Industrial literacy and the fate of American progress

Danny Crichton:
Jason, thank you so much for joining us on the Riskgaming podcast today. Obviously, long-time founder and head of Roots of Progress Institute. And the reason you're here today is you've been launching what you've dubbed The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century. And so, maybe just at the start here of the show, why don't you talk about what the manifesto is, what your goal is, and maybe the broader Roots of Progress community you've been building over the last couple years.

Jason Crawford:
First, thank you so much for having me. Great to be a guest here. The Techno-Humanist Manifesto is a book outlining my philosophy of progress that is scientific, technological, and industrial progress, economic progress, and how that relates to human progress and human well-being. I am writing it because I think the world needs a new philosophy of progress. I think our views on progress soured in the mid to late 20th century. The 20th century opened very optimistic about science, technology and industry and their effects on human life and society. Perhaps naively optimistic about those things.

Jason Crawford:
And then through the course of the 20th century, in the course of correcting perhaps that naive optimism, we turned to pessimism, to fatalism and defeatism. We learned some of the costs and risks and problems of progress, but we also lost some of the confidence in our ability to solve them. The first half, learning about the costs and risks was true and necessary, but losing confidence in our ability to solve them was a mistake and a wrong turn. I think we need a new synthesis and a new way forward in the 21st century, and I am dubbing that techno-humanism. And that basic worldview or view of progress is what I wanted to outline in this book.

Danny Crichton:
You've been really focused on this word progress, and I think there's a community around this, progress studies. And I can think of a lot of thinkers, Derek Thompson, Patrick Collison, Tyler Cohen, others who have all gravitated around this word. And then there's this hyphenated language all around it, techno-optimism, techno-futurism. And you've centered on techno-humanism. Why that specific phrase to center all of your research around?

Jason Crawford:
I wanted a term for my philosophy, and I wanted a term that would combine a couple of key ideas. One is that, hey, technology is good actually. And so that's the techno part. But two is, why do we consider it good, and by what standard, and how do we judge it? It's not good in and of itself. It's not a goal in itself. It's good because ultimately it makes human lives better, and human society better. It's good for humans. Techno-humanism is fundamentally a version of, or a form of humanism that is a worldview that places humans and human well-being at the center of our moral code. And so I wanted to combine those two things and to put forth a love of technology, but also to always remember the reason and the purpose for it.

Danny Crichton:
And I think one of the main misbalances of the last decade or two has been this idea of the technological juggernaut. The technology that comes out has its own motion, has its own momentum, and it progresses. What I like here is that you're bringing this back within the context of human agency. That technology isn't just coming from the sky, it was built by engineers, it was built by scientists, it was researched, it goes through a whole commercialization pipeline, whatever the case may be. But that all of this is ultimately built and designed by humans for the purpose of human betterment and welfare. And I feel like that just is not centered in a lot of the other theories that I've seen in this community.

Jason Crawford:
Yeah. And it's true to some extent that technology does take on a life of its own. It's not completely under our control. Then again, the same could be said of nature. Nature also has a life of its own and is not completely under our control. Technology is more under our control than nature is.

Danny Crichton:
One of the points you make in your introduction is obviously there's been a huge rise in the amount of criticism around tech. So it's not just that tech as a juggernaut, but obviously the media in particular, politicians are harping much more aggressively on the ills of technology. And you point out, among the optimist community, that there have been histories of moral panics that certain technologies that we thought were going to destroy all of humanity have later been found in retrospect to be tremendously powerful and empowering for all humans. But at the same time, you're saying that you can't be overweening on the optimism, that there's a balance between optimism and pessimism that you think is necessary for progress to succeed.

Jason Crawford:
Well, I think what we need is the right optimism. In particular I think we need to avoid is a complacent optimism that is so blindly optimistic that it doesn't even acknowledge the reality of the problems that are facing us, or the risks and the costs of new technology. I think progress is not made by ignoring the problems of progress. Progress historically is made by acknowledging the problems, embracing them, and finding new solutions. The kind of optimism that I think we need to have is a much more contingent optimism, a prescriptive optimism that is a belief in our ability to solve those problems. And a belief in human agency, both as individuals in terms of having control over our own lives, and as a society in terms of having control of the future of humanity. That's the optimism that we need.

Danny Crichton:
One of the things I think is interesting, and this also relates to the yin and yang of the Riskgaming podcast. There's me, who's generally more on the pessimistic side, always prepared for the worst. And then Sam Arzman, our scientist in residence here, who does a subseries on the podcast called The Orthogonal Bet, is really bring the sense of wonder of science and imagination and the poetic web, and all these interesting areas and niches of science. And one of the things that you've highlighted, both in your introduction then the first... Whatever you want to call it, the first piece past the introduction. Is this sense of bringing people back to a sense of wonder. That it's not enough to just say we have agency, it's all controlled. But actually that we should be looking around industrial civilization going, wow, this is amazing and incredible.

Jason Crawford:
Yeah, I think we've totally lost that. The first chapter is titled Fish in Water, because I think that we are all a little fish in water when it comes to technology. We are so completely surrounded by industrial civilization. We live in it, we live through it and by it every day of our lives every moment. It recedes into the background and we start to take it for granted. We notice it almost more when it stops working. You notice electricity when there's a power outage. You notice supply chains when there are empty shelves on the stores, when there's some interruption in the supply of our daily necessities. Even a wifi outage maybe you notice and then you forget the rest of the time that you've got this amazing technology connecting you wirelessly to the knowledge, art and philosophy, and science and everything of the collective intellectual product of all of humanity.

Jason Crawford:
Of course we forget about the problems that were solved long before we were born. We don't see horse manure in the streets. We don't see epidemics of smallpox and cholera sweeping through our towns. But I find that even I tend to forget about the problems that have been solved even within my own lifetime. I am just old enough to remember when you needed to drive around paper maps.

Danny Crichton:
Right, right. The MapQuest printed. Yes, yes. [inaudible 00:07:00]-

Jason Crawford:
Well, that was the intermediate stage.

Danny Crichton:
Yeah, the intermediate. The old Rand McNally, yes.

Jason Crawford:
I can remember driving before the internet, or certainly before online maps, where you literally had to go to a book and look in the index for your street and flip to that page. And it's what, K3, and then you can find your way to it. And then there was the intermediate stage where you could look it up online, but you had to print it out on paper and take the paper with you. And now we're at the stage of the real-time directions, where it's virtually impossible to get lost unless your phone runs out of power or doesn't have signal. But even those things we tend to just take for granted. And so, in the first chapter I just wanted to point that out, and to remind people, to exhort people to look around every once in a while with awe and wonder at the amazing world that we have created.

Jason Crawford:
This is your inheritance from all the generations who came before you. This industrial civilization and the standard of living that it gives to us, certainly to everyone listening to this podcast, this is a gift from your ancestors. And we should look at it with awe and with gratitude to those who came before. And particularly to scientists, the inventors, the founders who worked and struggled and fought very often in order to bring this to us. We really owe them that debt of gratitude. And I closed out the chapter by saying we can never pay them back, but we can pay it forward to future generations by committing ourselves to progress and making the future even better.

Danny Crichton:
Let me ask you, obviously modern life is much more complicated. I'll use a little bit of a metaphor, but the old idea of the palimpsest, layers of sediment adding on, adding on, adding on. When I think of modern society, I think of the millions of problems that we... And the exact way you just described, millions of problems have been solved. In fact, they've been solved so well we don't even notice that they have been solved until we lose them. Electricity is maybe the best example. Air conditioning is another good example. When I was at TechCrunch a couple of years ago, one of the most controversial articles that I ever published was around air conditioning, which is only about 100 years old. We forget that there are actually people alive today who did not have access to AC, and lived in New York City, in very hot tropical parts of the world without air conditioning. And buildings were designed to handle this and we've been able to move beyond that.

Danny Crichton:
To what degree do we owe, not just a pay-on to the ancestors in our past, but some obligation or responsibility to actually teach what was solved? Whether that's in schools, whether that's through curriculums, whether that's part of learning biology. A biologist, we learned about Mendel, we learned about Crick, and Watson and Crick and how DNA came out. We learned a little bit about the scientific discoveries, but we didn't really get into the tooling that they had or the instruments they had available. We just don't explore that because there's too much to learn. And so, what obligation do we have on top of just teaching all the craziness that's going on in the world, of looking back and saying, "Well, here's what it was like 200 years ago, and here's how people lived and here's how they survived, and those are the problems you don't have to deal with anymore."?

Jason Crawford:
Absolutely. I think progress is a missing subject in the curriculum today, falls between the cracks of history and science classes. History is mostly about politics and kings and wars and governments, and so forth. Which is obviously a very important topic. And science is about the science, but we barely even teach the history of science, let alone the history of technology and industry. So you don't really get to economic history unless you perhaps specialize in that in university. And that means that students can graduate from undergrad, from university, let alone from high school, with really very little understanding or appreciation of industrial civilization, of the modern world and the systems that give us all our standard of living. Or why those systems were created, or what world they replaced.

Jason Crawford:
Or what it takes to keep things going and to even simply maintain the system and to operate it. And that is I think a basic tragedy of education and of society today. And I absolutely, one of my big goals in life is to try to help the world figure out, how do we get this on the curriculum? This should be taught in every high school, in every undergrad program. Everybody should learn this and have some basic... I've coined the term industrial literacy, the basic understanding of industrial civilizations and the system that you depend on and live your life through. Everybody out there.

Danny Crichton:
We had, a couple of weeks ago, James Pethokoukis, who's a fellow and researcher at AEI, wrote a book called The Conservative Futurist. And he makes a distinction throughout his book around an upwing faction and a downwing faction. One of the ideas he had in the book was this idea of an AP progress studies class. A specific class that would be designed to teach the concept of human progress, even agency. Get it on the curriculum, people can take classes, get scores, et cetera. I'm curious whether you think it's better to teach it... You talk about industrial literacy, is that something that should be taught as a one-off class reading, writing, industrial literacy? Or is it something that gets integrated into more traditional fields? You would learn biology or physics or math, but with that lens included throughout that curriculum?

Jason Crawford:
Yeah, I definitely think it can and should go beyond one class. I think it should be more broadly integrated into the curriculum. And the specifics I'll leave maybe to people who have more expertise in pedagogy. But I'll just point out, one of my favorite thinkers about pedagogy is a guy named Matt Bateman, who has worked on Montessori in particular, and more broadly he's working on the history of education. And he points out that Montessori believed that the story of progress was an indispensable part of the curriculum. And this gets dropped from most Montessori schools today, that it's a forgotten part of her philosophy and her ideal curriculum, but she really believed that this was an important thing.

Jason Crawford:
Notably, she believed that one of the reasons it was important was to develop in the student love for humanity. That you could look around, you could read about history and not just be reading about the kings who waged wars, but also be reading about the inventors who created these amazing technologies that you use in your life. So learning about the good things that humans had done over the past would not only maybe make you feel more of a sense of agency over the future, but would also just increase your love for humanity and for your fellow man. That, wow, there are good people out there who did amazing things in the past that we should be thankful. That's a perspective you almost never hear.

Danny Crichton:
And talk about the perspective. I'm going to go into chapter two, which is the latest chapter you've published so far, as we all wait for chapter three and onwards. But you're calling this the Surrender of the Gods, and it's a little bit of the story of building up a human agency and the material wealth that we've accumulated over the last couple hundred years. Why don't you just give a little bit of a summary of what you're going for? And this is a two part, and the second part's coming out shortly, but give us a little bit of a precis of what's going on here.

Jason Crawford:
My thesis in this most recent essay is that you can see the story of progress as the story of the expansion of human agency, that this is a lens by which you can look through everything. And I think it's a real unifying lens. What more knowledge, technology, wealth and infrastructure have allowed us to do is to take more control over the world, more command over nature. And to greatly expand our choices and options both as individuals and as a society. And so I start off by looking at the most primitive state of humanity in hunter-gatherer tribes. The agency of those tribes, the choices and options open to them, their ability to make those choices was extremely limited. They ate what they found, literally the plants and animals that they encounter. They made tools and weapons out of found materials with no real ability to transform those materials.

Jason Crawford:
Their entire lives, essentially, were at the mercy of nature. And if you look at the major developments in technology and society over time, so much of it is really just coming up with ways to not just be dependent on blind luck and random chance and the vagaries of the things that nature gives us, and occasionally takes away from us. Agriculture, for instance, was a huge leap forward in this sense. Because for the first time we were eating the food that we planted, the crops that we planted and the livestock that we raised, rather than what we found out there in nature. Agriculture has been criticized. Jared Diamond wrote a piece calling agriculture the worst mistake in the history of the human race. James C. Scott, right? [inaudible 00:15:41]-

Danny Crichton:
That was my next question.

Jason Crawford:
I talked about the agriculture as the foundation of tyranny, and et cetera. And they're all pointing to real facts. Agriculture is difficult. It is likely that the early agriculturalists had to work harder than hunter-gatherers, maybe had worse nutrition. Actually, the stature of humans, the skeletons actually is reduced in the archaeological record. So it seems like people maybe weren't eating as well, et cetera. But one thing I've never quite heard these critics answer is, why did people do it? The move to agriculture was very gradual. It wasn't like we crossed some threshold that we could never go back, it was a very evolutionary incremental move. People must have preferred something about it. And if you look at the theories for why we moved to agriculture, many of them are actually that we were essentially forced into it. There are some theories that there was climatic variation, that the climate changed and agriculture was a natural response to that.

Jason Crawford:
But there's something even simpler, which is that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle depends on a luxurious amount of land per person. It cannot support high population densities at all. And population densities, of course, for a successful species naturally increase. And so you spread out to more and more land. And when you can't do that, the population density increases. And eventually I think you are forced into agriculture. And into, ultimately, more and more intensive forms of agriculture that are higher and higher yielding. And even within agriculture, by the way, you see that people will do the least labor-intense forms of agriculture that are lower yielding when they can get away with it, when they have enough land to do so. And the more they get forced into needing to be more efficient with the land, the more they're going to do more work to bring more fertility to the soil and grow more crops.

Jason Crawford:
So if you take this perspective that actually what happened was the hunter-gatherers were living a completely unsustainable lifestyle. Unsustainable not in the modern fantasy sense of that term, but in the actual literal sense that lifestyle could not be sustained. They did not have the means to sustain it because their population was increasing. And they ultimately were driven into agriculture. So even you believe in some sense, which I don't yet totally buy, but even if I were to grant that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was somehow more pleasant and pleasurable to live than the agricultural one, there is still the fact that the hunter-gatherers were not able to keep that lifestyle when their circumstances changed. Whether it was climate or population density, or whatever it was. For us to look back on the hunter-gatherers and say, "Oh, they should have just stayed where they were. It was a mistake to ever leave that lifestyle."

Jason Crawford:
It's actually a deeply ahistorical analysis. Because we are looking back at them as if they had any idea what was actually going on, as if they had scholars writing publications and magazines, publishing things, talking about our lifestyle and whether we should keep it or not. There was no such thing. We are looking back at them with an extremely modern viewpoint where we can analyze entire societies and historical trends and gather data, and have entire fields full of experts analyzing these things and thinking about different options and so forth. To analyze them in that context is completely forgetting that they had no perspective on anything literally outside of their range of sight. They had no ability to coordinate their societies.

Jason Crawford:
Even if some brilliant Einstein level hunter-gatherer had a glimpse of what was going on and wanted to somehow coordinate such that all the tribes would not increase population density, there would've been no way to do it. They had no such coordination mechanism. So when you start looking at these things through the lens of human agency, the progress of humanity becomes much more clear. That all that science, technology, wealth, and industry, they actually do expand our view and expand our ability to comprehend and to act in the world. And I think that's fundamentally a good thing.

Danny Crichton:
When you think about, we brought up James C. Scott who just passed away last month. Recent times, Noam Chomsky has passed away, David Gravers passed away. And many of them were all in this category of this defensive anarchy, and defensive anarchism. James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State, The Art of Not Being Governed, these histories of saying not only that it was a possible to go a different direction away from industrial capitalism away from strong states, the way away from property rights away from debt and the capitalist structure that came out. They say, look, sure, to your point, hunter-gatherers had no context. They had no idea what was going on. They weren't building societies. There's no reservoir of knowledge at the time. There's no libraries. It's hard to have that perspective. But with our lens today, many of them would argue that was a route that may have actually been very... Has a balanced quality of life.

Danny Crichton:
We don't have the sedentary office lifestyles like I'm sure you and I have. I'm looking at your bookcase that no one can see, but you and I are both sitting at desks for most of the day. Hunter-gatherers were active, they didn't have to go to a hospital to make up for their inactivity. That is the general criticism of progress studies, is it doubles down on a direction of capitalism, of free markets, and that model that many already criticize. Do you agree with some of that criticism? Do you think that is inaccurate? Is it a misdirection? How do you take in what I would broadly put under the label of that late stage capitalism criticism? [inaudible 00:21:03] Neo-liberalism.

Jason Crawford:
Yeah, it's funny. Late stage capitalism is such a funny term. I think they've been using that term since the 1930s or 40s.

Danny Crichton:
It's a very long late stage. It's where the multiple over time innings.

Jason Crawford:
Yeah. Well, the communists got very disillusioned through the mid to late 20th century, because they expected capitalism to just fall apart on its own, and that's not the way it worked out. Okay, I've read Seeing Like a State, fascinating book. I definitely have some disagreements with it, but highly recommend people read it. The stuff about Corbusier alone was worth the book for me. What a fascinating character. I think the aspect of James Scott that resonates with me the most is when he is talking about some of the failures of schemes that are imposed technocratically top-down on a society, and how those schemes can go disastrously wrong. Even if you grant, which you may or may not grant, that they're done with the best of intentions. And sometimes done in order to help the very people whom they harm.

Jason Crawford:
Where I disagree with Scott is that he then takes that to be a general indictment of all order system science planning. The anarchy goes very deep for Scott, at least what I infer from Seeing Like a State, is that the anarchy for him is virtually metaphysical. He literally believes that reality itself simply does not lend itself to being comprehended or described in any simple way. Any attempt at order or conceptual comprehension is therefore somewhat fake. And the reality is, the farmer on the ground who works his soil and knows his farm extremely well. And if anybody comes in to try to tell him, "No, you should be using this crop or that fertilizer," they're going to be wrong.

Jason Crawford:
Now, nowhere in Seeing Like a State does Scott mention Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution. Which stands out as just like the obvious first counter example. Borlaug is exactly what Scott would've said is never going to work or is going to create disaster. Some Westerner, some American who does his science in Mexico, comes up with the crop that somebody in India and Pakistan is going to use. If you read Seeing Like a State and then you heard an abstract description of Borlaug's project and how... No, okay, originally he was growing wheat in Mexico for Mexicans to use. Great. But then it ended up getting used in India and Pakistan. And you would've just predicted, from reading Scott, that this would've been a complete disaster, but it was the opposite. And it arguably saved hundreds of millions, maybe a billion lives from famine.

Jason Crawford:
So there's something to be said for science, and occasionally for a scientist coming in. The important point to me, coming from a classical liberal tradition, is that these schemes should not be forced on people. In Seeing Like a State, Scott says there are something like four criteria, four ingredients that have to come together for these disasters that he talks about. And I'm going to try to rattle it off the top of my head. But it's something like, one, you need what he calls the high modernist, what I would call the technocratic perspective, somebody coming in with their top-down plan. But also, one of the ingredients was crucially that they're basically willing to impose their plans by force. And you have a populace that's too demoralized or not organized enough to resist.

Jason Crawford:
My perspective is that the real problem here is with technocratic plans imposed by force on a population unable to resist, not with planning as such, or with science or with technology, or organization, or forests where the trees are arranged in neat rows. Or whatever it's that he wants to criticize. I think there's much more value to order and to monocropping, and to all those different things that he seems to be in opposition to.

Danny Crichton:
When I think about progress studies, you're getting at one of the crucial questions around progress and progress studies and making it more popular among folks. Which is, you're talking to a technology literate audience, people are very excited about it. I doubt many listeners are listening to progress studies or your techno-humanist manifesto and going, "I don't like this, I don't want it to go." But obviously there's a lot of criticism. Obviously, a lot of folks are worried about technocrats coming to them and saying, "Look, let me tell you how your community should run. There should be more growth, there should be more housing. You're going to love medium density, you're going to love transit-oriented development. Just let me get through this community and trust me on the other side of this."

Danny Crichton:
And I've struggled with this question myself over the last couple of years. Because on one hand, I'm with you as a classical liberal. If you don't want it, you don't force it on them. If they want a community a certain way, it's okay to live in a small town, you shouldn't have to grow. But then there's this tension that the entire Bay Area has chosen not to grow. Entire regions, entire states. And arguably, America, Britain have chosen as entire countries not to continue growing, and to pull back from the frontiers of progress, productivity, and economic growth.

Danny Crichton:
And so, how do you balance this idea of, look, we want to push people, we want to get into the curriculum, we want to recreate an ideology around this with that tension of, are we just trying to force people to go a direction? That they're saying, "Look, I just want to be at home. I want to de-growth, I want to turn off my AC. And I'm very happy to expire in my 50s because I don't want science to progress." Man, that might be an extreme dichotomy, but yeah, vivified.

Jason Crawford:
Well, I think what... You said the Bay Area doesn't want to grow, America doesn't want to grow. I think what we are seeing right now and why the Bay Area maybe has trouble growing, why America has trouble building anything, from housing to infrastructure, to power lines to transit, to et cetera, you name it. Is because of a alliance or cooperation that grew up between the technocrats and their mechanisms, and the reactionaries who are in opposition to progress. Virginia Postrel describes this brilliantly in her book from, gosh, about 30 years ago now, The Future and Its Enemies. Which I highly recommend. She was talking about, who are the enemies of progress? And she paints this picture of these two factions.

Jason Crawford:
The technocrats want to control progress, and maybe direct it to the right ends. They're theoretically, or are for progress. Or maybe once in the past they were for progress, but they didn't like the messy way it was unfolding under free market capitalism. And then there's the reactionaries who actually are against progress as such and think it's a bad thing, and it's going in the wrong direction. And it's harming people and they want to slow things down or stop it, or maybe even reverse and go back to a probably, frankly, romanticized, idealized vision of the past.

Jason Crawford:
What Postrel points out is that they end up working together. And so, the technocrats created mechanisms through courts and government, and the reactionaries take advantage of them. And so, a law like NEPA, the National Environmental Protection Act, is a great example. It's a very technocratic method where you require certain impact statements to be filed. And you have court processes where you can sue if you believe someone hasn't followed the law, and so forth. And then the reactionaries have taken full advantage of that to use the mechanism for their goal, which is to stop anything from getting built. To slow things down and make things so costly that almost nothing can happen. And so I think that's how we've gotten to where we've gotten.

Danny Crichton:
Well, and I think we saw that evidence when we bring up the Bay Area because of the Solano County future California, our Forever California. I forget their names, apologize. But-

Jason Crawford:
Yeah, the California Forever Project.

Danny Crichton:
California Forever Project. And this idea of building an excerpt on the edge of the Bay Area, hopefully beyond the remits of all the constraints, and the technocrats try to bring environmentalism and slow it down. And the project has really slowed down to a trickle, and arguably is years away now of actually getting to fruition. And arguably, that's probably not going to happen in the end anyway. I do think that that synthesis is really interesting, I hadn't heard of Virginia before.

Danny Crichton:
We've gone over the introduction, first couple chapters. But you have a plan to launch installments of this, all 11 chapters, until January of 2025. So over the next four to five months. Why don't we talk first about where the next couple of essays are going to go, and then I would love to hear more about this model of this punctuated publication schedule around a manifesto. But where are you taking the essays in the next couple of installments?

Jason Crawford:
Yeah, sure. Look, the high level plan, part one is the value of progress. This is where I try to address the moral issues. Is progress actually good? Part two is about the future of progress. Where I want to address the question, can progress continue? Is there more progress to be had? Was high growth a thing of the past? As Robert Gordon suggests in his book, Rise and Fall of American Growth, and his talks. Or, is there actually much more, should we expect acceleration going forward? More Kurzweilian type of view, something like that. And then finally, part three, I talk about culture of progress and our society's ideas of progress, how that relates to progress itself. And ultimately, what is the culture of progress that we lost in the 20th century, and how do we move forward with a new synthesis in the 21st? And what is that going to take in terms of building a progress movement?

Danny Crichton:
And then, let's talk about the format. You're doing installments, you have three parts, and then 11 chapters within that. Some of the chapters have multiple parts as well. You're mostly publishing this through Substack, and then on your own website with Roots of Progress. Why not write one mega manifesto? I'm sure this is going to aggregate to, I'm going to make up 70 to 100,000 words across all these different installments, book, ebook, large, long email. You're doing this in these bite sized chunks. Why that strategy for your manifesto?

Jason Crawford:
Oh, yeah. It's very simple. I am going to publish it as a book once it's all written, but I wanted people to start reading it as soon as possible. Rather than write the whole thing and then tell everybody, "You can read it in 2025," I figured I would just start publishing as I wrote it.

Danny Crichton:
You're very ambitious about the progress of the book publishing industry, I might add.

Jason Crawford:
Oh, yeah. Well, I doubt, by the way, that I will go with a traditional publisher for this book. I just doubt that it's a good fit for the traditional publishing industry. So if I wrote it now, first, I'd have to spend the rest of the year writing it anyway, then it would have to get published. And so, then when would people be able to read it? The world needs this book now. I wanted people to be able to read it as soon as possible. Plus, I prefer to work in public. I prefer to deliver my work as incrementally and regularly as possible. Just as a practical consideration, I need the regular deadlines in order to actually get my butt into gear as a writer and sit down and publish something. If I hadn't publicly committed to a writing schedule, I probably would never get this thing done.

Jason Crawford:
But also, I think it's better to get things out there incrementally, and I get feedback along the way. It also just builds the audience incrementally along the way. In a sense, it's like a rolling book launch. Frankly, I think this is the future. I'm not the only person who's done it like this. Stewart Brand is doing a similar thing right now with his book on maintenance. A number of books have started as blogs, and then everything from Eric Reese's book, The Lean Startup, was built out of his blog. When Chris Anderson wrote his book, The Long Tale, came out of blog posts. I think it's the way to do it. And it's not even all that new. If you look back to the 19th century and before, there's a lot of serializing a book in publication I think was actually a pretty common mode. Didn't Dickens do that kind of thing?

Danny Crichton:
Oh, yeah, of course. That's why they're so long.

Jason Crawford:
Some of them got paid by the [inaudible 00:32:25] word, I believe.

Danny Crichton:
Yes, I think we knew this in the pre-capitalist, mid-1800s, we're still learning incentive structures and pre-game theory. And Dickens found out exactly how to do it way earlier before The Economist did. But I think it's actually super interesting to see this full loop back to serialization. The fact that for 20, 30 years in traditional publishing you would do a single chapter, you'd publish that in Atlantic or Foreign Affairs, or some prestigious magazine. You'd see how it would go. And then if that was successful, you do the book. And usually the book is never as good as the original article, because the article is this amazing synoptic beautiful piece that's really tightly edited. And then you're like, okay, turn that 25 page article into a 300-page book. And that translation seems to never hold up as well as the original.

Danny Crichton:
This model I think is super interesting. But I want to highlight something that you emphasize, because I think it's also part of the Roots of Progress mission, which is this working in open areas and actually building community around it, or an audience. But you have a writing mentorship program. You're trying to build a community around the idea of progress. Is that not just obviously strategical, but has that been useful to create and intersect different types of folks together around this community? Does it help with your own work? How do people get into this community, and what do people get out of it?

Jason Crawford:
Just for context, for all the listeners, a couple of years ago I founded a nonprofit called The Roots of Progress Institute. It really grew very organically out of my writing. My blog, The Roots of Progress began in 2017, and was a side project for me for a long time. Then my full-time focus, and then launched the nonprofit on the basis of it. And the mission of the nonprofit is to build a culture of progress for the 21st century. We are working on building this movement, and that means both building the intellectual base for the movement and also building the community around it. So in order to support the intellectual base, we have a Progress Writers fellowship, which we are about to announce the second cohort. We did the first cohort last year, and we're about to announce the second cohort of Progress Writers that we're going to be supporting through that.

Jason Crawford:
And we support them through a program that gives them writing instruction and help in promoting themselves online and just connects them with mentors and advisors and a peer group. And then the second big thing we're doing this year that we've announced is we're holding our first annual progress conference in the fall, and that'll be in Berkeley, California in October. Super excited about that. We've got keynote speakers like Tyler Cowen from Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe. The two of them, by the way, coined the term progress st.udiAs in the Atlantic back in 2019. We've got Steven Pinker who wrote the book Enlightenment Now, which has progress in the subtitle and a bunch of other great writers. I mentioned Virginia Postrel, she's going to be speaking as well, and a bunch of other great folks.

Jason Crawford:
What we're trying to do in this conference, and more broadly in our community building efforts, is to bring together a broad variety of folks, authors, journalists, and academics on the one hand, especially folks in history, economics and philosophy., but also practitioners, technologists, scientists, inventors, founders, investors, and policymakers. And people who are building culture itself, educators, filmmakers, the other storytellers, screenwriters, novelists and so forth. That's the cohort there, the contingent of folks that we're bringing together all around this central concept of progress.

Danny Crichton:
And then I want to close our conversation, because obviously the US election is going on right now in the background for most of us. Progress has obviously been a key policy node for a lot of folks. Obviously, we can talk about cancer, whatever, and that seems much less interesting. But to what degree, when you think about progress studies and the mission you have, is this theoretical and getting missionaries to sell a vision here? How much do you want to engage on say, the Senate just recently passed a bill to make it easier to permit around energy projects across the United States? We're in that spectrum between really tactical policymaking at the state level, federal level to big theories, manifestos as you've been writing. Where do you stand and where do you think the movement needs to go?

Jason Crawford:
Policy is definitely a part of the movement, because it is one of the big things that we need to do. When I think about progress and what is blocking it, I think that there's a bunch of areas where what's blocking it is scientific and technological breakthroughs. We don't really know how to cure cancer yet. We haven't quite figured out fusion energy. We're still working on AI and robotics. All of these things, we need scientific and technical work at the frontier. But then there are a number of other things that are basically solved problems that we can't implement the solutions for social reasons, whether that's law, policy, or just general culture. Like I said, we can't build housing in this country, and housing is a solved problem, technologically speaking. I would say nuclear fission is, we've basically got the technology we need to create clean, abundant, cheap, reliable power, and we're just not letting ourselves do it.

Jason Crawford:
I think policy is really important. Immigration is another area where we could be letting in a lot more of the super bright folks who are going to be helping to continue to make progress and keep America as a leader in progress. And we're not doing that either. So policy is super important. I personally don't focus on policy, I focus on the stuff that's a little more upstream, like history and philosophy. And that's what Roots of Progress Institute does as well. But some of our fellows write about policy, and there are some of our aligned partner or friendly organizations who focus on it as well. The Institute for Progress in DC, for instance, is all about federal policy. The relatively newly launched Abundance Institute has been working on policy issues. I do think that is an important component of it, definitely.

Danny Crichton:
Well, a lot of work to do, and I'm so glad you're working on it. But Jason Crawford, founder of Roots of Progress Institute, and the writer of The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, the new philosophy of progress for the 21st Century. Thank you so much for joining us.

Jason Crawford:
Thanks for having me. Great conversation.

‍