thanks so much for the opportunity to
speak to so many of you today about
radical politics now gonna start off
with a bad a bad graph because there is
a big crisis in democracy at the moment
and I don’t think we realize just how
bad it actually is couple of years ago a
survey was done asking people whether
they thought it was essential to live in
a democracy and they broke the results
down by decade of birth and as you can
see people who were born in the 1930s
1940s people in their 70s and 80s high
proportions of them still think yes it’s
essential to live in a democracy but as
you roll forward people born in the 70s
and 80s and that number goes down until
we get to people in the 80s who we’re
talking about people in their 30s here
very low proportions of them think that
it is essential to live in a democracy
and it’s graphs like this that really
got me thinking a couple of years ago
that big change was coming in politics
there was appetite for something
different and thinking back over history
the story the lesson is radical weird
fringe ideas that everybody says are
impossible a dangerous they’re never
going to work some of them become the
mainstream ideas of tomorrow and I don’t
need to tell people in Manchester this
you know so close to the home of the
founding of the suffragette movement and
it’s the same today if you think the
last two years have been turbulent in
politics I’ve got news for you I think
it’s gonna get way more turbulent before
it calms down again and so I spent my I
spent two years trying to and have embed
myself in all sorts of weird and
wonderful and sometimes quite terrifying
radical political movements to see if
any of those offered me a glimpse into
what the future of politics might look
like and
I’m gonna give you just a quick drive-by
look at a handful of them
and we’re going to start with technology
because I think technology is going to
be the real driver of political change
in the next 20 years or so in politics
and the most radical candidate in the
2016 US presidential election was not
the man who eventually won it was Zoltan
Istvan a transhumanist he’s someone who
believed like other transhumanists that
we can and should use science and
technology to radically change what it
means to be human to go beyond the
limits of human capabilities perhaps to
live forever slow down aging introduce
AI chips into our brains anything we can
think of to evolve into a higher species
and over 2016 he took this message to
the American people in a 30-foot long
coffin bus called the immortality bus
which was supposed to highlight them the
sort of the lack of government research
in anti-aging technology and he would
say to people you don’t have to die we
can spend millions of dollars changing
all of that and we’re gonna bring robots
into society so that they can do the
work and we can all live a wonderful
life of luxury and by the way that’s me
in the middle by the way that little
this meant to look like a coffin I don’t
know if it does really look like a
coffin but the casket on the top like
was blocking the air ventilation so
apparently if we turned on the air
conditioning there was a literally a
chance we were going to die which I
thought would have been so beautifully
ironic on the immortality bus but never
mind and I think my favorite bit of the
journey was we went to a bio hacking lab
where he got a Zoltan got a little chip
implant into an RFID chip implant into
his hand so that he could like just it
was programmed to just unlock his phone
by tapping it but it was programmed to
work on an iPhone and Zoltan had a
Samsung phone so didn’t actually work
that’s the problem with modern
technology but here’s the thing this
that he was saying in 2015 about AI
about changing our social structures
about life extension it sounded crazy
and yet today it started to sound more
and more sensible and I think in ten
years or so all of these questions that
he’s raising are going to be they’re
going to be as important to us as
immigration or the NHS is today now some
of the driver behind transhumanism I
think is the end of organized religion
and a feeling that if we if there’s
nothing after death and well hell let’s
just keep living forever and in a weird
way it’s a similar thing to the next
movement the psychedelics movement sorry
about the slide which I think actually
is going to be as big in ten years or so
as it was in the Timothy Leary days of
the 1960s this is a huge and growing
underground movement and exponents say
psychedelics if you take them carefully
in the right setting with the right
mindset very cautiously and deliberately
you can attain a higher level of
consciousness and and with that you can
get more connected to yourself and to
other people and it sounds like a load
of hippy mumbo-jumbo except for the fact
that emerging still small but emerging
scientific research is showing in fact
that there’s potentially incredible
results to be had using psychedelics
carefully in all sorts of mental health
conditions PTSD and addiction
end-of-life anxiety and I’m very glad
that we’ve finally recognizing in this
country that we have a mental health
epidemic but I don’t see yet enough
solutions carefully done this could be
one of them now the psychedelics
movement has always been associated with
with hippies I think slightly unfairly
and inaccurately
but I got good news for you because the
hippies is back as well
now I spent a week living on a free love
commune in Portugal where 200 souls are
happily living together
in a completely self-sustaining
self-sufficient commune where they have
all their own energy food and water now
the one you can have to read the book to
find out everything that happened during
that week but the one thing that I
really learned from that was just how
reliant I am on systems that I had
really don’t understand I can order a
taxi through my uber app but if anything
really goes wrong in society I have no
idea about how to get food or water or
energy and I think many of us feel a
certain sense of anxiety about that and
that’s one of the reasons that in 2015
there were more intentional communes
often off-grid communes set up than any
time since the 1970s and the other thing
I didn’t find in this commune was people
walking around like the zombie army that
exists in society today looking down
instead of up all the time
nobody was addicted to their mobile
phones which i think is one of the
greatest epidemics of our time that
nobody really acknowledges now these
ideas I think so far are fairly gentle
they’re the kind of things that people
that attend TED lectures would be open
to but what about political ideas that
you strongly disagree with can we learn
something from them too can we learn
something from somebody like Tommy
Robinson former leader of the English
Defence League the notorious anti Islam
group yeah actually I think that we
probably can in 2016
Tommy Robinson tried to set up a
respectable version of the EDL he said
the problem with GDL is that there’s too
much drinking and fighting and violence
and it’s Lama phobia and I want to set
up a respectable version of that
movement and he tried followed him I
shadowed him for weeks as he tried to do
that and he did he over the course of
2016 he did he held several
demonstrations
where there was no drinking there was no
fighting
there was no chanting there was no
violence and there were no people
because they’re the reasons that people
go to these sorts of movements and I
think we misunderstand that a lot about
some of these groups that actually it’s
in some ways a social movement it’s a
social activity being part of a group
like the English Defence League spending
time with like-minded people and having
been chased across Europe by
anti-fascist and having police guards on
our hotel this is exciting thrilling
stuff and I think roots like the English
Defence League in a strange way are
something like a warning system to the
rest of us what happens when large
groups of people feel like progress has
left them behind and they feel the need
to find purpose and meaning in a
movement that is aiming at something
bigger than them and if we constantly
sneer and patronize people like this we
only push them further away and mark my
words groups like this are always the
most avid and early adopters have any
new technology to get their message out
the best website in British politics for
a very long time was not the labor or
the Conservative Party it was the
British National Party the first
political group in the u.s. to use
bulletin board systems to reach people
in the 1990s when the Oh Nazis these
people are using technology in very
clever ways and actually the rest of us
could learn from that now these are
nationalist groups but maybe the nation
maybe countries aren’t going to be
around forever
anyway I’m going to introduce you to the
world’s newest country liberal and this
is libel and it’s on the Croatian Serbia
border it’s the seven square kilometers
shaded in red and it’s disputed
territory but it’s disputed in a very
unusual way because Croatia on the left
there says that belongs to Serbia
Serbia’s as it belongs to Croatia which
i think is the first time that’s ever
happened just so you know why that is
the after the Croatian war of
independence from Serbia the de facto
border was set at the Danube River there
Croatia wanted it to be the 19th century
course of the Danube River which is the
black line which would have put a lot of
Serbia into Croatia but that little bit
of liberland into Serbia Serbia who’s
happy with the status quo so there’s no
thanks we don’t want it so that’s that
makes liver land terra nullius land
unclaimed by a sovereign nation state
and under international law anyone who
turns up sticks a flag in the ground can
claim sovereignty over terra nullius
which is what this guy does in 2015 his
name is viktor jedlica he’s a
libertarian activist from the Czech
Republic he turns up declares this the
new free state of liberland and says
it’s going to be the first libertarian
country in the world where all taxation
is voluntary there’s no central
government telling us what to do
there’ll be no restrictions on what you
can own what you can say what you can do
what you can put in your body and
thousands and thousands of people rush
to sign up for citizenship Croatia gets
really angry and shuts the border
immediately and now it is on a campaign
to get recognition for this country now
to become a new country all you have to
do is to get other countries to agree
that you are a country so it’s
ridiculous it’s a cartel system you can
add it up be out so so so bit is now on
a mission to try to persuade everyone
that liberland is a real place so he’s
getting all the trappings of the
nation-state he has a Minister for
finance who doesn’t do much because
there’s no taxation he has a Foreign
Affairs Minister they have an air
traffic controller they have a football
team they have a national wine they have
a national beer they run architectural
competitions to see what the place is
going to look like it’s it actually
looks like this at the moment so it’s
not quite
but it sounds like a ridiculous pipe
dream no country has yet recognized
liberland but is it is it because people
like Vince and other libertarians think
that technology is actually on their
side
that the world is changing fast
countries and big central governments as
we know them were designed really a
couple of hundred years ago with large
centralized bureaucracies that could
control things the modern technology
especially Bitcoin our smart phones
actually reduce government’s ability to
control us govern central governments
and nation states won’t be around
forever they’re relatively new what
might replace them people like VIPs say
these small city states using
libertarian principles to encourage
freedom now you might say that all of
these I’m going back to my branding now
off Fitz branding you might say that all
of these ideas are ludicrous and none of
them are ever going to work and maybe
you’re right
you may also disagree strongly with a
lot of them and I have big problems with
all of the ideas that I’ve talked to you
about
I worry greatly about psychedelics it
can be very dangerous I don’t
particularly want to live forever either
but contained within all of these groups
and movements there is nearly always
something that is worth listening to an
idea or a possibility whether it’s
talking about technological inequality
as a result of AI the stuff assault
hands talking about or the potential of
new psychedelic research if done
carefully or using new technologies like
vit there is something there’s always an
idea there that the rest of us can learn
from if we listen now I think in the
next 20 years liberal democracies are
going to come under unprecedented strain
a combination of technological
environments or attitudinal demographic
change is going to put you
pressure on the way that we organize
society we need new ideas about how to
manage those transitions and those ideas
are not going to come from me they’re
not going to come from the mainstream
center left or Center right history says
they’re going to come from these people
so you can critique these guys you can
disagree with them you can co-opt their
best ideas perhaps you can come up with
solutions of your own to the problems
that they talk about but the one thing
you can never do with radical groups is
ignore them thank you very much
[Applause]
speak to so many of you today about
radical politics now gonna start off
with a bad a bad graph because there is
a big crisis in democracy at the moment
and I don’t think we realize just how
bad it actually is couple of years ago a
survey was done asking people whether
they thought it was essential to live in
a democracy and they broke the results
down by decade of birth and as you can
see people who were born in the 1930s
1940s people in their 70s and 80s high
proportions of them still think yes it’s
essential to live in a democracy but as
you roll forward people born in the 70s
and 80s and that number goes down until
we get to people in the 80s who we’re
talking about people in their 30s here
very low proportions of them think that
it is essential to live in a democracy
and it’s graphs like this that really
got me thinking a couple of years ago
that big change was coming in politics
there was appetite for something
different and thinking back over history
the story the lesson is radical weird
fringe ideas that everybody says are
impossible a dangerous they’re never
going to work some of them become the
mainstream ideas of tomorrow and I don’t
need to tell people in Manchester this
you know so close to the home of the
founding of the suffragette movement and
it’s the same today if you think the
last two years have been turbulent in
politics I’ve got news for you I think
it’s gonna get way more turbulent before
it calms down again and so I spent my I
spent two years trying to and have embed
myself in all sorts of weird and
wonderful and sometimes quite terrifying
radical political movements to see if
any of those offered me a glimpse into
what the future of politics might look
like and
I’m gonna give you just a quick drive-by
look at a handful of them
and we’re going to start with technology
because I think technology is going to
be the real driver of political change
in the next 20 years or so in politics
and the most radical candidate in the
2016 US presidential election was not
the man who eventually won it was Zoltan
Istvan a transhumanist he’s someone who
believed like other transhumanists that
we can and should use science and
technology to radically change what it
means to be human to go beyond the
limits of human capabilities perhaps to
live forever slow down aging introduce
AI chips into our brains anything we can
think of to evolve into a higher species
and over 2016 he took this message to
the American people in a 30-foot long
coffin bus called the immortality bus
which was supposed to highlight them the
sort of the lack of government research
in anti-aging technology and he would
say to people you don’t have to die we
can spend millions of dollars changing
all of that and we’re gonna bring robots
into society so that they can do the
work and we can all live a wonderful
life of luxury and by the way that’s me
in the middle by the way that little
this meant to look like a coffin I don’t
know if it does really look like a
coffin but the casket on the top like
was blocking the air ventilation so
apparently if we turned on the air
conditioning there was a literally a
chance we were going to die which I
thought would have been so beautifully
ironic on the immortality bus but never
mind and I think my favorite bit of the
journey was we went to a bio hacking lab
where he got a Zoltan got a little chip
implant into an RFID chip implant into
his hand so that he could like just it
was programmed to just unlock his phone
by tapping it but it was programmed to
work on an iPhone and Zoltan had a
Samsung phone so didn’t actually work
that’s the problem with modern
technology but here’s the thing this
that he was saying in 2015 about AI
about changing our social structures
about life extension it sounded crazy
and yet today it started to sound more
and more sensible and I think in ten
years or so all of these questions that
he’s raising are going to be they’re
going to be as important to us as
immigration or the NHS is today now some
of the driver behind transhumanism I
think is the end of organized religion
and a feeling that if we if there’s
nothing after death and well hell let’s
just keep living forever and in a weird
way it’s a similar thing to the next
movement the psychedelics movement sorry
about the slide which I think actually
is going to be as big in ten years or so
as it was in the Timothy Leary days of
the 1960s this is a huge and growing
underground movement and exponents say
psychedelics if you take them carefully
in the right setting with the right
mindset very cautiously and deliberately
you can attain a higher level of
consciousness and and with that you can
get more connected to yourself and to
other people and it sounds like a load
of hippy mumbo-jumbo except for the fact
that emerging still small but emerging
scientific research is showing in fact
that there’s potentially incredible
results to be had using psychedelics
carefully in all sorts of mental health
conditions PTSD and addiction
end-of-life anxiety and I’m very glad
that we’ve finally recognizing in this
country that we have a mental health
epidemic but I don’t see yet enough
solutions carefully done this could be
one of them now the psychedelics
movement has always been associated with
with hippies I think slightly unfairly
and inaccurately
but I got good news for you because the
hippies is back as well
now I spent a week living on a free love
commune in Portugal where 200 souls are
happily living together
in a completely self-sustaining
self-sufficient commune where they have
all their own energy food and water now
the one you can have to read the book to
find out everything that happened during
that week but the one thing that I
really learned from that was just how
reliant I am on systems that I had
really don’t understand I can order a
taxi through my uber app but if anything
really goes wrong in society I have no
idea about how to get food or water or
energy and I think many of us feel a
certain sense of anxiety about that and
that’s one of the reasons that in 2015
there were more intentional communes
often off-grid communes set up than any
time since the 1970s and the other thing
I didn’t find in this commune was people
walking around like the zombie army that
exists in society today looking down
instead of up all the time
nobody was addicted to their mobile
phones which i think is one of the
greatest epidemics of our time that
nobody really acknowledges now these
ideas I think so far are fairly gentle
they’re the kind of things that people
that attend TED lectures would be open
to but what about political ideas that
you strongly disagree with can we learn
something from them too can we learn
something from somebody like Tommy
Robinson former leader of the English
Defence League the notorious anti Islam
group yeah actually I think that we
probably can in 2016
Tommy Robinson tried to set up a
respectable version of the EDL he said
the problem with GDL is that there’s too
much drinking and fighting and violence
and it’s Lama phobia and I want to set
up a respectable version of that
movement and he tried followed him I
shadowed him for weeks as he tried to do
that and he did he over the course of
2016 he did he held several
demonstrations
where there was no drinking there was no
fighting
there was no chanting there was no
violence and there were no people
because they’re the reasons that people
go to these sorts of movements and I
think we misunderstand that a lot about
some of these groups that actually it’s
in some ways a social movement it’s a
social activity being part of a group
like the English Defence League spending
time with like-minded people and having
been chased across Europe by
anti-fascist and having police guards on
our hotel this is exciting thrilling
stuff and I think roots like the English
Defence League in a strange way are
something like a warning system to the
rest of us what happens when large
groups of people feel like progress has
left them behind and they feel the need
to find purpose and meaning in a
movement that is aiming at something
bigger than them and if we constantly
sneer and patronize people like this we
only push them further away and mark my
words groups like this are always the
most avid and early adopters have any
new technology to get their message out
the best website in British politics for
a very long time was not the labor or
the Conservative Party it was the
British National Party the first
political group in the u.s. to use
bulletin board systems to reach people
in the 1990s when the Oh Nazis these
people are using technology in very
clever ways and actually the rest of us
could learn from that now these are
nationalist groups but maybe the nation
maybe countries aren’t going to be
around forever
anyway I’m going to introduce you to the
world’s newest country liberal and this
is libel and it’s on the Croatian Serbia
border it’s the seven square kilometers
shaded in red and it’s disputed
territory but it’s disputed in a very
unusual way because Croatia on the left
there says that belongs to Serbia
Serbia’s as it belongs to Croatia which
i think is the first time that’s ever
happened just so you know why that is
the after the Croatian war of
independence from Serbia the de facto
border was set at the Danube River there
Croatia wanted it to be the 19th century
course of the Danube River which is the
black line which would have put a lot of
Serbia into Croatia but that little bit
of liberland into Serbia Serbia who’s
happy with the status quo so there’s no
thanks we don’t want it so that’s that
makes liver land terra nullius land
unclaimed by a sovereign nation state
and under international law anyone who
turns up sticks a flag in the ground can
claim sovereignty over terra nullius
which is what this guy does in 2015 his
name is viktor jedlica he’s a
libertarian activist from the Czech
Republic he turns up declares this the
new free state of liberland and says
it’s going to be the first libertarian
country in the world where all taxation
is voluntary there’s no central
government telling us what to do
there’ll be no restrictions on what you
can own what you can say what you can do
what you can put in your body and
thousands and thousands of people rush
to sign up for citizenship Croatia gets
really angry and shuts the border
immediately and now it is on a campaign
to get recognition for this country now
to become a new country all you have to
do is to get other countries to agree
that you are a country so it’s
ridiculous it’s a cartel system you can
add it up be out so so so bit is now on
a mission to try to persuade everyone
that liberland is a real place so he’s
getting all the trappings of the
nation-state he has a Minister for
finance who doesn’t do much because
there’s no taxation he has a Foreign
Affairs Minister they have an air
traffic controller they have a football
team they have a national wine they have
a national beer they run architectural
competitions to see what the place is
going to look like it’s it actually
looks like this at the moment so it’s
not quite
but it sounds like a ridiculous pipe
dream no country has yet recognized
liberland but is it is it because people
like Vince and other libertarians think
that technology is actually on their
side
that the world is changing fast
countries and big central governments as
we know them were designed really a
couple of hundred years ago with large
centralized bureaucracies that could
control things the modern technology
especially Bitcoin our smart phones
actually reduce government’s ability to
control us govern central governments
and nation states won’t be around
forever they’re relatively new what
might replace them people like VIPs say
these small city states using
libertarian principles to encourage
freedom now you might say that all of
these I’m going back to my branding now
off Fitz branding you might say that all
of these ideas are ludicrous and none of
them are ever going to work and maybe
you’re right
you may also disagree strongly with a
lot of them and I have big problems with
all of the ideas that I’ve talked to you
about
I worry greatly about psychedelics it
can be very dangerous I don’t
particularly want to live forever either
but contained within all of these groups
and movements there is nearly always
something that is worth listening to an
idea or a possibility whether it’s
talking about technological inequality
as a result of AI the stuff assault
hands talking about or the potential of
new psychedelic research if done
carefully or using new technologies like
vit there is something there’s always an
idea there that the rest of us can learn
from if we listen now I think in the
next 20 years liberal democracies are
going to come under unprecedented strain
a combination of technological
environments or attitudinal demographic
change is going to put you
pressure on the way that we organize
society we need new ideas about how to
manage those transitions and those ideas
are not going to come from me they’re
not going to come from the mainstream
center left or Center right history says
they’re going to come from these people
so you can critique these guys you can
disagree with them you can co-opt their
best ideas perhaps you can come up with
solutions of your own to the problems
that they talk about but the one thing
you can never do with radical groups is
ignore them thank you very much
[Applause]
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