Simon Critchley on Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us

Deleuze on Nietzsche

Two excerpts from the "Philosophize This" podcast. above:.

If you want to think more along the lines of the picture Deleuze lays out in his work, instead of thinking of the world like there's a bunch of "fixed Essences to things", like a tree is a thing, a person's a thing, rock is a thing, think instead of reality as being made up by a collection of forces that are defined by their interactions with each other. Trillions of different forces that are all vying for expression in each moment as the world unfolds into the future. Well, in that kind of world then, Frederick Nietzsche is not a static identity. What we think of as Nietzsche, when he was alive at least, was the interaction between a collection of forces at a specific location. He was ultimately a "site of becoming". He was many different forces, all vying for expression, overcoming each other, gaining expression.

In other words, think of Nietzsche not as a person with an Essence, like we might typically think of him. Nietzsche is a historical collection of forces that are still having impacts on forces in the world to this day. And when you look at them in that way, again, Nietzsche is not a static identity. To Deleuze, what we call "Nietzsche", in any given moment, is a temporary formation of just a repetition of certain similar forces that gained expression during this particular moment, but haven't changed drastically enough for the illusion of a static identity to go away.

So, on that same note, think of what you are along these same lines. Any identity where it seems like it's what you are right now is really just a temporary pattern of forces that found expression that, through repetition can seem to you like they're a stable identity.

But I mean obviously we also recognize that if other forces that are a part of you found expression, then you would be a different person. And if enough of them changed, and had repetition in another direction for a long enough period of time, then your whole identity would feel like it was something different to people. But never was there a static essence or identity to what you were, and always was there the ability for you to become something totally different, and explore new modes of existence.

Now, this is just a totally different way of looking at what a person is. Classic subjective identity just doesn't apply here. And to take this back to Plato, you can understand this as a totally different way of looking at what a tree is as well. I mean, you go into the Home Depot and you see all those trees. And, on one hand, yes it's all very pragmatic to call all these "trees", the same genus and species, they look kind of similar. But on a different level, this denies the true level of difference that's going on here. Every single one of these trees is a different repetition of forces that are all constantly shifting and adapting within a world and universe that is always shifting and adapting. And this view of reality, in terms of it being an interaction between different forces, is one of the things Deleuze thinks Nietzsche's work lays the foundation for. So, if it's not entirely clear yet, under this view of reality any attempt at making Identity or reality into something fixed and static, while it's undeniably useful when you're checking out at the Home Depot. Which is nothing to gloss over, by the way. It's at another level always in denial of the true state of change that the world is always in.

So you can see here where the critique starts to make sense for the history of philosophy and the supposed "image of thought" put forward by philosophers. To Deleuze, even our concept of thinking is always subject to change. And why wouldn't it be? There are no static categories of thought. There are an infinite number of ways the universe could be conceptually framed and mapped out by philosophers. And, thinking in this limited way sabotages our ability to arrive at new ways of thinking, or new forms of what life is.

You can also start to see how, when you're affirming your place as one small piece of this constant unfolding of reality into the future, how always looking to the past to verify the present starts to deny something very important about what existence is altogether. In other words, you can start to see the similarities we're building to here between the tendencies in our philosophy, and the tendencies in the way people live their lives.

More on that in a second, but for now, since we have a basic picture here of the universe in Deleuze's interpretation of Nietzsche, this is a good place to start to make a case for why he thinks Nietzsche's work is actually the enemy of Hegel and dialectics. He's going to say that the dialectic is making too many assumptions to try to eliminate difference. And it's interesting, cuz usually people will think of the dialectic, and they'll see it as something you use if you're actually acknowledging the true complexity of reality. "You know, Justice isn't some thing out there with an Essence," they'll say. "It's just one piece of an opposition within a more complex network of oppositions."

In the more Marxist type of dialectics, when it comes to social relations, like we talked about in that Zizek episode we did, one very simple way of looking at the world is to see something like a "school" and to think, "well a school is just a school". It's a place where kids go, you send them there to get an education. But as we talked about, somebody thinking more dialectically might look at that and say, "that's an oversimplification, that when you truly dig into what a school is to anyone in a particular structure of meaning, a school is something that has the meaning it does to us only because of its' relationship to all the other things around it in a given Society, or in a network of oppositions. For example, the meaning of a school requires how it relates to what a company is in that Society, or what the government is, or what the economic setup is, or the faculty of the school. These things are not as separate as an Essence driven view of reality might suggest they are. And, as it's said in dialectics, "what this means is that the form of what something is becomes an important piece of what the content of the thing is now. "

As I was just saying, this is typically seen as moving away from oversimplifying things. But, if we take the ideas of Nietzsche seriously through this interpretation by Deleuze, then the dialectic becomes yet another example of one of these needless rational scaffoldings that we're projecting onto a reality that's actually more complicated and dynamic than the dialectic can allow for. Let me give an example. One of the ones Deleuze uses is the dialectic between Master and Slave. Now in dialectics, these two seemingly different things, of being a Master or being a Slave, are in reality two sides of the same coin. They are oppositions to each other. The meaning of them is Unified. You can't understand the meaning of one of them without presuming the existence and the meaning of the other. But under Nietzsche's worldview, he says there's no reason to chop up reality into these oppositions that need to be resolved. Because difference, to Nietzsche accounts for all of these things. For example, Master and Slave to Nietzsche are not two sides of the same coin. Masters and Slaves come from two completely different genealogies. They're explained by two completely different histories. They often come from two completely different moral approaches to reality. So, if each one of these forces are distinct and very different from each other, why do we got to make them the same thing? What, just to remove difference and replace it with negation?

See to Nietzsche, in the actual world, when a master overcomes a slave, or slaves rise up and overthrow a master, that's not an opposition that's being resolved. In Nietzsche's view, this is the affirmation of difference. This is one will to power overcoming another will to power. And subordinating difference to it simply being a negation of a more unified thing, is again a needless rational scaffolding that denies how Dynamic the reality of difference truly is. So picture that world. It's not a bunch of Essences that are all competing with things that have other Essences. It's not a bunch of oppositions seeking resolution and clarification. This just a near infinite collection of Wills that are all competing for and striving for differentiation. The dialectic, in that kind of word world then, the argument is, it becomes unnecessary and quite distorting.

Now the takeaway from this, in a more practical sense, will lead people to call the end result of Nietzsche's philosophy an approach to life that's based on a type of Joy, lightness, or playfulness. The reason for this is, because if we take what Nietzsche has to say seriously, then the picture of life is not one where you have this rigid set of protocols, like a moral code from a God your entire life. It's not a picture of life where there are these countless dialectical oppositions that need to be worked out, so you better go get to work on them. No, the picture of life to Nietzsche becomes almost like a game you're playing, where through affirmation of what life is, you're essentially rolling the dice over and over again, hoping to roll a seven one of these times. But, even if you don't ever get a seven, you're still at least playing the game. In other words, there's a seriousness and an expectation to what life is, that just gets lifted. And instead, it starts to make more sense to just affirm difference in each moment of your life heading into the future, whether it lines up with a set of protoclls that you've created in the past, or not. And this recurring affirmation of difference in each moment as it unfolds in the universe is what Deleuze believed was the true significance of Nietzsche's "Eternal Recurrence". It was the affirmation of difference in each moment.

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...Society itself is a reactive Force that's trying to govern people's behavior. And if history is full of these people that are choosing more reactive ways of living, does that maybe have something to do with the way those societies have been set up? Is it maybe easier to control people when they're encouraged to be passive and reactive?

And for Guilles Deleuze, one of the promising ways forward, when it comes to all this we've been talking about today, is going to be for us to emphasize Art, as opposed to information. Let me explain, because hearing that, you may be like, "Good God, is this guy really going to say we need to do more finger painting and that's going to free us from the bonds of the digital panopticon"? No, just think of what information truly is in the type of Society we live in.

We typically think that information is something that's liberating. You know, "if only people had the information, then they'd be able to make decisions that were better for them and their families". But so often, what happens in the Information Age is that whoever dominates the flows of information, gets to dominate the limited worldview of the people that they're reaching. So when you're given information in one of these modern control societies to Deleuze, it's obviously not about transmitting knowledge. It's most of the time hardly even verified. So what this information becomes is a method of mass communicating the meanings, norms, and directives of the day that people are supposed to internalize and believe in, and then go throughout their lives.

Information is like a police communication, he says. When you watch a news story or a political debate or whatever it is. This is not some neutral thing that's happening, or just "take this information for what it's worth guys, here it is". No, it's a prescription of the meaning of the events that are are going on. Information in a control society he says, is both a snapshot and a command at the exact same time. It carries with it an implicit order that this is the view that polite Society is going to believe in next.

And it's this, combined with the other ways, that people are turned into bits of that information and then manipulated. Information turns out to be a massively effective way of controlling people's behavior. Turns out, it's also very easy to convince people that they have a different sort of way of looking at things, a diverse perspective, even though they're just funneled into the same algorithmic channels that so many other people are given their information in. It's "fake difference" to Deleuze.

But if it's not obvious by this point in the episode, Deleuze is a philosopher that has, as maybe his chief goal above all others, to find ways to facilitate the creation of the new "real difference". In other words, think about what we know about him so far. This constant unfolding of existence into the future. Difference and repetition to replace the traditional idea of a static identity. The critique of philosophers being stuck in the image of thought from the past. Philosophy, to Deleuze, true thinking is a creative activity. It's not prescriptive. It's not a set of protocols to determine how valid someone's thoughts are. Philosophy is about the creation of a new tracing of Concepts that can understand reality in a totally different way. And as important as what Nietzsche would call reactive forces may be, we also need people who are not sitting back being reactive all the time. Deleuze himself doesn't break these forces down into this kind of binary like Nietzsche does, but he's going to say that any activity that truly has as its' goal to not sit around and repeat the traditions and the way that things have been done in the past, but one that actually genuinely aims to find new lines of escape from these traditions, or new forms of what life can look like, that is an activity that he is deeply interested in finding better ways to facilitate, no matter what the context is.

And if you had to give a name to that sort of activity, whether it's in philosophy, science, painting, music, the only name that makes sense that we have really, is Art. Deleuze says that Art is not a form of information, it's not even a form of communication to him. True Art, in the sense that it's about creating a new tracings of reality, in the sense that it's inspiring people to see life in a new way, this is something fundamentally different than what information is, which again, is only trying to give people a snapshot of the past that's loaded with a bunch of meanings and directives. True Art, to Deleuze, helps people think and feel beyond the prescribed limitations of the information they get on a day-to-day basis.

So if you hear Deleuze's philosophy and you feel a little disoriented, like "man this is a truly bizarre picture of what our reality is, how am I ever going to use this way of thinking practically in my everyday life"? Well, that's actually part of his entire point. True Art gets people thinking outside of these rigid boxes. So, you know how they say there's a comedian's comedian, or a musician's musician? This is why I think one way to describe Deleuze is, that he's a philosopher's philosopher. Or at the very least, an artist's philosopher. Cuz his work is designed to inspire someone to think, think different than they otherwise do. Truly different.

Peter Sloterdijk on Becoming a Culture of B*stards

An alternative perspective on Post-Modernity

The Resentment of B*stards...

...of things "Legitimate" and "Illegitimate"

Zizek on Christian Atheism

Happy Columbus Day!

Contra Byung-Chul Han's "What is Power?"

From Wiki:

What is Power? (2005)

"Violence and freedom are the two endpoints on the scale of power."

"The task of power is to transform the always possible 'no' into a 'yes.' "

"Power is not opposed to freedom. It is precisely freedom that distinguishes power from violence or coercion. "

"A truly powerful holder of power does not simply elicit agreement, but enthusiasm and excitement. "

"Often what is absent has more power than what is present. "

"When power is separated from any communicative context, it becomes naked violence. "

"Power is more 'spacious' than violence. And violence becomes power if it 'gives itself more time.' Looked at from this perspective, power rests on an excess of space and time. "

"Architecture is a way for power to achieve eloquence through form. "

"Rather, power is most powerful, most stable, where it creates a feeling of freedom and where it does not need to resort to violence. "

"Power is never naked. Rather, it is eloquent. "

"An absolute power would be one that never becomes apparent, never pointed to itself, one that rather blended completely into what goes without saying. Power shines in its own absence. "

"Power turns pure being into a having." 

"Violence may capture space, but it does not create space."

"Power tends to reduce openness... Power tries to solidify and stabilize its position by eradicating spaces open to play, or incalculable spaces."

"An ethos of freedom stops power from solidifying into domination and makes sure it remains an open game."

"Perhaps power is never free from a feeling of lack."

More Tales from Elon...

America, Many Super-Positioned Cognitive Clusters

...Which May only Collapse the Wave Function and Reveal the State of Schrodinger's Cat One at a Time (typically on Election Day)

|America|

Red grid is a 3-D graph representing the wave function of the photon. Green film represents the photon as a particle, that is, as a collapsed wave function. [Image source: stills from Fermilab video by Dr. Don Lincoln, “Quantum Field Theory” (in the public domain) Jan. 14, 2016; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBeALt3rxEA&feature=youtu.be.]

Demapping the Warren: Down the Rabbit Hole with Adam Curtis

 

Referenced Nathalie Olah & Adam Curtis "Crack" Interview

Adam Curtis: The Map No Longer Matches the Terrain

Since the late 1980s, British documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has been delving into the unexpected ways in which politics, economics, religion, technology and philosophy intersect to create the world we live in. His television journalism has earned him a cult following across disciplines: his visuals are part of Massive Attack’s current touring live show, which explores geopolitics, climate action and disinformation. In this extended Q&A, author Nathalie Olah speaks with Curtis about climate change, and how nostalgia and doomerism are affecting our ability to organise for, and imagine, a better tomorrow.

Nathalie Olah: What are your feelings on the current climate change discussion?

Adam Curtis: I’m bored of the way climate change is discussed because it seems to completely ignore the central question of power. The discussion is dominated by… not technocrats, but people of a technical mindset; people who think that if you can somehow dial the temperature down then everything will be solved, and I don’t think that’s going to happen. The climate change movement has gone nowhere since the Rio [Earth Summit] conference in 1992. At that point, scientists who conceived of the problem as a system that simply needed to be stabilised took over, and because that’s a powerful model, it bled out into our idea of society as a whole.

NO: Do you think there’s a similar phenomenon happening in electoral politics; a nostalgic yearning for a moment when liberalism appeared to be working more effectively?

AC: Yes, there’s a great deal of nostalgia, of resetting what you had – but if you look underneath the votes that this new government got, it’s delicate. It’s interesting that Labour ignored the green movement, or the climate change movement, to a great degree, in the interests of getting other votes from provincial towns. That seems to have been their strategy. Nostalgia might be at play, although it might be too early to tell how widespread it is. There’s a great yearning among ‘good thinking people’ for everything to just shut up and go back to ‘being nice’ again.

NO: Do you think it’s reasonable for people to draw comparisons between the cultural climate of today and 1930s Europe?

AC: No. I think it’s nostalgic, to be brutal. What’s happening here, over Gaza, is completely new. The kind of societies people were yearning for then were highly centralised and controlled technocracies in which you, the individual, would disappear. This is what fascism in its original incarnation was about. We now live in a world of hyper-individualism. That’s not what people want now.

“We’ve retreated into a sense that there’s always a new apocalypse on the horizon; it’s a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, ‘We’re all going to die, it’s terrible.’ That’s not the way you change the world” – Adam Curtis

NO: What do you make of the American election and the new Democratic vanguard?

AC: It’s inevitable that some journalists, sooner or later, will start saying Kamala Harris has no policies. Others will say that she replaced an old person, but that she and Walz want to bring back an old time, before Donald Trump, so it’s a case of going backwards dressed up as going forward. Then there will be journalists who say she is just as vacuous as Donald Trump. It’s waves of hysteria caused by a total vacuum of ideas.

People who voted Trump were angry and wanted change, but when he got in he didn’t actually carry out many of his pledges. He was lazy, and he reduced taxes for rich people – which is what Republicans do – but apart from that, he didn’t build a wall and he didn’t start fixing the terrible infrastructure in America.

Now, what Kamala Harris represents, and what Keir Starmer represents, is a large portion of the middle class that says, “We’re fed up with all this anger, we just want it to shut up.” They might get their way. The other possibility is that these politicians really do represent the end of a decaying system of power that rose up during the Cold War, and because they are bereft of ideas they are talking in memes and with emotional spasms.

NO: Well, on nostalgia, it’s perhaps that these presidential candidates embody two dying ideologies that Americans can’t let go of.

AC: I think the major, current feeling is of disenchantment with politics because those in charge don’t know. They don’t have a picture of what they want to do and are just trying to manage things. People are waiting for someone to say, “This is the society we’re going to create.” Trump hasn’t done that. Trump has nostalgia, but I’m not sure it’s completely nostalgic; what he’s channelling is anger from people who feel marginalised. That’s true of Reform in the UK, too.

This is a strange year, in which election upon election is overturning the expectations of those who ran the old systems. Everyone thought Modi was going to storm in and turn India into a super-nationalist state, but he was undermined. The ANC is falling apart in South Africa – there’s a mood check. In Mexico, you’ve got a green technocrat. The old smug certainties are being undermined. You get the feeling we’re at the end of something and we have absolutely no idea what’s coming.

NO: On climate change, is there a failure of language? We talk about melting ice caps, rising sea levels and immense floods, but these images don’t seem to precipitate a widespread shift in thinking.

AC: We’ve retreated into a sense that there’s always a new apocalypse on the horizon; it’s a terrible teddy bear that the bourgeois greens hug to themselves and say, “We’re all going to die, it’s terrible.” That’s not the way you change the world. In fact, it frightens people, and when people are frightened they don’t want change. It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen. Of course, there are serious issues. And of course, they’re incredibly dangerous. But fear is the last resort of those who’ve failed to mobilise people to transform the world for the better. I get grumpy about this because it’s almost cowardly.

An aspect of the climate movement ignores the fact that there are people who are having a horrible time right now; for whom poverty today is more important than worrying about the climate tomorrow, and you can’t blame them. The solution is to create a movement that says, “We are going to transform the world so that we avoid the disaster in the mid-future, and we’re going to transform it in such a way that it becomes better now for you.” No one has done that and I wonder why.

I wonder whether the middle classes are feeling their own power waning; that, unconsciously, they’re projecting their doom for their own class status onto the world. What’s also hampering the climate change movement is the narcissism of the boomers. They know they’re about to die, and because they were the first, big individualists of our modern era, they’ve discovered that there’s nothing beyond them and it terrifies them; “It’s not me that’s going to die, it’s the whole world that’s going to die.” They’re driven by solipsism.

What the movement should be saying is, “No, you will die, but in the time you’ve got left, you should be working hard to ensure we create a different kind of society, which helps people now and transforms the world in the future.”

NO: That’s a great diagnosis.

AC: In the old days – and this is not nostalgia, I’m just noting – when you were part of a church, a trade union, a political party or revolutionary movement, you felt that what you did would go on beyond you. Today, people are self-contained units and can’t bear the idea that they won’t exist. That’s not to say there aren’t lots of people doing good things, but what we need more than that is a picture of how this could transform the world now.

“[AI] is a strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist” – Adam Curtis

NO: I was thinking about some of the work you’ve made around AI. One of my frustrations with the emphasis on AI is a belief that the world’s problems are down to a failure of comprehension, rather than a failure of will and imagination. AI companies say they can help us understand and optimise certain systems, but without the will to change those systems these improvements will be marginal at best.

AC: Yes, and AI can have no imagination because AI has to be trained on stuff that’s already happened. If I was going to do a clever drama about AI, I’d do a ghost story because, in a way, what’s coming out of AI is stuff that is made of all that. It’s a strange haunting; a vast collage of our dreams and fantasies that we’ve put online. AI can’t imagine anything that hasn’t happened yet, and good, optimistic, progressive politics imagines something that doesn’t yet exist.

NO: Yes, and they have to input ethical heuristics to avoid human rights violations, for example, but naturally, the instinct of AI is to move towards a kind of Malthusian diagnosis of the world, and of ‘efficiency’ at all costs.

AC: Yes, and it also sees the world as a static system, which is another problem with the climate change movement. Feedback is the most terrible ideological problem with the tech world. They believe that if you can get the feedback right, the world can stabilise. Well, history isn’t stable. No, it’s a dynamic world; the forces of history roar on, they change. We surf on them. It’s great.

AI is going to be a very good administrative system. Someone was telling me that the SwiftKey system now in the NHS is brilliant. It’s solving the problem of [access to and backlogs of] appointments. Going back to the earlier point, the real problem with individualism is that it undermines democracy, because democracy depends on accumulating people together.

People have collective power because they all agree on something, and from that point they can change the world. If you have individuals acting like screaming piglets who just want to be themselves, it completely screws democracy. So the other argument is that what you’re going to have – and I don’t know how far I believe this – is a benign AI that manages lots of people’s lives. The problem is: who writes the code?

NO: A system in which we are all conceived of as individual nodes?

AC: Yes, and we would all get to live under the illusion of individualism, but the machine would know the truth; that we are, in fact, all very like each other. “They all like Taylor Swift, give them more.” No one likes to say it, but sometimes you appreciate the stuff recommended by the Spotify algorithm.

NO: We can’t say that, though – this is meant to be a celebration of independent music and thinking!

AC: See – and we are back to the modern rules of liberal fear!

NO: In Doppelganger, Naomi Klein speaks to something I recognised in your work – particularly in the segment on Jane Fonda in HyperNormalisation – which is how the body became the new frontier of individualism; where the focus is on becoming as fit and resilient to the outside world as possible. Have you thought about that in the context of Covid?

AC: Well, that emerged around the AIDS crisis. It’s very paradoxical. I wonder whether we haven’t fully understood the extent to which AIDS has had an effect. They made these terrifying warning adverts about AIDS in the 80s, and I wonder if that’s related to the instinct of thinking, “God, I’ve got to protect my body.” If you have the idea that you can no longer change the world, all you’ve got left is to change yourself. Your body becomes the territory that you can exercise control over because no one is going to look after you. Also, the mind: anxiety, trauma.

NO: And then there’s the book [The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk] that says trauma and the body are one and the same. That trauma is carried in the body.

AC: I know! Have you seen Inside Out 2? It’s all about anxiety. The new character is anxiety; it was trauma last year, anxiety this year. What’s fascinating about Inside Out 2 is that there’s no mention of changing society. This is the modern thing: you deal with it all inside yourself, forget society. I deal with this to an extent in [2002 documentary] The Century of the Self. It’s been around since the 1960s and radical psychotherapy, but it’s become almost physical now.

NO: What makes you the way you are – tentatively optimistic, I suppose, about the present moment – rather than sharing those feelings of anxiety, dread, stubbornness?

AC: I made a film for Charlie Brooker about a problem at the heart of the liberal middle class, which I call “Oh-dear-ism”; you come to this point where everything is bad and your only response is to say, “Oh dear.” It came to a head with Trump and Brexit. What gave that class of patrician liberals its sense of dignity and self-worth was this implicit feeling that they cared for the little people underneath them. They felt there was a feedback of gratitude and the gratitude fed a sense of dignity and self-worth.

NO: It was a paternalistic dynamic.

AC: Yes, and for a long time they were probably right. But suddenly, in 2015 and 2016, those little people turned round and said, “We don’t like you, we think you’re arrogant” – and they can’t bear it. I voted against Brexit but I was astonished by the reactions to it. It wasn’t just a case of [the patrician class] saying, “Oh, we fucked that up,” it was like, “They’re stupid.”

NO: Hillary Clinton is terrible for this, too. As soon as she lost, and arguably before, the tone became extremely patronising. Raymond Williams talks about how the ‘mass’ is just a way of reframing ‘the mob’, which is a way of stigmatising anyone who isn’t you.

AC: I know bourgeois people who still say, “They’re stupid,” and I say, “No, you’re stupid, because you can’t understand why everyone dislikes you.” It’s interesting to observe a class that’s losing power and ask yourself where that power is going. The traditional left position is to say that it’s the bankers, but bankers say, “We do arbitrage, we spot gaps and go for it, we’re just chancers.” That’s not power. It has an effect, but it’s not power. The other left position is that we’ve returned to a sort of feudalism, but I’m not convinced by that. My theory is that the map we currently have in our heads no longer matches the territory we are in. We’re waiting for someone to draw a new map, and until then, we’re just going to witter away to each other on podcasts.

NO: So is the new frontier for holding power to account through whistleblowers? And is that going to happen at the scale that is needed when we see what happened to Assange, or the strange circumstances surrounding the people who have spoken out against giant corporate monopolies?

AC: No. The old model was investigative journalism, where you would find a whistleblower, or documents, to expose the corruption to us – the readers, the viewers – and then we would get angry and pressure lawmakers. That doesn’t work now. When I read that rich people hold their money in tax havens, I think, “Yes, I know that, but I also know that nothing is going to happen about it.” In a way, investigative journalism is a cliché now because it’s [only] telling us that the world is corrupt. What I want is journalism that explains to me why nothing is ever done about it.