 Welcome to today's IEA seminar. We're delighted to be joined today by Professor Quinn Slobodian, Slobodian, Marion Butler McLean, Associate Professor of History of Ideas, as well as in college. This topic today is crack up capitalism, profiting from fear in the time of the pandemic. So economic crisis, COVID, world disruption, the future capitalism, it's all there. He's gonna speak to us for about 20 minutes or so, and then we move on to the Q&A with our audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom on your screen there. And please feel free to send your questions throughout the session, and we'll come to them once Professor Slobodian has finished his presentation. Just to remind you that today's presentation and the Q&A are all on the record. Please do join the discussion on Twitter as well, and please use the handle at IEA. So now to introduce Professor Quinn Slobodian. He's the author of the book Globalists, The End of Empire and the Birth of Neo-liberalism, where he traces ideas, unusual, lesser examined ideas about the origins of neoliberalism, right back to the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and to strands of thought that maybe our slightly unexpected was published by Harvard University Press in 2018, and offers an enormous amount of insight into the variety of ideas that we call neo-liberalism in our current era. He's a visiting associate professor at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs for 2022. And Marion Butler McLean, associate professor of the history of ideas of wealthy college. He's also an associate fellow at Chatham House and co-director of the history and political economy project funded by the Hewlett Foundation. And he's a new book coming out quite soon on capitalist exit fantasies, and it'll be out in 2023. So over to you, Professor Silovian, on crack-up capitalism. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much, Professor Hardiman and to the staff at the IEA for inviting me and giving me a chance to talk about some of this material. And some of it is related to things I've been publishing over the last year and a half or so. And it attempts to sort of get a perspective on this time of pandemic and disruption that is maybe a little bit different from one that we usually hear. So it's kind of looking at it from the margins and kind of the somewhat radical, far-right fringes as we'll see in the next 20 minutes or so. But I'm happy to hear whatever reactions people have or sort of contributions they might have to this different way of understanding sort of the social symptoms of a time of social rearrangement. Now clearly for most of us, as I'm going to think I can speak for myself and probably most of the people on the call, the pandemic since it took over our lives in March 2020 has been a time of isolation, hardship, illness and for many people, death, loss of relatives, loss of colleagues and loved ones. But for other people, of course, it's been a time of great economic opportunity and great economic enrichment. And one could speak probably most concretely to the historical surge of the stock market valuations of the last couple of years, the unprecedented year-on-year leap in the number of billionaires worldwide, the unprecedented returns and bonuses being reaped at the hedge funds and the asset managing funds globally. Those are I think important topics, perhaps maybe even more important than what I'm going to talk about today. But what I'm going to talk about today is something a little bit more again on the margins is talking about sort of specific individuals who have managed to navigate the kind of waves of fear and panic produced by the pandemic to enrich themselves through articulating a kind of a novel form of politics. So drawing on the work that I've done, as I said of the last year or two, I want to talk about a few cases of what I think we're sort of provisionally calling a crack up capitalism. That is a form of economic activity propagated by people whose profit model and their kind of a normative vision of change and the social future relies on an idea of an accelerating process of social dissolution and an accelerating process of political fragmentation. So this is a form of sort of a profit model and a kind of a political vision that sees an acceleration in the near future and in the medium term future of processes of political crack up. The people I want to look at are first the entrepreneurs of so-called startup societies who preach secession from existing nation states in the creation of private polities not governed by democracy, but simply through contracts and private ownership. The second group we can call catastrophe libertarians of the gold bug community. So people who predict a monetary collapse and then sell you the means of fending off your own private tragedy in the form of gold bars, ETFs, gold shares and gold coins. And then the third group is a group that we've me and my co-author, Will Callison have called the movement hustlers of the so-called Corona skeptic community where sort of esoteric entrepreneurs and self-branding tech gurus have managed to turn contrarian opposition to vaccination, lockdown and mitigation measures into personal paydays for themselves. And I'm sure they're everyone listening has their own personal version of the kind of personality that I have in mind when I say that. I think all three of these even though they can look different in a certain way exemplify a common dynamic which we would do well to keep an eye on. That is these investors and business leaders who like war profiteers before them know how to capitalize on crisis and also have it in their own interest to kind of give the crisis a nudge to when necessary. So even though I mean, I don't mean to sort of make the pandemic a closed story clearly it's still ongoing but I think it's possible already for us to start to sort of historicize it to treat it as something that can be analyzed as the outcome of some sort of longer and short-term developments in the recent past and certain things that are still following us to the present. But it is in this sort of funny space where it's long enough ago now, early 2020 that it can feel like it's becoming a kind of an era that we have now spent some time in. It's not, we're not living in the sort of day-to-day headlines we're starting to see sort of patterns emerging. And if you remember in the first months those first months of 2020 much of the talk was about the kind of centralization of authority and the centralization of forces. There was this at least momentary idea that the nations were coming together against what then US President Trump called the invisible enemy, right? So although there was already a kind of a competitive aspect between who would have the fewest cases who would have the fewest casualties nonetheless there were sort of this this common perspective of looking towards national leaders assuming that central states were being reinforced by the need to deploy supplies to enact rapid measures to overrun often private interests or business interests to make sure that people got what they needed. So there was this kind of centripetal force at first, right? This tending towards the center. People's eyes were locked on the leaders in crisis mode and central agencies were giving forecasts sending down lockdown measures from above. These figures like Anthony Faiucci in the United States every country had their own kind of medical guru who now became the voice of either reason or oppression depending on your politics. But almost inevitably they were sitting somewhere next to the national leader and we could see a kind of a centripetal direction of political travel. But even then, even when our eyes were kind of locked on the national leaders there was also a kind of a centrifugal energy, right? Which was sometimes a little bit harder to notice but there was an energy, a political and social energy that was tending away from the center too. Think back to that sort of March, April, May time period suddenly local authorities became very prominent, right? Chinese mayors, US governors, Indian chief ministers. The uneven spread of the contagion was actually also leading to kind of sub-national forms of containment and sub-national sort of patterns of affliction and likely recovery. In the United States, this was extraordinary. This was happening at an extraordinary level. The California governor, Gavin Newsom, called California a nation state at one point in the early months of the pandemic. The Washington governor, Jay Inslee accused his own commander in chief, the president, Donald J. Trump of fomenting domestic rebellion because Trump was talking about quote, liberating individual states from COVID containment measures. So we saw this actual dramatic expression of the actual existing federalism of places like the United States and places like India as well. In the US, the Maryland governor in another example confessed that he was actually keeping COVID tests in an undisclosed location under armed guard to prevent Washington DC from seizing them and redistributing them more evenly across the political landscape. The different parts of the US broke up into so-called compacts for the purposes of governance and in some cases, differential right of movement. So you wouldn't be able to enter the one compact if you had come from certain high case states or you hadn't received vaccinations and so on, a place like Vermont next to Massachusetts here kept these policies in place until relatively recently. So this is amidst the attempt to sort of tackle as the species, this existential challenge of the pandemic and the virus, it was easy to notice or forget sometimes or easy to overlook the way that these sort of extraordinary experiments in subnational politics were actually underway at the same time. These were of course not happening sort of purely spontaneously. There were people who were attempting to kind of accelerate this tendency. And among those were some people who were actually sitting right in the White House. So there were a couple of economic advisors, Arthur Laffer and Stephen Moore. Arthur Laffer, you might know the name from the Laffer Curve, the pseudo-ideological, pseudo-intellectual justification for the large tax cuts of the early Reagan years, but also one of Trump's closest economic advisors. He and his co-author and collaborator, Stephen Moore, who works for the think tank alloc, the American Legislative Executive Council, which has it in his interest to sort of deliver ready made policy to Republican Congress people to get put into law. What they tried to do in the course of the pandemic was to sort of set states against each other and to argue that the unwillingness to lift COVID measures, the unwillingness to rollback containment was going to hurt growth in states that made those choices. And if it was going to hurt growth then they should not be receiving sort of certain benefits from the center. And the laggard anti-growth states of the blue democratic America would be sort of disadvantaged against the pro-growth, anti-lockdown red state. So even as there was this language of the nation pulling itself together and so on, beyond the kind of, forget about the kind of, the Black Lives Matter movement and the kind of street protests that were happening through 2020 that we can sometimes too easily forget when the biggest on the street protest movement in American history, even at this sort of higher level of policy, there was an attempt to set sub-national units against one another in a competition for scarce resources and for scarce mobile capital. In some cases, for example, there was a great deal of movement from places like California to lower tax states like Nevada, Texas and Florida. So there's this sort of much valley who texted us from Silicon Valley to Miami as a new hub for especially things like crypto. So there was a lot of sort of sub-national movement happening and it wasn't happening organically or on its own. It was happening because there was an effort to kind of redeploy and scramble the concentrations of wealth and productive resources in the United States. So that is still, I would say, within the realm of pretty standard what you would call competitive federalism. I don't think we could call the decision of Elon Musk to move Tesla to Texas for reasons of low taxes, sort of a symptom of crack up capitalism because it's more or less business as usual. So the United States, especially the auto industry has been reshuffled over the last half century largely by this logic of tax holidays, leveraging public funds to better enrich private companies and to draw them from one place to the other. There were more radical examples, however, and those are the ones that I want to spend the rest of my time here talking about. One of the most kind of articulate exponents of a more radical form of what we think we could call crack up capitalism is someone who was PhD in electrical engineering from Stanford, formal general partner at Andreas and Horowitz, which is one of the most important Silicon Valley venture capital funds. It's a fellow named Balaji Srinivasan who has a very large social media following. He's sort of a celebrity of the tech media world. And he was also rather early in predicting the radical outcome of the spread of COVID-19. So already, I think in February, he was saying that this thing is coming. We need to lock down now. We need to start putting on masks, et cetera, et cetera, which would be itself perhaps kind of admirable in the sense that he had to kind of foresight to see the sort of direction of travel for this epidemiological event. But where it becomes more notable is that he saw this as kind of a chance to accelerate something he had already seen in the making in a while, which is the kind of breakup of centralized states altogether in a lasting way, not just short-term lockdown, quarantine to prevent the spread of the virus, but he actually is a proponent of something called startup societies, which suggests the creation of new private polities on quote unquote, virgin land, somewhere leased or bought from developing countries in which people could expatriate from the country that they're currently living in, become citizens of this country and enter in a non-democratic form of contract-based affiliation. So effectively a kind of gated community, but as a country altogether. So this is something that he had been actively helping to promote and advocate for years along with Patry Friedman, the grandson of Milton Friedman. Apologies from Austin have been involved with supporting the so-called seasteading movement and so on. And it was very interesting to see in the early pandemic how he anticipated that the effect of COVID-19 would be to kind of accelerate what he saw as a kind of a hoped for fragmentation, that the effect of COVID would be to increase the mobility of certain factors of production. So mobile talent, mobile capital would start following the logic of the places that had locked down, most effectively would become green zones that would suck in mobile talent capital. Places that had not would experience a kind of a capital flight or a kind of talent flight or a brain drain, making states evermore into kind of vendors and entrepreneurs of doing everything they can to fashion themselves in a way to draw in this important small percentage of the world's population that was able to pull up stakes and reestablish themselves wherever they want without discomfort. So this was, of course, something, a vision that has now been complicated by the difficulties of a zero COVID policy, for example, in China, Taiwan and New Zealand and Hong Kong. But at the time it was notable, at least to me, because most of the world, you know, March, April, May 2020 was still in kind of panic mode, triage mode, and notably someone like him was saying, this is actually an opportunity and it could be this could be the chance that we've been waiting for to accelerate a movement into a kind of a post-national much more kind of fractal as he likes to put it, landscape of options for a kind of larger palette of policy options for the mobile millionaire and entrepreneur. This was picked up on by people who do things like rankings for world passports, you know, who predicted that COVID would spark a sort of step shift in global mobility, increasing the movement of people who wanted to secure second passports for the ability to relocate. You know, it has indeed taken a different color now when, for example, people are trying to get out of China because they are locking down and containing the virus so well. So one can see how there's, things have not turned out as this group has hoped for, but it is notable that they thought that the pandemic itself would serve as a kind of a rocket fuel towards a fragmentation process that had, in many ways, had been happening across what we call the sort of neoliberal era over the last 40, 50 years. Another set of crack up capitalists that I followed a bit in my work and that I wanted to say something about was people who are specifically involved as precious metals consultants or in the business of selling gold and gold backed assets in various forms. This group of people collectively called gold bugs insofar as if this is a belief that they have and not just a line of work that they happen to be involved in, is a kind of a longstanding strain of libertarianism which is itself quite interesting in that it got a big bump after the end of the Brentwood system in the early 1970 when the US closed the gold window. In other words, stop making the US dollar a convertible, free late gold. The price of gold went way up. The subculture was produced within which the belief was that paper money, fiat money, money not backed by precious metals was simply a kind of a means of politicians to buy off favors from the electorate that the printing presses, so to speak would be run forever by these quote unquote socialist politicians to buy off poor people's votes, buy off minority people's votes, hand off money to their chronic capitalist partners within the business community and that the world according to the gold bug since the end of the Brentwood system has been the buildup of this sort of paper mountain of fiat currency, which at some point will be set ablaze, leaving the world in ashes and only people who have left the sort of the concrete token of value, i.e. gold that has been recognized for thousands of years and so on as they say as a store of value, only the people left holding gold will be the ones who can sort of survive in this ashes of this monetary apocalypse. I am not exaggerating in the rhetoric that I'm using, this is the kind of way they talk about things. The 2008 financial crisis indeed gave a big push to gold bugs, they got new renewed relevance within sort of French communities. The internet has provided a wonderful new platform to kind of push this idea that things like quantitative easing, things like zero interest rate policy are ways for people in power to just keep themselves in power and at the expense of the long-term effective collapse of the economy and society. So when the pandemic hit, the gold bugs were kind of rubbing their hands because it was now clear that the moment had come, the moment they had predicted. One place that I followed this specifically, although I think you could follow this in most countries, the place I looked at it was in Germany. And in 2020, there was just this sort of flood of books called things like the greatest crash of all time, how you can still protect your money, the world before the greatest economic crisis of all time, the crash is here, what you have to do now, exclamation point, world system crash, the solution, I could go on and on and on. And these were not marginal books, right? These were actually bestsellers on Amazon in Germany. And they all basically promised the same thing, which is if you want to protect yourself and shield yourself from this now currently occurring collapse in 2020, then you need to, as quickly as possible, get yourself to the precious metals real retailer that in many cases these authors had to consult for or work directly for and buy gold ingots, buy gold bars, buy gold coins. Of course, if you tried to do that in early 2020, you would find that there was such a run on things like gold ingots and gold bars that you could actually couldn't get your hands on them. There were long lines when the stores were still open at the gold retailers of a place like Degusa, for example, in Germany. And the effect was, you know, the sense of desperation for people who felt now that the gold bug fearmongering had been confirmed and that now one had, you know, only to sort of cling to the possibility of sort of accessing some of those last remaining, those last remaining wafers or bars or ingots that were still available out there, it often being bought at a great premium, right? The gold price did rise by about a third over the course of 2020. It's gone up and down since then, but has remained at a much higher level as it was before the pandemic. So within the community of gold retailers, gold consultants, there are some, you know, properly well-read kind of ideologues, one of whom is a fellow named Markus Krall, who Germans might have heard of, if there's any Germans in the audience, but he was sort of recognized by the far right in Germany as the kind of, you know, the Friedrich Hayek of their movement, the alternative for Germany, the right-wing party, which has had a close working relationship with the gold bug community, you know, had politicians who were recommending people go to read Markus Krall's book, watch his YouTube shows which would get hundreds of thousands of views within days of being posted in March, April, and May of 2020. And he is relevant because he's matched his vision of sort of monetary collapse, not only with the kind of self-interested project of selling you the only remedy against the crisis which he predicted was coming, but also a kind of elaborated political worldview as well. So most notably, he suggested that there needed to be what he called a bourgeois revolution, within which, again, most notably, if you received any sort of a state support, you know, a pension, if you were poor or disabled and you received some sort of bursary or subsidies from the government, if you were civil servant, if you were a student on a government scholarship, you forfeited the right to vote. So democracy should only be a right of people who abjure any kind of the state dependency, as he called it. I mean, you know, anyone who's state spent 10 minutes in a political economy class knows that anyone who's an entrepreneur is profiting in all kinds of indirect ways from state spending, but the ideology was this, that there is a kind of 50% of the population, makers, takers, et cetera, who are parasitic on the state and therefore have no right to participate in the democracy. And this is a strong strain within far-right discussions in Germany and Austria and Switzerland, often overlooked in a discussion of sort of populism, which suggests the kind of welfare chauvinism along the lines more of what Marine Le Pen just ran on in France. But in the German-speaking countries, far-right movements tend much more towards this kind of a thing, a kind of anti-poor, anti-democratic, anti-fiat money and often a kind of a very austere, like hyperfiscal discipline model rather than a kind of a reversion to a more generous social state. So I'm running low on time. So those are my first two crack-up capitalists, the kind of startup society entrepreneurs, the gold bugs predicting, you know, imminent collapse. Third group I'll just mention briefly is the corona skeptic movement. In Germany, you know, the place that I, in a way, know best or that my training is in, the corona skeptic movement was led by something called the Khvedenka, which can be translated as kind of diagonal thinkers or sort of thinking outside of the box. And they're often depicted in the media as a kind of spontaneous reaction against the lockdown measures, I mean depicted very unflatteringly in the media, but depicted as a kind of, you know, a grass or something like the gilet jaune of the coronavirus moment, people spontaneously expressing their discontent for what we're often described as, you know, erroneous or misguided reasons. But missed often in the reportage, and I would say this is true of most of the ways the kind of COVID skeptic anti-lockdown movements have been narrated or reported is there's often, there's missing these sort of these hinge figures who we, me and my co-author Will Callison call movement hustlers, or you could just call sort of ideological entrepreneurs, policy entrepreneurs, people who kind of organize that ambient discontent, you know, bundle it, give it some kind of a, give it some kind of a shape, and then often, you know, are critical in making it not only more effective, but also in producing its own momentum. In the case of this, the German movement, this movement, which is a term that is very much like a kind of early 2000 sort of tech term, right? In that sense, it's very much like thinking out of the box, something you might see on a PowerPoint slide or on a kind of like a low energy kind of piece of PR for a, you know, recruitment firm. So the person who sort of coined the term and attached it to opposition to the coronavirus measures was himself an IT developer, an entrepreneur, had had a bunch of startups to his name. Within Stuttgart, which if you don't know, Germany is one of the richest parts of Germany, and copyrighted the term, Kvea Denk in 2020. And in the course of 2020, I guess he was, you know, organizing this grassroots discontent, was taking monetary contributions directly by PayPal or bank transfer to his account and was legally describing Kvea Denk as an initiative rather than a foundation so he could avoid taxes on the donations. So this can be replicated from country to country. The people who are, it's not to say that they don't believe in it themselves, they could very well have profound convictions about the dangers of the vaccine or the long-term psychological harm to children that lockdowns and masking has performed. It's not to question that people believe this or even in some cases that there's some legitimate foundation to their concern, but that the people who are the middle men and middle women are often have a vested interest in pushing this towards ever less conciliatory or ever less sort of compromise capable forms of opposition. And I think that that form of kind of crack up capitalism really thrives on the internet, it thrives in the kind of silos of social media, it thrives in the sort of paid webinars and paid sub-stacks and paid newsletters that induce people entrepreneurially to incite more emotional response as the last kind of hit sort of fades, right? So the radicalizing tendencies of social movements are well known, I've been studied for decades, but I think the kind of augmentation of social media platforms onto social movements is something that has a sort of a combustible quality that is often not lasting, is often not sustainable, but it can produce these sort of pyrotechnic moments that are also very profitable for those people who managed to kind of capture the energy and more importantly, the funds and skim off their fair share in the process. So I think that it's probably a good place to leave it there, so leave us some time to chat, but I wanted to just give a kind of a little bit of an insight into what I think is the palette or the tableau of some of the more extreme forms of political morbid symptoms that we're seeing in our presence in Maltryer's moment, so thank you.