fuck you want and that is outlining that as a vision, not like we need more billionaires. No, no, we need fewer billionaires way fewer — we need no billionaires.

But we need to distribute things so that people can have a life where they probably still have to work a bit for their income, but have a clear path of doing something with their life that enriches their life, how they can express themselves, how they can create art or go see football matches, whatever, whatever they want to do. I think that that would be a European way that makes sense, and that has also a tradition and that I think people could get behind. That could actually be innovative and where the world could say: Hey, this is kind of neat. Let’s maybe take some of that; that’s cool.

PM: Absolutely. Think about the people and not just the billionaires. It’s been a long time coming, tante. Happy to finally talk to you for the podcast.

t: It’s been a huge pleasure.

PM: Thanks so much.

t: Thank you.