Building a culture of progress

Episode Overview

• Jerusalem Demsas, editor and founder of The Argument, argues that achieving technological and social progress requires more than just behind-the-scenes policy tweaks; it demands building a broad cultural consensus through persuasion.
• The talk challenges the prevailing "fatalism" in the tech and progress community that assumes the public is inherently anti-progress or unchangeable, using historical data on social issues like marriage equality and technological adoption to prove otherwise.
• This discussion is highly relevant for technologists, policymakers, and advocates who feel stuck by public opposition to innovation (such as AI data centers or self-driving cars), offering a strategic pivot toward marketing progress as a tool for human flourishing.

Key Concepts

• The Necessity of Mass Politics: While some policy victories can be achieved through quiet regulatory changes ("Secret Congress"), high-salience issues like AI, housing, and healthcare inevitably become public political battlegrounds. Ignoring public sentiment or hoping to force unpopular changes through technocratic means is a failing strategy because people will eventually notice and push back against changes to their physical environment or daily lives.

• Cultural Conditions Precede Innovation: Referencing Nobel Prize winner Joel Mokyr, Demsas explains that technological breakthroughs (like the steam engine) existed before the Industrial Revolution, but they didn't trigger sustained growth until a "culture of growth" emerged. This culture values pluralism and new ideas, allowing innovation to flourish without the innovator facing persecution.

• The "Thermostatic" Myth of Public Opinion: Contrary to the belief that public opinion just fluctuates back and forth (thermostatic backlash), history shows that persuasion works over the long term. Data on interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and immigration shows massive, durable shifts in public sentiment over decades. This suggests that fatalism about the public's ability to accept new norms or technologies is unfounded.

• The Gender Gap in Tech Optimism: There is a significant gap between men and women regarding support for technologies like self-driving cars and nuclear energy. However, this is not an immutable trait. Historical precedent shows women were early adopters and drivers of technology when it was framed as essential for "human flourishing" and domestic labor-saving (e.g., electricity, washing machines, typewriters). The current skepticism may stem from how technology is marketed—as grand world-building rather than practical life-improvement.

• Reframing Progress for Flourishing: The current rhetoric from tech leaders often focuses on abstract competition (e.g., beating China) or masculine risk-taking. To build a true culture of progress, advocates must pivot back to the language of human flourishing—explaining concretely how a specific innovation makes daily life better, safer, or easier for the average person, rather than focusing on the "cool factor" or macroeconomic dominance.

Quotes

• At 1:21 - "People are not being very quiet about AI progress... A lot of these things are really meaningful to people's lives at a fundamental level. They're going to be plugged in at some point. People are going to pay attention to the fact that data centers are coming up in their communities." - Highlighting that high-impact technologies cannot fly under the radar and will require public buy-in.
• At 7:56 - "Market research at the time showed that marketing it directly to women as a technology that was going to make their families' lives better was the primary way that you were going to get mass adoption across the whole country." - explaining the historical success of framing technology as a tool for domestic and personal benefit to overcome hesitation.
• At 10:47 - "I like science a lot... but I think that most people like to know why people are doing science and how it's going to make their lives better. Not just from a 'are taxes funding this thing,' but also from a perspective of just like, why are we taking on the risk of new technology?" - Clarifying that the public needs a tangible "why" to accept the inherent risks of innovation.

Takeaways

• Shift communication strategies from "technological inevitability" to "persuasion," specifically targeting skeptics by addressing how innovations improve their personal daily lives and human flourishing.
• Abandon the "Secret Congress" mindset for high-salience technologies; assume that if an innovation changes the physical environment (like data centers) or fundamental services (like healthcare), you must proactively win a political mandate from the public.
• When facing demographic resistance (such as the gender gap in tech support), look to historical marketing strategies that successfully framed new tools (like electricity or household appliances) as liberators from drudgery rather than accepting the resistance as a permanent biological or cultural trait.