We are living through an incipient technological revolution. AI, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, commercial space travel, and other innovations are rapidly transforming everything from the workplace to the financial architecture of the global economy. While many of these technologies hold vast potential to benefit the social good, the multinational corporations and financial oligarchy that drive innovation and own its products are solely motivated by private profit. The consequences are unfolding all around us. As technology and the power of the oligarchy advances, the misery and disenfranchisement of the majority grows. We are now in an age of “Space Barons and Techtitans,” and the future they are leading us to is one of even greater exploitation, inequality, and ecological crisis. Loretta Napoleoni, author of Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barrons and the Fight for the Common Good, joins The Chris Hedges Report to discuss the technocapitalist present and future described in her book.
Studio Production: David Hebden, Adam Coley, Cameron Granadino
Post-Production: Adam Coley
Transcript
Chris Hedges: A small group of high-tech-savvy entrepreneurs who understand the velocity of technological innovation have harnessed this new power to establish predatory high-tech monopolies, such as Uber or Amazon. They subvert labor laws, strip the state of its power, gut regulation, ignore legal norms, and amass personal fortunes in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Their apps, services, and private equity firms dominate our lives. They are technological predators seen in every aspect of social existence commodification. The living wages of working people decline; The gig economy abolishes job protections, sustainable incomes, and benefits. AI replaces human beings.
The most vulnerable are pillaged for profit. The sick feed the profits of Big Pharma. The bodies of poor men and women on the streets of our bleak de-industrialized cities feed the profits of the prison-industrial complex: They’re worth nothing until they are locked in a cage in the world’s largest prison system generating between $50,000 and $60,000 a year. Fed, of course, to the privatized phone services, the money transfer services, the commissary, and the medical services that have privatized American prisons. Utilities sold to private companies gouge us with overpriced water, electrical, parking, and sewage bills.
At the same time, we are the most-watched, photographed, spied upon, and monitored population in human history. This technology, far from improving our lives, is creating a new serfdom, if not a new slavery, all the while propelling us at a dizzying rate toward ecocide.
Joining me to discuss our dystopian present and most probably our dystopian future is Loretta Napoleoni, author of Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good. So let’s begin. You open the book with Bitcoin, cryptocurrency. I am very weak on that so I told you you’ll have to hold my hand through it. But you cite it as extremely important in the emerging societies in which we are going to live. So, I’ll let you start and explain what they are and why they’re so important.
Loretta Napoleoni: Bitcoin can be described as the currency of the people. For a start, let’s distinguish between Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is the first one. It was given to the world by an anonymous group of individuals called Satoshi Nakamoto and it was put into the cyber universe exactly at the time of the big crash: Right after the Lehman Brothers crash. So the timing was perfect which makes us think that perhaps whoever Nakamoto is, is somebody from the system, that knows very well how the system works.
What is Bitcoin? Bitcoin is a currency that is produced by software and this software performs all the tasks that a true currency should perform. So we’re not talking about US dollars. We’re not talking about the pound or currency; They’re constantly devalued because of inflation. We’re talking about the old-style currency that was linked to gold and was produced and in circulation according to the rules of the gold standards, which were very few for a very short time.
Bitcoin is produced by software so it’s not controlled by any central bank, it’s not controlled by any government. The software has been programmed in a way in which the Bitcoin is released in blocks by an activity which is called mining, and this activity is the solution of mathematical formulas. The solution of mathematical formulas becomes increasingly more and more difficult. Now, why is that? Because whoever created this currency wants to guarantee a scarcity. So there is a limited number of Bitcoins that will be produced which is 21 million. The time scale is going to be a century and a half almost and the timing has to be every 10 minutes a block is produced. The timing and all of this structure are guaranteed by the difficulties of solving the mathematical formula. So this is quite a complex system that initially was not understood.
In the very beginning, kids used to solve mathematical formulas with skates, that kind of stuff, and then used Bitcoin for various things. There’s an interesting story of somebody who bought a pizza using Bitcoins, for example. But as we went through the financial crisis, it became increasingly clear that Bitcoin was an alternative to the fiat currencies, which clearly after 2008 had lost their meaning. Most of the bailout that was given to the banks was produced by clicking a few keys on the treasury computer. In other words, money doesn’t exist. So this is the issue that Bitcoin is trying to address: To create a currency that will give you that stability, and trust, and will not be controlled by anybody else.
The controlling system is all based upon the people that participate in the system. So you download your software from a computer that is free for everybody, you start investing, you become a member of the Bitcoin community, and you are the one together with all the others that will evaluate the various activities that are taking place. So everything that happened is right there, is transparent, and is in the clear. Even the mathematical solution of the formula – This is very important – Once somebody manages to solve the formula and a block is released, the entire community of people who are connected – So they’re part of the Bitcoin community – Has to approve that solution. This is called proof of work.
So it is quite complex to do because we’re talking about millions of people. This is why Ethereum – Which is another cryptocurrency that came after Bitcoin – Decided not to use the approval work but to use a limited amount of people who would evaluate if that solution was right or not. I disagree with that; If it’s the currency of the people, the control should be among the people. So that’s more or less is… Oh, yeah. Then there is the other thing which is about to happen: Between the end of March and the beginning of May, there will be a halving. About every four years – Every 21,000 blocks that are released – The number of Bitcoins contained in the block is reduced by half. At the very beginning it was 50 bitcoins, today we’re at 6.75, and then in a few months after the halving it will be at 3.75. So that is a mechanism in place in order to guarantee that the Bitcoin is not inflated and also to guarantee that whoever is using the Bitcoin does not use it for speculation.
Chris Hedges: How widely used is it?
Loretta Napoleoni: At the moment, Bitcoin is widely used. We got the approval for Bitcoin from the FDA so every single big bank is using Bitcoin for investment and trading the Bitcoins in the open. So this recognition was very, very important. Now there was a reluctance to do that but in the end, they had to accept that the popularity of Bitcoin is a reality. If they can make money off something, they will go and make the money; And there is money to be made in Bitcoin. But the key issue here is the fact that Bitcoin is a threat to the currencies in circulation in every single state.
Bitcoin is a transnational currency; It’s a currency that you can use everywhere but it is a threat to the monetary monopoly of the central bank, and that is why they tried to stop it but they couldn’t. They couldn’t even put it out of law. They have done it with other currencies before because the software… You can’t put the software on trial, right? They don’t know who Satoshi Nakamoto is, so they can’t arrest them. The community of the Bitcoin holders is the people so you can’t stop the people from doing it. At the end of the day, money is based on an act of faith. You trust that the US dollar is worth something. On the US dollar, it says “In God We Trust” meaning it’s a bit of faith.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about all the cryptocurrency fraud; The queen of cryptocurrency from Bulgaria, you write about her in the book. There are also a lot of people who have been fleeced in this digital currency world.
Loretta Napoleoni: At the very beginning, Bitcoin was the first one. Then a few years later we got other currencies. The OneCoin – The one I talk about – In Bulgaria was a fraud and a scam. Looking at Bitcoin, even Bitcoin was used for illegal activity; It was used on the Silk Road and on the Darknet. Why was that? It was a means of exchange. There was no control and nobody knew how traceable Bitcoin is, but once this became clear… What I have not explained to you is that every single block that is released is then logged into a blockchain. The moment the proof of work is approved, that block becomes part of a chain. Inside that blockchain we have all the information about the block: Who solved the formula, at what time, and so on and so forth.
Let’s call it block number five. Okay. Every single time Bitcoin contents in block number five are sold, purchased, halved – You can sell half of it and keep that half – Everything is put in another block which is attached to that block, let’s call it block 5A, and it stays right there. You can’t delete it, you can’t alter it. That’s the blockchain technology which is behind Bitcoin. You can go into the software and see the life of every single Bitcoin that was produced from day one, which was in January 2009. So once this was understood, Bitcoin became one of the worst currencies to use for illegal activity because you can trace every moment.
Now, if you want to do money laundering you will have to move the Bitcoin from one of the blocks. Let’s say you have done some illegal activities and you’re being paid in Bitcoins – Nobody has seen that from the point of view of the authorities – But the moment you want to change that Bitcoin into a currency – Because you do need to money launder that money – What are you going to do with the Bitcoin? Otherwise, it sits there. At that moment, that is going to be registered automatically into the block. This is how the monetary authorities, the anti-terrorism, and the anti-drug squads have unveiled several of these activities used through Bitcoin and have arrested people. So today, Bitcoin is one of the least used currencies because most illegal and criminal activity is done in cash because cash is still king when it comes to traceability.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the fraud because these cryptocurrency empires have pretty rapidly deflated.
Loretta Napoleoni: Well, the FTX is the best possible example, then again, it is not cryptocurrency per se. I want to distinguish between Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies because I’m a great believer in Bitcoin but not a believer in the other cryptos. Bitcoin is the only one that has this system that I explained to you; The others are much more loose. In any case, the FTX story is very significant. How did it happen? Well, Sam Bankman-Fried was one of those intelligent mathematical kids. He was trading and then all of a sudden he discovered that there were discrepancies in arbitrage between one place and another place. In other words, if you bought Bitcoins in Tokyo, you got a better rate than if you bought Bitcoins in New York.
This is at the very beginning, so we’re talking about seven or eight years ago. He thought, great, let’s exploit these differences, and he made quite a lot of money. Then at that point, he decided that he was going to create an exchange. Basically, the exchange was doing what he was doing: Making money out of the discrepancies in prices due to the geographical position. But then it started to produce its own cryptocurrency which was out of nowhere. It was not Bitcoin. It was one that didn’t have a software system. One day he decided, I’m going to issue this currency. People started flocking and wanting to buy it, especially celebrities. Now, the guy was very popular among celebrities. This is another thing with these tech titans is that they live in a ghetto, which is the super-rich ghetto, and everybody wants to make even more money using the expertise and knowledge of one another. So he started getting hundreds of millions from various people in order to invest in exchange. He took the money in dollars or other currencies and in exchange he gave them cryptocurrency. So basically the participation exchange was based upon exchange at the end of the day; dollars for this cryptocurrency.
Why did they buy these cryptocurrencies? Why did they do that? Because they thought that it was so smart and the idea of the crypto exchange was so incredibly appealing that they thought, I get, today, the cryptocurrency that is producing at an exchange of, let’s say one-to-one to the dollar. Then you carry on making so much money that it’s cryptocurrency is going to go up in value so it’s going to be more like two to the dollar and I’ll be immediately doubling all my money. Okay. So it’s a scam but it is also a scam that was supported by people who participated in the scam and who were the victims of the scam. Because it’s the classic story of people that come to you and say, oh, if you give me this money, I’m going to invest in that. You’ll double your money.
Chris Hedges: Does all of this threaten the hegemony of the dollar? Because the power of the dollar is that it is the world’s reserve currency and once it loses that hegemony, it is going to be catastrophic to the American financial system.
Loretta Napoleoni: Yeah. It’s going to be catastrophic not only to the financial system but to the power of the state. Imagine a world where you do not have any more currencies but you only have Bitcoin or something similar to Bitcoin – So software will produce it and then your people will control it. How is the state going to be able to print billions and billions of dollars to save the financial sector from yet another crisis? That would be impossible because the state won’t be in control of Bitcoin. Okay. But also how would the state print the money to finance the war in the Ukraine? Because, of course, the state will not have control over the money supply. Money is key. Money supply is the biggest pillar of power or political power.
I started the book with the story of the Cyberpunk group of computer scientists in the Bay Area in the 1980s. These people wanted to guarantee the protection of individuals inside the net – To prevent the state from controlling the net and from spying on people on the net. They produced a cryptographic system to guarantee people would be able to talk to each other without being spied on by the state, but they couldn’t possibly produce a way in which people would not have to use banks to do transactions because there was a real barrier.
If you want to buy something, you’ve got to buy it through a bank, through a credit card, and you have to pay through a currency which is controlled by the state. Then came Satoshi Nakamoto, but he came 20 years later. So this is the real threat now. That explains why the state is now trying to produce its own digital currency; Which is not a crypto but it is considered like crypto, so they’re trying to catch up. But I am a firm believer that if Bitcoins take off, this potentially could change the structure of the nation-state.
Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about crypto-anarchy. Then you mentioned Julian Assange and I want you to play out his opposition to the crypto-anarchists.
Loretta Napoleoni: The Cyberpunks were a group of computer scientists all from the US. The only one that was not from the US was Julian Assange. Now, it was a very strange group of people because they were connected through technology, so they were all very much pioneers in computer science, but politically they were very different. So there was a very strong group of libertarians, for example, the classic American libertarians where the state should not have anything to do with me, I can look after myself, and that kind of stuff.
But there were also people that were quite, I wouldn’t say necessarily right-wing but almost intellectually racist because these people were very smart, but also some of these people had serious social… Problems with interactions; They were on the spectrum of Aspergers. So part of this group was talking about the supremacy of the smart guys over the people. So they were considering the people as inferior groups that had to be ruled, that had to be directed, and that they did not have the same understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong as they did. Assange was very much against that.
They had a mailing list, which was a mailing list where people would exchange… We’re talking about a time when there was CompuServe, so before we had the internet as we have it today. They had this mail system where they could talk to each other and exchange ideas and proposals. Within this mailing list – It was all cryptographic, so only they could see it – There was a very heated exchange and discussion between this group of crypto-anarchists – If you want to call them that – And Assange who instead said, this is an instrument through which we can empower the people; The people should know. The people should be allowed to make decisions. Then Assange went on to create WikiLeaks, which did exactly that.
Chris Hedges: What did the rest do? Because they became, as you call them, the new robber barons. You have examples in there. Uber is a good example. But they harnessed this technology to carry out vast campaigns of pillage and greed against the rest of us.
Loretta Napoleoni: We have several examples. Now, in all fairness, most of the robber barons were not part of the Cyberpunk mailing list necessarily; Although, several of them, especially the founders, became immensely rich because they were in the industry from the very beginning. So they stopped working, taking away several millions of dollars so they could do whatever they wanted. But I would say that the robber barons are very much the generation that came right after people like Assange. Some of them are younger – By 10 years, not very much – But these are the ones who came to this business through video games.
So forget about politics. At the very beginning, the internet was considered an instrument for empowering people and also bringing about democracy into society. Then, a decade later, we have kids who have grown up playing video games who know the functioning of the internet extremely well and they spot certain situations where being computer-savvy, knowing how to code – Because that’s the other thing – Could create a business model that could enrich them immensely. And then they started to – So the first wave made quite a lot of money – Sell their businesses and then they became the so-called serial entrepreneurs.
What is a serial entrepreneur? This is a robber baron, basically. They spotted an opportunity, they learned from that opportunity, they made a lot of money from that opportunity, and then they decided to reproduce that model in another sector at a higher and higher and higher scale. Now, all of this was motivated by profit. So there’s absolutely no desire to produce anything that can enrich society. This is why I’m talking about the common good. Possibly, this is due to the fact that these people grew up with video games, so for them, it’s all a game. See what I mean? That there is this filter of the internet which doesn’t let them understand what it means to be exploited, or exploited by the system. But possibly also because of their ego because all of a sudden being a serial entrepreneur, being Jeff Bezos for example, or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel was the maximum that you could achieve. Everything was allowed – Except those original members of Cyberpunk – Because you were smarter than the others.
Chris Hedges: But they’re not smarter; They’re smarter in terms of technology. There’s a wonderful short story by Stefan Zweig about the world chess champion; Everybody thinks because he’s the world chess champion he’s wise about everything else. The conceit of the story is that he’s an idiot about everything else. You do a pretty good job of exposing – Especially figures like Elon Musk – And you get into how the whole space industry are idiots. What they do know how to do is harness this new technology to exploit.
Let’s give some examples. First, I want you to talk about blockchains, and then I want you to give the example of Uber because it’s a classic example of how that technology is used as bait at the beginning and then a form of horrific oppression by the time it’s cemented into place – in terms of timing and exclusion and all that stuff. But talk about blockchains and then talk about the case of Uber.
Loretta Napoleoni: Okay. Blockchain is what we have in Bitcoins. Potentially, blockchain could completely change the way we interact at a commercial level. It also could make an obsolete, phenomenal amount of work. So now we’re all talking about how AI is going to put lots of people out of work, which is absolutely true, but the blockchain comes before AI. So let’s say you don’t need to have a lawyer anymore if you have these contracts, which are smart contracts, whereby the contract states that if certain circumstances are verifying – For example, a divorce – Then, automatically, the division of wealth is going to be such – And this is signed and done and that stays in the blockchain – So it can verify they were done on a certain date. Then the situation verifies, and then here you are: You’re not going to court, you’re not doing anything because you already have the agreement in place. Now, this is a very simple example.
But blockchain also could be applied to smart cars. Eventually, you can have a driverless car, which through a smart contract will drive itself for an oil change after a certain number of miles and go to the mechanic. They will do the change of oil or maybe the robot will do the change of oil and pay automatically because in the smart contract, which is in the blockchain, you will have all of this information. When a certain number of miles are reached, that verifies, and then all of this is going to happen. That’s what blockchain could do and the same thing goes for voting.
Now, it can be positive. It can be negative. It all depends. This is the issue: The issue is all of this technology can be immensely positive for us provided it’s put in the hands of the people for the common good. Of course, it is controlled by a limited number of individuals. Here we go to Uber; At the end of the day, the concept of Uber, the story is quite interesting. One of the two founders of Uber, he is Canadian and he sold his first startup for quite a lot of money then he moved to San Francisco where he was working for the company that bought his original startup. But he was doing nothing, right? He was going clubbing every night in San Francisco and he was watching James Bond movies.
These are the people who we were talking about, these kids. Anyway, while he was watching Casino Royale, he saw that James Bond was calling his car with the smartphone through a map to come and pick him up at the casino. So at that point, he had this idea to create a system that would use the smartphone and the maps that Google had put on the market in order to call a cab a night after going clubbing. The problem was that you couldn’t find cabs because there was a shortage of cabs in San Francisco. So the idea was to use rental cars – The blue cars that you can rent, what we call Minicabs in the UK – And put them on a map so that you could interact with the map, call them, see who is available, and blah, blah, blah, this is how he got the idea. Then eventually he did develop the first Uber app, thanks to the technology.
Now, he knew the technology because he was somebody who understood technology or had knowledge of technology. The Minicab company in the UK who were doing that service did not know the technology, so they couldn’t do the app themselves. Today, everybody has the app, but we’re talking about a time in which it really was a great idea. Then he had this question of why are we using these cars? Why not use normal cars? Why not use normal people so people can make an extra buck driving people around through the app? Initially, it was very appealing to the drivers and to the passengers because it was a system where he put together two people that were happy to do business together. The drivers were all self-employed, so they got a good return for their work, but then as the system developed, everything changed because of greed. So Uber started taking more of a percentage from the driver and then it started conditioning and forcing the driver to accept certain rides.
Chris Hedges: Well, and punishing the driver if they don’t. In the book, they have 15 minutes or something, and if they don’t accept, then they can’t even get work.
Loretta Napoleoni: Yeah, exactly. Then if you do not accept three rides in a row, you are locked out for 24 hours. I was in Calgary and I was picked up by an Uber driver, and this guy was telling me that he had lost his job. He was from West Africa. He had a family, a new baby, and another child. The wife was not working, he had lost his job, and he was Uber driving to integrate his salary, but now he was driving all the time. He was telling me that the situation hadn’t changed at all. Uber takes a big, big cut out of every single ride. I asked him, I said why don’t you go and work for a taxi company? He said there aren’t taxi companies.
That’s the other thing because Uber has driven out of the market in certain places – Not everywhere, in certain places – All the competition. Now, that is another element of what I talk about in the book. These people have been able to create an oligopolistic position for themselves and the few other people like them who can master technology kicking out everybody else. That should not happen because this is competition policy but the only place where they’re trying to stop them and implement competition law is the EU. In the US, it’s a completely wild market.
Chris Hedges: Well, they also skirt labor laws and regulations. Because they’re a new technology, there’s no real oversight and they exploit it. There’s a lot in the book. I want to close – Because you do at the end of the book – With SpaceX, space exploration, and Ecoside. Here’s where you lay out how, technologically, these people are quite gifted. But in terms of understanding reality, the world around them, and what we face in a moment of climate catastrophe, they’re utterly clueless. You really make that point around this whole idea that we’re all going to live on Mars or something. So, let’s close –
Loretta Napoleoni: – Isn’t it absurd?
Chris Hedges: – It’s completely absurd. But let’s talk about it because they don’t think it’s absurd. You write the physics of what being in a situation with zero gravity does to your… It destroys your body. It’s not even sustainable. But go ahead, I’ll let you talk.
Loretta Napoleoni: It took me a long time to write that section. I had to have doctors working for me to make me understand. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos come across as if they know it all. You think, if these people become billionaires, I must believe what they’re saying. Well, it’s not because it’s absolutely not true. The reason why they’re talking about going to Mars, being colonized, being a multi-planetary civilization, and stuff is because that thought appeals to people because people like to dream about us being able to conquer the universe.
So through that appeal, then they can get the real objective, which is to colonize the low Earth orbit. Now, the only place where the human body can live in space for a limited amount of time – We’re talking a maximum of one year with massive exercises to reduce the bond density phenomenon due to the lack of gravity – Is the low Earth orbit because the low Earth orbit still has a little bit of gravity, so you’re not completely out of gravity. So the reason why they want to colonize the low Earth orbit is because this is where the business of the future is going to be done. Forget about the Moon, forget about asteroids.
Even if in a future not too far away, we could go and mine asteroids, you will have to do it with robots and the robots will have to live from the low Earth orbit. So that will be the center of distribution of activity in order to mine space. But for now, the reason why they want to colonize the low Earth orbit is because of telecommunication. So because they put satellites there and then here we are, they will mine our data, suck our brains through their satellites. There are places already in the world, like if you go to the very north of Canada where there’s no internet, the only internet is Starlink. So Elon Musk is the only one who provides the internet. There are places in the Pacific and in the Atlantic where there is no internet. So you can get very good internet through Starlink.
Another thing I want to add is why this data is so important. Everybody says, oh yes, data is how they managed to manipulate elections. Well, the truth is the data with AI now is also going to be one of the fundamental factors of the future of warfare. Without that data, you’re not going to be able to go to war anymore. Whoever is going to have the most amount of data – Because this is how AI improves – Is going to have a distinctive advantage over all the others. So they are a step ahead of us, but they’re also a step ahead of governments. The reason why they’re a step ahead of us and the government is that most people and most governments do not even bother to understand what the technological revolution is all about.
So it is our fault. And that’s what I say in the book, we’ve got to wake up from it; We’re sleepwalking. This is the end of the book. I said we’re sleepwalking into dystopia and we don’t even realize. We think everything is fantastic because we can see each other on Instagram, we can talk to each other on Facebook, and we do not understand. So I hope that this is what the book does to teach a little bit about technology and help people wake up.
Chris Hedges: It goes back to Plato’s cave; They have quite effectively mesmerized us on the apps and the screens while in a very real way, not just financially. But also in terms of you have a section on what it takes to produce an electric car. By the time you’re done, your carbon emissions are – You write that producing fossil fuel-driven cars – Actually more. But it’s all a game. It’s all a very pernicious game while we’re barreling towards systems collapse.
Loretta Napoleoni: Yes, exactly. System collapse but due to ignorance. This winter, for example, it’s always happened with the Tesla. At -15°, -20°, the Tesla stops working. Now, it doesn’t take a lot to know that because if you have your iPhone and you go to Finland and it’s minus 20, within a few minutes, your iPhone stops working because the batteries go flat – that’s what’s happened to the lithium batteries. But how is it possible? Nobody’s thought about this before. How is it possible that nobody has confronted Elon Musk when he was launching his Tesla, producing all this stuff, saying, excuse me, you can drive in California where the weather is never going below zero but what happens when you drive in the Scandinavian countries? What are you doing to prevent the flattening of the lithium batteries?
Okay. A lot of journalists do not do their jobs properly anymore because newspapers and magazines don’t have money. But the government, for God’s sake, they do have money. So why is there no expertise from the government contesting that information that is put through the various channels that these guys control?
Chris Hedges: Well, in order to sustain this technological revolution, as you point out in the book, it’s an acceleration of our assault on the planet. So on the one hand, we are given all these gadgets and toys but in order for this revolution to happen, we’re obliterating what future we have left.
Loretta Napoleoni: This is why the idea of a colonized Mars is part of the narrative; The truth is that if you tell people, don’t worry too much about climate change. Don’t worry too much about overpopulation… Shall we discuss overpopulation also? Because we’re going to go and colonize Mars, and then Mars is going to be as beautiful as Earth, or Jeff Bezos comes with these weird ideas to create artificial planets where people could live. There’s a film, I think it’s called Elysium. It’s a film where the poor people are on the Earth, they’re left behind, blah, blah, and all the rich people live on these artificial planets which are absolutely beautiful, and they all look like California, where the weather is always nice. It’s not cold, blah, blah. Clearly, if you fall into that trap, you don’t worry so much about the planet because you think, well, there is a solution. Well, no, there is no solution. This is the only planet we have. If we do not save this planet, our grandchildren will not be able to survive.
Chris Hedges: And that’s the point of the book.
Loretta Napoleoni: Yeah, this is the point of the book. Now, if all of this technology was put to use for the common good, that technology could reverse everything, could reverse the climate change. It is not going to solve the problem of overpopulation, which is a problem that we have to address in a different way, but technology could provide zero energy production for the entire planet. You can put solar plants in the low Earth orbit which harnesses the rays of the sun, and then send microwave rays to Earth, and they can power the entire planet. Do you know who is using this technology at the moment? The US is using that technology to produce microwave weapons.
Chris Hedges: That’s right. Depends on who has it. Technology is a neutral force.
Loretta Napoleoni: Exactly. Exactly.
Chris Hedges: It serves whoever controls it. Unfortunately, we live in an age where the technocapitalists and corporations have us in a death grip. That was Loretta Napoleoni, author of Technocapitalism: The Rise of the New Robber Barons and the Fight for the Common Good. I want to thank The Real News Network and its production team; Cameron Granadino, Adam Coley, David Hebden, and Kayla Rivara. You can find me at chrishedges.substack.com.
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