Prompt: Steve Shirley, Ann Moffatt, and their coworker Dee Shermer. Soon, the most powerful people within the Civil Service had become convinced that the government could no longer function by trying to get more young men into computing: the numbers simply weren’t there. The shortage of “suitable” computer labor had risen to the level of a national security issue in the eyes of the state. Even low-level women computer workers held great power: when the all-women punching staff went on strike for better pay and working conditions, the massive new VAT (value added tax) system ground to a halt, derailing months of planning, to the horror of the men at the top. So they decided to approach the problem from a different angle: if there weren’t enough men for computer jobs, the number of these jobs needed to be reduced. They needed to find a way to do the same amount of computing work with fewer computer workers.

Response: This meant ever more massive, powerful mainframes that could be run by centralized control and command. On the advice of the Minister of Technology, the UK decided to force the largest remaining British computer companies to merge into one huge firm that could provide government and industry with the sort of massive, centralized mainframe technologies they needed. In 1968, International Computers Limited (ICL) was born, and ordered to produce the machines that would allow Britain to meet its digital needs with its newly minimized and masculinized computer labor force.


Prompt: Unfortunately, this change occurred right as the mainframe was on its way out, in a period when smaller and more decentralized systems were becoming the norm. This meant that by the time ICL delivered the product line they had been tasked with creating, in the mid-1970s, the British government no longer wanted it, and neither did any other potential customers. As the government realized their mistake—though not the underlying sexism that had caused it—they quickly withdrew their promised support for ICL, leaving the company in the lurch and finishing off what was left of the British computer industry.

Response: Hiding Tech’s Mistakes Stephanie Shirley’s company succeeded by taking advantage of the sexism intentionally built into the field of computing to exclude talented and capable technical women. At the same time, the rest of the British labor market discarded the most important workers of the emerging computer age, damaging the progress of every industry that used computers, the modernization projects of the public sector, and, most strikingly, the computer industry itself.


Prompt: By utilizing just a small portion of this wasted talent, Shirley rescued many women’s skills from being discarded entirely and helped British industry and government fulfill some of the promise of computerization. But for every woman Shirley employed there were always several more applicants she could not. The massive waste of human talent rippled upward, eventually destroying the British lead in computing and the British computer industry.

Response: In computing, discrimination is as old as the field itself. And discrimination has shaped the field in ways we are only now coming to understand and admit. The technical labor shortage in the UK was produced by sexism—it did not represent a natural evolution of the field, nor a reflection of women’s talents, goals, or interests.


Prompt: Computing history shows us that the “computer revolution” was never really meant to be a revolution in any social or political sense. People who were not seen as worthy of wielding power were deliberately excluded, even when they had the required technical skills. To a great extent, that process continues today. Now, as then, hierarchies are constructed through high tech to preserve powerful social and political structures.

Response: That we have historically ignored the impact of women on computing—both the women who stayed in the field and the many more who were pushed out and shaped the field through their absence—shows how narratives of technological progress hide the mistakes of the past. Often, failures teach us more. But by assuming the tautology that technology always leads to progress, we become blinded to all of the situations in which the opposite has occurred.


Prompt: For the contemporary US, the British example is a chilling lesson. In twentieth-century Britain, computers helped re-institutionalize ideas about women’s second-class status in society. They took away women’s ability to participate in the digital economy under the pretext that they should not be in charge of powerful machines even if they had the technical know-how.

Response: Though these attitudes may seem antiquated today, a closer look at our own technological landscape reveals that we continue to ignore the role of women and other minority groups in technology fields—and the impact of technology on those minoritized groups. When Twitter or Facebook is accused of doing something that hurts women, it is seen as a niche concern. Women do not stand in for “people” in general in the eyes of technology behemoths—a major problem when those technologies increasingly define every aspect of how we live. The issues affecting white women and women of color, people of color of all genders, the LGBTQ population, and other groups are repeatedly constructed as not being of primary importance by the technology companies that structure our political and economic environment—perhaps because to view things in that way would reveal how badly technology is failing us.


Prompt: The British aspiration to build a new technological empire through computing should sound familiar: it is eerily akin to our own current situation. The US approach to high technology in the Cold War was baldly imperial. But what many fail to realize is that it has remained so long after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The stock market bubble of the first internet boom did not herald a warmer, fuzzier era of more democratic computing. It inaugurated a new era of “greed is good,” and in the process, Silicon Valley learned that it could actively profit from social inequality. The only catch was it had to be willing to manufacture ever more of it, selling technological “advances” that were actively harmful to a progressive civil society under the guise of technosocial progress.

Response: The dynamic continues to this day. Silicon Valley reaps enormous profits at the  expense of the majority of users, and calls it progress. But technology’s alignment with actual progress has a long and uneven history, and its effects are rarely straightforward or fully foreseen. Real progress isn’t synonymous with building another app—it involves recognizing the problems in our society and confronting the uncomfortable fact that technology is a tool for wielding power over people. Too often, those who already hold power, those who are least able to recognize the flaws in our current systems, are the ones who decide our technological future.


Prompt: Somewhere, right now, a manager is intoning to a broke, exhausted underling that someone is willing to do the same job for less—or, that some thing is willing to do it for free. Since the dawn of market society, owners and bosses have revelled in telling workers they were replaceable. Robots lend this centuries-old dynamic a troubling new twist: employers threaten employees with the specter of machine competition, shirking responsibility for their avaricious disposition through opportunistic appeals to tech determinism. A “jobless future” is inevitable, we are told, an irresistible outgrowth of innovation, the livelihood-devouring price of progress. (Sadly, the jobless future for the masses doesn’t resemble the jobless present of the 1 percent who live off dividends, interest, and rent, lifting nary a finger as their bank balances grow.) Though automation is presented as a neutral process, the straightforward consequence of technological progress, one needn’t look that closely to see that this is hardly the case. Automation is both a reality and an ideology, and thus also a weapon wielded against poor and working people who have the audacity to demand better treatment, or just the right to subsist.

Response: But if you look even closer, things get stranger still. Automated processes are often far less impressive than the puffery and propaganda surrounding them imply—and sometimes they are nowhere to be seen. Jobs may be eliminated and salaries slashed but people are often still laboring alongside or behind the machines, even if the work they perform has been deskilled or goes unpaid.


Prompt: Remarkable technological changes are indeed afoot, but that doesn’t mean the evolution of employment, and the social world at large, has been preordained. We shouldn’t simply sit back, awestruck, awaiting the arrival of an artificially intelligent workforce. We must also reckon with the ideology of automation, and its attendant myth of human obsolescence.

Response: Overselling Automation This myth of human obsolescence was on full display when elites responded to the initial campaigns of the Fight for 15 movement. As exploited and underpaid fast-food workers went on strike across the country in 2013, agitating for little more than a livable wage, pundits scoffed that the protests would only spur employers to adopt fleets of burger-flipping robots. The Employment Policies Institute, a conservative think tank, took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal to drive this message home—and presumably to persuade disenchanted food-service workers that they were lucky to have a job at all: Today’s union-organized protests against fast food restaurants aren’t a battle against management—they’re a battle against technology. Faced with a $15 wage mandate, restaurants have to reduce the cost of service in order to maintain the low prices customers demand. That means fewer entry-level jobs and more automated alternatives—even in the kitchen.


Prompt: Former McDonald’s CEO Ed Rensi got plenty of press attention a few years later with similar comments. “It’s not just going to be in the fast food business,” Rensi said. “If you can’t get people a reasonable wage, you’re going to get machines to do the work… And the more you push this it’ll just happen faster.” Employers, he continued, should actually be allowed to pay certain groups—high school kids, entry-level workers—even less than the meager amount they currently get thanks to the floor set by federal minimum wage law.

Response: Soon after making these remarks, Rensi provided gloating commentary for Forbes.com that his warnings about automation had already proven true. “Thanks To ‘Fight For $15’ Minimum Wage, McDonald’s Unveils Job-Replacing Self-Service Kiosks Nationwide,” boasted the headline. Rensi could barely contain his glee—though he did gamely try to shed a few crocodile tears for the burger behemoth’s now-redundant corps of line workers. “Earlier this month, McDonald’s announced the nationwide roll-out of touchscreen self-service kiosks,” Rensi wrote. “In a video the company released to showcase the new customer experience, it’s striking to see employees who once would have managed a cash register now reduced to monitoring a customer’s choices at an iPad-style kiosk.” In reality, what is actually striking when you watch that video is not the cybernetic futurism but rather just how un-automated the scene is. Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free, while young, friendly-looking employees hover nearby and deliver meals to tables.


Prompt: Rensi certainly had grounds to gloat—what mercenary corporation wouldn’t want to substitute paid staff with people who pay for the privilege of doing the work needed to keep the company afloat? But to grace this latest move toward the casualization of low-skilled service work with the somber moniker of “automation” exponentially oversells the shifting workplace dynamic. McDonald’s customers aren’t on the brink of some hyper-digitized foray into commerce that we might recognize from sci-fi fare like Minority Report or Black Mirror. Instead, they’re, if anything, on course to re-experience the rather quaint dining chambers of the midcentury automat.

Response: Hence, I propose making our idea of automation itself obsolescent. A new term, “fauxtomation,” seems far more fitting. More Work For Everyone In its more harmless form, fauxtomation is merely a marketing ploy, a way to make pointless products seem cutting-edge. (The Tovala “smart oven,” for example, is Wi-Fi-connected and scans barcodes to glean reheating instructions for pre-made meals available through a subscription delivery service. Overpriced TV dinners cooked in an expensive toaster hardly live up to the slogan, “Cook your own ingredients with your smartphone.”) The gap between advertising copy and reality can be risible. But fauxtomation also has a more nefarious purpose. It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.


Prompt: Where Hollywood’s sci-fi futurism and leading tech pundits lead us astray, however, socialist feminism can lend invaluable insight, inoculating us against techno-capitalism’s self-flattering claims. The socialist feminist tradition is a powerful resource because it’s centrally concerned with what work is—and in particular how capitalism lives and grows by concealing certain kinds of work, refusing to pay for it, and pretending it’s not, in fact, work at all.

Response: That women have special insight into technology shouldn’t come as a surprise: after all, they have been sold the promise of liberation through labor-saving devices since the dawn of mass consumerism, and this applies to kitchen appliances in particular. (It’s a short and rather sad leap from self-cleaning ovens to self-cooking ones.) Despite this, they have seen their workloads multiply, not diminish.


Prompt: In her study More Work For Mother: The Ironies Of Household Technology From The Open Hearth To The Microwave, Ruth Cowan sheds astonishing light on the way innovations like electric irons and vacuum cleaners only added to the list of daily chores for women confined in the cult of domesticity. These innovations also increased cleanliness standards—i.e., ramped up the productivity expectations for home workers as well as their workloads—while transforming housekeeping into a more gendered, solitary, time-consuming occupation. Here is an especially vivid reminder from our patriarchal past that automation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and hardly guarantees the absence of work.

Response: But the relevant critique here runs deeper than simply observing that better living through technology was often an empty publicity slogan. Socialist feminists have long argued that women have been fed a lie—a lie that is increasingly foisted on the entire population, regardless of gender: they have been told their labor was not worthy of a wage and thus had no social value.


Prompt: The Italian theorist Silvia Federici has tenaciously analyzed the ways in which feminized, domestic work—what she calls reproductive labor—is essential to capitalism even as capitalists and bosses refuse to acknowledge its productive existence. Beginning with her activism with the group Wages For Housework in the 1970s, Federici has argued that we must recognize the underappreciated, uncompensated labor that sustains everyday life, providing the foundation that underpins all manner of paid work recognized by the formal economy. Every bridge, every factory, every Silicon Valley app is merely the visible tip of a hidden iceberg of reproductive labor.

Response: It’s an insight that may seem obvious, but is actually revelatory. At the University of Toronto in 2017, I watched as Federici fielded an earnest question from a graduate student who said something about how automation would expand the reserve army of labor—Karl Marx’s term for the multitude of workers without access to steady employment. The graduate student took for granted that, soon enough, there would not be enough work to go around and that many people would become surplus, expendable, and effectively irrelevant to society. Many in the audience nodded their heads in agreement—including me.


Prompt: Federici’s response was bracing. She vehemently denied the premise of the question—that we must acquiesce to the idea that, come the great automated apocalypse, masses of people would have no productive work to do: “Don’t let them make you think that you are disposable,” she passionately proclaimed. At that moment, I realized the depth of Federici’s insight. Her point is not that women have, historically, performed reproductive labor outside the sphere of waged work, that their efforts are supplemental to the real action. Rather, she insists that reproductive labor is utterly central: in its absence, the entire system would collapse.

Response: The joint creation of social life is the very basis of all economic activity. There would be no GDP to contribute to without it, no assets to leverage or profits to hoard. We are more important and powerful than we have been led to believe—and the we in question here is no longer the marginalized ranks of women performing reproductive labor, but increasingly the postindustrial precariat at large.


Prompt: The Robotic Reserve Army As socialist feminism usefully highlights, capitalism is dedicated to ensuring that as much vital labor as possible goes uncompensated. Fauxtomation must be seen as part of that tendency. It manifests every time we check out and bag our own groceries or order a meal through an online delivery service. These sorts of examples abound to the point of being banal. Indeed, they crowd our vision in virtually every New Economy transaction once we clue into their existence.

Response: One recent afternoon I stood waiting at a restaurant for a to-go meal that I had ordered the old-fashioned way—by talking to a woman behind the counter and giving her paper money. As I waited for my lunch to be prepared, the man in front of me appeared astonished to receive his food. “How did the app know my order would be ready twenty minutes early?” he marveled, clutching his phone. “Because that was actually me,” the server said. “I sent you a message when it was done.” Here was a small parable of labor and its erasure in the digital age. The app, in its eagerness to appear streamlined and just-in-time, had simply excised the relevant human party in this exchange. Hence the satisfied customer could fantasize that his food had materialized thanks to the digital interface, as though some all-seeing robot was supervising the human workers as they put together his organic rice bowl.


Prompt: Our general lack of curiosity about how the platforms and services we use every day really work means that we often believe the hype, giving automation more credit than it’s actually due. In the process, we fail to see—and to value—the labor of our fellow human beings. We mistake fauxtomation for the real thing, reinforcing the illusion that machines are smarter than they really are.

Response: Though omnipresent, fauxtomation can sometimes be hard to discern, since by definition it aims to disguise the real character of the work in question. The Moderators, a moving 2017 documentary directed by Adrian Chen and Ciarán Cassidy and released online through the Field of Vision series, provides a rare window into the lives of individual workers who screen and censor digital content. Hundreds of thousands of people work in this field, ceaselessly staring at beheadings, scenes of rape and animal torture, and other scarring images in order to filter what appears in our social media feeds.


Prompt: If what we encounter on Facebook, OkCupid, and other online platforms is generally “safe for work,” it is not because algorithms have sorted through the mess and hid some of it from view. Rather, we take non-nauseating dips in the digital stream thanks to the labor of real-live human beings who sit before their own screens day and night, tagging content as vulgar, violent, and offensive. According to Chen, more people work in the shadow mines of content moderation than are officially employed by Facebook or Google. Fauxtomatons make the internet a habitable place, cleaning virtual public squares of the sort of trash that would chase most of us offline and into the relative safety of face-to-face interaction.

Response: Today many, though not all, of the people employed as content moderators live abroad, in places like the Philippines or India, where wages are comparatively low. The darkest tasks that sustain our digital world are outsourced to poor people living in poorer nations, from the environmentally destructive mining of precious minerals and the disposal of toxic electronic waste to the psychologically damaging effects of content moderation. As with all labor relations, race, gender, and geography play a role, determining which workers receive fair compensation for their labor or are even deemed real workers worthy of a wage at all. Automation, whether real or fake, hasn’t undone these disturbing dynamics, and may well intensify them.


Prompt: Gilded Chains For many, the concept of fauxtomation may conjure the famous image of the Mechanical Turk, a fanciful eighteenth-century contraption that purportedly knew how to play chess. (In truth, the Turk was an elaborate hoax with a human player hidden under its board.) Amazon adopted the Turk as its mascot to advertise its crowdsourcing service, Amazon Mechanical Turk, which enables an enormous distributed workforce to perform piecemeal tasks for less than minimum wage even though most “turkers” reside in the United States. (Automation cheerleaders like Rensi must be crushed that no app has yet figured out how fries can be bagged from afar.) Amazon’s cheeky slogan—“artificial artificial intelligence”—acknowledges that there are still plenty of things egregiously underpaid people do better than robots.

Response: But a better predecessor for fauxtomation as I understand it would be Thomas Jefferson’s dumbwaiter—which, if it were invented today, would probably be called the “smartwaiter,” in keeping with Silicon Valley’s intelligence-fetishizing argot. Jefferson is hailed as a great American thinker and tinkerer. But he also, arguably, deserves credit as the first great American fauxtomator. His legendary estate, Monticello, was full of ingenious devices.


Prompt: Jefferson did not invent the dumbwaiter himself, but was an avid user, as Monticello’s website makes clear: “The dumbwaiters—some of which were built at Monticello—were on casters so that they could be wheeled to the table. A guest who dined at the President’s House during Jefferson’s tenure recalled: ‘by each individual was placed a dumbwaiter, containing everything necessary for the progress of dinner from beginning to end.’” A YouTube video produced by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation goes into greater detail, showing exactly how the historic devices worked. As we’re encouraged to marvel at the dumbwaiter’s quaint design, a gentle voiceover struggles to adequately grapple with the cruelty behind Jefferson’s contraptions: In Jefferson’s dining room, he installs dumbwaiters into both sides of the fireplace mantel. A weight drops, and a bottle rises from the wine cellar directly below the dining room. Just outside the dining room is a revolving door with shelves on it, so when the food is ready to serve, it can be brought upstairs, loaded on the shelves, and the door turned into the room. These gadgets impress visitors, but they also allow Jefferson to hide something from his visitors and that is the reality of slavery… One of Jefferson’s own visitors noted these things that Jefferson was doing—noted Jefferson’s conversations about what he called “ameliorating slavery,” as though it could be made better—and her observation was simply this: that Jefferson was doing nothing more than gilding the chains of slavery.

Response: Jefferson gilded chains by making them hard to see. Slaves (“members of the slave community” as the video awkwardly dubs them) cooked hot food and put it on shelves, making it appear as if the evening’s fare had been conjured by magic. The same hidden hands whisked away dirty plates just as quickly. Slaves also stood at the ready in the basement, waiting to load up any wine the master and his guests required. The appearance of seemingly automated abundance Jefferson so doggedly cultivated required substantial additional labor—the labor of making labor seem to disappear.


Prompt: More than 150 years later, black workers in Detroit toiling at what were widely regarded as America’s most secure and iconic jobs—the automobile assembly line—called out another form a false innovation. In 1968, radical organizer and editor John Watson decried the prevailing and degrading situation of “speedup, bad working conditions, automation,” in which “one black man does the job previously done by three white men.” According to Detroit icon and activist Grace Lee Boggs, members of the United Auto Workers, including her husband Jimmy Boggs, used the term “man-o-mation” to describe the dynamic.

Response: As Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin make clear in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, the term caught on and for good reason: “In 1946, some 550,000 auto workers had produced a little more than three million vehicles, but in 1970 some 750,000 auto workers had produced a little more than eight million vehicles.” The rapid pace took a devastating toll of people’s health and lives, leaving millions of workers disabled or dead; one study from the period estimated “sixty-five on-the-job deaths per day among autoworkers.” Auto industry executives credited the industry’s productivity boom to advances in machinery, but the predominantly black workforce knew it was in fact due to old-fashioned exploitation, not automation: heavier workloads and unsafe, unhealthy conditions.


Prompt: Machine Dreams Over 2,000 years ago Aristotle dreamt of a self-weaving loom that would end slavery and exploitation. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Luddites broke weaving machines in protest against the domination and destitution that came with the new contraptions, only to be unfairly remembered as opponents of progress. Today, in our own optimistic reveries about labor-saving devices, we too often forget to ask: who owns the looms? There is no denying that technological possibilities that could hardly be imagined a generation ago now exist, and that artificial intelligence and advances in machine learning and vision put a whole new range of jobs at risk. Entire industries have already been automated into nonexistence: Kodak was decimated by digital photography and Instagram, Netflix and Amazon killed off Blockbuster, and ATMs made countless bank tellers obsolete.

Response: The problem is that the emphasis on technological factors alone, as though “disruptive innovation” comes from nowhere or is as natural as a cool breeze, casts an air of blameless inevitability over something that has deep roots in class conflict. The phrase “robots are taking our jobs” gives technology agency it doesn’t (yet?) possess, whereas “capitalists are making targeted investments in robots designed to weaken and replace human workers so they can get even richer” is less catchy but more accurate.


Prompt: Capitalism needs workers to be and feel vulnerable, and because automation has an ideological function as well as a technological dimension, leftists must keep intervening in conversations about technological change and what to do about it. Instead of capitulating to the owning class’s loose talk of automation as a foreordained next phase of production, we should counter with demands that are both visionary and feasible: a federal job guarantee that provides meaningful  work to all who want it or job sharing through a significant reduction in the workweek. When pundits predict mass unemployment following a robot takeover, we should call for collective ownership of the robots and generous social benefits detached from employment status, including pushing for a progressive variation of a universal basic income under a rallying cry that updates the 1970s socialist feminist slogan to Wages for All Work—not just the work that bosses recognize as worthy of a meager paycheck.

Response: We have to recognize both the dangers and possibilities associated with automation while relentlessly poking holes in rhetoric that seeks to conflate technology’s present and potential capacities with an inescapable, and deeply exploitative, way of organizing labor and compensation. Where fauxtomation attempts to pass as automation, we should call it out as such.


Prompt: Of course capitalists want working people to be precarious, pitted against one another, and frightened about what the future may hold. Of course they want us to think that if we dare to push back and demand more than scraps the robots will replace us—that we can be automated away at the push of a button. They may wish that were the case, and are no doubt investing their fortunes toward making it seem so. But it, and indeed anything like it, has not come close to being true. If the automated day of judgment were actually nigh, they wouldn’t need to invent all these apps to fake it.

Response: On July 15, 1951, like so many times before, Mexico City’s lakes returned with a vengeance. After heavy rains, the sewers overflowed onto the streets, eventually covering half the city in fetid water. Dramatic photos circulated in newspapers, showing men rowing boats across the city’s downtown streets. The flood paralyzed the capital for ten days and was a major embarrassment for the national government. The event was a spectacular technological failure—the Grand Canal, the state-of-the-art drainage canal built a half-century earlier, had proven totally unable to drain the city. It sat idly by as the city’s residents waded to work.


Prompt: These kinds of violent, spectacular disasters are what the public has come to understand as a technological failure. But most technological failures, especially when dealing with the environment, are decidedly mundane. They often disproportionately affect the poor in ways that are spatially diffuse and take generations to unfold—a kind of “slow violence,” as the scholar Rob Nixon has memorably argued. Because of these characteristics, these failures remain largely invisible to those in power and difficult for the majority to fully appreciate. This makes it possible for these technologies to look like successes—until the full extent of their failure is revealed in moments of catastrophe.

Response: The story of Mexico City’s battle against flooding offers a telling lesson for us as we face the slow-motion disaster of climate change. The danger today is that we will again fall for the promise of technological fixes peddled by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that seem to allow us to continue with business as usual. The problem with these solutions is precisely that they so often appear to work, at least for the groups whose voices count—for now.


Prompt: We have been thinking about environmental engineering wrong. It does not “solve problems” as is popularly believed. It transforms problems, creating new and different challenges that burden other people—and future generations. The challenge we face as a society is to build the structures of popular power to decide collectively which burdens are worth their weight, and how to distribute them justly. These are not choices we should leave to politicians, or even engineers.

Response: Draining a Sinking City The official reason for Mexico City’s 1951 flood was clogged drains. But engineers knew something else was to blame: the city was sinking, rendering its drainage system a mess. By the 1940s, scientists and engineers like Nabor Carillo had concrete evidence that this sinking was not natural, but anthropogenic. From the turn of the twentieth century, the rapidly growing city had turned to extracting groundwater using mechanical pumps, depleting the water trapped in the soil below. As the clay soils of the former lakebed upon which the city was built dried out, they shrunk irreversibly, leading to a phenomenon known as “land subsidence”—sinking.


Prompt: The subsidence had a particularly marked effect on the Grand Canal, a marvel of early twentieth-century hydraulic engineering. The canal, completed in 1900, ostensibly fulfilled the centuries-old project of draining the city’s lakes, which were seen as the cause of flooding—and impediments to urban expansion. Mexico City was trapped at the bottom of a closed valley with no natural rivers flowing in or out. Stretching over thirty miles, the Grand Canal was designed to collect rain and sewage from the city center and take it first east, towards Lake Texcoco, and then through the mountains of the north, where it would be used to irrigate the agricultural fields of the Valle de Mezquital. There was just one problem: the city’s subsidence meant that the canal rapidly lost its slope in the decades after its completion.

Response: By the 1950s, the Grand Canal’s ability to drain the city was already vastly diminished. Engineers began to fear that by the 1970s, the first section of the canal (built on soft, clay soil) would slope towards the city center rather than away from it—rendering it useless. Without the Grand Canal during a major rainstorm, water would accumulate in downtown and turn it into a virtual lake.


Prompt: To prevent such a catastrophic flood of the city center in the future, engineers after 1951 initiated two major changes. First, they began to move groundwater wells out of the city center and towards the urban periphery, particularly the south and eastern fringes where thousands of new internal migrants were arriving daily from the increasingly destitute countryside. Second, they began studying a radical solution to the Grand Canal’s failure: a system of deep drainage tunnels that would be dug in firm soils less susceptible to subsidence.

Response: The tunnels, which they called the Deep Drainage System (Sistema del Drenaje Profundo) would capture water from the center of the city and use gravity to send it under the mountains to the Valle de Mezquital. There, during the wet summers, a raging torrent of rain, shit, and industrial waste would be used to irrigate the crops that fed the city. This would expand a practice that had begun in earnest with the water of the Grand Canal in 1900.


Prompt: The Deep Drainage System’s initial phase was completed in 1975. It took over a decade of planning and eight years of dangerous construction, which former workers have described to me as simultaneously awe-inspiring and macabre. (Hundreds are said to have died in its construction, though the number cannot be confirmed with written evidence.) The centerpiece of the system is the Central Emitter Tunnel— nearly twenty feet in diameter, over thirty miles long, and nearly 1000 feet deep in places. The concrete tunnel was large enough that then-President Luis Echevarría was able to tour the completed work in a convoy of trucks, with his full entourage and foreign dignitaries in tow. His government inaugurated the project with great fanfare, releasing full-page ads in every major Mexico City newspaper to declare that the war on the capital’s flooding had finally been won.

Response: The following decades brought a gradual expansion of the tunnel system. It now reaches much of the massive city, like an invisible subway network ninety-five miles long that nearly everyone depends on but no one sees. The project has ostensibly been a huge technological success. Nature appears to have been subdued; the city center never again experienced a flood anywhere close to the magnitude of the 1951 inundation. As a result of the flood protection the system offered, the city was able to continue to grow rapidly without worrying about a large-scale disaster.


Prompt: Robbing the Future But this flood protection has come at a steep cost, both for those living on the urban periphery and future generations. With the Deep Drainage System, the city’s groundwater is pumped from the city’s aquifer and mixed with water imported from other watersheds via massive aqueducts, contaminated, and then mixed with the rain that doesn’t evaporate before it is finally ejected from the watershed through the massive tunnel system. An average of four Olympic-size swimming pools of water are expelled per minute through the tunnels. The result is that wastewater that could have been treated and reused in the city—or rainwater that could have been captured in the hillsides and used to replenish the increasingly parched aquifer—is instead sent out a giant tube.

Response: The result is unsurprising, yet largely invisible to downtown power brokers: the city’s water table is rapidly falling, particularly in the southern and eastern periphery where most of the city’s wells are now located. As a result, wells must be constantly relocated or deepened to access a diminishing resource. Over a million poor residents lack adequate water service, receiving water just a few times a week if at all. Women must stay home to wait for water tanker trucks that may never come, or pay enormous sums for bottled water to perform basic household chores.


Prompt: Yet this daily deprivation, while at times made visible through popular protests, is largely suffered in silence in the desolate housing blocks of marginalized zones like Iztapalapa. This reality seems worlds away from the gleaming towers of the financial and political elite whose swimming pools never run dry. Across the city, the luxury real estate market has exploded, with new towers sprouting from the rubble of the 2017 earthquake like mushrooms of concrete and steel.

Response: To add insult to injury, the falling water table has provoked severe land subsidence, causing many of the same problems in the periphery that the city center had faced in the decades prior. This has left sewer lines—carefully constructed to flow downhill—flipping like see-saws or simply broken. With even modest rains, these sewers overflow onto local streets and double or triple already grueling commute times, especially for the poor who live far from the city center. Even when the waters do not rise high enough to enter their homes, low-income residents run the risk of infection and ruined clothes trudging through the sewage from these shallow floods.


Prompt: But the subsidence is uneven. How much a given point sinks—and thus how much its sewers are damaged—depends on its particular geology and its proximity to pumps. As a result, most floods today are patchy. A single image—even from a drone—would be unable to capture the extent of these localized floods, which are dispersed primarily across the poor periphery. They are seen as isolated events in the popular imagination, rather than symptoms of a systemic failure. As a result, they do not provoke the same level of generalized social discontent as the more concentrated flooding disaster of 1951 did.

Response: The Deep Drainage System succeeded precisely by failing in the most mundane and invisible way possible. It transformed a catastrophic problem into a creeping one, out of sight of city elites. In trying to prevent the flooding of the city center, it created a patchwork of flooding along the urban periphery. It displaced the costs of the city’s voracious growth onto the margins, far from the centers of power—and onto future generations.


Prompt: The Politics of Poop Emboldened by the false sense of security offered by the tunnels and other hydraulic engineering works, government leaders over the decades since 1975 have had no qualms pushing for further growth of the metropolitan region, even as the aquifer dwindles. The growth of the metropolis has not only generated more humans dumping waste. It has also led to more buildings and roads, shrinking the green areas that once allowed water to infiltrate into the groundwater aquifer, rather than run off into the drainage system.

Response: Today, the capacity of the Deep Drainage System is no longer sufficient during the rainy season. During heavy storms, engineers find themselves in an uncomfortable predicament: they have to start closing certain floodgate connections to the surface sewers, or else the tunnels will overflow in spectacular ways they cannot control. With these gates closed, water from the surface sewers has nowhere to go except the streets.


Prompt: The question of which floodgates to close—and hence whose streets (or whose homes and businesses) will be sacrificed is highly political. It is an open secret that engineers simply aren’t allowed to flood the central neighborhoods where the rich and powerful live. So they will generally close the floodgates in poorer peripheral neighborhoods—often where their own families live—leaving residents to wade through fetid wastewater.

Response: But the sheer quantity of floodwater, combined with deteriorating infrastructure, has eroded the engineers’ control. Standing in their rudimentary command center on the tenth floor of the water utility’s headquarters, there are moments when all they can do is look out the window at the brewing storms and pray. Floods are increasingly reaching the once untouchable neighborhoods and critical infrastructures of the city. Just last year, the airport itself was temporarily shut down due to flooding.


Prompt: Yet these floods pale in comparison to the city water engineers’ worst nightmare: a collapse of the Central Emitter Tunnel of the Deep Drainage System. This is the system’s main artery, but was designed to function during the rainy season only. Yet in the years after 1975, the city grew exponentially—meaning more sewage and runoff— while the Grand Canal lost even more capacity. This situation forced engineers to use the tunnel year-round just to get the sewage out of the sinking city. With no viable route to divert the sewage, critical maintenance work was delayed for years. This led some engineers by the 1990s to worry the tunnel could collapse due to the degradation of the concrete and steel exposed to years of corrosive gases from wastewater. Such a collapse—in the context of a vastly larger urbanized area—could produce a flood that would make 1951 appear mild in comparison.

Response: To forestall this crisis, the government began building a parallel drainage tunnel in 2008. The Eastern Emitter Tunnel (Túnel Emisor Oriente, or TEO in Spanish) has been touted by its builders as the definitive solution to the region’s flooding problem, and as the longest and most complex drainage tunnel in the world. But standing at the bottom of the tunnel’s deepest underground shaft, large enough to fit a thirty-story building into, it’s hard not to feel that Mexico City, in trying to solve its immediate crises, has dug itself into a hole it will find increasingly difficult to climb out of.


Prompt: Initially, the TEO will certainly reduce the likelihood of catastrophic floods of the kind that left thousands in the poor peripheral municipality of Chalco with noxious waters in their homes in 2000. It will allow engineers to divert water from the Central Emitter Tunnel and ideally prevent a major failure. But, like its predecessor, it will accelerate the draining of the city’s aquifer and soon be overwhelmed by the very growth it makes possible. Without the TEO, the new airport and its associated real estate developments being pushed by Carlos Slim and foreign investors would be unimaginable. But the airport—and the urbanization it will stimulate — are likely to produce so much new runoff and sewage that in a couple of short decades, the TEO itself will be insufficient.

Response: Yet like the Deep Drainage System before it, politicians and business elites will not judge the TEO by its mundane failures, such as the groundwater depletion and subsidence it facilitates. These effects are slow-moving and concentrated on the urban periphery, far from the centers of power. Instead, elites will consider the TEO a success insofar as it prevents the kind of catastrophic flooding that might stall their dreams of a fast-growing Mexico City.


Prompt: Whacking Moles The story of Mexico City’s flood protection infrastructure has its unique twists and turns. But it also has the outlines of a broader truth: in engineering, the “success” of a technology often has less to do with solving problems than rendering them opaque or distant from our imagination. Like an endless game of whack-a-mole, the problems never truly go away—they come back with a vengeance decades later and miles away in new forms, often made worse by the very infrastructure engineers created.

Response: This tendency is far from unique to Mexico—or giant sewers. Fossil fuel combustion is a clear example. Like the effects of the Deep Drainage System on residents in the periphery of Mexico City, the effects of burning fuels are felt disproportionately by the poor in the periphery of our capitalist world—in places like Bangladesh, where the sea is slowly swallowing much of the country’s land. Yet this effect is, like Mexico City’s subsidence, nearly invisible—especially to a Wall Street banker or our president.


Prompt: Even with decades of scientific work proving that our technologies have endangered the very survival of our (and countless other) species, our obsession with economic growth at all costs has barely budged. But if we are to listen to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and their allies in government and academia, we should not worry about changing our collective way of living on the planet: climate change is simply a problem that can be solved with “disruptive” new engineering innovations, from carbon capture and storage to electric cars.

Response: Yet the story of Mexico City’s struggles over water suggest that we should be skeptical of claims that environmental problems are ever neatly solved through technologies like these. I once asked a Tesla executive who came to Stanford to give a talk whether creating cheap and efficient electric cars wouldn’t simply encourage more driving, more cars, and, further down the line, crises related to lithium mining for batteries in places like Bolivia. (The idea that people with Teslas would drive more is an example of what economists refer to as the “rebound effect”: if you make something more efficient—and hence reduce the cost—people will tend to use it more, whether it’s driving electric cars or taking advantage of flood control infrastructure to build houses in a floodplain.) The executive responded by saying that “those are questions for philosophers—next question?” These are not questions for philosophers. They are questions for all of us—and especially engineers.


Prompt: But to be able to wrestle with these questions, we need to change the language we use to think about engineering and technology. Saying engineers “solve problems” implies a kind of mathematical tidiness that doesn’t reflect our messy reality. This language suggests that problems just disappear or are neatly contained through technologies. Yet if Mexico City’s floods are any indication, we should instead talk about how engineers transform problems.

Response: This subtle shift in language brings our attention to the fact that any “solution” produces, inevitably, more and different problems—many of which may not be visible in the moment or place it is implemented, or to the particular group of people designing the intervention. This seems to be, at first glance, obvious. We often say that a given tool “creates more problems than it solves.” Yet the idiom is rarely taken to heart—even if, as engineers, we talk about tradeoffs and generate cost-benefit analyses of different “alternative solutions.” Anyone who has ever worked in an engineering firm or the government knows that these are inevitably influenced by our own biases and interests, whether conscious or not. Furthermore, not every effect of an engineering solution can be quantified in dollars and placed into our analysis.


Prompt: This is not to say that there are not “better” or “worse” engineering interventions, or that new technologies will not be crucial for dealing with environmental problems. Rather, we must create the popular power necessary to democratically deliberate about these new technologies, and the tradeoffs they represent. We should decide together what kinds of problems we can live with, and what problems we cannot. And we shouldn’t let the promise of magical new technologies distract us from the arduous but essential work of organizing to change our economic system.

Response: The notion that engineers simply “solve problems” is alluring, but dangerously imprecise. It allowed Mexico City’s political class to imagine a city that could grow forever, even while sinking and drying out. As long as engineers appeared to “solve” the city’s most immediate crises, the city’s growth continued. It is only in recent years that citizens have begun to question whether that growth is equitable—and worth the social and environmental cost.


Prompt: Beyond Mexico City, the fantasy that engineers can wave magic wands and make problems go away is the basis of a global economy built on the fossil fuel extraction that has led our society to the precipice of environmental collapse. Engineers—and our faith in them—make it possible to imagine that the crises we create today will be solved tomorrow by future innovators.

Response: Yet, like the soil underneath Mexico City, this dream is beginning to sink. In recent years, major US cities like New York and Houston have found themselves underwater from storms worsened by climate change. The question is whether we will reverse course before we find ourselves, like Mexico City’s engineers, forced to repeat century-old mistakes just to survive a few years longer.


Prompt: In the introduction to your new book you write, “the problem with Facebook is Facebook.” What do you mean? When we look at the various crises that Facebook has faced in the past couple of years, people talk about them as failures or breakdowns or meltdowns. In fact, it’s just the opposite. None of these are mistakes—they’re fulfillments of a vision.

Response: Facebook intended to connect billions of people. It intended to create an algorithm that would favor engagement around highly emotional content. It intended to create an advertising platform that was more efficient, more accurate, and more specialized than any that had ever been created. These features were all intentional. And they have produced almost every negative externality that we’ve seen come out of Facebook. Those externalities are a fulfillment of Facebook’s design.


Prompt: In the book, you also say that social media connectivity is a form of disconnection. 2.2 billion people have Facebook accounts, but none of us can really communicate with 2.2 billion people. None of us can communicate in a serious way with more than a few hundred people on Facebook. Even if some of us have thousands of friends, it would be impossible to actually participate in a conversation with all of them—it would be cacophony.

Response: The folks at Facebook realized this long ago. So they designed a system that prioritizes certain relationships based on our own expressed preferences and habits. If there’s a person whose posts you often like, or with whom you share passions and interests, Facebook is going to promote posts from that person on your News Feed and your posts on their News Feed.


Prompt: That sounds a bit like the “filter bubble” argument advanced by Eli Pariser and others—that the algorithms that organize our experience of platforms like Facebook tend to create echo chambers by only showing us content we agree with. Filter bubbles exist, but Facebook’s narrowing and funneling of your vision also creates interest bubbles.

Response: Facebook wants us to keep coming back. That means Facebook wants to create the most engaging experience—but you don’t always engage the most with content you agree with. Sometimes it’s the opposite, in fact. Let’s say you have a Facebook friend you argue with a lot—you will see lots of posts from that person too. There are a number of conservatives I argue with regularly on Facebook, and I see their stuff all the time.


Prompt: So we have to think beyond the left-right divide in the American political spectrum. Interest bubbles can be about sports, knitting, golden retrievers—whatever. We all occupy intersecting interest bubbles. People on the left and the right who care about public education can be in constant communication, but they can be cut off from those on the left and the right who obsess about climate.

Response: Does that mean Facebook is more useful for political discourse than many commentators think? Interest bubbles don’t sound so bad, if they’re drawing people from different political perspectives into conversation with each other. The problem is that there’s no guarantee. You can choose to engage with people of different political beliefs through Facebook, and over time their posts are likely to show up more often. But Facebook is constantly tweaking the algorithm to take different signals into account. We don’t know how exactly engagement is being measured, and how those measurements are affecting the algorithm that determines our News Feed.


Prompt: So it comes down to a lack of transparency. Even if Facebook were more transparent, it’s the worst possible place to perform our politics, because it amplifies our tendency to see our political opinions as deeply tied to our identities. That makes political conversation harder, because you can’t challenge someone’s beliefs without challenging who they are.

Response: We are political animals: we should have protocols and norms and platforms that allow us to engage respectfully with other people. Facebook is not it. I don’t think we should expect it to be. The problem is that the people who run Facebook do. What we actually need is to strengthen our forums for deliberation. We need institutions that allow us to transcend our identity even if we continue to affiliate based on interest.


Prompt: What would such institutions look like? And would they have to be offline? Well, online media are dehumanizing because the people on the other end are just photos and strings of text. They’re not people who have nieces and nephews and are looking for childcare and living full lives. These flat screens that we use don’t easily allow us to recognize the fullness of someone else’s experience. There’s a flattening of discourse.

Response: Is that flattening inevitable? The simplification of expression comes partly from the urge to quantify it. The act of quantification requires the simplification of language. It also requires a collapse of language into a highly controlled set of characters. Take the “Like” button. For the longest time, Facebook would not allow any interactions beyond the thumbs up. They thought that including a “Dislike” button would encourage bad vibes. Then they must have tested it and found that their assumption didn’t hold up, because they decided to introduce a very controlled set of emoji “reactions.” But these reactions were finely tuned to be able to measure our mood. They let Facebook quantify our emotional state, because quantifying our emotional state helps them manipulate it.


Prompt: Are there other features you find especially problematic? Well, the Graph API was a super idealistic and profoundly dumb idea. What’s that? Facebook launched the Graph API in 2010 as an app platform for third-party developers. In exchange for developing apps for Facebook, developers received an extraordinary amount of data about Facebook users. From what I’ve heard, developers couldn’t turn off the data hose. You just got this stuff.

Response: This was how the Obama campaign in 2012 ended up with the whole social graph of the United States—and probably beyond—after building a Facebook app. They probably had no idea they were going to get all that data. And they quickly had to figure out how to use it. It’s also how Cambridge Analytica obtained the data of more than eighty-seven million users.


Prompt: During the Obama episode, scholars in my community were raising questions about whether we wanted a head of state to have that much information on their citizens. But nobody in Silicon Valley wanted to pay any attention, because they thought Obama was great. It took the Bond villains of Cambridge Analytica to make them see the problems with it.

Response: The version of the Graph API that enabled this kind of data access was deprecated in 2014 and shut down completely in 2015. But in those intervening years, developers acquired a ton of data about Facebook users. Let’s shift gears and talk about the global context. Your book spends a lot of time exploring Facebook outside of the United States.


Prompt: I wanted the book to be less about what happens in Silicon Valley and more about what happens in our lives. In particular, I wanted it to be about what happens in the lives of people in India and Cambodia and Turkey and Brazil. Often our policy debates about Facebook are all about Trump and the United States and how the Russians invaded and infected our elections. But that’s not the beginning of the story. What the United States suffered in 2016 is nothing compared to what Estonia has had to put up with for the past five years, for example.

Response: How is Facebook eroding democracy in other countries? Let’s start with India. If you look at what Prime Minister Narendra Modi did with Facebook to promote his campaign in 2014, he was building on a long career of using social media. His success taught others of his ilk—like Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines—that Facebook was a powerful tool for propaganda. He came up with a playbook.


Prompt: He employed two strategies—strategies that Trump would later take up in 2016. The first was using social media as his prime outlet to target his potential supporters—often with emotionally charged propaganda to motivate them to vote. The second was undermining the other side by targeting messages to its potential supporters that weaken their support or enthusiasm. Targeting is what Facebook is so good at, after all.

Response: But there’s a third part—the troll farm. This is the room full of people that are either employed or volunteering to directly harass your opponents or critics with death threats, rape threats, and kidnapping threats; cutting and pasting people’s faces onto pornography and sending it around WhatsApp—that sort of thing.


Prompt: As far as I know, we have not seen this happening at scale in the United States yet. It might happen in 2020. But it’s a technique that Modi really perfected. So journalists and opposition leaders and NGO leaders and reformers have all suffered and continue to suffer tremendously because of these troll farms and their activities in India.

Response: How is the experience of Facebook different in other countries? And what role does Free Basics play? Free Basics is a program that Facebook created to spread internet connectivity, especially in poorer parts of the world. It offers poor people in developing countries a data channel for something close to free. If you have a smartphone and you can’t pay for a data plan, you can use an app that Facebook created to get online. But the app doesn’t give you access to the entire internet: it only lets you use Facebook and other sites that Facebook has approved.


Prompt: And Facebook tracks everything you do. They track everything, yes, but mostly they just funnel your usage towards Facebook. More than sixty countries have Free Basics now. In a country that has Free Basics, the entire digital media ecosystem is governed by Facebook, especially for poor people. In many cases, the entire digital media ecosystem is Facebook, or some combination of Facebook and WhatsApp, which Facebook owns.

Response: It’s true in the Philippines, Myanmar, Kenya, and Cambodia. Those are four politically fraught places where we’ve seen tremendous success by ethnic nationalist and religious nationalist groups using Facebook either to support a particular candidate in a campaign or to instigate mass violence against the other side.


Prompt: Facebook didn’t create the conflicts in those countries, of course. No, of course not. These phenomena existed long before Facebook. You can’t blame Facebook for the massacre of the Rohingya in Myanmar any more than you can credit Facebook with the revolution in Egypt. But people use what’s available to them, and it just so happens that in Myanmar, Facebook is new and ubiquitous and full of hate. It’s also easy and inexpensive to use. So it ends up playing a powerful role.

Response: That brings up a broader question: How new are the problems you’re describing? In your book you talk about Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman’s classic study of “infotainment” from the 1980s. Postman blamed television news in particular for corrupting the public sphere and weakening our capacity for rational argument. Do you think what we’re seeing today reflects an extension of that process or a break? It’s funny: when I was reading that stuff in the 1980s and 1990s, and working with Neil in the early years of the 2000s, I thought he was way off. I thought he was being the grumpy old man. Now I’m the grumpy old man.


Prompt: When I look at his arguments about how the forms of media that emerged in the 1980s contributed to the trivialization of public discourse and the fracturing of the public sphere, I think he wasn’t wrong. It was only going to get worse. Neil did not live long enough to see Facebook. But had we taken him more seriously, maybe we could have done better as we rolled out new communicative models. Maybe we could have built some forums for fostering deep deliberation and examination, or preserved and subsidized existing ones, knowing that there was going to be tremendous commercial pressure.

Response: Instead, we did the opposite. We rolled back funding for libraries and universities and public media. We rolled back funding for the arts and humanities. We erased any argument about market failure. Market failure was the argument for public broadcasting. It was the argument for public schools. But by the 1980s and 1990s, hardly anyone was talking about market failure.


Prompt: We shouldn’t have lost the notion that a commercially driven media ecosystem is unlikely to foster the kind of rich analysis and deliberation that we need as an advanced technological society and as a democratic republic. The world is so complex that we actually need better forms of analysis and better forums for deliberation than the ones we inherited from the 20th century. And instead of building those, we trusted Facebook and Google. Google said, “Hey we’re going to build the library in the future! Let’s defund the libraries of the present!” Facebook said, “We will build a public square that will liberate the world and spread democracy!” And everyone went, “Great!” The very fact that these corporate leaders believe so deeply in their ability to improve our lives should have set off alarm bells. It’s not that they’re lying. It’s that they actually believe it.

Response: Meanwhile, big tech firms have become so big that they are exempted from the logic of the market to some degree. One of the perverse things about both Facebook and Google is that because their money came so early and so easily, they think of themselves as market actors that are liberated from the market. Venture capital has a distorting power. It encourages inefficiency in the distribution of resources, it encourages bad actors, and it encourages foolish ideas. So much money chasing so many bad ideas gets abused and wasted by so many bad people.


Prompt: I think we should call a halt to it. If companies want funding, they should have to go public early. We should slow down the culture and say we want there to be fewer moonshots. We want an economy with more solid businesses, ones that grow slowly, that are tested over time, and that have to be run by grownups.

Response: Does the geographic concentration of the tech industry make this dynamic worse? The ideas all have to come from Northern California or Seattle. That’s not healthy. We should be encouraging smart people in Little Rock to create solutions for Little Rock and smart people in Flint to create solutions for Flint and we should be able to give them the money to do that. But there’s no capital market for those ideas because they’re only about Flint or Little Rock.


Prompt: In addition to different models of investment, do you think we need new privacy laws in the US, like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that recently went into effect in the European Union? The GDPR is necessary but insufficient. We shouldn’t pass a few laws and think the job is done. We have to alter our expectations as users around the world.

Response: Are you saying that artificial intelligence won’t fix all our problems? Machine learning is not governance! Machine learning is the opposite of real governance. That was a joke. When Zuckerberg goes before Congress and says “artificial intelligence!” as the answer to every question, it’s just the latest version of, Trust me I have wizards! The very nature of machine learning is that it makes mistakes along the way. And those mistakes can be devastating. Then whoops, you’ve got a little more ISIS propaganda in the News Feed and people die. But that’s Zuckerberg’s response to a set of problems that have been generated by his naive faith in his own engineers: to express even more naive faith in his own engineers.


Prompt: What about the argument, often made by Silicon Valley leaders and their allies in Washington, that regulation will stifle “innovation”? At some point in the early twentieth century, buildings got higher. And as buildings got higher, we figured out we needed building codes. And when we started proposing building codes, people didn’t scream, “You’re stifling innovation! You’re a Luddite!” We need walls that can hold buildings up. We need elevators that don’t plummet to the ground. And companies can’t be counted on to do it themselves. That’s why we need public agencies to enforce the codes, and penalties as deterrents for misbehavior. Governance has to come from outside.

Response: Sure, complying with building codes cost companies money. But fewer people die in elevator accidents. So Silicon Valley can’t regulate itself. One place you see a budding movement for tech self-regulation is the Center for Humane Technology. Their project is good-hearted and some very smart people are committed to it. I find it hard to say that they’re wrong. They might actually make something of a difference.


Prompt: But it’s the wrong starting point. They refuse to acknowledge that this is a political problem—or at least that it demands a political solution. Nothing will happen if we don’t demand building codes for these sorts of systems. And those codes have to be enforced from outside, in the form of regulation. Solving Facebook through Facebook is futile.

Response: E. Glen Weyl (GW): We spend a huge amount of time talking to each other over Skype. But one of the first things that I learned from you was how foolish it is to be satisfied with Skype, to assume that it offers any kind of substitute for being there in person with someone. I wonder if you could start us off by talking about technology’s failures, and why it’s important for us to be aware of them.


Prompt: Jaron Lanier (JL): Accepting any particular technology as being a given, as an inevitability, as beyond criticism, as just a part of the natural environment, means that technology has failed. Such a technology has failed to foster human engagement. It has failed to be integrated into human society in a constructive way.

Response: To criticize technology is to love it. Technology is people getting better at doing things in the world—there’s really no need for a more elaborate definition. And so to criticize the technology—whether it’s Skype, or the way our cities are laid out or the way the English language is constructed—is not to hate technology. Rather, it’s to love technology by engaging with it.


Prompt: GW: It sounds like what you’re suggesting is that a “better” technology—a better Skype, for instance—isn’t actually better if it doesn’t provoke us to think critically about it. JL: The most successful technologies in history are what you might call living technologies. They engage the people who use them in an ongoing conversation in which both the people and the technology change. Or you could use the word evolve if you like.

Response: I mentioned cities and the English language as examples. And the reason I used them is because they have a systemic quality that is a precedent to what we have to deal with in digital systems these days. People have been arguing about proper usage in the English language ever since it’s existed. The language changes with us: it’s a living, growing thing. And the same is true of cities. We’re constantly reconsidering what they’re meant to be. Right now, for example, we’re reconsidering the role of bicycles in American cities. This is also a necessary process: without it, the city would become useless.


Prompt: The issue with digital technologies is that they get harder to change. They get locked in. The financial incentives for the people who run them become so precisely tuned to particular features that they become stuck. And it starts to feel like some stupid feature in a social network is an eternal thing, like the physics of a photon. That’s what’s so dangerous about digital systems: the sense that things can only be as they are.

Response: GW: We’ve talked a lot about your interest in taking a humanistic approach to technology. What does that mean? Does it involve letting technology change with us? Does it involve using technology to critically reflect on our own perceptions of how we see the world? JL: The funny thing about the term humanism is that it’s had a bad name in various times and places. But it’s strangely difficult to come up with vocabulary for the most basic and obvious things that are right in front of your nose.


Prompt: Humanism means we’re willing to mystify people a little bit. We’re willing to say that there’s something we don’t understand, something extraordinary, something perhaps even a little supernatural about the way people experience what they’re doing. That they’re not just going about their behaviors as if they were automata. That there’s an internal life to people that is genuinely not something that’s ever been well reconciled with the kind of world we can explore with science and logic. It’s this other channel, this experiential channel.

Response: So what I mean when I use the term humanism is the belief that people are special, that people are central, that everything else becomes absurd if you don’t believe in the specialness of people—especially everything we do with technologies for the benefit of these special things we call people. For instance, the Saudi government recently granted citizenship to a female robot. That robot has been able to do things in public that Saudi women, actual human ones, are forbidden from doing. And that’s a great example of what happens when you don’t believe in real people. You end up in this world of make-believe where you don’t even notice how you’re screwing over real people.


Prompt: So in order to be ethical, in order to be moral, in order to be decent, in order to be kind, in order to have a society that’s functional, in order to even tell if your technology is working well or not, you have to grant a specialness to that thing we call a person. And that’s what I mean by humanism.

Response: Virtual Reality as a Medium GW: I love that. Now, I want to turn towards how these ideas relate to your work on virtual reality. As you know, I’ve never experienced virtual reality myself. But you’ve told me how much you’ve learned about human sensory perception from working on virtual reality. And I wonder whether an important part of the goal for you is not just to build better technology, but rather to learn more about what it means to be human and how we can embrace it more fully.


Prompt: JL: Virtual reality is a medium. It’s fundamentally no different than print or photography or cinema. It’s a technology we use to create a media experience. I used to have a catchphrase many years ago when virtual reality was fresh in the 1980s: “Information is alienated experience.” In physics, we have this idea of “potential energy.” By lifting up a weight and sticking it on a shelf, you’re storing up potential energy. Then when you knock the weight off the shelf and it falls, you’ve released that potential energy.

Response: In the same way, the only thing that’s ultimately real about a communications medium is the experience it can result in. That’s what I meant by the phrase “information is alienated experience.” You can create some bits, and if they are knocked off the shelf, some sort of experience will result. You don’t know exactly what kind of experience. You don’t know exactly where those bits will fall. But you know there’s some potential that’s been stored by putting them there.


Prompt: GW: So virtual reality is a trigger, rather than something that’s meaningful in and of itself. JL: Virtual reality is an engineered well of potential. It’s only meaningful to the degree that the person who experiences it has some bridge of intelligibility with whoever else might’ve been involved in creating it.

Response: It’s important to understand that virtual reality is not a substitute for reality. And in fact I think virtual reality gets more and more beautiful and more and more worthwhile the less you respect it. That’s in general true for everything digital. The degree to which you disrespect digital stuff makes it more interesting and vivid, and increases its potential—the more you say, “This computer isn’t real; it’s just a pattern-generating heater that I only understand because I share culture with the people who set it in motion.” And that’s very, very true for virtual reality. In the early days we used to sneak a flower or a mineral or something interesting in front of a person while they were wearing a headset. So when they took the headset off they’d have this little piece of the real world there. They would have their senses freshened. They would recognize the depth of reality, which you can take for granted and fail to notice on a day-to-day basis.


Prompt: GW: That seems like an interesting example of a way that technology can wake us up to certain things that are outside of the technology. And it reminds me of how people often describe virtual reality as a powerful empathy-inducing device. The idea of virtual reality as an “empathy machine” is a bit counterintuitive, because it seems like empathy shouldn’t have anything to do with technology. If anything, empathy might seem anti-technology. But perhaps technology, by helping us reflect on how we see things, can also help us see things from the perspective of another person.

Response: JL: So far as I know and recall, I brought the term empathy into dialogues around virtual reality back in the 1980s. Back then I had been thinking about empathy a lot in relation to philosophy. I used to hang out with the psychedelic crowd, and the idea of empathy had a lot of currency in that world.


Prompt: But you know, there’s this problem of nerds robbing us of our vocabulary for talking about ourselves. Take the term “consciousness,” for instance. It used to refer to something perhaps a little mysterious or very mysterious about why there’s an internal channel of experience. But an imperial conquest has taken place, and the term consciousness now just means one part of a program modeling another part of a program.

Response: People talk about when AI programs will become “conscious” as a matter of fact—as if we actually know what that would mean, as if that’s an event that could be known. So consciousness has been lost to our vocabulary. I’ve started to use “experience” as an alternative to consciousness. I think the question is whether empathy is a term that might suffer the same fate. Empathy has had a little bit of a glow to it over the years, and perhaps it’s losing that through too much usage in high-tech marketing. Empathy might become something that you can measure the degree of in the latest redesign of Facebook. Whereas it should be reserved as one of those terms for something we don’t understand, as something that is at the edge instead of at the center of our craft.


Prompt: GW: Another concept that’s similarly mysterious, at least to me, is “proprioception.” It’s something that people are constantly experiencing yet never aware of. And it’s precisely the failure of technology to capture proprioception that makes us more aware of what we’re experiencing. What is proprioception, and how does it relate to virtual reality? JL: This is another area where the terminology fails us. Proprioception has a precise meaning, which is sensations that come to us through muscles and tendons and joints. For instance, it could refer to the self-awareness of how much a muscle is being stretched, which can then be interpreted by the brain to tell you about your pose if you’re a dancer. Proprioception can even tell you about your motion: your whole body can start to function like a giant accelerometer tree, a tree of little flaps that are moving as you’re moved.

Response: Then there’s tactile perception, which involves sensations that reach the brain through sensors embedded in the skin. And that’s in turn extremely complex because there are a great variety of sensors in the skin and it’s quite possible we don’t even know of them all. We’re learning new things about them and how they work together all the time. They’re strange. For instance, some detect sharpness, while others only detect if a sharp thing is moving by, not if it’s stationary against you.


Prompt: In virtual reality, we sometimes use the term “haptics” to cover both touch and feel—which is to say the senses from the skin, and the senses from muscles and tendons and joints. But the terms are loose. Different communities use them differently. What’s difficult is that this is a world that science has only begun to intrude upon. There are people who will say you can learn a lot from a handshake. There’s a famous pop song from the early days of rock about how you can tell if somebody is true from their kiss. We know there are channels of communication that exist tactically. But you don’t even have to be touching somebody to be communicating. Whenever you’re talking to someone, there’s an elaborate communication channel between people that’s based on their head pose.

Response: You’re constantly in motion. The head has to be in motion in order to perceive. If you put the head in a vise so that it can’t move, your visual acuity drops precipitously. The metaphor I always like to use with students is that the head is not like a Mr. Potato Head with little USB cameras and microphones stuck in it. Instead, the head is a spy submarine that’s out probing the environment. So when you’re with someone else, your two heads are probing, and you enter into a kind of dance that is almost always not undertaken consciously. And you become aware of how each other is perceiving in some way that we don’t really have the vocabulary to describe.


Prompt: GW: I wonder if one example of that kind of unconscious communication might be the stutter. I have a friend who has a little bit of a stutter. And it reveals her emotional state in a way that I find very powerful as a form of communication. It makes it hard for her to fully hide her emotions. JL: I’m just purely speculating, so don’t take this too seriously. But it’s not unreasonable to wonder if some of these things might not be flaws at all but rather adaptive. They might have been cherished in a deep evolutionary context.

Response: One of the odd little research projects I’ve gotten involved in over the years is studying the relationship between olfaction, which is smell, and language. Going back in deep evolutionary time, you see the olfactory bulb in the centers of the brain that eventually turned into language centers. And if you look at the olfactory channel, there’s actually two of them: there’s the olfactory bulb, and then there’s a special channel that’s suppressed in humans but is present in most animals, which is meant for sensing other animals of that species. It senses things like defecation and sexual odors. And this pheromonic channel is a completely separate pathway.


Prompt: A lot of animals have something called a Jacobson’s organ in their mouth where air is taken in. You’ll see these animals do a particular kind of rapid inbreath to sample air for this channel. Humans apparently have a vestigial Jacobson’s organ. We don’t use it but its traces might manifest in some way—it might be why we hiccup, for instance.

Response: GW: Are there people who lack language in whom this Jacobson’s organ becomes less vestigial or more active? JL: Well, we don’t know. Language is combinatorial. You put words together, you get different meanings. And of all the core sensory modalities, the only one that’s combinatorial is smell. Because you have combinations of odors that create a subjective smell. Whereas the other senses are more spectral. You can see a color that’s somewhere between one blue and another blue, but you can’t really sense a smell that’s somewhere between one odor and another odor because smell is combinatorial. So smell, like language, is combinatorial. And that means that smell may have served as a kind of precedent for language.


Prompt: But to get back to the idea of the expressive stutter: it’s conceivable to me that the stutter, like laughter, might have been some sort of social signal that long preceded language. And that we might be in the process of repressing it, very much as we repressed the Jacobson’s organ and who knows what else.

Response: The modern human species really does focus on a certain kind of vision that’s commensurate with hand-eye manipulation and with language. And we tend to repress other behaviors and sensory channels that might still be with us. Maybe stuttering is a vestigial behavior that is related to empathy—some sort of way that people communicated their emotional state.


Prompt: GW: It’s interesting when you think about dividing these more mysterious senses from the better understood ones. What is it that makes senses like vision or touch less mysterious? It’s that we can both look at the same thing and think to ourselves, “We had the same experience of that.” Or we can both run our hands over the same surface and feel more or less the same thing.

Response: But then you start getting into other sensations. Let’s say we both kissed the same person—would it actually be the same? Or, going deeper, could I ever feel what the inside of your stomach feels like? Could I know what it is to experience the back pain that you feel? Could I as a man know what it is to undergo labor? That kind of empathy is not accessible to us with current technologies. But I’ve always thought that modern dance—something that you and I share a passion for—captures a bit of that quality. What I love most is watching dances where I feel like I’m getting inside the subjective physical experience of the dancer. That’s really what sets dance apart from other art forms for me.


Prompt: JL: Yeah, that’s beautifully said. I think we really are speaking at the edge of mystery here. There’s a way that people can experience something of another person’s subjectivity. But obviously it would be absurd to think that such an experience would be precise. It’s not. And yet it’s also not meaningless. It’s neither everything nor nothing. It’s somewhere in between.

Response: And we don’t quite know how to talk about things that are somewhere in between. We’re used to metaphors that come from the digital world: everything or nothing, one or zero. Either I understand you and I can say that I’ve gotten this information from you—or I don’t. But there’s this other in-between thing—it’s almost as if we can live a little bit through each other, but just a little bit. Like there are faint traces of us in each other. It’s a wonderful quality of life that’s difficult to describe and I don’t think is well addressed by any of our metaphors from science or math or technology. It’s this other domain, and it makes me sad sometimes that people growing up in technical culture don’t appreciate it.


Prompt: GW: One story of yours that really amazed me was how in virtual reality, you can attach a tail to someone and they immediately know how to control it. I wonder if that relates to the inbetweenness you’re describing. JL: The fact that you can take on different body plans and still control your body is one of the most startling and surprising results of virtual-reality research. It’s probably the most significant scientific discovery to come out of virtual-reality research, actually.

Response: It was known before that you could alter the body to a degree, because of phantom limb research and other related investigations. But the notion that you could radically reorganize the body and the brain could still control it was not something that could have been tested before. And it is remarkable. One thing that’s probably going on is that the brain remembers body forms that our ancestors inhabited, because as far as the brain is concerned evolution is a slow, gradual process. So the brain remembers what it was like to have a tail.


Prompt: There have been a few different experiments with putting a tail on a person in virtual reality. But the best, most rigorous work came out of Mel Slater’s lab at University College London. That particular tail was a really good tail. It was a long tail. And the task was to get it to whip around in front of you to hit a target. So it was a pretty non-trivial bit of athleticism with your tail. And people can just do it. I mean, it’s natural. Everybody’s brain knows how to run a tail.

Response: The more striking experiments involved changing people into completely different creatures with different numbers of limbs, or with limbs attached strangely. And there you start to see a kind of jigsaw puzzle, where there are some body designs that brains can control and some that it seems that they can’t. What we’re unveiling is the brain’s own cartography. We’re discovering what world the brain thinks it’s inhabiting, or what body it thinks it’s part of. And the body that your brain thinks it’s part of is not just your body at the moment—it’s a multi-million-year stream of changing bodies.


Prompt: Love, Sex, and Guessing the Number of Jelly Beans in a Jar GW: That makes me think of how this all relates to love and sexuality. How do we know that something is a part of us? Usually because we can control it—we can move it, we get feedback from it, our brain is programmed to assimilate it to us in some way. Now, when it comes to love, we obviously have huge effects on the people that we love and who love us. But this research makes me wonder whether love might let us actually experience another person as a part of ourselves.

Response: JL: I have thought about this on many levels. To speak in the simplest descriptive terms possible: sex between people tends to be a longer and more elaborate affair than what a lot of animals do. Sex between animals tends to be a bit quicker, with less variation. This feature of sex ties into a remarkable feature of the human species, which I think is our most precious quality: neoteny. Neoteny means we have very long childhoods and we’re helpless for longer than the youth of other species. As a result, we have both the need and the opportunity to take in learning from our parents. And that creates this cross-generational body of knowledge and experience and stories that becomes our culture and becomes our wisdom.


Prompt: Part of neoteny is that the parents have to be more committed to their children than is typical for parents of other species. They have to be able to work with each other. So I think part of what’s going on in sex between people is not just pair bonding, which you see in other species like penguins, but a kind of learning to be each other. We’re learning a kind of a body empathy that then helps us remain connected for the long and difficult process of raising kids over many years.

Response: I remember when I was young, and children and reproduction and families seemed like the last thing you wanted to think about when you thought about sex. People want to think about sex as this separate force, as this cool drive that powers everything, as this gasoline that fuels the psyche. But actually the whole cycle through which we reproduce is so much more interesting. I’m saying that now from the perspective of a middle-aged parent, so maybe my younger self would think I’m full of shit. But raising children is about ten thousand times more involving and more costly and more rewarding than sex or romance. You don’t realize that at first.


Prompt: GW: It seems like there are a lot of social trends these days that help box that realization out. JL: I really want to avoid falling into the fallacy of “the kids these days.” But it almost seems like romance and sexuality have become reflections of digital designs rather than reflections of our cultural and biological heritage—which is something so much richer and so much more profound. Dating apps turn people into these commodities that you swipe left or right on. Everybody’s caught up in this stupid rush for optimization that makes no sense at all. You have this false rationality about dating where people are supposed to analyze who’s right for them, and are supposed to follow protocols for getting to know each other, which seems weirdly bureaucratic from what I see. It seems strangely like a job market.

Response: GW: You and I are big believers that markets are important for honoring people’s work and treating them like adults. And that a problem with the digital age is that it has removed money from much of the system, which has the effect of devaluing and infantilizing people. But there’s a limit to that line of thinking. Because romance actually doesn’t seem to be well modeled by a market, despite the fact that everyone seems to be modeling romance by markets at the moment. If you approach every date as a five-minute transaction to evaluate someone, you’ve sort of vitiated the whole point, which is that through the process of getting into someone else’s head you determine whether it’s a head you want to be in.


Prompt: So how do you reconcile those things? How do you believe in the importance of markets as a way of respecting people’s work and yet at the same time remain skeptical of the market model of romance? JL: I like to use as a starting point a demonstration that’s often done on the first day of business school. They have everyone in the class guess how many jelly beans there are in a jar. And the answer is often pretty good. The reason the demonstration is done is because it’s supposed to indicate a kind of a wisdom in the overall community that no single person might have. The idea is that a market might get at that collective wisdom.

Response: But the interesting thing about the jelly beans in the jar is that it only works if each person starts as a real individual who is distinct. If you have people who can’t actually look at the jelly beans in the jar directly, but can only look at Facebook postings about the jelly beans in the jar—and if a lot of those postings have been written by bots—then it doesn’t work. If everybody is only perceiving the jar through some sort of intermediation that regiments them, then the effect won’t make sense anymore.


Prompt: The same thing is true for voting in a democracy. This idea of getting people to work together in some kind of a collective abstraction only makes sense if each person is an individual in the first place. Otherwise the whole idea becomes ridiculous. And there are limits. All you can do with these collective abstractions, like voting or marketplaces, is to work on one simple parameter at a time. So you can set a price for something, or you can choose a candidate, but you can’t, say, direct a movie. Whenever somebody tries to do these collectively created movies, they don’t turn out well.

Response: Some people argue with me. They’ll say, “Look at Wikipedia.” But I feel that that makes my case. The example I like to use with Wikipedia is math. Before Wikipedia started, there was a whole movement of people making pages about math online. They became some of the most popular pages on the whole internet. When I was at Internet2, we used to have a contest that gave kids prizes for coming up with great websites. Each site had a distinct point of view and distinct authorship. It presented math or any other topic with a particular passion and a particular flavor.


Prompt: Now when people want information about math they go to Wikipedia, and they get this dry, academic voice that completely excludes everybody. It has the precise function of turning math into a walled garden that only a few professional people can understand— just like Newton wanted it to be back in the day when mathematical notation was made terrible! When you do things by committee, even if you think you’ll get something more inclusive, you inevitably end up with an institutional quality that excludes anybody who doesn’t fit the rigid model that brought the committee together. So these abstractions that bring people together, like markets, voting, and perhaps the internet, they only work for single-parameter investigations. And they only work if each person is a genuine individual with their own perspectives, their own earned knowledge of the world, their own legitimate separation from each other.

Response: GW: How do romance and sexuality fit into that? JL: Romance and sexuality are much closer to writing a movie together. They’re creative, not single-parameter. Now if we were just mealybugs, then sexuality would be more like voting for a candidate or setting a price, where we would just share our genes and that would be that. But since we have this high degree of neoteny, we must create together in order to procreate. And so the collective abstraction model fails and it turns into this horrible, bureaucratic, lifeless, scentless form of connection.


Prompt: This brings us back to the specialness of people and to humanism. I mentioned at the start of our conversation that sometimes the term humanism is not held in high regard. There are circles, especially in Europe, where there’s the feeling that humanism represents a degraded form of individuality. And then there are religious people who have the same problem with humanism. They feel that in order to be a person, you should have a belief in something that transcends reason and what you can sense. That you should believe in some kind of higher spirit and calling and tradition. And so the humanist is their bogeyman as well.

Response: But those two ways of disliking humanism are actually pretty similar to each other. They’re both saying that treating society as a channel to being yourself and being free and being an individual isn’t adequate. And I think it can be and it should be. I think society should be something sacred and beautiful. But just as guessing the number of jelly beans in a jar only works if everybody is a real individual, an authentic society only works if the people in it are fully authentic individuals. It only works if people have invented themselves.


Prompt: Ten years ago, you published a book called The Future of the Internet—And How To Stop It. That was 2008. There was a lot of optimism in the air about the internet being a democratizing, empowering force. In your book, you argued that the great value of the internet lay in its “openness,” which made it a uniquely generative technology. But you warned that this openness was being threatened by “appliancization”—the attempt by certain companies to enclose the internet and turn it into a more locked-down, proprietary, and closed-source place.

Response: The mood around technology and the tech industry has changed dramatically in recent years. The optimism has turned to skepticism, even cynicism. What do you make of this shift? And how has it affected your thinking on these issues? I think that the future that I was worried about and wanted to stop has come about.