Full Transcript for Automated Athens: Ancient Greek Ideals in the Early Age of Automation | Dr. Michele Kennerly

cybernetics and automation, information and artificial intelligence in the 1940s, 1950s, Unknown Speaker 3:08 1960s. So essentially, why does ancient Athens appear? What is it doing? What do people want it to do for them when they invoke it in discourse about automation? So, talk to me a little bit about what you mean by kind of these ennobling, aspirational discourses? Unknown Speaker 3:25 Sure. Well, I mean, new technologies are really disorienting, and people Unknown Speaker 3:34 struggling for meaning, struggling for guidance, struggling for orientation, cast about for all kinds of antecedents and precedents and models, or even anti-models, that could guide us through the new, that could shape our values and vocabularies and demands and hoped for outcomes. And ancient Athens comes to the fore because, for the most part, it's celebrated Unknown Speaker 3:58 as being the origin place of democracy, of philosophy, of rhetoric, of tragedy, of comedy-all those words that come from ancient Greek-and almost invariably, to make some sort of analogy between X and ancient Athens is to elevate and ennoble X. So, of course, we know that there are plenty of things about ancient Athens that we wouldn't say it had going for it, and the folks I'm looking at in my book are not shy about that per se. Unknown Speaker 4:27 But there's also a kind of denialism because there's this feeling that if we do automation correctly, we can do ancient Athens better than ancient Athens did it. That is, we won't have to enslave people in order to have relief from labor, we won't have to confine women to the home. We won't have to confine craftspeople to their Unknown Speaker 4:52 crafting sheds. That everyone will be able to fill out into public places, deliberate about the matters of the day. Unknown Speaker 5:00 Withdraw to have philosophical conversations if they like, write plays, scrutinize themselves, you know, develop self-knowledge, whatever it is, and so we can have Unknown Speaker 5:12 the idealized elements of ancient Athens without Unknown Speaker 5:17 the the aspects we know about that we tend to not cherish, like some of the ones I just mentioned. Unknown Speaker 5:24 Yes, Unknown Speaker 5:25 and this may be this is just a shot in the dark. So if you don't like this question, feel free to discard it. One of the things that I've noticed, and that I started because I was kind of looking at your book to to really think about, Unknown Speaker 5:39 is the is one of those questions that nobody even asked. We're we're looking at AI and consciousness, and and immediately the idea is, oh, we can replace slave labor because that was dehumanizing, Unknown Speaker 5:52 and no one's like, well, if AI actually becomes conscious, we're we're so it's it's amazing how we're so quick to dehumanize for our own benefit instead of being like, "Oh, something just became conscious. What are our duties to it? Where we're saying, "Oh,

good, that can go do all the chores I don't want to do. Unknown Speaker 6:11 Is that like is that part of this discussion? Unknown Speaker 6:17 There isn't a whole lot of fretting among the authors I'm studying when it comes to that question. I think one exception might be the work of MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener, because he identifies a fundamental paradox there, which is you can't have supreme intelligence and also Unknown Speaker 6:35 supreme obedience. Those qualities tend not to go well together, and so if we if we intend to subordinate Unknown Speaker 6:44 automated systems or artificially intelligent systems to our will, and at the same time they're growing Unknown Speaker 6:51 smarts or consciousness, Unknown Speaker 6:54 then inevitably we can. Well, that's every science fiction story now, right? Inevitably, we can expect an uprising. We saw it with, you know, Spartacus in ancient Rome. There are untold other instances of enslaved people rising up for their own liberation, and so perhaps we are in a kind of dot dot dot where we're not really sure what will happen with automated systems and artificially intelligent systems. But if we Unknown Speaker 7:18 read, you know, any science fiction published in the last while, we we might have a notion or two of how that might play out. Unknown Speaker 7:28 Why is Athens at the center of this discussion? I mean, you kind of referenced this already, Unknown Speaker 7:34 and do you think it should be at the center of the discussion? Do you think it's it's healthy to have at the center of discussion, or do you think that we should replace it with something else. Unknown Speaker 7:44 Well, I think it's healthy insofar as people who tend to draw it into their discourse do so because they value democracy very highly, and Unknown Speaker 7:54 I think that's a word that can sometimes occasion eye rolls because we know that Unknown Speaker 8:01 what we showcase in our, Unknown Speaker 8:03 you know, central documents, and then what what reality is like for most folks. You know, we can we can drive a semi in between there. Like there's some daylight, and so there's there's really good reason to be profoundly dissatisfied with democracy. And so a lot of my authors are finding themselves in a similar place. They're, you know, they're writing in the 50s and 60s. So you have McCarthyism. You have the Cold War. You have the military budget expanding massively. You have the United States coming out of World War Unknown Speaker 8:33 II, being world dominant and, you know, not really being sure how to adjust to that position. And so you have a lot of really smart people, kind of grasping for a way to Unknown Speaker 8:47 to take democracy seriously when the one that they're currently living in Unknown Speaker 8:52 is showing mixed signs, and so they look back to Athens, and and Athens oftentimes gets this kind of discourse of purity, and so they look back to Athens as being the original democracy, so what do they? How did that work? And we find interest in things like, you know, sortition. That if you were part of the demos, part of the group of people considered the citizens of a city state, Unknown Speaker 9:17 then you were just as good as anyone else to hold public office. And there were mechanisms for making sure everyone's names ended up Unknown Speaker 9:26 possibly being chosen. It didn't matter who you are, how much money you had, what you did, who your parents were, Unknown Speaker 9:32 etc. And so that's a really attractive notion. That's kind of radical egalitarianism, Unknown Speaker 9:37 and Unknown Speaker 9:39 you know, there's denial of Athenian militarism and imperialism, of course, but if they're just looking at the institutions of democracy that Athens instituted and kept going for almost 200 years, Unknown Speaker 9:53 then the thinking is there's a lot we might borrow from, Unknown Speaker 9:57 and also part of this discourse is usually. Unknown Speaker 10:00 That ancient Rome Unknown Speaker 10:02 is the antithesis. Unknown Speaker 10:04 That that's that's offering an example of what we don't want to do. We don't want to head for outright militarism, imperial expansion, Unknown Speaker 10:14 violence, Unknown Speaker 10:16 a decrease in citizen rights, authoritarianism, etc. And in my book, it's Alice Mary Hilton who really plays ancient Athens and ancient Rome against one another. And in fact, she intended to write an entire book about how that's the big battle in the cybercultural age: is which way are we going to go toward ancient Athens or ancient Rome? And as far as I can tell, she never actually wrote this book. But gosh, I wish he had. Unknown Speaker 10:43 I so and that's interesting because Unknown Speaker 10:47 all right now most of these scholars that you're studying and you're talking about are they American? Unknown Speaker 10:53 Yes, the only exception is probably Leon Burgert, who was a Ukrainian British, Unknown Speaker 11:00 and I guess McLuhan was is Canadian or was Canadian, but everyone else is is U.S. American. And Hannah Arendt, you know, from Germany, but ended up a U.S. citizen. And same with Alice Mary Hilton. She was born in Vienna, Austria, and then her dad ran afoul of the Nazis as they were coming to power. And her family went to the UK, and she was educated at Oxford in classics, comparative literature, and mathematics. She worked for Bertrand Russell, and then they ended up in the US. So, for the most part, the discourse I'm looking at comes from the United States, is about the United States. But there are a couple of characters who came from elsewhere. Unknown Speaker 11:39 The reason I ask is because Unknown Speaker 11:41 this sort of return to Unknown Speaker 11:44 Athens really stands kind of in contrast to the very strong Roman inheritance of the early

church church fathers, founding fathers. Sorry, yes, different episode church fathers. Anyways, but so the founding fathers were very explicitly Roman. I remember finding out in high school that George Washington has a, you know, the Cincinnatus statue where he's like in a toga. I was like, wait, oh, they were like really into Rome, yeah. And so, is there a little bit of this kind of a their way of critiquing Unknown Speaker 12:20 the early American governmental philosophy, philosophy of government. Unknown Speaker 12:27 Yeah, I love the Cincinnatus example because Unknown Speaker 12:30 Cincinnatus, you know, twice left his farm to serve Rome, but then returned to his farm, and Washington did the same thing. Unknown Speaker 12:38 And you know, this is probably most famous right now for being part of one of the songs in Hamilton, Unknown Speaker 12:44 but anyway, I don't think there is explicit Unknown Speaker 12:50 an explicit attempt to kind of talk back to the founding fathers and to the basic architecture of this country, which is Republican in nature. And you know, if you've read Unknown Speaker 12:59 the Federalist Papers or Unknown Speaker 13:01 any of the letters of the founding fathers, you know that Athens Unknown Speaker 13:05 was unsettling to them. They thought there was something just very unstable about a democracy, and that's why they built things the way they did. Unknown Speaker 13:14 But by the 1820s or so, democracy is not really a pejorative anymore, and it starts to be a word that's that has a really positive valence, and so you're you're dealing with this interesting, you know, vortex of discourse about a system that's republican, but increasingly uses this uses the word democracy to talk about itself, but the republican Unknown Speaker 13:40 structure of our country sometimes gets in the way of our democratic impulses or desires or dreams, and you can see. I mean, Alice Mary Hilton of everyone I'm writing about is the most active in policy. She's constantly talking about it. She's part of an open letter that goes to Johnson in '64 called, Unknown Speaker 14:02 "Well, it's just like a statement from the ad hoc committee on what they call the triple revolution, and they're looking at the cybernetic revolution, the human rights revolution, the weapons revolution, all happening at the same time, and they're talking about how our democracy needs to make some decisions about what to prioritize right now when those three three things are braided together and and operating at the same time, Unknown Speaker 14:26 and that's braided together Unknown Speaker 14:29 in time and history, not necessarily in theoretical principles. If I'm understanding that correctly, absolutely, yes, they're co-occurring. Yeah, co-occurring chronologically, but Unknown Speaker 14:41 you can see them impinging on one another Unknown Speaker 14:45 increasingly, and Unknown Speaker 14:48 because there's, for instance, there's there there's a lot of argument happening in the early Unknown Speaker 14:54 '60s. Well, maybe not quite then, but as we you know get more and more invested in Vietnam. Unknown Speaker 15:01 Sending more and more American troops there. There's a lot of discussion about how that money could be used and who is being sent over there. And Unknown Speaker 15:10 Alice Mary Hilton was a huge part of all those conversations, as were you know Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs and Unknown Speaker 15:18 a lot of other labor activists. They were caught up in in cyber nation and cyber culture because they could see that it was increasingly infusing culture and the military industrial complex and policy making at the highest level. Unknown Speaker 15:35 When you say cyber culture in the 1960s, Unknown Speaker 15:38 what are you referring to? Because I I do I I have to I caught it and when you start talking about the 60s but when you say cyberculture now I think the internet and obviously Unknown Speaker 15:50 that's not possible in the 60s so what what are we talking about with cyberculture in the 60s Unknown Speaker 15:56 sure yeah well that word was coined by Alice Mary Hilton who I've mentioned before in '63, Unknown Speaker 16:02 in a book she wrote about logic and computers, and essentially she was looking for a term that would be a kind of Unknown Speaker 16:12 counterweight to agriculture. That is this big leap forward for humanity that happened 8000 years ago. She thought that what was happening with cybernetics and automation offered a similar moment for for humanity, and she wanted a term that would match the weightiness of agriculture. So she she chose cyberculture, Unknown Speaker 16:36 and she spends a lot of her writing trying to figure out what this could look like and what sorts of old habits we need to shed if we're gonna properly Unknown Speaker 16:46 kind of step into what this moment could offer Unknown Speaker 16:49 us? So she thinks, you know, that we have this obsession with work that we need to figure our way around. That a lot of us get all of our meaning and worth from our work, and if there's no work anymore because of automation, she's very dreamy about that. If there's no work anymore because of automation, how are we going to make meaning? Unknown Speaker 17:07 How are we going to develop self-worth? And she thinks we've just all these capacities are woefully underdeveloped, and that's one reason she looks to the Athenians because she thinks they offer models of what to do with your day if you don't have to spend it working, Unknown Speaker 17:23 yeah. Now, did she come up with the term cyberculture, or just the term cyber in general? Unknown Speaker 17:29 Cyberculture is okay. Yeah, and cybernetics is is wiener's coining, but of course, a lot of French scholars argue that he wasn't the first. That actually, Plato was the first

Unknown Speaker 17:41 one, and then Unknown Speaker 17:43 like Ampere was after that, and there's a Polish scholar in the 19th century, a Polish mathematician who also uses it, and so he kind of claims he coined the term with one of his Unknown Speaker 17:57 colleagues, Arturo Rosenbluth, who was a Mexican physician, and Unknown Speaker 18:03 a couple of people are quick to say you weren't the first. But yeah, cyber is kind of a weird cut of this Greek word Unknown Speaker 18:11 kubernetekey, like having to do with steering, and that's why it appears in the work of Plato because he uses navigation and steering as an analogy to government, politics, rhetoric, all other sorts of of systems throughout his work. Unknown Speaker 18:30 Now you mentioned McLuhan, Unknown Speaker 18:33 and of course, Unknown Speaker 18:35 probably most famous for the medium is the message or the medium is the massage, Unknown Speaker 18:40 And so, Unknown Speaker 18:43 what role does he see in regards? I mean, you talked about mechanization and cybernetics, and then you talked about information. I assume that's where McLuhan comes in. Unknown Speaker 18:55 How does? Unknown Speaker 18:56 Go ahead. Unknown Speaker 18:58 Yeah. Yes. So you're right that essentially Norbert Wiener kind of loses the the lexicon battle. He he actually hated the word automation. Unknown Speaker 19:09 This is Norbert Weiner. He thought automation was the way that word should work, which is terrible. So at that, he did not get his wish there. But Unknown Speaker 19:19 information was the keyword of one of his students, Claude Shannon. Claude Shannon didn't really thought cybernetics was too broad. Cybernetics is just the study Unknown Speaker 19:29 and the theory of dynamic interrelated systems, be they biological, mechanical, hybrid, cultural, organizational, and that was too big for Claude Shannon. So he chose information as his term, and that ends up supplanting cybernetics by the late '60s, early '70s, Unknown Speaker 19:48 and cybernetics kind of becomes a little bit Unknown Speaker 19:52 tinfoil hatty for a while, and then you see cyber terms really take off in the '80s Unknown Speaker 19:59 with. Unknown Speaker 20:00 You know William Gibson's neuromancer with Unknown Speaker 20:06 oh my gosh what word did he coin cyberspace cyberspace and so you see the yeah so you see the term so cyber starts to to be a prefix on everything again but there were a few decades there when it was just not considered hip at all to use that that prefix. So with McLuhan, he is talking about automation. He begins and ends understanding media with attention to automation, and he closes out the book by talking about how if we're really going to prepare ourselves and be Unknown Speaker 20:37 kind of quick of foot about taking advantage of all these various items that Alice Mary Hilton was saying was coming for us if we truly turn

toward cyberculture. He argues we need to reanimate liberal education. Unknown Speaker 20:50 That in fact, liberal education Unknown Speaker 20:53 is is what we need in a time of cyberculture because it's all about you know developing the self. It's all about learning arts of conversation, of listening, Unknown Speaker 21:01 and when your day is opened up, you have a lot more time for those sorts of, Unknown Speaker 21:08 you know, Unknown Speaker 21:09 activities. And calling them activities even seems like it's too harsh because it seems like they have the telos. But the lovely thing about a conversation is that it just it meanders and it wanders, and you can't say, well, obviously this is a timed conversation, but still, even within it, we're finding little trails and rabbit holes, and we're going down them. And it's really a luxury to have the time to do that. And McLuhan thinks if we're going to take full advantage of what automation is going to be granting to all of us, which is kind of liberation from work, that we are going to need to figure out how to read text closely, talk about them, listen with others, debate with others, dialog, and the like. Unknown Speaker 21:50 Is there a movement away from Unknown Speaker 21:54 purpose and more towards maybe play in in these kinds of discussions? Unknown Speaker 22:00 Yes, yes, but that's also a little bit of a source of anxiety for for some folk because Unknown Speaker 22:08 they think Unknown Speaker 22:11 we just no longer have a cultural capacity for kind of robust play. That the kind of play in which we engage tends to be kind of passive, Unknown Speaker 22:22 not very ambitious. Unknown Speaker 22:24 So there, they embrace play, but it's a it's a really capacious Unknown Speaker 22:29 kind of play that they envision, where people are Unknown Speaker 22:34 making things, Unknown Speaker 22:35 doing things, that they are Unknown Speaker 22:39 kind of setting themselves into the world with an idea of leaving a trace of themselves, so it's again a more ambitious vision of play. Unknown Speaker 22:46 That's not just kind of a frolicsome vision, but it's a kind of taking seriously that human as creator, and that that that is there's a ludic impulse in all of us that we tend to lose once we get in, you know, once we've been through enough schooling, kind of gets disciplined out of us, and so there is kind of a hope for getting back in touch with a kind of childlike wonder, a kind of sense of one's own abilities to make a difference in the world. That's the kind of play that they're invested in, Unknown Speaker 23:21 and I'm trying to connect that with Marshall McLuhan because he's not Unknown Speaker 23:26 he's not frightened of us losing reading per se, but his concern is with the Unknown Speaker 23:33 way that TV and maybe automation removes our capacity for this kind of play. Am I understanding that correctly? Unknown Speaker 23:41 I think he feels that the educational system has become really segmented, and so he he likes liberal arts because there's a kind of there's a focus on wholeness of developing a whole person, Unknown Speaker 23:53 and not just a person who has some degree of knowledge in this subject matter and that subject matter, but has trouble connecting them. He there's a sense of of comprehensiveness that he finds really attractive about a liberal arts education, Unknown Speaker 24:08 and Unknown Speaker 24:10 you know he he Unknown Speaker 24:13 you know he knows that there are lots of different media that can perform narrative functions. So he's not he doesn't say you know turn off your dials, but there's a sense that you know he talks about hot and cold media, for example, and so he wants us to be just more attuned to the whole temperature expanse when it comes to to media. That we're not just beholden to whatever one happens to be the hip one at the at the time, but that we are we're engaging with different modalities, different Unknown Speaker 24:41 Media formats, and that we're kind of availing of everything that culture has to offer. Unknown Speaker 24:48 And so, I'm just trying to make sure I'm tracking with you. Like his concern would be, you go and you work your nine to five job, and it's very Unknown Speaker 24:58 just checklist oriented. Unknown Speaker 25:00 And you go home, you eat dinner, which very well might come from like a freezer with compartments, and then you watch your your blocks of entertainment for three hours, and you go to bed. And that's yes to him that is that is a problem. So it's not that TV itself is the problem; it's the way that it's all compartmentalized. Yes, it's everything is hyper segmented. That is what he finds problematic. He wants continuity, fluency, flow, Unknown Speaker 25:31 immersion, and he thinks that Unknown Speaker 25:34 work under automation offers that. He doesn't give us a lot of details about how, but he does he does say repeatedly that work under automation is a lot closer to the sorts of Unknown Speaker 25:49 work that artists do, where you're in kind of a flow state and you're immersed in the work, and it's not just that you're doing one one task and then someone over here is doing this other task, and there's just a series of segmented tasks going on, and then you go home and you eat your segmented meal, and you watch your television program at the same time every night. Unknown Speaker 26:11 There's something about automation that he thinks Unknown Speaker 26:15 kind of opens us, Unknown Speaker 26:16 opens us up, frees us from the tiny little boxes that we've been putting ourselves in, and again, Unknown Speaker 26:24 he doesn't connect the dots for us. He just tells us this is his vision of what's coming. Unknown Speaker 26:30 You're using the the phrase "work under automation, and that's not the preposition

I would have thought of. Why is it work under automation? Unknown Speaker 26:41 I guess. Well, that's probably just me being stubborn because. Oh, Unknown Speaker 26:47 well, I like that too. Why? Why? Why are you being stubborn about it? That's great. Yeah. Well, because he he does sort of Unknown Speaker 26:56 offer this depiction of automated work, Unknown Speaker 26:59 but he doesn't. He's not descriptive about it, so he doesn't ever really explain what that means. He just talks about the kind of larger cultural outcomes of automated work, and so I'm saying work under automation Unknown Speaker 27:13 in the sense of just the fact that technology is here Unknown Speaker 27:18 has an effect on how we think about work, even if we're not doing automated work, which I think is a very McLuhan way of thinking about Unknown Speaker 27:28 it. Can you can you try? Unknown Speaker 27:31 I'm not sure. I followed the last bit. Do you mind? Do you mind expanding on that? Unknown Speaker 27:36 Sure. Well, yeah. So by work under automation, I just mean that I guess I'm trying to Unknown Speaker 27:42 give him a leg up a little bit by saying that Unknown Speaker 27:46 you know McLuhan's idea about what media does is extend us, right? And Unknown Speaker 27:53 when a new medium appears, it changes human life. Human life contours and adapts around Unknown Speaker 28:00 it, and so I guess what I what I'm trying to to give him is a line that he lacks in his own book, which is that even if my own job does not become automated, the fact that I'm working in an automated culture, or people, or some people do have jobs that are becoming automated, changes the nature of my work. Unknown Speaker 28:21 Okay. Unknown Speaker 28:23 Thank you. Sorry, I wasn't tracking before. No, not at all. Yeah, I mean, no, he's. I mean, he's famously pithy, and so he's. He's not writing to personally irritate me. He's writing to to at Unknown Speaker 28:36 least I don't I don't think that was his aim. But you know, he's trying to provoke, and he's trying to be aphoristic, and sometimes that's really rich, and sometimes it's just really frustrating. Like when you're writing a book about automation, and he keeps using the word, but he's really Unknown Speaker 28:52 small with details, then I just find myself trying to pitch myself into these places of hiatus and kind of fill it out for him. Unknown Speaker 29:02 That's what I was trying to do there. Yeah, absolutely. Unknown Speaker 29:07 I I love this idea that he was looking. He was trying to look into the future and be like, "Man, if only I could just really annoy those Penn State professors. You know, that's Unknown Speaker 29:18 so. And this is interesting. You talked about communication studies. If I understood correctly, is coming out around the 30s and 40s, or is that a little bit even later? Is that Unknown Speaker 29:32 how does the advent of this

new field Unknown Speaker 29:36 interact with this whole discussion? It kind of sounds almost like it starts it, but Unknown Speaker 29:42 how does rhetoric react? How does that play out in the discipline of the field, Unknown Speaker 29:48 or the fields fighting each other? I don't. Unknown Speaker 29:51 Yeah, yeah. Well, if if anyone out there has ever taken a communication studies class, they probably learned the communication law. Unknown Speaker 30:00 Which has sender, receiver, feedback, channels, noise-that is straight out of information theory, straight out of cybernetic theory. It's essentially the way a thermostat works, and so you have enshrined at the. I'm being a little cheeky, but it's also it's true. So you have within communication studies the central model of how communication works, coming from cybernetics, so that's one big inheritance Unknown Speaker 30:26 with communication studies departments. I mean, they look different everywhere. Sometimes media studies is within a communication studies department. Sometimes there's there's been a schism at some point, and communication studies Unknown Speaker 30:38 becomes more arts and sciences, like mine is, which is humanists and social scientists playing nice together, and then everyone doing journalism and sort of critical cultural studies and media is an entirely different college. So it's a strange inheritance. I think McLuhan again would be, Unknown Speaker 30:58 you know, tearing out his hair because it's all hyper segmented. He he would prefer I think that we be Unknown Speaker 31:05 all you know in one big tent having interesting conversations with one another, but but yeah, there are a few rhetoricians who try to take cybernetics really seriously, and that typically just goes in the direction of kind of lexico statistics, like using computers to figure out patterns of discourse in speech, to do better rhetorical criticism, or at least do rhetorical criticism differently. Like, what it what does it mean Unknown Speaker 31:32 if Unknown Speaker 31:33 you know if we can identify certain patterns in someone's syntax? Is there kind of like a liar's syntax, or is there some syntax that is more sublime than others? These kinds of questions become compelling to them when they invite computers into the conversation. Unknown Speaker 31:50 So, if we look at the kind of communication studies model, the sender-receiver feedback channels, Unknown Speaker 31:59 and and maybe they they don't get into it at all, but we look at kind of the classical rhetorical model, which I know Unknown Speaker 32:07 is, you know, I have done a little bit in this where Unknown Speaker 32:10 everyone's idea of what classifies as rhetoric is very different. So I understand that, but if we look at kind of even just the most basic Unknown Speaker 32:20 logos, pathos, ethos, Unknown Speaker 32:22 and and then decorum. You know, you did mention Cicero, so I thought that might. Unknown Speaker 32:30 How would that model, that kind of classic Unknown Speaker 32:35 rhetorical model, how would that change the discussion around Unknown Speaker 32:40 mechanization and automation. Unknown Speaker 32:45 Well, Unknown Speaker 32:47 I mean, Unknown Speaker 32:49 if you read our ancient friends, I mean, obviously there's there's focus Unknown Speaker 32:56 on on audience, but it's very speaker centric, Unknown Speaker 33:01 especially if you read, you know, anything Cicero Unknown Speaker 33:04 wrote. Unknown Speaker 33:05 When he talks about pathos, obviously there he has to talk about, you know, affect, and so the audience has to come into play. But for him, Unknown Speaker 33:14 like the locus of Unknown Speaker 33:17 pathos affectus in Latin has to be the orator. Like the orator, has to feel what they want others to feel, and so their primary. So I think there's a primariness of the speaker to ancient rhetoric that communication studies tries to decenter a little bit, and it tries to Unknown Speaker 33:36 put more focus on kind of dyadic relationships, groups, Families, Unknown Speaker 33:42 organizations, where maybe there's a hierarchy, but there's still some degree of dynamism, and there's some degree of feedback that those at the top desire from others. Unknown Speaker 33:53 So, you know, obviously the question gets more complicated when you bring in Aristotle because he wrote, you know, Unknown Speaker 34:00 ethical works as well, and so, Unknown Speaker 34:04 and even if you read his rhetoric, you don't get the sense there that audience members are just there to to listen and obey. Unknown Speaker 34:11 He calls them judges. Unknown Speaker 34:13 Sometimes he calls them spectators, but even spectatorship is kind of a critical spectatorship, Unknown Speaker 34:19 and so I think, Unknown Speaker 34:22 you know, bringing in ancient conceptual systems of of rhetoric Unknown Speaker 34:28 and trying to make it mesh with that sender receiver model Unknown Speaker 34:33 can be tough. But you know, my colleagues in communication science, for whom that that model is quite central, Unknown Speaker 34:40 and and for rhetoricians like myself, for whom it is is less central to our thinking and our theory building, Unknown Speaker 34:47 we can still have really rich conversations about character, about emotion, about argument, about analysis, about synthesis. So we can still, you know, we have different ways of getting at. Unknown Speaker 35:00 A lot of these questions about about power, Unknown Speaker 35:05 you know, about justice, about equity, about equality, but we have different different apparatuses for for getting at these questions. Unknown Speaker 35:16 And I think, and I I am not going to lie. This this it may sound like I'm headed somewhere, and I have no idea where this is

going, but I'm excited about it. As you're as you're talking about this, Unknown Speaker 35:28 yeah, you're talking about all these different subdisciplines like journalism. Unknown Speaker 35:33 There is public speaking, and then there's kind of this critical studies, and then there's media studies, Unknown Speaker 35:42 and some of it sounds like when you look at Cicero, he is mainly concerned with public speaking and how you how you speak publicly. Right? It's very practical, and that's part of like he's he's not interested in teaching you how to be a good audience member, right? It's like which is part of why it's all framed that way. Unknown Speaker 36:03 Do you think what what roles do these different disciplines play and help us as we Unknown Speaker 36:09 look at the rapidly changing technology? Unknown Speaker 36:13 So things like journalism is is distinct, like almost you know, and critical studies is almost like how to be a good audience member. I mean, that's overly simplistic. But each of these, you know, even this more systematic look-it's this third-person look-is just entirely. Unknown Speaker 36:30 Each of them has like a fundamental application they're looking for. Unknown Speaker 36:36 Yeah. Anyways, I'm not even entirely sure what I'm asking, but I don't know if that any of that, it strikes as rich to you, or Unknown Speaker 36:44 yeah. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna grab it this way. So I don't know if you've ever heard of Kenneth Burke, but Kenneth Burke was a major literary and music critic in the mid 20th century, and he was quite interested in in ancient rhetoric and what it would mean to create a new rhetoric. And he decided to put instead of persuasion at the center identification, which is the term he takes in Freud. So in Freud, identification is just an emotional bond forged between one person and another person. And Burke, Unknown Speaker 37:14 you know, takes that seed and kind of and waters it and thinks about how before persuasion can ever happen, there has to be some kind of a connection between the speaker and whoever's listening to them, and then he builds, you know, the rhetoric of motives is the book he writes about this around this notion. Unknown Speaker 37:31 And Burke famously referred to literature as being equipment for living, which is a really beautiful way of thinking about it. And the way I think about communication studies, no matter what it looks like at this institution or that institution, is it's it's equipment for living together. Unknown Speaker 37:47 That whether you're interested in rhetoric and you really are interested in maybe social movement oratory, Unknown Speaker 37:54 when one powerful person Unknown Speaker 37:57 is speaking to others and trying to empower them and galvanize them, or whether you're interested in Unknown Speaker 38:03 small group communication, or you're interested in Unknown Speaker 38:08 spousal relationships, there's there's a relationship happening there, and and so I think communication, what it really is all about, is figuring out how it is you go about living with the fact that there are other people, and it's both a tragedy and a comedy. That I will never be you, you will never be me, and we have to find ways to to bridge that chasm. How do we do that? How do we do that charitably? How do we do that equitably? Unknown Speaker 38:37 How do we do that given that there could be so much turbulence in certain relationships, so I think that's really what brings together a lot of the different facets of communication studies. Is just this fascination with getting on with others. That project. How do we go about doing that? Unknown Speaker 38:57 Thank you. That was a great answer to a terrible question. So I appreciate Unknown Speaker 39:02 it. Wasn't a terrible question. Unknown Speaker 39:04 So as we as we look at this kind of equipment for living together, I think that's what brings us back, perhaps, to the main point of your book is that there's the art and the kind of instruction, Unknown Speaker 39:20 the the steps that we take, and then there's the actual mediums that we use as well. Unknown Speaker 39:26 Does that, as as we look at those two things together, is that another way of kind of approaching your book? Unknown Speaker 39:34 Sure. Well, one of the things that's fascinating about the crew eye symbol in this book is that they, Unknown Speaker 39:40 I mean, they're propagating what we could call public discourse. They're writing books. They're holding Unknown Speaker 39:46 they're holding conferences. They're constantly in dialog with with others. They're constantly in dialog internally, trying Unknown Speaker 39:54 to trying to kind of work things out in terms of Unknown Speaker 39:59 self knowledge. Unknown Speaker 40:00 And kind of figuring out how to marshal their smarts in a way that will get through to others in a in a complex Unknown Speaker 40:08 time, and you know, there's Unknown Speaker 40:12 there are grand plans, Unknown Speaker 40:14 but sometimes there's a kind of rubber not hitting road issue, Unknown Speaker 40:20 you know, like you get the okay. Asian Athens offers us a gorgeous model, at least if we're only paying attention to the the shiny parts of it. But you don't get a lot of Unknown Speaker 40:33 you don't really get the bureaucratic part. You just get the imaginary part. And I don't think we need to all all the time bureaucratize the imagination. But we're kind of short here on on steps of like I was just conveying my frustration with McLuhan's. Like, how do we get there? And there's not a lot of kind of how do we get there Unknown Speaker 40:54 guidance with a lot of these writers. There are fears expressed, there are hopes conveyed, but you don't get a lot of sense of how just how do we do it? How do we do it? Unknown Speaker

41:06 And that's where I mean that's of course where persuasion and deliberation dialog comes in. So I think what they're really hoping to do is just kind of catalyze Unknown Speaker 41:15 people's thinking about possibilities, and then kind of entrust others to do the legwork to figure out how we instantiate these things, but their job, really, I think, is just to kind of initiate Unknown Speaker 41:26 our imaginations into thinking about what things could look like. Like we, Unknown Speaker 41:33 you know, we could settle for some kind of techno utopia where there's everything's frictionless. We don't ever have to really talk to anybody else or negotiate tough things, or we can envision something more like Athens, where people are constantly debating, where the agon is celebrated. You know, having contesting things is important. The stakes are high for everything, and we ought to be talking about things. And so, there's in a way we could say, perhaps we're being generous, that everyone in my book, is they're entrusting us to do the work to figure out how to bring this vision to life, but they are not they are not disclosing to us the the blueprint, the steps for how to get there. Unknown Speaker 42:15 So there, that's the kind way to say it. The the Unknown Speaker 42:20 perhaps not so kind way to say it is, oh, thanks for leaving us to do all the hard work. Is that Unknown Speaker 42:27 kind of yeah, yeah, or just maybe just the fact that Unknown Speaker 42:34 you know I can have really enriching, Unknown Speaker 42:37 maybe life altering conversations with my neighbors about the kind of future we want to build together, but if the infrastructure of the country is still a particular way, Unknown Speaker 42:46 that's a real point of recalcitrance. So I think, and that's kind of how I end the book. That Unknown Speaker 42:53 because I'm thinking people probably are expecting me to conclude the book with attention to rhetorical education being the answer Unknown Speaker 42:59 to where we are right now with AI, and Unknown Speaker 43:02 I kind of thought about going in that direction, but I I think we just need systemic change in how our democracy works in order for rhetorical education to be efficacious. Like it's efficacious in ancient Athens because if you're a member of the demos, Unknown Speaker 43:16 you can speak in any public space, and you're expected to. Unknown Speaker 43:22 But but here where we all fit in the democratic scheme of things is a lot less clear. And so I I would offer you know and I do in fact in the conclusion that we should bring back sortition, that we shouldn't have elections anymore. They're far too expensive. They are far too time consuming. I mean we're the only country in the world where elections start two years before the election happens, most countries radically truncate the amount of time that can be used for fundraising and politicking, and you know we

don't. So I think we, you know, I think we need a couple of pretty serious systemic structural fixes, and then we can kind of get excited about the conversations and the kinds of educational schema that we can adopt to help us fully Unknown Speaker 44:08 move into these changed structures and really enliven Unknown Speaker 44:15 them. And I was actually just about to ask, and I think you you just answered it. Is that I was feeling not a tension, but there were there were two things going on. Is there's this rhetoric around automation and how do we speak well, and then there's this idea of the good life, and both of these are at play. Unknown Speaker 44:35 Leaving aside systemic change, because I don't think we have time. Unknown Speaker 44:41 I don't have time to fix that or the power. Unknown Speaker 44:46 Do you see? Unknown Speaker 44:49 You know, you're talking about let's bureaucratize Unknown Speaker 44:53 it. Do you see that there's a real need if we're going to what's what's the word you keep saying sortition? Unknown Speaker 45:01 Do you see? Unknown Speaker 45:03 Are we talking about like a developing a new culture and new manners, Unknown Speaker 45:09 new art, Unknown Speaker 45:11 a new rhetorical art around things like Unknown Speaker 45:15 internet discourse that makes something like Unknown Speaker 45:20 across three was it 300, 350 million people in U.S. now? I think it's 350 million Unknown Speaker 45:25 that make that make that much more possible because obviously we can't just all gather in the in the agora and just start yelling at each other. People have tried; it does not seem to work. Unknown Speaker 45:38 So, do you when from the rhetorical education standpoint, are we talking about a new rhetorical art in that sense? Unknown Speaker 45:47 I mean, that's the that's the question: democracy at scale. Unknown Speaker 45:51 How do we do that? And there are Unknown Speaker 45:55 people in political science, and I would also include my my colleague John Gastel, who's an expert on small group communication? Who any time a country decides to move to a jury system brings him in to advise on how they should do it. So he has been working with sort of citizen groups. So there's going to be some kind of representation. I mean that that is, and that's even how it worked in in ancient Athens as well. You didn't have all citizens clamoring together in the blue in the Bulitarian. You just had a select few of them. But the idea was, if you lived in a deme of Athens and you were considered a citizen, your name could get picked, and you were entrusted to do this public work. So I think Unknown Speaker 46:41 that's the vision that I find Unknown Speaker 46:43 captivating. The idea that any one of us could, and and we we find this with juries. Any one of us could be called up to serve on a jury. Unknown Speaker 46:54 There's no test to make sure we know something that we have technical expertise. There's the fact that we're all endowed with judgment, we can listen to argument, and we can reason. And I think that's a lovely vision of any member of a citizenry. And I I think that that should work for every public office. We should be able to have some kind of a sense that any of us could do this work. Unknown Speaker 47:19 Whoever did it before us could could teach us a little bit of how it how it works. So there'd have to be systems of knowledge in place so that wisdom could could pass from one person to the other. Unknown Speaker 47:30 And you know, honestly, when I was writing this book, I was also going to write about all of the the visions of Athens that start to appear with the public internet in the mid '90s, and the fact that oh, right, we can have this. People oftentimes say the Athenian Forum, and you know the expert here is like Unknown Speaker 47:51 you're mixing ancient athletes in Rome. But we could we could have a digital agora where we all are are together. Unknown Speaker 48:00 You know this great marketplace of ideas that the internet makes possible. So these you find it in the speeches of Al Gore. You find it all over in early internet discourse that the internet makes it possible to finally have democracy at scale. Unknown Speaker 48:14 And what you know what we've seen is that the internet has not really been a source for democratization Unknown Speaker 48:21 per se. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 48:22 yeah. yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's not that's not to say it couldn't. But I think really we have to kind of focus Unknown Speaker 48:29 on on physical spaces and the kind of face to face deliberations that can happen there, and that we're still going to have to use some kind of a system of representation. But the idea is, you could be in that room, I could be in that room, he could be there. They could be there. She could be there, and any of us can be trusted to do the work of democracy. It's not just something that people who have the the time and resources to run for office do uniquely. Unknown Speaker 48:56 Well, so I want to be considerate of your time. First, let me say thank you. And besides buying and reading your excellent book, Automated Athens, Unknown Speaker 49:07 what is something you would recommend Unknown Speaker 49:10 to our audience after listening for about the last hour to either meditate on or do in response over the next week? Unknown Speaker 49:19 Sure. Well, I guess it would be to think more about who you want to to be kind of setting the tone for what work looks like for you, Unknown Speaker 49:29 because I think we need to have a national conversation about that and not trust in big tech and their platforms to to Unknown Speaker 49:38 to kind of shortcut the debate to figure out what you want work to look like for you, Unknown Speaker 49:45 and figure out what kind of affordances are available to us Unknown Speaker 49:49 to push back when our institutions or Unknown Speaker 49:55 companies or employers are deciding to embed. Unknown Speaker 50:00 AI and everything is this the vision of work we want, Unknown Speaker 50:03 and what can we do to push back when we feel like it's not? Unknown Speaker 50:08 A beautiful and very practical answer, Dr. Kenner Lee. Absolute joy having you on today. Thank you. Thanks, PJ. This was delightful. Thanks a lot. Transcribed by https://otter.ai