Dynamite, Anarchy and the Future of Creativity

Today on the Next Big Idea podcast, Steven Johnson and I discuss the invisible forces that drive history. Listen on Apple or Spotify , and let us know what you think in the comments below.

My day is off to a great start.?

Why? Because a really interesting conversation I had with an old friend — Steven Johnson — just dropped on the Next Big Idea podcast. There are few things that are more satisfying, in my experience, than sharing the convergence of good friends and shared passions.

Steven has a new book out called The Infernal Machine . It's about the creation of dynamite, the rise of anarchism, the development of the modern surveillance state, and how these phenomena drove one another. It's a fascinating story that in the end caused me to feel better about our modern world.

Many of us feel a sense of hopelessness about the politically polarized environment that we live in — I certainly feel this at times. Our institutions are fragile. Our future, we are told, is precarious. In contrast, the past feels solid, as if it could only have played out one way.

But was it so? How delicate was the balance of human history in decades past? What drives historical change? Charismatic leaders? The evolution of technologies? Contagious ideas?

Steven and I have been talking about these themes for a very long time. We’ve been friends since fourth grade. We went to college together. Back then he wrote poetry and played bass in a band called The Lenny Kravitz. Now, he’s known as the author of 14 books and host of the PBS shows How We Got to Now and Extra Life . (He also partnered with The Next Big Idea Club to create an original audiobook called Immortality: A User's Guide about the possibility and implications of radical life extension). And in an unexpected plot twist, Steven recently began a new professional journey —?he’s working at Google to build an AI platform called NotebookLM specifically for writers.

In this week's Next Big Idea podcast conversation, we get into all of this – we talk about the surprisingly idealistic vision of early anarchists, who envisioned a world modeled after 15th-century free cities. We talk about the anarchists unlikely choice to become America's first terrorists, using a brand new technology —dynamite —?in thousands of bombings in New York City over a 25 year period. And we talk about how, ironically, the anarchist bombing campaign played a significant role in the creation of the modern FBI and the surveillance state, the very institutions they sought to dismantle.

We go on to discuss?how history happens, what drives it, and what the past tells us about our present moment. And finally how Steven writes, and how the tools he’s building at Google can help us all write better, and think better too.?

Listen on Apple or Spotify , and let us know what you think in the comments below!