Episode 42: Transcript

Episode: 42 — It’s time to stop quoting Clarke’s Third Law

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and everything else. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:10] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. I'm a science fiction writer who thinks a lot about science. 

Annalee: [00:00:14] Today we're going to talk about a disagreement that Charlie Jane and I had on a panel we were on recently where I hadn't even realized that we had a disagreement about this. And it had to do with Arthur C. Clarke's third law of prophecy. And in this episode we're going to talk about why that law has been so influential in science fiction, why it's kind of garbage, but also what we can salvage from it. And what's really interesting about it and how Charlie and I have kind of a disagreement over what it means and why it's important.

[00:00:47] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.

Annalee: [00:01:14] So Clarke's third law of prophecy is not actually something that he wrote down in a list. It actually comes from an essay that he wrote and people kind of backformed the law out of this essay. But, the best summation of it comes from the recent season of Doctor Who, and here's the Doctor telling us the law. 

Doctor Who Clip: [00:01:30] A brilliant man once said, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. I’m just about to prove him right. 

Annalee: [00:01:40] So the thing about this law is that it kind of comes out of Clarke's obsession with the idea that science fiction really does predict the future and is a form of prophecy. And that's an idea that was quite popular, I think in the 1950s and ‘60s, still popular in some quarters. But it's really fallen out of the mainstream idea among science fiction writers, which generally now holds that science fiction is really about the present and that it’s extrapolation and certainly, we're not saying that nothing that we write could ever come true, but the point of writing science fiction isn't really about predicting tomorrow. It's about talking about current issues and current trends and where they might go. 

[00:02:23] So, Clarke is coming out of that era and that's why he is really interested in this notion of technology and magic kind of looking like each other. Because his idea is that if you went far enough into the future and came back and tried to tell people what it was like, you would sound like a crazy person talking about wizards and things that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:45] Makes sense so far. Yeah. And what are his first two laws? 

Annalee: [00:02:49] No one ever talks about his first two laws. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:51] They don't, it's like—

Annalee: [00:02:53] It's because his first two laws are really dumb. So, and they're also not even really things that he wrote—they kind of grow out of these essays that he did on prophecy. And so, the first law is generally summed up to be “If an imminent and august scientist in his field—" And it's important that you know that this is an older male scientist. “If he says that something is possible, it is almost certainly correct. But if he says that something is impossible, it is almost certainly incorrect.” So that's the first law.

[00:03:28] The second law is “If you want to know what's possible, you have to journey into the impossible.” So—

Charlie Jane: [00:03:36] Okay, yep, let’s—

Annalee: [00:03:37] —I don’t even know how you do that.

Charlie Jane: [00:03:38] I packed my bags, we’re doing it. We’re journeying into the impossible. 

Annalee: [00:03:41] I mean, I think to be charitable that he was probably just talking about writing science fiction, and saying, you've got to kind of explore stuff that seems impossible in order to—

Charlie Jane: [00:03:50] You've got to think beyond what we know or what we understand. 

Annalee: [00:03:53] And to me, again, to be fair to Clarke, even though we're about to trash him a little bit, he actually was a terrific futurist. He really did a lot of thinking about satellite technology that wound up being quite accurate.

[00:04:06] And he also, famously, in the early 60s, did a BBC show where he talked about basically the rise of mobile phones using satellite technology. He talked specifically about how communication satellites, we're going to allow people to do things telecommute. So he knew what was going on. He was able to basically do a great job looking at the technology around him and seeing where it might go. And also, of course there were lots of limitations in his thought. 

[00:04:34] One of the things I wanted to remind everyone about Arthur C. Clarke is that not only did he do that BBC show where he predicted mobile phone networks, he also did three different series that were basically ancient alien series. He was really into the kind of chariots of the gods stuff. So he did Arthur C Clark's Mysterious World in 1980, Arthur C Clarke's World of Strange Poowers in 1985, and Arthur C Clark's Mysterious Universe.

[00:05:02] And these were shows where he hosted—he would kind of do a little segment at the beginning and the end, and they had to do with ESP and ghosts and cryptids and UFOs, fairies, miracles, like almost all of the series that had something about the Bible. Like, the stigmata or the Virgin Mary or whatever. So he was really… and in his fiction, too, he was really into this kind of blurring of science and mysticism. It was just something that really preoccupied him. 

Charlie Jane: [00:05:33] Yeah. And his fiction is full of aliens who are practically gods and mysterious artifacts that are inexplicable and things that are kind of beyond our understanding, but they're still artifacts of science basically. 

Annalee: [00:05:47] That's right. As much as he was a woo-woo kinda guy, which he really was, he also maintained a little skepticism. And so here's a great clip of him on the ‘85 series, World of Strange Powers, talking a little bit about why scientists get things wrong when they're looking at, in this case they were talking about spoon bending.

Arthur C. Clarke: [00:06:06] If there's one thing we've learned from P.K. research is this, the scientists are the easiest people to fool and there's a very good reason for this. Scientists study nature and nature never cheats, but some people do. They bend the evidence. And that's something that scientists often forget.

Charlie Jane: [00:06:23] That spoon is fully bent. It’s been bent.

Annalee: [00:06:25] So what he’s saying there is basically that scientists often forget human behavior. They don't add human behavior into what they're observing and they kind of aren't aware of their own observational biases. So that's a pretty smart thing to be noticing there. 

[00:06:43] So, to return to Clarke's third law, this has become kind of a cliché of science fiction and futurism, this idea that at a certain point when you're observing something, it might seem magic, but it's really technology. And I know that this really bugs you, Charlie Jane. So tell me why it pisses you off so much. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:03] Yeah, I mean it didn't use to bug me. It sort of started to bug me more over time. I've been on a lot of panels and conventions about magic versus science because I wrote a book about magic versus science, All the Birds in the Sky—

Annalee: [00:07:13] Which is a great book.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:15] Aw, thank you. And I feel like when Clarke came up with his third law, he was specifically trying to kind of create space for, like, alien gods and mysterious, basically magical things in science fiction books that you know are giant objects from space that are kind of magical or whatever. And that was what he was concerned with. But oftentimes when people deploy the third law now, it's specifically to debunk magic and to say that— it goes along with this idea that magic needs to have rules, that it needs to be clearly understood and that it has to be basically something that we can study like a science. But also it's a way of kind of subordinating magic to science and saying that magic is basically a like a subset of science and that if you have a scientist character, they're probably smarter than any of the magic users in a given universe, if they coexist.

Annalee: [00:08:02] Because they understand how magic really works, or?

Charlie Jane: [00:08:04] Also, there's always… it's a trope in science fiction that you have something magical, and this happens on Doctor Who a lot, it happens on Star Trek a lot. It happens in—

Annalee: [00:08:12] It happens on Scooby Doo. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:13] It happens on Scooby Doo. Anytime you have something that appears to be mystical, some scientist will step forward and be, well actually it's done with blah blah blah blah blah. And the magic is debunked and it loses all of its mystique. And the idea is basically that magic is kind of dumb and that science is smarter than magic. And I feel like Clarke's third law, the more you look at it, the more meaningless it begins to seem because it's full of weasel words like, “sufficiently advanced.” “Sufficiently advanced technology” is basically, well, if I had a big enough hammer, I could hit the entire universe at once. It’s like, if I have a large enough piece of bread, I could eat the entire planet earth as a sandwich. And it's like, maybe, I don't know. I mean—

Annalee: [00:08:52] That’s a very advanced piece of bread. It sounds tasty, though. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:54] It’s a very large piece of bread. It's a giant—

Annalee: [00:08:56] Watery. A little bit watery sandwich though. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:59] A little bit of a watery sandwich. It's true. It's, like, yeah. Anyway, point is, and it's that sufficiently advanced technology is kind of a cop out because it's just basically saying you're back to gods or whatever, but you're just gonna cover it with a veneer of “it’s sufficiently advanced.” And then the idea that it's indistinguishable. I’m like, well, does that mean that if something is sufficiently advanced technology, even the person who created it would be unable to distinguish it from magic? Because indistinguishable means nobody can distinguish. It doesn't just mean that credulous people can't distinguish. And I just feel like it's one of those things that probably isn't intended to be used as an absolute the way people do use it now. I think it's meant to be just kind of a way to hand wave having non-scientifically plausible things in a science fiction story, like faster than light travel or transmutation of materials.

[00:09:48] And when you think about, for example, turning someone into a pigeon, like, turning a human being into a pigeon without any extra material leftover and the pigeons still retains the consciousness of the human being and can later be turned back into a human being with no ill effects. Which is a thing that magic frequently does, that kind of stuff—

Annalee: [00:10:04] I love it when magic does that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:06] Yeah. And—

Annalee: [00:10:07] It's my favorite, I think.

Charlie Jane: [00:10:07] You could be, well nanotech blah blah blah. But like, would nanotech really be able to create a pigeon with a human consciousness that can be turned back into a human and remember being a pigeon? It feels like a lot of hoops to jump through in order to just explain something that might just be magic. And I think that part of what bugs me is that I feel like if you are going to have science and magic coexist in a story or if you're going to talk about them as two different worldviews, they should be on an equal footing. And it shouldn't be a thing where magic is just insufficiently explored science and magicians are people who've stumbled on some scientific phenomena that they don't even fully understand and that they're kind of dumb and that—

Annalee: [00:10:48] And they're just waiting for some dude to come in with a chalkboard and like—

Charlie Jane: [00:10:51] Exactly. 

Annalee: [00:10:52] Make a formula that totally debunks everything they've been doing. 

Charlie Jane: [00:10:55] So I don't have anything against stories where magic is a fully understood phenomenon or it's studied like a science or there are clear rules and clear limitations and costs or whatever. I think that's a great vehicle for storytelling, but I also think that you can approach magic differently. And I feel like people often—I don't think Clarke intended this, but I think people often use Clarke's third law as a stick to sort of beat magic with.

Annalee: [00:11:18] Hmm. So it becomes a situation where magic is just a stepping stone to science or it's the red-haired stepchild of science or something like that. 

Charlie Jane: [00:11:32] Yeah, I mean it's basically just like, magic is either people are just being unsophisticated in their understanding of a scientific phenomenon or it's just that we don't possess the technology or the kind of theory yet that will explain what this thing is. 

Annalee: [00:11:48] Yeah. I was watching some clips of Arthur C. Clarke talking about futurism from that same early ‘60s BBC special where he talks about the future of sort of mobile phone technology. And he was describing what has now become the third law. And he said, “Well, you know how if you brought some sophisticated technology to some other fellows somewhere else in the world and they might not understand how that technology worked.” And it immediately clicked for me that what he was really talking about was, in the lingo of the 1960s, first world versus third world cultures. 

[00:12:23] And it immediately brought back traumatic flashbacks of that horrible movie from the ‘80s, The Gods Must Be Crazy. Which, like, white people in the United States loved that movie so much because it was all about some dude somewhere in Africa who finds a Coke bottle and decides that whoever made the Coke bottle must be gods because it's so amazing because it's magic, right? Because the ability to make glass, which actually we've had since long before industrial times, somehow seems magical to this person who has been, has not been exposed to the industrial world. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:58] Yeah. There's the cargo cult thing. There's the people who have an ancient computer that they worship as a God. There's—

Annalee: [00:13:04] Right. 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:05] There's—

Annalee: [00:13:05] There's definitely future versions of it. 

Charlie Jane: [00:13:07] —super, tons of tropes about quote unquote “primitive people” who worship technology or think that technology is magic. And then there's also the, the trope we mentioned before where, people see something, that has a scientific explanation, but they're just like, “Oh my God.” People who are not necessarily coded as being primitive are still kind of taken in by some kind of quote unquote “magical thing” that then turns out to just be, X, Y, and Z kind of.

Annalee: [00:13:33] Right. Well then that gets back to the sort of Scooby Doo thing where it's a con artist who's like, you think you're seeing a ghost, but it's really just smoke and mirrors. Literally. 

[00:13:42] Also, it just occurred to me, I'm, while we're blaming Arthur C. Clarke for things, he wrote 2001, the screenplay and then also the novelization. And that movie starts with that kind of a scene where one of the giant slabs of whatever arrives. One of the little monolith things arrives and all the apes are, “Whoa.” And they're kind of dancing around it. And it's that's the origin of humanity is something that those, very early, proto-Australopithecus creatures are clearly kind of worshiping and it's turning them into, whatever will turn into Homo sapiens

Charlie Jane: [00:14:22] Right.

Annalee: [00:14:22] Because that’s how evolution works. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:23] Oh yeah.

Annalee: [00:14:23] It's just one straight line from—

Charlie Jane: [00:14:25] It’s the giant slab of whatever.

Annalee: [00:14:29] From the monolith. Wait, what were they called? They're the…

Charlie Jane: [00:14:32] I think they were just called the monolith, so, I'm not sure. 

Annalee: [00:14:36] Yeah. So it's basically… someone will correct us if we're wrong, but yeah, it's basically from monolith, straight line, right to Homo sapiens. No branching, no, just, yeah, don't worry about how evolution actually works. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:46] And I love that movie. And part of what I love about that movie is it's insane sense of wonder, the kind of just the, whoa, everything is just huge and colorful and weird and trippy lights and—

Annalee: [00:14:57] Babies floating in space. 

Charlie Jane: [00:14:59] Giant fricking babies and shit. And I love that. And I feel that's what Clarke’s third law is intended to kind of facilitate. 

Annalee: [00:15:06] Absolutely. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:07] And I feel like—

Annalee: [00:15:09] That’s exactly what he was talking about. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:08] And I feel like it's now, when I hear it quoted, it's often used in the opposite way to kind of destroy any sense of wonder and replace any sense of like—

Annalee: [00:15:17] That’s interesting.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:17] —this is something that we may never understand. This is something that may just be beyond human comprehension.

Annalee: [00:15:23] For now. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:24] No, I mean, but, I think that—

Annalee: [00:15:26] Ever.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:26] Ever. I think if you have actual magic, I don't necessarily believe that magic exists in the real world, but I think if you have a story where there's magic, part of the wonder of it is we may never be able to explain this fully. We just have to under,—we just have to cope with it. 

Annalee: [00:15:39] I want you to talk a little bit more about that, because that to me is so interesting. I think this is part of where we disagree. Well, I don't even know if we disagree here, but I just find the idea of a thing that could never be comprehended. I find that, I want to say simultaneously implausible and kind of annoying. And at the same time I totally get what you're saying. Like it's amazing to have that sense of wonder and to have that sense of something that maybe we could never comprehend. So I wonder if you could talk more about what magic should be or not that, I mean, not in a sort of prescriptive way, but what is it that you're imagining as being magic as opposed to technology and science that would make them always distinguishable from one another? 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:30] Yeah, I mean, I think that, if you're writing or reading fantasy books, part of the fun is that, magic is kind of this weird, incomprehensible, I love the word numinous, somebody's gonna say numinous, um, numa numa. Anyway. This sort of numinous dreamlike thing that, on the one hand it connects us to something larger and weirder and more ancient and just stranger than anything that we can encompass within our, scientific systems. And the other hand, part of what's interesting about magic is that it does give you power and it gives you power that is not just the power of technology. 

[00:17:14] And part of what I was interested in in All the Birds in the Sky, and some of my other stuff that deals with magic, is the idea that there is, there could be power that is not constrained by the laws of physics or our understanding of how the universe works. And I think that you kind of rob magic of some of its splendor. Some of its miraculousness if you insist that there has to be some sense that it's going to get put back in the box of science at the end.

[00:17:43] That we can revel in the weirdness and the beauty and the unpredictability of magic for now. But eventually we're going to have to put it back in that box because that's the sane, sensible, responsible adult thing to do. And it just feels a little bit puritanical in a way. And it also just feels like people who want everything to be explained and everything to be completely rationalized are uncomfortable with the idea that magic is just this kind of—Fictional magic, I should insist is just this kind of unexplainable weird nonsense thing. 

Annalee: [00:18:18] I had a really trippy interesting conversation with the synthetic biologist Drew Endy many years ago where I had been a big fan of his work doing non-magical synthetic biology.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:33] Or was it?

Annalee: [00:18:33] Or was it? Well, and that was kind of the question that he asked me was he sat me down and he was, do you think that there is going to be an end to the scientific project because the scientific project is a project that will at some point end, right? We will finally describe everything we can using science. And I was, Whoa. It really was one of those moments where I was like, dude, no way. 

Charlie Jane: [00:18:56] Dang.

Annalee: [00:18:56] And we were actually sitting in this garden full of flowers and it was all very mystical, I suppose. And I had never thought about that idea. And I’d never imagined that there would ever be an end to the scientific project because, of course everything will always be describable by science. And he was, well, but maybe in like, a really, really long time in the future, we'll be done. And so maybe, I mean, first of all, that's a really fun thing to think about. And second of all, maybe that's where magic is, maybe it's all the stuff that literally that either happens when the scientific project is over and we're done. Or it's the stuff that just falls outside what science can describe, which is actually a lot of stuff in our lives, right? There's many things where if you try to apply the scientific method, it'll get you, you know, 25% of the way there. Sure. Go ahead. Use methodologies that are coherent and try to keep good notes and do open access publishing. But you can't replicate a social experiment.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:03] Well that's a problem in the social sciences right now, for sure. 

Annalee: [00:20:06] That's a problem in history.

Charlie Jane: [00:20:08] I mean, it’s a problem in history, yeah.

Annalee: [00:20:09] I know, but you can't, I mean it is. You're right that that is also a problem in the social sciences literally, there's this replication crisis. But also, if you're trying to understand human behavior or psychology or emotion, it's really hard. I would say impossible. I don't think that the scientific method can do complete justice to psychology. Group psychology, individual psychology, whatever. Like I said, it can get you 25% of the way there. I'm not saying it's useless and again I don't—like you, it's not I'm saying there's magic out there and that we can kind of tap into it, although that would be great. I just think that there's stuff that we need other models of inquiry to explore and maybe they're mushier and maybe they're more chaotic and they don't behave like science and we may never get a perfect answer. We may never get a repeatable answer that's always the same every time. It might be that certain other methods of inquiry require us to admit, actually the answer is somewhere between 1 and 12 and you're never going to know.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:16] Or the singularity is going to happen next year and then we'll understand everything. 

Annalee: [00:21:20] Oh, no. Fuck off, singularity. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:24] Okay, and on that note we're going to take a really, really quick break and then we're going to talk about stories where magic is treated like tech or science.

[00:21:31] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.

Charlie Jane: [00:21:31] So we kind of established that Clarke’s third law was originally intended to kind of handle things that are of scientific origin or alien origin or whatever, but they look like magic and they're kind of weird and trippy and amazing and there's a giant baby and etc. etc.

Annalee: [00:22:01] Floating in space.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:02] But, Annalee what about all the situations now where you have something that basically is just like, it's magical and people treat it as magic but then it's investigated and proven to be tech or science or it turns out that there's a scientific explanation?

Annalee: [00:22:19] Well, I want to start with a quote that may sound familiar to you.

Star Wars Clip: [00:22:22] And force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.

Charlie Jane: [00:22:33] Yeah. And the force is basically magic, right. 

Annalee: [00:22:36] In the first few films. And I think in a lot of the comics the force is kind of magic. It's a spiritual thing. And then later as I don't mean to kind of go over painful ground for Star Wars fans. Because I know that this is kind of, this is a bit rubbing salt in a wound, but it's all revealed to be midichlorians and it's this kind of measurable, quantifiable thing that is passed down through our genetics essentially. 

[00:23:06] So it not only does it end up being scientific, but it winds up being this kind of weird kind of eugenics kind of underpinnings to the story of the force. 

Charlie Jane: [00:23:15] Oh man. Yeah. It's the quantified self except with magic powers. 

Annalee: [00:23:21] Yeah. I mean, or it's, like I said, it's a eugenics project where you're, breeding certain people with other people in order to make stronger force.

[00:23:31] Same thing happens in Dune by the way, which is another one of those kind of magical technology books where there's been this, we don't even know, like thousands of years of a breeding project to bring about people who have more abilities. More psychic abilities, more kind of fighting abilities, all the different little things that spice enhances. The, the witches have certain kinds of abilities and those are also ultimately scientific in the Dune books and many spin-offs. 

[00:24:01] So the question is, you were saying earlier, I think rightly, that one of the things that turning magic into technology robs us of is that sense that there's things that science just can't explain. And those are real things around us. And actually when we use science to explain them, it ruins them or it, it actually makes them into something that they aren't. And it makes us ill equipped to understand the world. 

[00:24:29] But then when we think about these kinds of representations, and I think we could bring Harry Potter into that. We could bring Discworld books into that. A lot of series, like The Magicians, China Miéville’s Bas-Lag books. These are all stories where there’s a magical system that's treated like science. And I think for me, the thing that I really worry about in these kind of metaphorical scenarios is when a kind of social power, whether it's government power, like in Harry Potter or economic power, like in Max Gladstones craft books and also in China Miéville’s books as well. These are these huge social systems of power or scientific power, kind of scientific/industrial power. When we turn those into magical systems, I worry that it teaches our brains that there are social systems out there that we can't understand and we shouldn't even try.

[00:25:27] And I think it means—

Charlie Jane: [00:25:29] Or that aren't for us, right.

Annalee: [00:25:30] Yeah, that aren't for us to know or participate in. If you don't have midichlorians, well, fuck off. You're just never going to have social power. 

Charlie Jane: [00:25:36] Yeah. If you're a muggle.

Annalee: [00:25:38] Yeah, if you’re a muggle, if you're a mud blood, as, we know they are called by all of the fancy pants, magic people who've inherited their magic through genetics. And again, I mean even in Dune, of course, a lot of these people who have the fancy pants powers are also connected with an aristocracy. 

[00:25:56] And so I worry that it plays into something that we're seeing a lot in real life politics right now where scientific reason is being disparaged. Magical thinking is being used on many parts of our world. Not just on sort of looking at climate change and saying, well, magically climate change isn't really happening, or if it is, we didn't really cause it.

[00:26:21] You also have it in the realm of the economy where at least in the United States and England, a lot of magical thinking is being brought to bear on those economic systems in our countries. Where, you know, Brexit is somehow going to magically make England richer or cutting interest rates is magically going to make us survive a possible run of inflation or whatever. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:49] Basically, cutting interest rates is going to possibly help us survive a slowdown. The question is whether cutting interest rates will cause more inflation. And there's no, I mean, it's a complicated…

Annalee: [00:26:59] It is complicated, right? And I mean, that's part of the problem, is that I feel there's a lot of hand waving.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:05] Right.

Annalee: [00:27:05] I mean, but there's a lot of magical thinking brought to bear on our economy. There’s a lot of magical thinking being brought to bear on how politics actually work in the United States. 

[00:27:20] I worry that, when we immerse ourselves in narratives where magic kind of replaces these social structures. And I think Harry Potter is a great example where it's, there's this sort of just magical realm of power, which is both the nation and an economy and a kind of science. That it just sort of encourages people to think of the real world in those terms. And to say, like, all right, I just can't possibly understand how the economy works. So if we're cutting interest rates, how could I even know what that means? It's just too complex. I shouldn't even worry about it. I shouldn't base my vote on who is pushing for that kind of policy. I can't possibly understand how international trade works. So, tariffs, sounds we're using tariffs to punish China and that seems good.

[00:28:07] You know, because they're tariffs on China, so that'll harm China, right? And even though, over and over again, economists keep trying to explain, actually the tariffs will harm people in the United States. But I think that's—so that's kind of what I worry about. 

Charlie Jane: [00:28:22] So I feel what you're saying is that this thing of turning magic into something that's explainable and, and scientific-ish, scientized or whatever, I guess the scientization of magic, which is intended to make magic more comprehensible, might actually have the opposite effect of making science seem more like magic. 

Annalee: [00:28:41] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:41] Rather than the other way around. 

Annalee: [00:28:42] That it kind of bites us in the ass in a weird way because if we start saying that the two things are indistinguishable, right? It's not just about, like you said, it's not just about sort of undermining the wonderousness of magic. It's also about undermining the rationality of other kinds of systems.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:57] Right, because it just opens the door to anything being quote unquote “science” and that's how you get pseudoscience in the real world like the anti-vax people. And all these other people who have crazy non—

Annalee: [00:29:10] Conspiracy theories.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:11] Right. 

Annalee: [00:29:12] I mean, there's a reason why we call that stuff magical thinking. It's how we get really crackpot immigration policies. And like I said, crackpot economic policies, things like Brexit or massive tariffs. These are not sound economic policies in the mainstream of economics. But they're sort of presented as being this, delightful yet and comprehensible thing that we’ll wave…. We'll wave our wand of tariff.

[00:29:39] I mean that's a trick that capitalism is kind of designed for anyway because a lot of the way that sort of modern global capitalism works is hiding what's really going on.

Charlie Jane: [00:29:50] Rght? I mean you have these complicated supply chains where nobody really knows where something was built and this is part of what we're running into with this tariff thing. It’s like, oh, we're going to stop all the products made in China. And it's like, well, but a lot of them were made in various places, including the U S but assembled in China. And similarly our modern finance has all of these incredibly complex computerized systems where there's derivatives and these complicated formulae power these financial systems. And even the people running them often don't entirely understand how they work. And there's—it's become so sophisticated and so multilayered that from the outside it just looks this giant monolith kind of. Literally like an Arthur C. Clarke thing almost.

Annalee: [00:30:39] Yeah it does. 

Charlie Jane: [00:30:39] And meanwhile it's very commonplace to point out that people don't really understand how their technology works anymore. I can remember when I was a kid you could take your computer apart and, pull out the motherboard and be like, okay, I'm going to take the motherboard and I'm going to add some RAM chips and I'm going to do whatever. And now nobody has computers that you can do that with anymore pretty much.

Annalee: [00:31:03] Not really. I mean or if you do take them apart, unless you go to, Ifixit.com which I highly recommend and they'll teach you how to take apart your technology. But the reason why you need a whole website teaching you how to take your phone apart is because it's designed to resist that.

[00:31:19] You know, it doesn't—the manufacturers don't want you to take it apart. So you need specialized tools and… Really specialized and there are so many social systems in the world and natural systems that we actually can comprehend. And that we actually can use science or social science such as it is to understand where our commodities come from or where photons come from or where a storm system comes from and how carbon will affect the temperature and habitats around the globe. So these are things we actually can measure and that that can be understood, but as long as they are kind of mystified and portrayed as magical or so complex that they might as well be magical, be indistinguishable from magic. That it kind of… it discourages skeptical thinking. It also discourages critical thinking. And so that's kind of the, to me, sort of the downside of that kind of thought.

[00:32:23] And that long list of books that I kind of gave at the beginning, um, where I included people China Miéville. China is a guy who really wants to demystify stuff. He's really interested in social realism and he is a longtime socialist who writes a lot about that. And so, it doesn't mean that any kind of a story that contains magic is about engaging in that mystification process. And I think, for example, someone Charlie Stross, who wrote the Laundry Files series, he loves technology and thinks that it's quite comprehensible, but he still has written this series about magical technology. 

[00:33:00] And I think that there's different ways that this can play out. But I do think that there is a lot—especially at this time in history, there's a lot of risk that there's a lot of people walking around with kind of a Harry Potter view of US politics. And Brexit is totally a Harry Potter creation. It's like, magically we'll just wave the Brexit wand and everything will be wonderful again. And that's not really how it works. And we have tools to analyze what's happening in the British economy and British society to see what's actually really going on.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:42] Yeah, there are facts. There's data, there's empirical observations. And yeah, I think that that's a really important point that, in addition to wanting to keep magic magical, we want to keep science scientific.

Annalee: [00:33:53] Yeah. I mean, I guess that that's really the point, is that once we get into that realm where they're indistinguishable from each other, the next question that we have to ask, or maybe the corollary has to be in the service of what? In the service of what is this indistinguishable? Is it in the service of imagining that there is some future science that looks really weird to us now, which I think is the Arthur C. Clarke idea? Or is it in the service of saying, okay, muggles this is something you can't understand. Just let Voldemort take care of the tariffs for you. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:28] Yup. Voldemort, we'll take care of everything. 

Annalee: [00:34:31] He’s got a plan.

Charlie Jane: [00:34:33] Make magic great again. Oh my God.

[00:34:36] And on that note we're going to take a little break and then we're going to talk about what we're obsessed with right now.

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Annalee: [00:34:55] Okay. Charlie Jane, what are you obsessed with right now? 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:59] I'm obsessed with Nietzsche’s sister. So there's this myth about Nietzsche, or maybe it's not entirely a myth, but there's this belief about Nietzsche, the great philosopher of the 19th century, that he was an anti-Semite, that he was kind of a proto-Nazi and that he—really that his ideas of the uber mensch, or whatever, were kind of leading towards Nazi kind of ideology. And there's been a wave of scholarship in the last several years, I think starting around 2010 with a book called The Nietzsche Encyclopedia that basically kind of pins the blame on Nietzsche’s sister whose name was Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche. She lived a long time after Nisha died, I think he died in 1900 and she died in 1930. She lived long enough to become an actual early supporter of Hitler himself.

Annalee: [00:35:45] So she actually was a Nazi. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:47] She was an actual Nazi. And basically, Nietzsche had a nervous breakdown in 1889 and his sister started taking care of him and started just rewriting and editing and just changing his work—

Annalee: [00:36:01] Really?

Charlie Jane: [00:36:01] —to add more, Nazi shit to it and to make it more openly anti-semitic. And after Nietzsche died in 1900 she put out a posthumous book of his writings called The Will to Power, which scholars now believe that she wrote a lot of The Will or Power or she kind of tweaked Nietzsche’s work a lot to make The Will to Power more of a kind of Nazi book. 

Annalee: [00:36:25] Wow. 

Charlie Jane: [00:36:25] And, you know, Nietzsche in real life, he fought with Wagner over, the antisemitism stuff and over the kind of Aryan nationalism. And he made fun of his sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche when she and her husband tried to form an Aryan country, a new kind of white-only country in Paraguay called Nueva Germania in 1889. Sorry, 1887. They founded this country in 1887 in Paraguay. Her husband committed suicide two years later in 1889 and she went back home. So they only had two years of trying to start this white-only country in Paraguay. Because of course there's no brown people in Paraguay, like, you know.

Annalee: [00:37:06] I mean… Wow. well that was a bad moment in utopianism, I guess. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:13] Yeah. So basically there's all this work by Nietzsche scholars to prove that she meddled with his work a lot and that she kind of changed his stuff around to make it fit in with her Nazi ideology more. And it just, it's super interesting to think that there was this woman who just, her only recognition was through her brother and to some extent through her husband, the would-be founder of an Aryan nation. 

Annalee: [00:37:34] Wow. She was actually kind of the mastermind of this devious plot to give the world a brilliant Nazi philosopher. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:43] And it's, yeah, it's really depressing and really kind of sad. So what are you obsessing about right now? 

Annalee: [00:37:47] So I'm obsessing about this scientific paper that I've been reading by J. Andrew Dufton and it's called The Architectural and Social Dynamics of Gentrification in Roman North Africa, which is a very kind of meat and potatoes title for an investigation of what gentrification looked 2000 years ago.

[00:38:09] And it's really interesting. This is, he's part of a new wave of scholars who are really trying to use modern urban studies to think about what was going on in cities in antiquity. And of course you can't perfectly fit the two things together. I mean, obviously in the ancient world, they didn't have industrial capitalism, for example. But what they had in the Roman world, and he's writing specifically about the early second century CE through about the fourth century CE. He's looking at the Phoenician world, which was also kind of the world of Carthage. And so this is, like, Tunisia and areas around that in North Africa. 

[00:38:50] So what I was gonna say is what they had in the ancient Roman world was a kind of globalism, a kind of global sensibility that we have today. Which at the time of course wasn't completely global, but you had Roman culture spreading very, very far into areas that had previously had radically different kinds of cultures.

[00:39:13] So there was a kind of mini globalism of the Mediterranean area and what you see is there'd been all these Wars between Rome and Carthage which was kind of a Phoenician power. Carthage was a Phoenician city. So the Phoenicians and the Romans fought a lot. And eventually the Romans kicked their butts as they did with almost everyone around the Mediterranean. And then they kind of just settled into having a global mercantile empire. And during that time, one of the things that we see happening with cities in North Africa is something that looks curiously similar to gentrification that we see happening in cities like San Francisco, where we're recording this. 

[00:39:54] And so Dufton identifies three basic characteristics of gentrification, which would apply equally well today and an ancient Rome. And they are, that you see radical transformations in urban infrastructure. So houses being changed, streets being changed, new neighborhoods being built. You see wealthy people pushing lower income people out of an area, and you see what he calls intercity migration, which is to say people migrating within a city. So they're not leaving the country, they're just moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, which is something that… which happens all the time in the ancient world. But it's just not something that people had really thought to study before. 

[00:40:36] And so what he finds in this one—this is a really fun article cause he has several different examples of different cities. He has great recreations of layouts of houses that got gentrified. So it's really fun if you're an ancient world nerd, but he talks a lot about this city Utica, which is in today's Tunisia. And Utica became a real focus of Roman gentrification, partly because it was one of the cities that had actually sided with the Romans in the war against the Phoenicians.

[00:41:06] So Romans were like, yeah, those are our buds. Let's go hang out there. But the city had been designed by Phoenicians and it had a Phoenician layout and Romans came in and they were, we want to have a Roman grid. And so you can actually see this gentrification taking place where these rich cosmopolitan Romans are coming in, pushing out locals, changing the orientation of streets, changing the layout of the city to—

Charlie Jane: [00:41:28] Wow.

Annalee: [00:41:28] —be more Roman. And you also see one of the extremely common characteristics of gentrification in the archeological record is seeing multiple properties being merged into one property. So what was once three houses now becomes an ultra-fancy larger house. So it's kind of like in San Francisco where you saw tenement hotels being torn down and replaced with condos. And so if you could see that in the archeological record, which you couldn't actually, because these were tall buildings, but what you would see is a bunch of really small rooms becoming one big giant living room, for example.

[00:42:03] So a place where 30 people once lived, now four people live there. So you see this happening in Utica and other cities in North Africa. And so it's really changing—This kind of paper and this kind of long historical view on how cities change and evolve is just so interesting to me because it makes you realize that a lot of the issues that we're confronting in cities now, people have been dealing with in kind of global societies that are based around trade for a really long time. So, while of course ancient Rome was not a capitalist empire, it was at this time in history, it was an empire of trade. It really wasn't, yeah, I mean they engaged in some kind of military skirmishes, but it wasn't like the Roman Republic where all they did was go around smashing people's heads with pikes or whatever. It was like, no, we come in, we set up some stores, we move in, we sell, we buy.

[00:42:58] Like, it was that kind of colonial relationship. But also the other thing, to finish my long digression, is that what we see is that over and over again, gentrification is connected with colonialism and so… and colonial systems of social relationships. And so, even back 2000 years ago, you had these colonizers coming in and saying, this is our cool neighborhood now. Building new neighborhoods for the people they've pushed out. It's a little lesson in how colonization works and how mercantile societies change their infrastructure through this process of pushing out people who have fewer resources. 

[00:43:38] So instead of just rebuilding the city for everyone, the city is consistently rebuilt for the rich and the people who are more marginal get pushed to the literal margins oftentimes. 

[00:43:50] So anyway, check it out. It's a fun article. It might be behind a paywall because God damn it, academic publishing is annoying. Just keep an eye out for it, if you're an ancient world person, it's really a great new area of exploration is looking at gentrification in classical antiquity. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:08] Wow, that's super fascinating. 

Annalee: [00:44:10] Thanks. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:11] Yeah, so Nazis and gentrifiers. It’s awesome.

Annalee: [00:44:14] I know, history is so great. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:17] History is so great. Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. This has been, Our Opinions Are Correct.

Annalee: [00:44:22] nd you can find us on Patreon. We would love to have you support us at any level. It helps us think thoughts and be able take time out of our week to do these recordings. 

[00:44:35] You can find us on Apple podcasts or on Libsyn, or Stitcher. 

Charlie Jane: [00:44:38] Please review us!

Annalee: [00:44:41] Please review us on Apple podcasts. It really helps people find the podcast. You can also find us on Twitter at OOACpod.com… no.

Charlie Jane: [00:44:48] No.

Annalee: [00:44:48] You can also find us on Twitter at OOACpod and find us on Facebook. And thank you so much to our amazing producer here at Women's Audio Mission, Veronica Simonetti. Thanks to Chris Palmer for the music and thank you for being so awesome and for not gentrifying Utica anymore. 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:06] See you in two weeks.

Both: [00:45:07] Bye!

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Annalee Newitz