{"prompt":"Last year, we decided to start a magazine. We felt disappointed by the mainstream conversation about technology, and we wanted to create space for an alternative. Then Trump happened. At first, nothing seemed to matter. Why publish a magazine about technology in the age of Trump? Why write or read about anything but Trump? We thought about it, and came up with a couple of reasons.","completion":"The first one is easy: Fuck Trump. We have to fight him, and we will. But we’re not going to let him monopolize our bandwidth. That’s what he wants. Trump is the hideous id of the internet. He will do anything for our clicks—and he wants all of our clicks. But modern operating systems have made us good multitaskers. We can walk and chew gum and still slay the dragon."}
{"prompt":"The second reason is more important: Trump is a wake-up call. His election proves that many of the wise men and women who claim to understand how our world works have no clue. He is a reminder that we can’t afford to have stupid conversations about important things anymore. Trump is a creature of technology. A technologized world created the conditions for Trumpism. Social dislocations caused by automation helped create his base, and social media incubated and propagated his fascist rhetoric.","completion":"Technology will continue to serve our Troll-in-Chief, as his Administration and his allies in Congress hunt undesirables with databases and drones. Some of their barbarisms will be dramatic and highly visible. Others will be piecemeal, discreet, and hard to grasp immediately. We need intelligent writing to make both forms of brutality legible. We also need to build the tools that can help us disrupt and dismantle Trump’s agenda."}
{"prompt":"The era of Trump will be a technologized era, like the one before it. We will be paying attention—and proposing ways to resist. (Along these lines, stay tuned for Tech Against Trump, a short book coming soon from Logic.) We will also be in the streets. We hope you’ll join us. Yours, Jim Fingal Christa Hartsock Ben Tarnoff Xiaowei Wang Moira Weigel Technology is a scourge!, technophobic scolds tweet from their iPhones. Technology will fix it!, techno-utopians proclaim on Medium. Indistinguishable middle-aged men tout indistinguishable products in front of a press all too eager to write gadget reviews indistinguishable from ad copy. Companies tank; companies IPO. Legacy media editors commission lifestyle pieces about CEO sneakers and office cafeterias brimming with lacinato kale. Press releases are distributed and regurgitated on TechCrunch. Academics write screeds against Facebook and post them on… Facebook.","completion":"We can’t stop watching. We’re so, so bored. Tech is magic. Tech lets us build worlds and talk across oceans. Whatever kind of freak we are—and most of us are several kinds—tech helps us find other freaks like us. But most tech writing is shallow and pointless. It’s nobody’s fault; everyone is just doing their job. Communications teams feed reporters winning anecdotes about their founders that explain exactly nothing. (“One day, Chad was eating a ham sandwich and realized…”) The reporters are overworked and underpaid and need to file a new story by EOD. Who can blame them for taking the bait? Editors are desperate for shareable content, which too often means some kind of caricature. Tech is either brilliant or banal, heroic or heinous. The best minds of our generation are either curing cancer, or building a slightly faster way to buy weed. The robots will either free us from drudgery or destroy civilization. Hate-click or like-click, the stories tend to be about a handful of people. The pasty boy genius. The tragic token woman. The fascist billionaire. The duo of white dudes dueling to lead us to Mars."}
{"prompt":"We deserve a better conversation. By “we,” we mean you, because everyone uses technology. We are all both its subject and object. Tech is how you find the place you live. It’s how you turn your car into a taxi or your spare room into a hotel. Tech lets you see the faces of the people you love from thousands of miles away. It helps you buy clothes, and track the steps you take trying to fit into them. You use tech to order your dinner, find a date, or at least stream the video you masturbate to when you don’t have the energy to go out.","completion":"Someday, when you do swipe right on that special someone, and they swipe right on you—it’s a match!—tech will shape how you flirt, how you define the relationship, how you plan and brag about your wedding. When you have children, you will use tech to track their development and find a babysitter. By then, maybe the babysitters will be robots, and school will be software. As we grow old, tech will help you find a caregiver. Your children will manage your physical decay remotely via app. When you have a bowel movement, they will receive a push notification. They will know what to do. They will have been on Instagram since they were a twinkle in the first fetal ultrasound photo you posted. The NSA will have been spying on them since before they were born."}
{"prompt":"The stakes are high, is what we are saying. Like you, we are both insiders and outsiders. Luckily, this is exactly the position you need to be in to observe and describe a system. In the social sciences they call it “logic”: the rules that govern how groups of people operate. For engineers, “logic” refers to the rules that govern paths to a goal. In the vernacular, “logic” means something like being reasonable. Logic Magazine believes that we are living in times of great peril and possibility. We want to ask the right questions. How do the tools work? Who finances and builds them, and how are they used? Whom do they enrich, and whom do they impoverish? What futures do they make feasible, and which ones do they foreclose? We’re not looking for answers. We’re looking for logic.","completion":"In the beginning, my plan was perfect. I would meditate for five minutes in the morning. Each evening before bed, I would do the same. There was only one catch: instead of relying on my own feelings, a biofeedback device would study my brainwaves to tell me whether I was actually relaxed, focused, anxious, or asleep."}
{"prompt":"By placing just a few electrodes on my scalp to measure its electrical activity, I could use an electroencephalography (EEG) headset to monitor my mood. Whereas “quantified self” devices like the Fitbit or Apple Watch save your data for later, these headsets loop your brainwaves back to you in real time so that you can better control and regulate them.","completion":"Basic EEG technology has been around since the early twentieth century, but only recently has it become available in portable, affordable, and Bluetooth-ready packages. In the last five years, several start-ups—with hopeful names like Thync, Melon, Emotiv, and Muse—have tried to bring EEG devices from their clinical and countercultural circles into mainstream consumer markets."}
{"prompt":"I first learned about the headsets after watching the Muse’s creator give a TEDx talk called “Know thyself, with a brain scanner.” “Our feelings about how we’re feeling are notoriously unreliable,” she told the audience, as blue waves and fuzzy green patches of light flickered on a screen above her. These were her own brainwaves—offered, it seemed, as an objective correlative to the mind’s trickling subjectivity.","completion":"Their actual meaning was indecipherable, at least to me. But they supported a sales pitch that was undeniably attractive: in the comfort of our own homes, without psychotropic meds, psychoanalysis, or an invasive operation, we could bring to light what had previously been unconscious. That was, in any case, the dream."}
{"prompt":"Day One When I first placed the Muse on my head one Sunday evening in late October, I felt as though I was greeting myself in the future. A thin black band, lightweight and plastic, stretched across my forehead. Its wing-like flanks fit snugly behind my ears. Clouds floated by on the launch screen of its accompanying iPhone app. The Muse wasn’t just a meditation device, the app explained, but a meditation assistant. For some minutes, my initial signal was poor.","completion":"To encourage me not to give up before I’d even started, the assistant kept talking to me. Her calming female voice told me how to delicately re-adjust the electrodes to get the signal working. The ones behind my ears were having trouble aligning with the shape of my head. Eventually, the Muse accurately “sensed” my brain. It would now be able to interpret my brainwaves and translate their frequencies into audio cues, which I would hear throughout my meditation session."}
{"prompt":"Tap the button, she said encouragingly. “I’m ready,” I clicked, and my first five-minute meditation session began. Inward bound, I sat at my desk with the lamp on and closed my eyes. Waves crashed loudly on the shore, which indicated that I was thinking too much. But from time to time, I could hear a few soft splashes of water and, farther in the distance, the soft chirping of birds.","completion":"After what seemed like forever, it was over. Like all self-tracking practices (and rather unlike a typical meditation session), it seemed that the post-game was as important as the practice itself. Knowing this, I made a good-faith effort to pore over my “results.” They were, at first, second, and third glance, impenetrable. I had earned 602 calm points. In all my experiences counting—the miles of my runs, words on my documents, even the occasional calorie—I had never learned what a “calm point” was. The units used by the Muse seemed not only culturally insignificant, but void of any actual meaning. In an effort to build an internal chain of signification, the app had mysteriously multiplied these calm points by a factor of three, whereas my “neutral points” had only been multiplied by a factor of one. Birds, I was told, had “landed” sixteen times."}
{"prompt":"Equally inscrutable were the two awards I had earned. Whatever they were, I thought, they were hardly deserved, considering I had so far spent a total of seven minutes scanning my brain. One was for tranquility—“Being more than 50% calm in a single session must feel good,” the award told me. The other was a “Birds of Eden Award.” I was told that I had earned this because at least two birds chirped per minute, “which must have felt a bit like being at Birds of Eden in South Africa—the largest aviary in the world.” Not really, I thought. But then again, I had never been to South Africa.","completion":"It felt great to meditate for the first time only to be told that I was already off to a good start. But I knew deep down—or, at least, I thought I knew—that I had not felt calm during any part of the session. I was in the difficult position, then, of either accepting that I did not know myself, in spite of myself, or insisting on my own discomfort in order to prove the machine wrong. It wasn’t quite that the brain tracker wanted me to know myself better so much as it wanted me to know myself the way that it knew me."}
{"prompt":"The Brain Doctor The second morning of my experiment, I took the subway uptown to see Dr. Kamran Fallahpour, an Iranian-American psychologist in his mid-fifties and the founder of the Brain Resource Center. The Center provides patients with maps and other measures of their cognitive activity so that they can, ideally, learn to alter it.","completion":"Some of Fallahpour’s patients suffer from severe brain trauma, autism, PTSD, or cognitive decline. But many have, for lack of a better word, normal-seeming brains. Athletes, opera singers, attorneys, actors, students—some of them as young as five years old—come to Fallahpour to improve their concentration, reduce stress, and “achieve peak performance” in their respective fields."}
{"prompt":"Dr. Fallahpour’s offices and labs lie on the ground floor of a heavy stone apartment building on the Upper West Side. When I arrived, he was in the middle of editing a slideshow on brain plasticity for a talk he was due to give at an Alzheimer’s conference. On a second, adjacent monitor, sherbet peaks and colored waves—presumably from some brain—flowed on the screen.","completion":"Fallahpour wears bold glasses with thick-topped frames, in the style of extra eyebrows. When we met, he was dressed in a dark blue suit to which was affixed a red brooch shaped like a coral reef or a neural net—I kept meaning to ask which. An enthusiastic speaker with a warm bedside manner, it was hard to shake the impression that there was nothing he would rather be doing than answering my questions about the growing use of personal EEG headsets."}
{"prompt":"His staff had not yet arrived that morning, he apologized, so he would be fielding any calls himself. As if on cue, the phone rang. “No. Unfortunately, we do not take insurance,” he told the caller. “That happens a lot,” he explained, after hanging up. “Now, where were we?” Before turning to brain stimulation technologies, Fallahpour worked for many years as a psychotherapist, treating patients with traditional talk therapy. His supervisors thought he was doing a good job, and he saw many of his patients improve. But the results were slow-going. He often got the feeling that he was only “scratching the surface” of their problems. Medication worked more quickly, but it was imprecise. Pills masked the symptoms of those suffering from a brain injury, but they did little to improve the brain’s long-term health.","completion":"Like many of his fellow researchers, Fallahpour was interested in how to improve the brain through conditioning, electrical and magnetic stimulation, and visual feedback. He began to work with an international group of neuroscientists, clinicians, and researchers developing a database of the typical brain. They interviewed thousands of normal patients—“normal” was determined by tests showing the absence of known psychological disorders—and measured their resting and active brainwaves, among other physiological responses, to establish a gigantic repository of how the normative brain functioned."}
{"prompt":"Neuroscience has always had this double aim: to know the brain and to be able to change it. Its method for doing so—“screen and intervene”—is part of the larger trend toward personalized medicine initiatives. Advance testing, such as genomics, can target patients at risk for diabetes, cancer, and other diseases. With the rise of more precise diagnostic and visualization technologies, individuals can not only be treated for current symptoms, but encouraged to prevent future illnesses.","completion":"Under the twenty-first century paradigm of personalized medicine, everyone becomes a “potential patient.” This is why the Brain Resource Center sees just as many “normal” patients as symptomatic ones. And it’s why commercial EEG headsets are being sold to both epileptics trying to monitor their symptoms and office workers hoping to work better, faster."}
{"prompt":"Brain training is seductive because its techniques reinforce an existing neoliberal approach: health becomes a product of personal responsibility; economic and environmental causes of illness are ignored. Genetics may hardwire us in certain ways, the logic of neuroliberalism goes, but hard work can make us healthy. One problem is that the preventative care of the few who can afford it gets underwritten by the data of the many.","completion":"Consider Fallahpour’s boot camp for elementary school kids. For a few hours each day during school vacations, the small rooms of his low-ceilinged offices are swarmed with well-behaved wealthy children playing games to “improve brain health and unlock better function,” as well as to acquire a “competitive advantage.” “We tune their brain to become faster and more efficient,” he explained. “The analogy is they can have Windows 3.1 or upgrade it to 10.” Before I had time to contemplate the frightening implications of this vision, the phone began, again, to ring. Fallahpour exchanged pleasantries for a few minutes, asking about the caller’s weekend. No, he told them, he did not take insurance."}
{"prompt":"Bettering Myself The more I thought about the kind of cognitive enhancement Fallahpour promised, the more trouble I had remembering the last time I felt clear-eyed and focused. Had I ever been? Could I ever be? For a few days I had sensed a dull blankness behind my eyes. I wondered if it was a head cold, or sleep deprivation, or a newfound gluten allergy. I started sleeping more and my cold improved, but the brain fog continued. Reading a book felt like standing on a subway grate, with holes and winds weaving through the pages. I misspelled words, like “here” (hear) and “flourish” (fluorish). I waved to a man on the train who looked like someone I had dated years ago.","completion":"On a good day, I convinced myself, there was no way I was operating above sixty percent, maybe sixty-five. Sixty percent of what, I wasn’t sure. But I knew I could do better. I felt a twinge of envy toward those who had achieved the mythical “peak performance,” and I redoubled my commitment to self-improvement."}
{"prompt":"The headset remained subtly encouraging. “Whatever you’re experiencing right now is perfect,” my meditation assistant assured me—just moments before my fourth session’s calibration had paused, again, because the signal quality was too low. I re-adjusted my headset, practicing patience. “Training your mind is kind of like training a puppy,” the motivational preamble continued. “Getting angry at the puppy isn’t going to get you anywhere.” I wasn’t angry at anyone’s dog, but I couldn’t stop comparing each session’s score to the last’s. Was I hearing fewer birds? Was it easier to focus with or without caffeine? As suspicious as I was about the accuracy of the metrics, I still wanted to beat my previous score. The more elusive peak performance seemed, the more I came to realize that it was structured as an essentially nostalgic feeling. It relied on the fear that you used to be younger, sharper, more clear-eyed—and the hope that you could somehow, with practice, be this way again.","completion":"When I mentioned my experiments to a friend, he recommended that I watch a performance by the conceptual programmer Sam Lavigne. In “Online Shopping Center,” Lavigne trains a DIY EEG device to identify whether his brain is thinking about shopping online or his own mortality. Being either “shopping-like” or “death-like” was not so different, it seemed, from the Muse letting me know whether I was calm or active, focused or restless. In both cases, the data was mostly junk, the binaries reductive, the exercise absurd."}
{"prompt":"Test Subject When I went to see Dr. Fallahpour for a follow-up visit, I was running thirty minutes late. I had forgotten to transfer trains at 59th Street because I had gotten distracted trying to make sense of an advertisement chastening me for my distraction: “Daydreamed through your stop, again?” it asked.","completion":"I had, but I wouldn’t know it yet. It wasn’t until 116th Street that I realized I had missed my stop—in fact, I had missed several. Still, I felt a low current of satisfaction when I emerged into the sunlight at 125th Street, far from where I needed to be. Such inattention made me a more viable patient for brain training than I had previously realized, in need of greater focus for even the most elementary tasks. It had also made me very late."}
{"prompt":"Fallahpour and I decided I would try a calm protocol first, followed by one that rewarded my brain for focus. While he gelled the electrodes and placed them on my scalp, I asked him about some of the skepticism surrounding EEG headsets—namely, the fact that many people, myself included, found it difficult to tell what exactly was being measured.","completion":"“EEG is a crude tool and it isn’t the best we have, but it’s the most convenient in many ways,” he explained. “It’s prone to a lot of ‘garbage in and out.’” But when done correctly, he added, it can be “useful and quite powerful.” Deciphering signals from the noise required the trained judgement of an expert like Fallahpour. In this sense, the EEG’s biofeedback wasn’t quite as seamless as going to the gym with your Fitbit. You still needed someone to help you help yourself."}
{"prompt":"To start, we took a baseline measurement of my brain. I had very quick recovery, or response, or something, in terms of what I think were my alpha waves. This meant that my ability to calm myself was sophisticated. I felt surprised at first, and dumbly flattered, much like I had during my first session with the Muse.","completion":"For the calm protocol, classical music cut in and out of my headphones depending on whether certain frequencies in my brain were active. This was visualized by red and blue columns flanking both sides of the screen. I was supposed to keep the colors under certain thresholds in their respective containers. At one point, I opened my eyes. The blue column, which had been filling up, drained suddenly. This was supposed to be a sign of resilience."}
{"prompt":"When we tested my concentration, the settings were adjusted to exercise different kinds of brainwaves. I was tasked with keeping a blue column at a certain level while not letting other red columns reach a certain height. It was more difficult than meditating with my Muse—but also, because it was a game, more enjoyable. After five minutes, I convinced myself that I felt my mind becoming more elastic, more responsive. I had started to figure out how to modify my patterns in order to play the music, even if I did not quite know what those patterns meant.","completion":"Know Nothing By the end of my week with the Muse, my results were as perilously inscrutable as they had been at the start. Thousands of birds had chirped in my ear. An infinity of waves had crashed upon an endless shore. I had earned quite a few more badges, some by the sheer virtue of persisting: adjusting the signal, continuing the exercise day after day, not quitting in the face of a great and useless mystery."}
{"prompt":"I had learned very little about myself. This in itself wasn’t surprising. But if the EEG headsets were supposed to teach anything, their lesson was somewhat contradictory: I should know myself, but I should also be prepared to be wrong about what I knew.  In this respect, the headset was more like the Oracle of Delphi’s famous precept, “Know thyself,” than its designers had intended. The dictum was initially issued as a double-edged warning about the limits of knowing and the incompleteness of interpretation—a truth that the Muse, ironically enough, confirmed.","completion":"The more I parsed my personal graphs and charts, the more I arrived at the same conclusions as anyone who has ever taken more than a passing glance at the brain. Our tools aren’t good enough. At least not yet. And the inadequate and embarrassing analogies we use to describe our brains do little to help us see ourselves clearly. In the course of the week, mine had been variously compared to a loom, a digital machine, an obsolete Windows operating system, and a puppy. What had I been expecting? That a toy would illuminate the fog? Commercial EEG devices promise that we can know our brain frequencies, even while most of those frequencies are “garbage.” The machines might be too. Average EEG devices like the Muse have been shown to have trouble distinguishing between the signals of a relaxed brainwave, stray thought, skin pulse, or furrowed brow. And several studies have disproven the efficacy of related “brain training” games, which don’t augment intelligence so much as make people better at playing the game. It’s possible that all the Muse taught me was how to score calm points and charm songbirds, not how to unlock inner bliss."}
{"prompt":"When the next Sunday came around, I was just as anxious about relaxation and relaxed about anxiety as I had been the week before. I still didn’t know whether I wanted to go shopping. Other times I thought I was thinking about death, though I couldn’t be sure. Who knows, maybe I would never know. I might even die that way—knowing very little, and getting that part wrong too.","completion":"As the Trump Administration enters its first hundred days, the 2016 election and its unexpected result remains a central topic of discussion among journalists, researchers, and the public at large. It is notable the degree to which Trump’s victory has propelled a broader, wholesale evaluation of the defects of the modern media ecosystem. Whether it is “fake news,” the influence of “filter bubbles,” or the online emergence of the “alt-right,” the internet has been cast as a familiar villain: enabling and empowering extreme views, and producing a “post-fact” society."}
{"prompt":"This isn’t the first time that the internet has figured prominently in a presidential win. Among commentators on the left, the collective pessimism about the technological forces powering Trump’s 2016 victory are matched in mirror image by the collective optimism about the technological forces driving Obama’s 2008 victory. As Arianna Huffington put it simply then, “Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be president. Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not have been the nominee.” But whereas Obama was seen as a sign that the new media ecosystem wrought by the internet was functioning beautifully (one commentator praised it as “a perfect medium for genuine grass-roots political movements”), the Trump win has been blamed on a media ecosystem in deep failure mode. We could chalk these accounts up to simple partisanship, but that would ignore a whole constellation of other incidents that should raise real concerns about the weaknesses of the public sphere that the contemporary internet has established.","completion":"This troubled internet has been around for years. Fears about filter bubbles facilitating the rise of the alt-right can and should be linked to existing concerns about the forces producing insular, extreme communities like the ones driving the Gamergate controversy. Fears about the impotence of facts in political debate match existing frustrations about the inability for documentary evidence in police killings—widely distributed through social media—to produce real change. Similarly, fears about organized mobs of Trump supporters systematically silencing political opponents online are just the latest data point in a long-standing critique of the failure of social media platforms to halt harassment."}
{"prompt":"The Wise Crowd The Obama and Trump elections might be read as the bookends of a story about the impact of the internet on society. How do we size up the nearly ten years between 2008 and 2016? How do we understand what happened on the internet during that time, and the ripple effect it had on the public sphere? We can tell this story through investments, companies, and acquisitions, and the threading together of the worlds of technology and the media. But doing so might miss the forest for the trees. We would miss the fact that ideology is embedded in code, and that there is a deeper story about the aspirations of the internet at the end of the first decade of the 21st century.","completion":"One critical anchor point is the centrality of the wisdom of the crowd to the intellectual firmament of Web 2.0: the idea that the broad freedom to communicate enabled by the internet tends to produce beneficial outcomes for society. This position celebrated user-generated content, encouraged platforms for collective participation, and advocated the openness of data."}
{"prompt":"Inspired by the success of projects like the open-source operating system Linux and the explosion of platforms like Wikipedia, a generation of internet commentators espoused the benefits of crowd-sourced problem-solving. Anthony D. Williams and Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics (2006) touted the economic potential of the crowd. Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody (2008) highlighted how open systems powered by volunteer contributions could create social change. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks (2006) posited a cooperative form of socioeconomic production unleashed by the structure of the open web called “commons-based peer production.” Such notions inspired movements like “Gov 2.0” and projects like the Sunlight Foundation, which sought to publish government data in order to reduce corruption and enable the creation of valuable new services by third parties. It also inspired a range of citizen journalism projects, empowering a new fourth estate.","completion":"Faith in the collective intelligence of the crowd didn’t go unchallenged. Contemporary authors like Andrew Keen railed against the diminishing role of experts in The Cult of the Amateur (2007). Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not A Gadget (2010) warned of individual intelligence being replaced by the judgment of crowds and algorithms. Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble (2011) expressed anxiety about the isolating effect of recommendation systems that created information monocultures. Evgeny Morozov’s The Net Delusion (2012) attacked the notion of the internet as a democratizing force."}
{"prompt":"Yet regardless of the critics, the belief in the wisdom of the crowd framed the design of an entire generation of social platforms. Digg and Reddit—both empowered by a system of upvotes and downvotes for sharing links—surfaced the best new things on the web. Amazon ratings helped consumers sort through a long inventory of products to find the best one. Wikis proliferated as a means of coordination and collaboration for a whole range of different tasks. Anonymous represented an occasionally scary but generative model for distributed political participation. Twitter—founded in 2006—was celebrated as a democratizing force for protest and government accountability.","completion":"Intelligence Failure The platforms inspired by the “wisdom of the crowd” represented an experiment. They tested the hypothesis that large groups of people can self-organize to produce knowledge effectively and ultimately arrive at positive outcomes. In recent years, however, a number of underlying assumptions in this framework have been challenged, as these platforms have increasingly produced outcomes quite opposite to what their designers had in mind. With the benefit of hindsight, we can start to diagnose why. In particular, there have been four major “divergences” between how the vision of the wisdom of the crowd optimistically predicted people would act online and how they actually behaved."}
{"prompt":"First, the wisdom of the crowd assumes that each member of the crowd will sift through information to make independent observations and contributions. If not, it hopes that at least a majority will, such that a competitive marketplace of ideas will be able to arrive at the best result. This assumption deeply underestimated the speed at which a stream of data becomes overwhelming, and the resulting demand for intermediation among users. It also missed the mark as to how platforms would resolve this: by moving away from human moderators and towards automated systems of sorting like the Facebook Newsfeed. This has shifted the power of decision-making from the crowd to the controllers of the platform, distorting the free play of contribution and collaboration that was a critical ingredient for collective intelligence to function.","completion":"Second, collective intelligence requires aggregating many individual observations. To that end, it assumes a sufficient diversity of viewpoints. However, open platforms did not generate or actively cultivate this kind of diversity, instead more passively relying on the ostensible availability of these tools to all."}
{"prompt":"There are many contributing causes to the resulting biases in participation. One is the differences in skills in web use across different demographics within society. Another is the power of homophily: the tendency for users to clump together based on preferences, language, and geography—a point eloquently addressed in Ethan Zuckerman’s Digital Cosmopolitans (2014). Finally, activities like harassment and mob-like “brigading” proved to be effective means of chilling speech from targeted—and often already vulnerable—populations on these platforms.","completion":"Third, collective intelligence assumes that wrong information will be systematically weeded out as it conflicts with the mass of observations being made by others. Quite the opposite played out in practice, as it ended up being much easier to share information than to evaluate its accuracy. Hoaxes spread very effectively through the crowd, from bogus medical beliefs and conspiracy theories to faked celebrity deaths and clickbait headlines."}
{"prompt":"Crowds also arrived at incorrect results more often than expected, as in the high-profile misidentification of the culprits by Reddit during the Boston Marathon bombing. The failure of the crowd to eliminate incorrect information, which seemed sufficiently robust in the case of something like Wikipedia, did not apply to other contexts.","completion":"Fourth, collective intelligence was assumed to be a vehicle for positive social change because broad participation would make wrongdoing more difficult to hide. Though this latter point turned out to be arguably true, transparency alone was not the powerful disinfectant it was assumed to be. The ability to capture police violence on smartphones did not result in increased convictions or changes to the underlying policies of law enforcement. The Edward Snowden revelations failed to produce substantial surveillance reform in the United States. The leak of Donald Trump’s Access Hollywood recording failed to change the political momentum of the 2016 election. And so on. As Aaron Swartz warned us in 2009, “reality doesn’t live in the databases.” Ultimately, the aspirations of collective intelligence underlying a generation of online platforms proved far more narrow and limited in practice. The wisdom of the crowd turned out to be susceptible to the influence of recommendation algorithms, the designs of bad actors, in-built biases of users, and the strength of incumbent institutions, among other forces."}
{"prompt":"The resulting ecosystem feels deeply out of control. The promise of a collective search for the truth gave way to a pernicious ecosystem of fake news. The promise of a broad participatory culture gave way to campaigns of harassment and atomized, deeply insular communities. The promise of greater public accountability gave way to waves of outrage with little real change. Trump 2016 and Obama 2008 are through-the-looking-glass versions of one another, with the benefits from one era giving rise to the failures of the next.","completion":"Reweaving the Web So, what comes next? Has a unique moment been lost? Is the ecosystem of the web now set in ways that prevent a return to a more open, more participatory, and more collaborative mode? What damage control can be done on our current systems? It might be tempting to take the side of the critics who have long claimed that the assumptions of collective intelligence were naive from their inception. But this ignores the many positive changes these platforms have brought. Indeed, staggeringly successful projects like Wikipedia disprove the notion that the wisdom of the crowd framework was altogether wrong, even as an idealized picture of that community has become more nuanced with time."}
{"prompt":"It would also miss the complex changes to the internet in recent years. For one, the design of the internet has changed significantly, and not always in ways that have supported the flourishing of the wisdom of the crowd. Anil Dash has eulogized “the web we lost,” condemning the industry for “abandon[ing] core values that used to be fundamental to the web world” in pursuit of outsized financial returns. David Weinberger has characterized this process as a “paving” of the web: the vanishing of the values of openness rooted in the architecture of the internet. This is simultaneously a matter of code and norms: both Weinberger and Dash are worried about the emergence of a new generation not steeped in the practices and values of the open web.","completion":"The wisdom of the crowd’s critics also ignore the rising sophistication of those who have an interest in undermining or manipulating online discussion. Whether Russia’s development of a sophisticated state apparatus of online manipulation or the organized trolling of alt-right campaigners, the past decade has seen ever more effective coordination in misdirecting the crowd. Indeed, we can see this change in the naivety of creating open polls to solicit the opinions of the internet or setting loose a bot to train itself based on conversations on Twitter. This wasn’t always the case—the online environment is now hostile in ways that inhibit certain means of creation and collaboration."}
{"prompt":"To the extent that the vision of the wisdom of the crowd was naive, it was naive because it assumed that the internet was a spontaneous reactor for a certain kind of collective behavior. It mistook what should have been an agenda, a ongoing program for the design of the web, for the way things already were. It assumed users had the time and education to contribute and evaluate scads of information. It assumed a level of class, race, and gender diversity in online participation that never materialized. It assumed a gentility of collaboration and discussion among people that only ever existed in certain contexts. It assumed that the simple revelation of facts would produce social change.","completion":"In short, the wisdom of the crowd didn’t describe where we were, so much as paint a picture of where we should have been going. Fulfilling those failed aspirations will require three major things. Platforms must actively protect the crowd’s production of wisdom. The visibility of collective decision-making and the drama of mass action online produces the illusion of strength. In reality, the blend of code and community giving rise to sustainable collective intelligence is a delicate and elusive set of human dynamics. Rather than assuming its inevitability, we should build systems—either human-driven or autonomous—for robustly shielding and cultivating these processes in the harsh environment of the web."}
{"prompt":"The mission needs to be drawn broader than code. Ensuring that the wisdom of the crowd can produce social change means creating pathways for offline action that can effectively challenge wrongdoing. Ensuring that the wisdom of the crowd can reach accurate results requires more inclusive, diverse bodies of participants. Both speak to a political agenda that cannot be achieved merely by designing tools and making them openly available.","completion":"Experimentation must be accelerated at the edges. Although we depend heavily on a few key platforms, the internet is still a vast space. Today’s platforms emerged from experimentation at the edges. To produce new generation of robust platforms, we need more experimentation—a proliferation and wide exploration of alternative spaces for crowds to gather online."}
{"prompt":"It remains an open question whether the internet is traveling down the same, well-worn paths followed by all communications infrastructures, or whether it represents something truly new. But to accept the current state of affairs as inevitable falls prey to a fatalistic pessimism that would only further compound the problems created by the equally deterministic optimism of the decade past.","completion":"The vision of collective participation embedded in the idea of the wisdom of the crowd rests on the belief in the unique potential of the web and what it might achieve. Even as the technology evolves, that vision—and a renewed defense of it—must guide us as we enter the next decade. Technology has a gender problem, as everyone knows. The underrepresentation of women in technical fields has spawned legions of TED talks, South by Southwest panels, and women-friendly coding boot camps. I’ve participated in some of these get-women-to-code workshops myself, and I sometimes encourage my students to get involved. Recently, though, I’ve noticed something strange: the women who are so assiduously learning to code seem to be devaluing certain tech roles simply by occupying them."}
{"prompt":"It’s not always obvious to outsiders, but the term “technology sector” is a catch-all for a large array of distinct jobs. Of course there are PR, HR, and management roles. But even if we confine ourselves to web development, technical people often distinguish among “front-end,” “back-end,” and “full-stack” development. The partition between the two “ends” is the web itself. There are people who design and implement what you see in your web browser, there are people who do the programming that works behind the scenes, and there are people who do it all.","completion":"In practice, the distinction is murky: some developers refer to everything user-facing as the front-end, including databases and applications, and some developers use front-end to mean only what the user sees. But while the line shifts depending on who you’re talking to, most developers acknowledge its existence."}
{"prompt":"I spoke to a number of developers who confirmed something I’d sensed: for some time, the technology industry has enforced a distinct hierarchy between front-end and back-end development. Front-end dev work isn’t real engineering, the story goes. Real programmers work on the back-end, with “serious” programming languages. Women are often typecast as front-end developers, specializing in the somehow more feminine work of design, user experience, and front-end coding.","completion":"Are women really more likely to be front-end developers? Numbers are hard to pin down. Most studies consider the tech sector as a single entity, with software engineers lumped together with HR professionals. A 2016 StackOverflow user survey showed that front-end jobs—“Designer,” “Quality Assurance,” and “Front-End Web Developer”—were indeed the top three titles held by women in the tech industry, although that survey itself has some problems."}
{"prompt":"We need better numbers, as feminist developers have been saying for years, but it also doesn’t seem like a huge stretch to take developers at their word when they say that front-end development is understood to occupy the girlier end of the tech spectrum. Front-end developers, importantly, make about $30,000 less than people in back-end jobs like “DevOps” engineers, who work on operations and infrastructure, according to the salary aggregation site Glassdoor.","completion":"Sorting the Stack The distinction between back and front wasn’t always so rigid. “In the earliest days, maybe for the first ten years of the web, every developer had to be full-stack,” says Coraline Ada Ehmke, a Chicago-based developer who has worked on various parts of the technology stack since 1993. “There wasn’t specialization.” Over time, web work professionalized. By the late 2000s, Ehmke says, the profession began to stratify, with developers who had computer science degrees (usually men) occupying the back-end roles, and self-taught coders and designers slotting into the front."}
{"prompt":"For many people who are teaching themselves to code, front-end work is the lowest-hanging fruit. You can “view source” on almost any web page to see how it’s made, and any number of novices have taught themselves web-styling basics by customizing WordPress themes. If you’re curious, motivated, and have access to a computer, you can, eventually, get the hang of building and styling a web page.","completion":"Which is not to say it’s easy, particularly at the professional level. A front-end developer has to hold thousands of page elements in her mind at once. Styles overwrite each other constantly, and what works on one page may be disastrous on another page connected to the same stylesheet. Front-end development is taxing, complex work, and increasingly it involves full-fledged scripting languages like JavaScript and PHP."}
{"prompt":"“Serious” developers often avoid acknowledging this by attributing front-end expertise not to mastery but to “alchemy,” “wizardry,” or “magic.” Its adepts don’t succeed through technical skill so much as a kind of web whispering: feeling, rather than thinking, their way through a tangle of competing styles.","completion":"“There’s this perception of it being sort of a messy problem that you have to wrangle with systems and processes rather than using your math-y logic,” says Emily Nakashima, a full-stack developer based in San Francisco. That’s not true, of course; nothing on a computer is any more or less logical than anything else. But perhaps it’s easier to cast women in a front-end role if you imbue it with some of the same qualities you impute to women."}
{"prompt":"The gendered attributes switch as you travel to the back of the stack. At the far end, developers (more often “engineers”) are imagined to be relentlessly logical, asocial sci-fi enthusiasts; bearded geniuses in the Woz tradition. Occupations like devops and network administration are “tied to this old-school idea of your crusty neckbeard dude, sitting in his basement, who hasn’t showered in a week,” says Jillian Foley, a former full-stack developer who’s now earning her doctorate in history. “Which is totally unfair! But that’s where my brain goes.” The Matriarchy We Lost The brilliant but unkempt genius is a familiar figure in the history of computing—familiar, but not immutable. Computing was originally the province of women, a fact innumerable articles and books have pointed out but which still seems to surprise everyone every time it’s “revealed.” The bearded savant of computer science lore was the result of the field’s professionalization and increasing prestige, according to the computing historian Nathan Ensmenger.","completion":"“If you’re worried about your professional status, one way to police gender boundaries is through educational credentials,” says Ensmenger. “The other way, though, is genius. And that’s something I think nerd culture does really well. It’s a way of defining your value and uniqueness in a field in which the relationship between credentials and ability is kind of fuzzy.” And “genius,” of course, is a strongly male-gendered attribute—just look at teaching evaluations."}
{"prompt":"When programming professionalized, women got pushed out. Marie Hicks, a computing historian who’s looked closely at this phenomenon, explains that as programming came to be viewed as more important to national and corporate welfare, hiring managers began associating it with a specific set of skills. In the British case, Hicks’s specialty, a good programmer was supposed to be the ultimate systems-thinker, able to see and synthesize the big picture. In the United States, as Ensmenger and others have documented, the best programmers were purportedly introverted chess nerds, obsessed with details, logic, and order. (There’s very little evidence that these characteristics actually make a good programmer.) The traits of a “good programmer” differed by country, but they were universally male-gendered, enforced by hiring managers and other programmers who sought to replicate their own characteristics—not consciously, for the most part, but simply because the jobs were important. Hiring managers wanted to bet on qualities everyone agreed were indicators of success. “The people with more prestige in a culture are favored for all sorts of things, including jobs,” says Hicks. “If you have a job that you want to fill, you want to get the best worker for it. So in more prestigious fields, employers are looking for those employees that they think are the best bet. This tends to attract men who are white or upper-class into these more desirable jobs.” People often think that as a profession matures it gets more complex, and thus edges women out because it demands higher-level skills. But “historically, there’s very little to bear that out,” says Hicks, who has uncovered multiple incidents of women programmers training, and then being replaced by, their male counterparts.","completion":"The Dangerous Myth of Meritocracy The case of the female front-end developer is flipped in the other direction—it’s a feminizing subfield, rather than a masculinizing one. But it’s governed by many of the same market forces that edged women out of programming in the first place: prestige accrues to labor scarcity, and masculinity accrues to prestige. Front-end jobs are easier for women to obtain, and feminized jobs are less prestigious. In turn, the labor market generates its own circular logic: women are front-end developers because they’re well-disposed to this kind of labor, and we know this because women are front-end developers."}
{"prompt":"No one says any of this explicitly, of course, which is why the problem of women in technology is thornier than shoehorning women onto all-male panels. The developers I spoke to told me about much more subtle, very likely unconscious incidents of being steered toward one specialization or another. Two different women told me about accomplished female acquaintances being encouraged to take quality assurance jobs, currently one of the least prestigious tech gigs. Ehmke told me about a friend who applied for a back-end developer position. Over the course of the interview, the job somehow morphed into a full-stack job—for which Ehmke’s friend was ultimately rejected, because she didn’t have the requisite front-end skills.","completion":"And everyone can rattle off a list of traits that supposedly makes women better front-end coders: they’re better at working with people, they’re more aesthetically inclined, they care about looks, they’re good at multitasking. None of these attributes, of course, biologically inhere to women, but it’s hard to dispute this logic when it’s reinforced throughout the workplace."}
{"prompt":"Once you’re cast as a front-end developer, it can be challenging to move to different parts of the stack, thus limiting the languages and development practices you’re exposed to. “Particularly in Silicon Valley, there’s a culture of saying developers should always be learning new things,” says Nakashima, the San Francisco-based full-stack developer. Front-end specialization “can be a place that people go to and don’t come back from. They’re working on these creative projects that are in some ways very interesting, but don’t allow them to move to an area of the stack that’s becoming more popular.” Viewed from one angle, the rise of get-girls-to-code initiatives is progressive and feminist. Many people involved in the movement are certainly progressive feminists themselves, and many women have benefited from these initiatives. But there are other ways to look at it too. Women are generally cheaper, to other workers’ dismay. “Introducing women into a discipline can be seen as empowerment for women,” says Ensmenger. “But it is often seen by men as a reduction of their status. Because, historically speaking, the more women in a profession, the lower-paid it is.” An influx (modest though it is) of women into the computing profession might be helping to push developers to make distinctions where they didn’t exist before. “As professions are under threat, stratification is very often the result,” says Ensmenger. “So you take those elements that are most ambiguous and you push those, in a sense, down and out. And down and out means they become more accessible to other groups, like women.” But these roles are also markedly distinct from the main work of software engineering—which is safely insulated from the devaluing effect of feminization, at least for the time being.","completion":"Hicks, the computing historian, can’t stand it when people tout coding camps as a solution to technology’s gender problem. “I think these initiatives are well-meaning, but they totally misunderstand the problem. The pipeline is not the problem; the meritocracy is the problem. The idea that we’ll just stuff people into the pipeline assumes a meritocracy that does not exist.” Ironically, says Hicks, these coding initiatives are, consciously or not, betting on their graduates’ failure. If boot camp graduates succeed, they’ll flood the market, devaluing the entire profession. “If you can be the exception who becomes successful, then you can take advantage of all the gatekeeping mechanisms,” says Hicks. “But if you aren’t the exception, and the gatekeeping starts to fall away, then the profession becomes less prestigious.” My students are always so excited that they’re “learning to code” when I teach them HTML and CSS, the basic building blocks of web pages. And I’m happy for them; it’s exhilarating to see, for the first time, how the web is built. Increasingly, though, I feel the need to warn them: the technology sector, like any other labor market, is a ruthless stratifier. And learning to code, no matter how good they get at it, won’t gain them entrance to a club run by people who don’t look like them."}
{"prompt":"In more ways than one, medicine is dying. A 2015 article in JAMA: The Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that almost a third of medical school graduates become clinically depressed upon beginning their residency training. That rate increases to almost half by the end of their first year.","completion":"Between 300 and 400 medical residents commit suicide annually, one of the highest rates of any profession, the equivalent of two average-sized medical school classes. Survey the programs of almost any medical conference and you’ll find sessions dedicated to contending with physician depression, burnout, higher-than-average divorce rates, bankruptcy, and substance abuse."}
{"prompt":"At the risk of sounding unsympathetic, medicine should be difficult. No other profession requires such rigorous and lengthy training, such onerous and ongoing scrutiny, and the continuous self-interrogation that accompanies saving or failing to save lives. But today’s crisis of physician burnout is the outcome of more than just a job that’s exceptionally difficult. Medicine is undergoing an agonizing transformation that’s both fundamental and unprecedented in its 2500-year history. What’s at stake is nothing less than the terms of the contract between the profession and society.","completion":"The Rise of the Electronic Medical Record An electronic medical record, or EMR, is not all that different from any other piece of record-keeping software. A health care provider uses an EMR to collect information about their patient, to describe their treatment, and to communicate with other providers. At times, the EMR might automatically alert the provider to a potential problem, such as a complex drug interaction. In its purest form, the EMR is a digital and interconnected version of the paper charts you see lining the shelves of doctors’ offices."}
{"prompt":"And if that’s all there were to it, a doctor using an EMR would be no more worrisome than an accountant switching out her paper ledger for Microsoft Excel. But underlying EMRs is an approach to organizing knowledge that is deeply antithetical to how doctors are trained to practice and to see themselves. When an EMR implementation team walks into a clinical environment, the result is roughly that of two alien races attempting to communicate across a cultural and linguistic divide.","completion":"When building a tool, a natural starting point for software developers is to identify the scope, parameters, and flow of information among its potential users. What kind of conversation will the software facilitate? What sort of work will be carried out? This approach tends to standardize individual behavior. Software may enable the exchange of information, but it can only do so within the scope of predetermined words and actions. To accommodate the greatest number of people, software defines the range of possible choices and organizes them into decision trees."}
{"prompt":"Yet medicine is uniquely allergic to software’s push towards standards. Healthcare terminology standards, such as the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine (SNOMED), have been around since 1965. But the professional consensus required to determine how those terms should be used has been elusive. This is partly because not all clinical concepts lend themselves to being measured objectively. For example, a patient’s pulse can be counted, but “pain” cannot. Qualitative descriptions can be useful for their flexibility, but this same flexibility prevents individual decisions from being captured by even the best designed EMRs.","completion":"More acutely, medicine avoids settling on a shared language because of the degree to which it privileges intuition and autonomy as the best answer to navigating immense complexity. One estimate finds that a primary care doctor juggles 550 independent thoughts related to clinical decision-making on a given day. Though there are vast libraries of guidelines and research to draw on, medical education and regulations resist the urge to dictate behavior for fear of the many exceptions to the rule."}
{"prompt":"Over the last several years, governments, insurance companies, health plans, and patient groups have begun to push for greater transparency and accountability in healthcare. They see EMRs as the best way to track a doctor’s decision-making and control for quality. But the EMR and the physician are so at odds that rather than increase efficiency—typically the appeal of digital tools—the EMR often decreases it, introducing reams of new administrative tasks and crowding out care. The result is a bureaucracy that puts controlling costs above quality and undervalues the clinical intuition around which medicine’s professional identity has been constructed.","completion":"Inputting information in the EMR can take up as much as two-thirds of a physician’s workday. Physicians have a term for this: “work after clinic,” referring to the countless hours they spend entering data into their EMR after seeing patients. The term is illuminating not only because it implies an increased workload, but also because it suggests that seeing patients doesn’t feel like work in the way that data entry feels like work."}
{"prompt":"The EMR causes an excruciating disconnect: from other physicians, from patients, from one’s clinical intuition, and possibly even from one’s ability to adhere faithfully to the Hippocratic oath. And, if the link between using a computer and physician suicide seems like a stretch, consider a recent paper by the American Medical Association and the RAND Corporation, which places the blame for declining physician health squarely at the feet of the EMR.","completion":"Drop-down menus and checkboxes not only turn doctors into well-paid data entry clerks. They also offend medical sensibility to its core by making the doctor aware of her place in an industrialized arrangement. From Snowflake to Cog Physicians were once trained through an informal system of apprenticeship. They were overwhelmingly white and male, and there was little in the way of regulatory oversight or public accountability. It was a physician’s privilege to determine who received treatment, and how, and at what cost."}
{"prompt":"Supernatural justifications for treatment techniques eventually ceded to pseudoscientific ones; prayer was replaced by bloodletting and cocaine (and more prayer). Wilhelm Fliess engaged in surgical trial-and-error on his collaborator Emma Eckstein. His friend Sigmund Freud institutionalized female hysteria. Franz Joseph Gall performed backbends to legitimize racism via phrenology.","completion":"Then, in 1910, the Flexner Report caused a paradigmatic shift in medical education. Abraham Flexner was not a doctor, but a secondary school principal from Louisville, Kentucky, who later joined the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. It was there that he wrote “Medical Education in the United States and Canada,” and transformed the lives of millions of people."}
{"prompt":"The Flexner Report recommended that medical education develop an evidence-based curriculum. Under its influence, medicine was subjected to the rigors of peer review and the scientific method for the first time. Residency programs were established, uniting the university and the hospital, and placing apprenticeship within the academy. Medical teachers were expected to be proponents of the latest and most credible research. State licensure was tied to education, introducing some semblance of standards.","completion":"The recommendations in the Flexner Report also formed the basis of what we today understand as the social contract between the medical profession and the people whom it serves. Patients are entitled to competence, altruism, morality, integrity, accountability, transparency, objectivity, and promotion of the public good. In return, physicians are entitled to trust, autonomy, self-regulation, a funded healthcare system, inclusion in public policy, monopoly, and prestige."}
{"prompt":"In the intervening years, the tenets of physician prestige and self-regulation have remained intact. But the introduction of computerization has begun to rewrite the social contract between doctors and society, as EMRs lay the groundwork for the industrialization of medicine. Industrialization is the premise that people working together in a coordinated fashion will work more efficiently than one person doing everything themselves. To achieve this coordination requires standardization (the wheel goes on the car the same way every time); a technological innovation that makes work as simple as possible (an assembly line with power tools); and cheap labor (poor people).","completion":"An expert dressmaker may have once been responsible for every aspect of their craft: designing the dress, procuring the fabric, cutting and stitching, marketing and selling. Some dressmakers might be particularly good at one or more of those things. A few might even be good at all of them. But even in the best-case scenario, the quality of the dresses and the rate of their production will vary wildly."}
{"prompt":"Dressmaking is the kind of thing that’s easy to industrialize. The pieces of the process can be categorized, standardized, and delegated. The language we use to refer to the parts of the dress, and the tasks associated with the job, are clear. Reducing the qualifications for participation in dressmaking renders individuals interchangeable and disposable.","completion":"Industrialization has been applied to almost every field in which something is produced and sold. Now, EMRs are applying it to medicine. In the industrialized conception of medicine, as in the industrialized conception of all professions, more tasks become routine, and routine tasks are delegated downward. It’s no surprise that in the health policy world the introduction of EMRs often accompanies a discussion about hiring less educated professionals, like nurses and pharmacists. Meanwhile, fewer and fewer spaces are designated as safe for creativity and intuition, because these are considered unpredictable and unreliable."}
{"prompt":"Winners and Losers One wonders if it’s possible to carve out a third way between the purely intuitive and the mechanically standardized. Atul Gawande has written extensively about this possibility, depicting a meeting of minds between autonomous doctors and health systems designers—and he manages to do so without making it seem terrifying or fantastical. In this world, technologies might seek to complement and enhance, rather than replace, the physician’s ability to incorporate research into practice.","completion":"Natural language processing and dictation will allow physicians to use any words they like while recording notes into an EMR, as opposed to drop-down menus and pick-lists. Artificial intelligences like IBM’s Watson will comb through research on behalf of the physician and aid in clinical decision-making. The doctor’s lounge, an increasingly rare phenomenon, is a basic form of technology that allows physicians to connect and share information. Not all innovations need to be bleeding edge."}
{"prompt":"But reform is big business. The “eHealth” industry, which produces the infrastructure with which the square peg of medicine will be crammed into the round hole of scalable technology, is estimated to reach $308 billion by 2022, and is a key driver of America’s $3 trillion national healthcare expenditure. The Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) Annual Conference & Exhibition—the biggest eHealth conference in the world—was attended by just over 43,000 people in 2016. The allure of a disruptive solution that will tidily rationalize medicine has too many short-term winners to question—even if those winners are neither physicians nor patients.","completion":"LOGIC: Alright, let’s get started with the basics. What is a data scientist? Do you self-identify as one? DATA SCIENTIST: I would say the people who are the most confident about self-identifying as data scientists are almost unilaterally frauds. They are not people that you would voluntarily spend a lot of time with."}
{"prompt":"There are a lot of people in this category that have only been exposed to a little bit of real stuff—they’re sort of peripheral. You see actually a lot of this with these strong AI companies: companies that claim to be able to build human intelligence using some inventive “Neural Pathway Connector Machine System,” or something. You can look at the profiles of every single one of these companies. They are always people who have strong technical credentials, and they are in a field that is just slightly adjacent to AI, like physics or electrical engineering.","completion":"And that’s close, but the issue is that no person with a PhD in AI starts one of these companies, because if you get a PhD in AI, you’ve spent years building a bunch of really shitty models, or you see robots fall over again and again and again. You become so acutely aware of the limitations of what you’re doing that the interest just gets beaten out of you. You would never go and say, “Oh yeah, I know the secret to building human-level AI.” In a way it’s sort of like my Dad, who has a PhD in biology and is a researcher back East, and I told him a little bit about the Theranos story. I told him their shtick: “Okay, you remove this small amount of blood, and run these tests…” He asked me what the credentials were of the person starting it, and I was like, “She dropped out of Stanford undergrad.” And he was like, “Yeah, I was wondering, since the science is just not there.” Only somebody who never actually killed hundreds of mice and looked at their blood—like my Dad did—would ever be crazy enough to think that was a viable idea."}
{"prompt":"So I think a lot of the strong AI stuff is like that. A lot of data science is like that too. Another way of looking at it is that it’s a bunch of people who got PhDs in the wrong thing, and realized they wanted to have a job. Another way of looking at it—I think the most positive way, which is maybe a bit contrarian—is that it’s really, really good marketing.","completion":"As someone who tries not to sell fraudulent solutions to people, it actually has made my life significantly better because you can say “big data machine learning,” and people will be like, “Oh, I’ve heard of that, I want that.” It makes it way easier to sell them something than having to explain this complex series of mathematical operations. The hype around it—and that there’s so much hype—has made the actual sales process so much easier. The fact that there is a thing with a label is really good for me professionally."}
{"prompt":"But that doesn’t mean there’s not a lot of ridiculous hype around the discipline. I’m curious about the origins of the term “data science”—do you think that it came internally from people marketing themselves, or whether it was a random job title used to describe someone, or what? As far I know, the term “data science” was invented by Jeff Hammerbacher at Facebook.","completion":"The Cloudera guy? Yeah, the Cloudera guy. As I understand it, “data science” originally came from the gathering of data on his team at Facebook. If there was no hype and no money to make, essentially what I would say data science is, is the fact that the data sets have gotten large enough where you can start to consider variable interactions in a way that’s becoming increasingly predictive. And there are a number of problems where the actual individual variables themselves don’t have a lot of meaning, or they are kind of ambiguous, or they are only very weak signals. There’s information in the correlation structure of the variables that can be revealed, but only through really huge amounts of data."}
{"prompt":"So essentially: there are N variables, right? So there’s N-squared potential correlations, and N-cubed potential cubic interactions or whatever. Right? There’s a ton of interactions. The only way you can solve that is by having massive amounts of data. So the data scientist role emphasizes the data part first. It’s like, we have so much data, and so this new role arises using previous disciplines or skills applied to a new context? You can start to see new things emerge that would not emerge from more standard ways of looking at problems. That’s probably the most charitable way of putting it without any hype. But I should also say that the hype is just ferocious.","completion":"And even up to last year, there’s just massive bugs in the machine learning libraries that come bundled with Spark. It’s so bizarre, because you go to Caltrain, and there’s a giant banner showing a cool-looking data scientist peering at computers in some cool ways, advertising Spark, which is a platform that in my day job I know is just barely usable at best, or at worst, actively misleading."}
{"prompt":"I don’t know. I’m not sure that you can tell a clean story that’s completely apart from the hype. For people who are less familiar with these terms, how would you define data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence? Because as you mentioned, these are terms that float around a lot in the media and that people absorb, but it’s unclear how they fit together.","completion":"It’s a really good question. I’m not even sure if those terms that you referenced are on solid ground themselves. I’m friends with a venture capitalist who became famous for coining the phrase “machine intelligence,” which is pretty much just the first word of “machine learning” with the second word of “artificial intelligence,” and as far as I can tell is essentially impossible to distinguish between either of those applications."}
{"prompt":"I would say, again, “data science” is really shifty. If you wanted a pure definition, I would say data science is much closer to statistics. “Machine learning” is much more predictive optimization, and “artificial intelligence” is increasingly hijacked by a bunch of yahoos and Elon Musk types who think robots are going to kill us. I think artificial intelligence has gotten too hot as a term. It has a constant history since the dawn of computing of over-promising and substantially under-delivering.","completion":"So do you think when most people think of artificial intelligence, they think of strong AI? They think of the film Artificial Intelligence level of AI, yeah. And as a result, I think people who are familiar with bad robots falling over shy away from using that term, just because they’re like, “We are nowhere near that.” Whereas a lot of people who are less familiar with shitty robots falling over will say, “Oh, yeah, that’s exactly what we’re doing.” The narrative around automation is so present right now in the media, as you know. I feel like all I read about AI is how self-driving trucks are going to put all these truckers out of business. I know there’s that Oxford study that came out a few years ago that said some insane percentage of our jobs are vulnerable to automation. How should we view that? Is that just the outgrowth of a really successful marketing campaign? Does it have any basis in science or is it just hype? Can I say the truth is halfway there? I mean, again, I want to emphasize that historically, from the very first moment somebody thought of computers, there has been a notion of: “Oh, can the computer talk to me, can it learn to love?” And somebody, some yahoo, will be like, “Oh absolutely!” And then a bunch of people will put money into it, and then they’ll be disappointed."}
{"prompt":"And that’s happened so many times. In the late 1980s, there was a huge Department of Defense research effort towards building a Siri-like interface for fighter pilots. And of course this was thirty years ago and they just massively failed. They failed so hard that DARPA was like, “We’re not going to fund any more AI projects.” That’s how bad they fucked up. I think they actually killed Lisp as a programming language—it died because of that. There are very few projects that have failed so completely that they actually killed the programming language associated with them.","completion":"The other one that did that was the—what was it, the Club of Rome or something? Where they had those growth projections in the 1970s about how we were all going to die by now. And it killed the modeling language they used for the simulation. Nobody can use that anymore because the earth has been salted with how shitty their predictions were."}
{"prompt":"It’s like the name Benedict. Yes, exactly, or the name Adolf. Like you just don’t go there. So, I mean, that needs to be kept in mind. Anytime anybody promises you an outlandish vision about what artificial intelligence is, you just absolutely have to take it with a grain of salt, because this time is not different.","completion":"I’m actually less optimistic about the future than I maybe should be. Because it’s hard for me to see a way out of the lump of labor fallacy—even conscious of the fact that it’s a fallacy—when it comes to something like truckers. Because our truckers are not going to become JavaScript web devs. Maybe a fraction of them will, but I don’t know."}
{"prompt":"I was talking about this with my friend who has a completely different point of view. His brother works as a video game designer, and that’s a job that didn’t exist a hundred years ago, and now he makes a really good salary doing that. That said, his brother went to Harvard, is super smart, and frankly is probably a lot more intellectually talented and curious than a lot of the truck drivers they’re going to put out of business. And so there might be awesome jobs for people who really enjoy computers, but I kind of worry about what that looks like when computers start consuming more and more up the chain of the cognitive load.","completion":"Part of me likes being a programmer—because we’re the last job. I can see a future—if we don’t manage to blow ourselves up first—in the robot paradise where people are either robot engineers or programmers, or I guess do marketing. Or maybe bake pies, or smell things? Those are essentially the hardest things for a computer to do. But computers do everything else."}
{"prompt":"And I don’t know. What does humanity look like? What do jobs look like in that future? I have no idea. I think it’s not going to get there on the same timeline that the Oxford people think it’s going to get there. But yeah, we’ll get there, and I don’t know, as optimistic as I want to be about it, it is really scary.","completion":"What is the “lump of labor” fallacy? That there’s a fixed pool of jobs and that if computers take more jobs, there’s a slice of people that get laid off. That’s a fallacy. Like the idea of taking a slice of the pie, versus enlarging the pie? Yeah, exactly. And I think we’ve proven in our economy that we’re very comfortable with the idea that, yeah, a bunch of specific people are going to suffer, but other people are going to benefit and we’re okay with that. And that’s our economic progress and our economic growth. But I think it might just accelerate violently as computers keep getting better and better at what they do."}
{"prompt":"Deep Learning Is there a point at which a piece of software or a robot officially becomes “intelligent”? Does it have to pass a certain threshold to qualify as intelligent? Or are we just making a judgment call about when it’s intelligent? I think it’s irrelevant in our lifetimes and in our grandchildren’s lifetimes. It’s a very good philosophical question, but I don’t think it really matters. I think that we are going to be stuck with specific AI for a very, very long time.","completion":"And what is specific AI? Optimization around a specific problem, as opposed to optimization on every problem. So like driving a car would be a specific problem? Yeah. Whereas if we invented a brain that we can teach to do anything we want, and we have chosen to have it focus on the specific vertical of driving a car, but it can be applied to anything, that would be general AI. But I think that would be literally making a mind, and that’s almost irresponsible to speculate about. It’s just not going to happen in any of our lifetimes, or probably within the next hundred years. So I think I would describe it as philosophy. I don’t know, I don’t have an educated opinion about that."}
{"prompt":"Although I do really like Westworld. I was going to ask you about that. It’s like there’s this particular media moment right now—there’s a lot of good television that revolves around these questions, it’s science fiction but it’s increasingly closer to reality, at least in the popular imagination. So like Westworld, or Black Mirror. There was Ex Machina not too long ago. I’m curious what your thoughts are on that.","completion":"The rate of progress in AI over the past decade has been astounding. Ten years ago, Go was something that would never be solved by anybody, and now it’s there. That required tremendous leaps forward. And so I think that although the popular imagination is always going to be leaps and bounds ahead of what’s realistic, a lot of that is a reflection of the progress that has in fact been made in the past decade. Whether that’s because the actual technology itself is in the golden age and will soon revert back is a good question."}
{"prompt":"I enjoyed Her and Ex Machina—those are great films. Westworld has been fun to watch. I just don’t think they’re a realistic portrayal of what things are going to look like in our lifetime. Do you think that part of the fascination comes from the successful marketing of tools like Siri and Alexa and Cortana, which give this texture of interacting with an AI like that, even though it really is just something like speech-to-text piped into a search algorithm? Yeah, I think it’s easier for people to see it as possible, and I think that Black Mirror is really interesting too because it’s just right on the edge in some episodes, which is really neat.","completion":"But I think people are typically pretty aware of the flaws in Siri, right? You know it will get better, in the same way that with the first versions of Google, you needed to learn how to Google: how to use certain types of words to identify things. Google is getting better, to the point where you can just type in random shit and it comes up with the right answer."}
{"prompt":"You don’t even bother to spell things correctly anymore. It’s pretty astounding. I’m sure in elementary school you had to learn the Dewey Decimal System, and that crazy library and reference language where you have the Boolean qualifiers on terms that might appear in an item summary or something. That is just completely out of the window now. So yeah, it will get better.","completion":"But I think that the flaws will always be there. And, back to the hype cycle, a lot of the current AI assistants are just humans on the back end solving those problems. Whenever I get an invite from an x.ai system or something I always fuck with them. They do a great job, but they do a great job because it’s a human on the back end and not a computer."}
{"prompt":"Human on the back end—so does that mean it’s going overseas? In the Philippines or in the Midwest, somebody is tagging parts of the speech, and correcting things, and actually parsing whether I misspelled something or meant to write something else. It’s becoming training data for the machine, and eventually it will get incorporated.","completion":"It’s the MVP. Yeah, it is just so much easier to build a web app that connects someone in the Philippines to a series of database questions, and has them do the work, than it is to build an AI than can handle arbitrary responses to a calendar invite. So you just tell your venture capitalists that you’re working on AI, but that some of it still needs to be labeled by hand. That just seems way easier. That’s the business I would start if I were doing that."}
{"prompt":"It seems like wages would have to be higher for it to be profitable to invest in the R&D required to successfully automate these forms of labor. Do you think wage levels make a difference? I’ll say this—maybe it’s a little bit of a diversion from your question—but one of the things that I’ve noticed on AWS prices was that a few months ago, the spot prices on their GPU compute instances were $26 an hour for a four-GP machine, and $6.50 an hour for a one-GP machine.","completion":"That’s the first time I’ve seen a computer that has human wages. This is something that can run twenty-four hours a day, does not need vacation time, does not need benefits. I mean that’s the equivalent of essentially, I don’t know, depending on how you want to do the math you can easily make the argument that’s a $200,000-a-year person as this machine. I’ve never seen that before and that’s kind of frightening."}
{"prompt":"Whoever is using these machines must be someone pretty smart, because the ability to use a GPU effectively requires a bunch of smart data scientists… You would need to give me a team, and a bunch of time to build something that could adequately take that into account to solve some problem. At the same time, they’re paying $26 an hour to rent a server, and at that rate they are paying the full price of the hardware every two weeks, so they have to be really dumb too.","completion":"That’s fascinating. When you talk about the difficulties in building general AI, or even very sophisticated specific AI, how much of that is due to the engineering problems, and how much of it is because we currently have relatively low levels of investment in basic research? Does political economy play a role in this? I mean, if we were investing in basic research at mid-century Cold War levels, would we be automating things faster? Or would the technical problems still be so great that the amount of money that you threw at it wouldn’t matter? I think it’s a really interesting question. So I can say that Japan—I need to pull a little more data on this, I feel little bit dumb just putting things out there—but I know Japan made a huge push late in the late 1990s on AI robotics. They’re the reason we have those weird dancing robots like Asimo or whatever from Honda, that was the function of billions of dollars being put in AI. And I think we can say now that investment didn’t pay off for the companies. If it had, it would be unbelievable what they would have. But it didn’t."}
{"prompt":"So I don’t know. Nobody would deny that the technology is getting better and better year after year. But one of the interesting things about the recent push in AI around neural networks is that none of technology there is particularly new. In fact, perceptrons, which I believe are the simplest neural networks, go back to the 1950s. What’s changed is the hardware we can run them on has gotten so much faster and so much more efficient and so much more powerful, and the data sizes that we can work with have gotten so much bigger. So now we can solve these problems, and it’s kind of awesome what we can do.","completion":"Deep learning feels like it’s having a marketing moment. We’ve had neural networks forever though—can you talk a bit more about why now for this technology? So a neural network is… I’m trying to think of the most concise way of thinking about this. The basics of a neural network is that the output of one layer can be the input to another layer. And I believe once you get to two layers of a neural network you have a universal approximator, so it can learn any function, which is quite powerful—at least in theory. Once you have more than two layers, it becomes “deep learning.” So if you have that, then why not twenty? Why not thirty? Why not 600 layers? They didn’t try that many layers before because it was too slow. It’s incredible how even now you run a normal multi-layer neural network on a CPU machine and it’s quite slow. The GPU is a big advancement—and the other thing is there have been some algorithmic advances on the vision side of deep learning. It’s been incredible for vision applications because when computer vision started—I think literally at this Dartmouth conference they thought it was a project for a grad student over the summer, because you just hook a camera up to a computer and it gets the pixel values."}
{"prompt":"It turned out there was a lot more to computer vision, as we now know. Sixty years later, we’ve actually managed to achieve a lot of the ends of the original goal. But this is what I’m saying in terms of the over-promise of AI: we thought it would be one grad student over one summer, and it turns out to be dozens of research labs over sixty years.","completion":"So that’s the multiplier that should be applied to the people who say, “Strong AI is a decade away.” I think you can apply a similar multiplier to that. I feel like the Hollywood version of invention is: Thomas Edison goes into a lab, and comes out with a light bulb. And what you’re describing is that there are breakthroughs that happen, either at a conceptual level or a technological level, that people don’t have the capacity to take full advantage of yet, but which are later layered onto new advances."}
{"prompt":"Yeah, I think that’s a very coherent philosophy about how science advances. Thomas Edison was really fucking good at making money and keeping the IP for himself, so obviously he’s going to promulgate the view that it was a single genius, a loner working super hard in a room, who owns everything that came from it. Of course that’s going to be his mission.","completion":"That’s the startup founder. Right. Exactly. Who needs no help from anyone—except from all these open-source packages. But yeah, I think a lot of scientific discoveries are like that. Aluminum is the classic example. We had this metal that was super cool, but it required so much energy to produce. And you know, it has all these awesome properties that we take for granted. It never corrodes—it’s amazing as a metal. But in terms of actual industrial use—first we discovered this metal, then we figured out how to make it cheaply, and then energy got a lot cheaper. And decades later, it was like, oh shit, we have this new device called an aircraft and we need a metal to build it out of, and aluminum was there. So it moved in fits and starts."}
{"prompt":"For neural networks, I remember when I started graduate school I literally went to a presentation that was making fun of neural networks. They had a slide that was like, “If you don’t know what a neural network is, it was this thing that was really popular around the year 2000 but is now discredited.” To their credit, there were a few guys from a bunch of random schools that kept neural networks alive, like a bunch random Canadian schools and NYU. They kept this idea alive, like, “Hey, this could be a thing, at least we have this approximation theorem.” And they were right. Everyone else was totally wrong, and I think all of those guys are pretty rich now, which they deserve because they spent twenty years in the wilderness.","completion":"So yeah, I think it’s a lot sloppier than people make it seem. I most associate deep learning now with Google’s open-source TensorFlow, because it seems to be if anyone wants to use deep learning they’re using an existing package like that. And it’s just a nightmare to use in practice. It’s getting there—I’m sure in another three years it will be much more usable, maybe—but it’s bad. It’s really bad to use. There’s so much hype around it, but the number of people who are actually using it to build real things that make a difference is probably very low."}
{"prompt":"Are there any other popular deep learning libraries? There are like six different packages that are all computing. There’s TensorFlow, Theano, Caffe, Torch—then a bunch of other libraries that build on those libraries as primitives, like Keras and Lasagne. But outside of a handful of corporate research labs, nobody is using these tools to actually solve anything, because they’re just so hard to configure.","completion":"And frankly, a lot of the difficulties are exactly the spot where a lot of the data scientists are weakest. To bring the conversation back to the beginning, you have a bunch of people with physics PhDs who maybe wrote some R code in graduate school. And they suddenly have to compile all these packages with GPU support so they can get CUDA running, and they’re just like, “We can’t do that.” I think there’s just a huge gap right now between theory and practice."}
{"prompt":"That feels to me like the magic of AI marketing: you label something as AI and it sounds impressive, but under the hood it’s Naive Bayes—it’s whatever the simplest thing you can get up and running. And there’s a mysticism around the difficulty of the technology, even though the simplest thing gets you most of the way there.","completion":"For a number of applications, I think that’s completely correct. I think there are some—and I think these are the most interesting ones—where the information is in the correlation structure of the variables as opposed to the variables themselves. And those are applications where Naive Bayes, which is essentially counting, does poorly."}
{"prompt":"I mean, I know from experience that lending and credit ratings are examples where you get crazy out-performance by using multidimensional algorithms, as opposed to just simple counting-based algorithms. So there are genuine advances that you can see from this stuff. But I mean, I feel a little bit guilty taking the position that, oh yeah, it’s all a bunch of shitty marketers, or whatever. Because they made me a bunch of money. It’s been easier for me to sell myself because of the marketing that other people have done and the tremendous hype—it’s just easier to sell things. So it would be kind of disingenuous of me to completely disavow it. “Oh yeah, it’s all a bunch of bullshit.” Because it might be bullshit, but there is some real shit that happens, and as a practitioner, it’s made my job a lot easier. I couldn’t imagine selling what I sell as a day job without having that. It would just be so difficult.","completion":"You’d go and you’d be like, “Oh there’s this crazy complex stuff!” And they’re like, “Wouldn’t that take a lot of data?” And you’re like, “Yeah, it’s really hard, and you know what, it probably won’t work.” And they’re like, “Why would I pay you a bunch of money?” And you’re like, “Well, I don’t know.” So yeah, I don’t want to speak too ill of the marketing hype."}
{"prompt":"FinTech One hears a lot about algorithmic finance, and things like robo-advisers. And I’m wondering, does that fall into the same category of stuff that seems pretty over-hyped? I would say that robo-advisers are not doing anything special. It’s AI only in the loosest sense of the word. They’re not really doing anything advanced—they’re applying a formula. And it’s a reasonable formula, it’s not a magic formula, but they’re not quantitatively assessing markets and trying to make predictions. They’re applying a formula about whatever stock and bond allocations to make—it’s not a bad service, but it’s super hyped. That’s indicative of a bubble in AI that you have something like that where you’re like, “It’s AI!” and people are like, “Okay, cool!” There’s a function that’s being optimized—which is, at some level, what a neural net is doing. But it’s not really AI.","completion":"I think one of the big tensions in data science that is going to unfold in the next ten years involves companies like SoFi, or Earnest, or pretty much any company whose shtick is, “We’re using big data technology and machine learning to do better credit score assessments.” I actually think this is going to be a huge point of contention moving forward. I talked to a guy who used to work for one of these companies. Not one of the ones I mentioned, a different one. And one of their shticks was, “Oh, we’re going to use social media data to figure out if you’re a great credit risk or not.” And people are like, “Oh, are they going to look at my Facebook posts to see whether I’ve been drinking out late on a Saturday night? Is that going to affect my credit score?” And I can tell you exactly what happened, and why they actually killed that. It’s because with your social media profile, they know your name, they know the name of your friends, and they can tell if you’re black or not. They can tell how wealthy you are, they can tell if you’re a credit risk. That’s the shtick."}
{"prompt":"And my consistent point of view is that any of these companies should be presumed to be incredibly racist unless presenting you with mountains of evidence otherwise. Anybody that says, “We’re an AI company that’s making smarter loans”: racist. Absolutely, 100%. I was actually floored, during the last Super BowI I saw this SoFi ad that said, “We discriminate.” I was just sitting there watching this game, like I cannot believe it—it’s either they don’t know, which is terrifying, or they know and they don’t give a shit, which is also terrifying.","completion":"I don’t know how that court case is going to work out, but I can tell you in the next ten years, there’s going to be a court case about it. And I would not be surprised if SoFi lost for discrimination. And in general, I think it’s going to be an increasingly important question about the way that we handle protected classes generally, and maybe race specifically, in data science models of this type. Because otherwise it’s like: okay, you can’t directly model if a person is black. Can you use their zip code? Can you use the racial demographics for the zip code? Can you use things that correlate with the racial demographics of their zip code? And at what level do you draw the line? And we know what we’re doing for mortgage lending—and the answer there is, frankly, as a data scientist, a little bit offensive—which is that we don’t give a shit where your house is. We just lend. That’s what Rocket Mortgages does. It’s a fucking app, and you’re like, “How can I get a million dollar loan with an app?” And the answer is that they legally can’t tell where your house is. And the algorithm that you use to do mortgages has to be vetted by a federal agency."}
{"prompt":"That’s an extreme, but that might be the extreme we go down, where every single time anybody gets assessed for anything, the actual algorithm and the inputs are assessed by a federal regulator. So maybe that’s going to be what happens. I actually view it a lot like the debates around divestment. You can say, “Okay, we don’t want to invest in any oil companies,” but then do you want to invest in things that are positively correlated with oil companies, like oil field services companies? What about things that in general have some degree of correlation? How much is enough? I think it’s the same thing where it’s like, okay, you can’t look at race, but can you look at correlates of race? Can you look at correlates of correlates of race? How far do you go down before you say, “Okay, that’s okay to look at?” I’m reminded a bit of Cathy O’Neil’s new book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy (2016). One of her arguments, which it seems like you’re echoing, is that the popular perception is that algorithms provide a more objective, more complete view of reality, but that they often just reinforce existing inequities.","completion":"That’s right. And the part that I find offensive as a mathematician is the idea that somehow the machines are doing something wrong. We as a society have not chosen to optimize for the thing that we’re telling the machine to optimize for. That’s what it means for the machine to be doing illegal things. The machine isn’t doing anything wrong, and the algorithms are not doing anything wrong. It’s just that they’re literally amoral, and if we told them the things that are okay to optimize against, they would optimize against those instead. It’s a frightening, almost Black Mirror-esque view of reality that comes from the machines, because a lot of them are completely stripped of—not to sound too Trumpian—liberal pieties. It’s completely stripped."}
{"prompt":"They’re not “politically correct.” They are massively not politically correct, and it’s disturbing. You can load in tons and tons of demographic data, and it’s disturbing when you see percent black in a zip code and percent Hispanic in a zip code be more important than borrower debt-to-income ratio when you run a credit model. When you see something like that, you’re like, “Ooh, that’s not good.” Because the frightening thing is that even if you remove those specific variables, if the signal is there, you’re going to find correlates with it all the time, and you either need to have a regulator that says, “You can use these variables, you can’t use these variables,” or, I don’t know, we need to change the law.","completion":"As a data scientist I would prefer if that did not come out in the data. I think it’s a question of how we deal with it. But I feel sensitive toward the machines, because we’re telling them to optimize, and that’s what they’re coming up with. They’re describing our society. Yeah. That’s right, that’s right. That’s exactly what they’re doing. I think it’s scary. I can tell you that a lot of the opportunity those FinTech companies are finding is derived from that kind of discrimination, because if you are a large enough lender, you are going to be very highly vetted, and if you’re a very small lender you’re not."}
{"prompt":"Take SoFi, for example. They refinance the loans of people who went to good colleges. They probably did not set up their business to be super racist, but I guarantee you they are super racist in the way they’re making loans, in the way they’re making lending decisions. Is that okay? Should a company like that exist? I don’t know. I can see it both ways. You could say, “They’re a company, they’re providing a service for people, people want it, that’s good.” But at the same time, we have such a shitty legacy of racist lending in this country. It’s very hard not to view this as yet another racist lending policy, but now it’s got an app. I don’t know. I just think that there is going to be a court case in the next ten years, and whatever the result is, it’s going to be interesting.","completion":"When we talk about FinTech in general, does that refer to something broader than advising investors when to buy and sell stocks, and this new sort of loaning behavior? Or is that the main substance of it? FinTech may most accurately be described as regulatory arbitrage: startups are picking up pieces that a big bank can’t do, won’t do, or is just too small for it to pick up. And I think FinTech is going to suffer over the next five years. If there’s a single sector that people are going to be less enamored with in five years than they are now, FinTech is definitely the one."}
{"prompt":"The other side of it is that they’re exploiting a hack in the way venture capitalists think. Venture capital as an industry is actually incredibly small relative to the financial system. So if you were starting, I don’t know, a company that used big data to make intelligent decisions on home loans—which is probably illegal, but whatever, you’re small enough that it’s no big deal—and you say, “Hey, we’re doing ten million dollars a year in business,” a venture capitalist will look at them like, “Holy shit, I’ve never seen a company get up to ten million dollars in business that fast.” The venture capitalist has no idea that the mortgage market is worth trillions of dollars and the startup essentially has none of it. The founder gives a market projection like, “Oh, this is a trillion dollar industry,” and the venture capitalist is like, “Oh, that market is enormous. I’ve never seen numbers like that before.” It’s much more of a clever hack than an actual, sustainable, lasting, value-creating enterprise. One of the biggest flagship FinTech companies, Lending Club, is in a ton of trouble. SoFi is probably illegal. And those are the flag bearers for the sector.","completion":"The other thing that happened recently was the San Bernardino shootings—apparently the guns that were used were financed by a loan from Prosper, which is another peer-to-peer lender. And you just think about where this is going to go. Are we eventually going to get to the point where we have the credit models to assess and not give that guy a loan because of the risk that he could be a Muslim terrorist? Is that the society that we will be living in? Maybe. But we’re going to get there with the data."}
{"prompt":"The Future If you had to give a non-technical layperson one piece of advice for thinking about these questions, what would it be? Is it to be more skeptical? Is it to be less credulous when confronted with hype? Because it seems like there’s a fairly small number of people who understand these technologies well, and yet they appear to have the potential to make a pretty big impact on a lot of people’s lives.","completion":"I think the most realistic way of looking at it is that it’s not all hype. The technical advances are real—and even if they’re not real today, the relentless drumbeat of progress on hardware and algorithms will make them real eventually. It will take longer than you think—potentially a lot longer than you think—but it will happen. So everything you’re hearing is an early warning sign of what the future is going to look like. Maybe not even in our lifetimes, but yeah, it’ll get there. And the questions that we’re going over, they’re going to be real. It’s just not there yet."}
{"prompt":"So yeah, I would recommend some skepticism, but not complete skepticism. Because the advances underlying this are real. And the rate of progress has kept up, and I don’t see a reason why it’s going to stop. It’s funny, because I think the biggest concern that I have for the future is that a bunch of people like me are going to make a bunch of money. And a bunch of people are going to lose their jobs. And a bunch of people are going to get new jobs that are crazy and cool. But I don’t know on net how great it’s going to be for society moving forward, though I want to be optimistic about it.","completion":"I don’t know if it’s just the tweets that I read in the last election, but the automation of trucking with self-driving cars seems like the most tangible disruptive application of this sort of AI technology. And that impacts such a huge number of people in our economy. It’s the typical thing, where people overrate the effects of technological innovation in the short term, and underrate it in the long term. The automation of trucking is not going to happen overnight. It’s going to take years. But I believe “truck driver” is the single most common occupation in the U.S. Yeah, it’s not going to be next year. Maybe there will be some automation in five years. But in twenty or thirty years that might not even be a job that people do. And what’s going to happen? I don’t know. That’s a great question. It may involve becoming video game designers."}
{"prompt":"That’s the thing I have the hardest problem with. I often have this kind of discussion with people who are algorithmically minded, and they view capitalism as an optimizing function. And all questions about technological change go through this filter of, well, we’re glad we have cars instead of horse and buggies. And everything else will sort itself out. But everything else doesn’t just “sort itself out.” I mean, I try to not fall into the Y Combinator autistic Stanford guy thing, but I actually do think that universal basic income is going to be the endgame. I think that is what society will look like long-term, because I think universal basic income is the welfare that everyone can get behind.","completion":"But it’s such a weighty question and technology’s impact on the economy changes so quickly that I don’t know if any of us have ever really had the chance to take a breath. You look at some of the strikes a hundred years ago, like at the Homestead plant, where the workers held out and had fucking gun boats come down the river with Pinkertons and shot the shit out of people a hundred years ago. There’s a Costco there now, and a bunch of smokestacks where the plant used to be. And it’s like, was that whole thing just this ridiculous farce? I don’t even know."}
{"prompt":"I feel like it’s always a question of, what are you optimizing for? There is this fetish of capitalism as supremely rational. And it does optimize for certain things, like technological innovation. But if you think about it from another perspective, it’s also catastrophically irrational, because what could be less rational than wasting the potential of the millions of people whom capitalism exploits, or, worse, excludes by rendering permanently redundant? Capitalism doesn’t optimize for that.","completion":"I feel like I encounter this a lot in conversations with people who are in tech—my colleagues—who often have good intentions, but sometimes it’s hard for them to move their frame of mind from the technical to the political, to move from the technical question of how to optimize the process in front of you to the political question of what are you optimizing for."}
{"prompt":"It can also be hard for them to consider solutions to political problems that might be extremely low-tech. And for that reason are probably even more difficult—like the question of what happens in the future—which may not be a hundred years away or 200 years away—when robots or algorithms can do 90% of the jobs. How do you prevent that future from becoming a brutal neo-feudal nightmare? That seems to me like a political question rather than a technical one.","completion":"I think the strangest thing about being out here in the Bay Area is that the Aspy worldview has just completely saturated everything to the point that people think that everything is a technical problem that should be solved technologically. It’s a very privileged view of very smart people who just want there to be sink or swim. It’s troubling."}
{"prompt":"On the one hand, there’s no better shepherd for the economy than an engineer; on the other hand, there’s no worse shepherd for an economy than an engineer. Because that kind of machine thinking is very good at producing some things, and very, very bad at producing other things. On the one hand, I don’t view any of the Silicon Valley startup economies as producing any kind of sustainable growth or ways of employing all these people. On the other hand, I do think that the basic income idea eventually will be the future. One of the most interesting things is the amount of leverage that individual people in Silicon Valley are getting—you look at the WhatsApp acquisition or whatever, with so few people being worth so much money.","completion":"That may have been a little bit irrational, but longer-term, it’s hard to argue against. And I don’t see another endgame other than pretty high taxes plus basic income as the way of making that okay, because I don’t think that’s going to go away. I’m not even totally sure that we should discourage it from happening."}
{"prompt":"But the leverage is just astounding. To go back to that GPU example, there might be some guy who’s running some quant hedge fund somewhere who’s just sitting on the backs of thousands of these $26-an-hour machines making tons of money off of them. That kind of leverage was just unimaginable even ten years ago, and now there’s presumably one guy—I’m assuming it’s a guy, it’s probably a guy—just making shitloads of money, and that opportunity didn’t even exist ten years ago.","completion":"This may be a tangent, but I think the technical mindset is very compatible with the technocratic mindset. In both cases, it’s an evasion of politics, because just as the person who designs the racist algorithm presumably does not think of what they’re doing as political, neither does the technocrat who crafts the free trade agreement because all the mainstream economists in the room told him it would be good for the economy, full stop."}
{"prompt":"I think both approaches are connected to this overwhelming need to see political problems as technical ones, whether from an engineering perspective or from a technocratic governance perspective. To me those feel totally compatible. What you’re describing—the Silicon Valley view of the world—feels to me like a very technocratic view of the world, where if you can just solve certain problems then it will benefit everyone.","completion":"In defense of it, it’s also a hopeful view of the world, because you’re at least trying to describe problems that you can solve. It’s a very optimistic way of looking at things, and I’m hesitant to abandon that, because I think ultimately… It’s hard, grappling with this idea of the enormous amount of individual leverage and the crazy rate of change."}
{"prompt":"On the other hand, it’s hard not to be a kind of technical utopian. It’s hard to bet against the innovation that this country has produced, and maybe that’s a function of survivorship bias or looking back and saying we just happened to get lucky. But you know, airplanes, the elevator—we just invented that stuff, and that’s kind of cool. And so it seems sort of melancholy—or maybe this is my own limitation as a technical thinker to see it as melancholy—to be like, “Yeah, there’s some stuff we can’t solve.” I’m not sure I want to live in that world. I always want to live in a world where we’re at least trying. But we’ll see.","completion":"Alex Kriss The job of the psychotherapist is, in no small part, to help the patient find middle ground between extremes. This is what Janet Malcolm called “the freedom to be uninteresting.” When the patient can imagine more ordinary ways of being than the Gothic binaries of love/hate, depression/mania, or serenity/suicide, she begins to discard oppressive patterns of behavior in favor of living like herself."}
{"prompt":"The same philosophy should be applied to considering the role of technology within the psychotherapy context: it is not pathology or balm, but something in between, and what that something is depends entirely on how it is used. Jamieson Webster Patients know they have your cell phone. Patients will text you. Patients will search you on the internet. Patients will find out what they can. Patients will ask you to Skype or FaceTime them. Patients will use any of this technology, which becomes part of the transference. Why shouldn’t they? And why shouldn’t the technology be absorbed into the treatment? Marcus Coelen In psychoanalysis, the question of technology and media is the question of transference. Strangely enough, the German term for transference—“Übertragung”—is also used for “transmission” in the sense of technical media, as in “live transmission”— “Direktübertragung,” or more commonly, “Live-Übertragung.” “Übertragung”—“transmission,” “transference”—also means “metaphor.” Carlene MacMillan I actually find texting much more efficient than returning voicemails and playing phone tag. Even returning an email takes more effort to do than text. Particularly for teenagers, texting is very familiar with them. I’m happy to meet them where they are at, because they’re not going to call me, and even if I leave them a voicemail they’re probably not going to listen to it.","completion":"The one thing I’ve heard people worrying about is: What if you missed a text that was about suicide or some other kind of safety issue? But I think that the same thing can be true of a voicemail, especially if you’re using your work mail in your office. You’re not going to be checking it non-stop. I’m not going to check a voicemail in the middle of a meeting. But if I get a text, chances are I have my phone on me. I very rarely miss a text and so I find that it’s actually safer. I work with a lot of high-risk people who have chronic suicidality, so it actually matters for me."}
{"prompt":"AK: I have few if any inviolable rules regarding technology in my practice. When a patient is out of town we may opt to hold sessions via Skype, acknowledging that while video chat is less sacrosanct than meeting in person, it is a far closer approximation than speaking by phone, and above all preferable to not having a session at all. Patients frequently email me; particularly in handling logistical issues I find it more efficient than volleying voicemails back and forth. Even if an email contains more personal material, this is “allowed”—by what right could I forbid it? If a patient sends a provocative email, checks her phone in the middle of a session, or spends a great deal of time discussing the intricacies of her life on social media or in video games, I regard it, first and foremost, as meaningful. In one way or another, the patient is showing me who she is and how she relates to others.","completion":"CM: Different technologies like social media show up as the content of what you are working through with patients. I would say the biggest thing that we get is parents wanting to either monitor or restrict what social media platforms are okay for their kids. I think that when you’re talking about an eight-year-old with an Instagram account, it’s completely appropriate and reasonable that their Mom is going to follow them on it."}
{"prompt":"But once you get up into eleven, twelve, and beyond, I don’t think it’s realistic for parents to monitor them on everything. Kids find ways around it, or they have multiple profiles. They’ll do whatever they need to do to have their own space. I also don’t think it’s appropriate developmentally. I try to talk to parents about the developmental trajectory of using social media, and it shifting from monitoring to being more about trust and conversations. That’s really, really hard for some parents. Some totally get it, but others are still like, “Nope, I’m going to monitor them on everything, I own this phone, I pay for the internet, therefore I get full access.” Usually that doesn’t work out.","completion":"Parents will think that social media causes their kids to have X, Y, or Z problem. But usually the kids who are getting into serious problems on the internet with sexting or cyberbullying are having problems in other non-technological realms. And some parents don’t want to accept that. It’s much easier to scapegoat the technology."}
{"prompt":"AK: Understanding how technology intersects with the lives of patients and the broader culture is necessary extracurricular work for the psychotherapist. If I were to treat someone deeply embroiled in the world of Tinder, it would behoove me to at least have some idea of what Tinder is. More important would be the need for me to feel curious about what Tinder is to my patient, and not dismiss anything I don’t understand as corruptive or puerile, for to do so would be to dismiss a part of my patient’s life.","completion":"My rule, if you can call it that, is that a patient is free to say whatever they like, however they like, and I am free to respond (or not respond) in whatever way I think will benefit the treatment. For instance, I will rarely respond to an email or text message from a patient other than to acknowledge its receipt, and perhaps suggest that we discuss its contents at the next session. Many things happen in the asymmetric, virtual space that defines modern communication—ranging from the wonderful to the horrific—but not, I think, psychotherapy. The patient has enlisted me to bear witness to her experience, which demands my presence and undivided attention."}
{"prompt":"Technology can help this purpose—by keeping us connected even when physically apart—or present new conundrums. But it can neither destroy nor replace the emergent power of two people sitting in a room together, attempting to chart a course between extremes. MC: There are two extremes: Language, or rather speaking, is the medium of psychoanalysis. Its space is saturated with “speaks.” Everything in it speaks: silence, sounds, furniture, clothes—they all speak. Nothing is not speaking in the setting of psychoanalysis. The patient doesn’t show up—that’s speaking. He says “I hate you”—that’s not what it says alone. She dreams—that’s speaking.","completion":"So why not speak, yell, or not be there—on the phone? In a way, there is no difference. The bodies are there, by necessity, and without language. You have to be in a shared room and share the space. The classical setting for psychoanalysis (couch, facing opposite directions, free-floating attention), combined with voice, gaze, and touch, is a felicitous compromise between these two extremes. But it is only a compromise. And since this is only a compromise, there are others. A walk, a phone, a hotel lounge. The setting can be transposed, transferred, transmitted, and metaphorized. Into phone sessions, for instance."}
{"prompt":"You can never trust the setting nor can you trust just the medium or means of communication. JW: In a way I’m very laissez-faire about technology, but only because I seriously believe in structure: structure as something that is created by the treatment. There is the same laissez-faire attitude about technology in Freud, from Civilization and its Discontents: If there had been no railway to conquer distances, my child would never have left his native town and I should need no telephone to hear has voice; if travelling across the ocean by ship had not been introduced, my friend would not have embarked on his sea-voyage and I should not need a cable to relieve my anxiety about him. What is the use of reducing infantile mortality when it is precisely that reduction which imposes the greatest restraint on us in the begetting of children, so that, taken all round, we nevertheless rear no more children than in the days before the reign of hygiene, while at the same time we have created difficult conditions for our sexual life in marriage, and have probably worked against the beneficial effects of natural selection? And, finally, what good to us is a long life if it is difficult and barren of joys, and if it is so full of misery that we can only welcome death as a deliverer? It seems certain that we do not feel comfortable in our present-day civilization, but it is very difficult to form an opinion whether and in what degree men of an earlier age felt happier and what part their cultural conditions played in the matter.","completion":"For Freud, technology and progress seem to be at odds with the pleasure principle. The idea that they create more happiness is wrong at best, and a destructive illusion at worst. This is something that you hear in analysis: patients come up against the illusion that technological life is supposed to make them happy, make living easier or more fun, help them find the perfect life or the perfect match."}
{"prompt":"The question is whether they make this disappointment personal—whether they see it as their own failing to find the happiness that they think everyone else must have (FOMO) thanks to all this wonderful technology, or whether they encounter something else about what it means to be human. A small robot with a caterpillar track rolls into a dark tunnel. It holds a camera flanked by two flashlights. Lasers help it navigate this cramped space and trace an efficient route. At the other end of its connecting cable is a US Customs and Border Protection agent with a joystick. They are looking for smugglers and drugs.","completion":"Over the past few years, the US government has deployed these robots to disrupt the most famous technical achievement of Mexican narco-trafficking cartels: border tunnels. These underground miles-long structures have ventilation systems, electrical grids, and pulley-operated secret entrances and exits. Cartels spend millions of dollars and recruit talented architects and engineers from a mining state in northern Mexico to build them."}
{"prompt":"The popular fascination with these tunnels runs deep. Journalists obsess over their design. American films like Fast and Furious and television shows like Weeds feature detailed reconstructions of them. When famed cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman escaped from prison (the second time) through a tunnel, both Taiwanese animation studios and Las Vegas museums created artistic renderings of the structure.","completion":"For years, technophiles have argued that robots are the key to shutting down narco-tunnels. Citing developments by the Idaho National Laboratory and Canadian robot maker Inuktun, a 2009 Wired article claims that robots could be “the greatest weapon to emerge from the government’s attempt to stamp out the trade in illicit substances across its border.” A 2010 PR release from the MITRE Corporation boasts that their work on sensing robots could eventually provide “an effective, low-cost, and reliable solution to long-term border surveillance.” In 2015, a similar write-up from Makeshift magazine calls these robots “unlikely allies” of the US Border Patrol and features a color illustration of a fedora-wearing, anthropomorphized robot walking in the dark and holding a flashlight."}
{"prompt":"1. The internet has served Eros from the beginning. Once upon a time, the men who commanded the most powerful army in the history of the world decided they were going to create a giant, invisible apparatus for sex. They did not know the apparatus was for sex. They thought they were building a computer network that would help win wars in the age of the atom bomb. They thought it would prop up the dominoes of capitalism against the winds of communism. They gave teams of researchers vast sums of money. The researchers made the network work.","completion":"Then a funny thing happened. The researchers started using the network to talk about their feelings. The researchers had many feelings, especially the male researchers—and they were mostly male. They felt lonely. They felt randy. They wondered if anyone was listening. Having grown up in a society that told men that they shouldn’t feel at all, the computer network offered the perfect emotional prosthesis. It let them be human. Email was invented in 1971—by 1973, email accounted for 75% of traffic on the network."}
{"prompt":"The men loved to write emails. They wrote millions of them. They articulated their excitement, their sadness, their rage. They flamed and fanboyed, joked and trolled, made friends and enemies. They shared their fears and dreams. Like the egg avatars of Twitter howling diatribes into the void of their ten followers today—or the nice guys of OkCupid querulously saluting dozens of strangers (“hey”) before going ballistic when they get no answer—the researchers of the early internet wanted, first and foremost, to talk.","completion":"You never can tell how people will use a network. 2. Almost any technology can be used for sex—and probably has. The first humans we recognize as human used the first tools to paint a woman copulating with a bull on the walls of a cave. Not long after the invention of the photograph in the 1830s, the French poet Charles Baudelaire was complaining that you could find peepshow stereoscopes depicting prostitutes all over Paris. As soon as there were moving pictures, plucky entrepreneurs figured out that it would be lucrative to shoot smut with them. (The rules of narrative editing would take a little longer: an early porn film cuts from long shots of maidens and fawns frolicking in a glen to a close-up of the male member.) Today, the interweaving of physical and virtual life has reached a point that seems to raise new questions."}
{"prompt":"Pornography has become ubiquitous to the point where it is the paradigm for all human experience. Nourishment, shelter, and violence can now be made “food porn,” “real estate porn,” and “war porn.” And if your kink is to insist that you’re not a pervert, but just want to keep track of the latest in pervert praxis—if your perversion is research—then the internet is great for that too.","completion":"This endless variety raises the question: What even is sex? Once we acknowledge that it can mean more than baby-making in missionary position, how far can sex be extended? The social VR app that lets a stranger seduce you through an avatar—does that count? The sext that makes you come at a touch? “What is technology?” is also a trickier question than it might seem. The VR headset clearly counts. But how about a condom? How about a technique, a position, a piece of furniture? We don’t just use technology for sex. We use sex to interpret and inspire technology. As centuries of stories about men falling for statues and dolls and robots show, sex is one of the ways we make sense of the things we build, and the desires and the fears we feel for them. No matter how fantastical the powers that they ascribe to AIs, the stories are suspiciously the same: a male AI, even if he seems friendly, is bent on world domination. (See 2001, Transcendence.) A female AI, on the other hand, is a secretary. (See Her, Siri IRL.) Of course, there is no reason that a computer or an algorithm should have a gender at all. However advanced our tools, they are unlikely to be more enlightened than the people who build them. These biases run deep. If we are not careful, we will continue to encode them. If we want to live as more equal subjects of desire, we will need to make better toys."}
{"prompt":"3. It will always be in the interest of the men who own the machines to say their machines will make the world a better place. But they have a point. The internet has been a godsend for countless people who were poorly served by more standardized forms of sexual culture—from queer teens to divorcees to professional dominatrices to people with disabilities.","completion":"On the other hand, capitalism is pretty adept at cooptation. It is, as they say, complicated. An app lets you source whatever strain of sex you want—or at least play a video game about people within a ten mile radius who might have sex with you. But it only lets you make some choices. Most choices it makes for you. It sorts you by a set of rules, because all algorithms are sets of rules. Above all, it converts your sex life into a subject of surveillance, and a stream of profit. Each intimate instant is making someone else money, from the first swipe right to the first relationship status to the first post-breakup revenge selfie."}
{"prompt":"You can make money for Barry Diller while you sit on the bus. You can make money for Barry Diller while you sit on the toilet. When you tell the internet what you want, the internet remembers. Somewhere, a company is building a library of every longing on earth. A record of every fetish, every crush, every passionate and perverted thought persists on a hard drive in a climate-controlled room in Virginia or Dublin or Singapore.","completion":"What an erotic, and terrifying, vision: our desires all crammed together, sharing the same strips of disk, indefinitely. My dick pic next to your love letter, your Google search for tentacle porn next to my flirtatious Facebook message. One soup of sexuality, expanding at the speed of human thought."}
{"prompt":"It will make an odd monument for future archaeologists. What if you knew, in excruciating detail, the wildest fantasies of a third-century Chinese farmer? We will be extremely well-known to future generations. Will they find us as fascinating as we find ourselves? 4. We owe it to ourselves and our lovers to think through the ways that technology is rewiring sex.","completion":"The consequences are complex. The internet can make sex workers safer—and more vulnerable to police surveillance. Smart sex toys can create new forms of pleasure—and enable corporations to spy on our intimate lives. Dating apps can make it easier to disclose HIV status—and harder to meet someone from a different class background."}
{"prompt":"These are a few of the themes explored by writers in this issue. We hope you like it. (We hope you more than like it.) With online dating and matchmaking, what sorts of problems did you deal with that were technically very difficult but might not seem that way on the surface? Or, on the flip side, what sorts of problems seemed hard but turned out to be very easy? That’s a really interesting question. One of the things I’ll say is that at OkCupid, as with many startups, using really advanced algorithms ends up being a second-order optimization. Often, the more effective thing is just to work on getting the user experience right. It’s much easier to do user experience improvements that make larger differences on the dynamics and the site.","completion":"OkCupid has always been very algorithmically focused. It’s pretty unique among the dating sites in allowing people to participate in defining the matching algorithm—each person picks out exactly which questions are important to them, how important they are, and what their ideal answers would be to each of those questions. That’s unlike any other site, where there’s less of an algorithmic focus, and there is some psychologist that comes up with an opinionated rating system, or there’s no rating system and there’s no attempt to match personality at all."}
{"prompt":"There’s a lot of nuances that are pretty tricky there. One of the interesting ones is the human psychology of match questions—understanding what it is that you want. When you go through the process of answering questions, maybe you’ll answer some questions in a way that is consistent with what you really want, but you might not answer all questions that way. You might provide answers for how you feel that night, which may not be reflective of your larger perspective.","completion":"So that’s one of the big challenges: understanding what someone is really trying to say when they’re answering questions about their preferences. How did you all deal with that? The first step we took was looking over all the different questions, and identifying which questions lead to confusion from a statistical perspective."}
{"prompt":"We focused on how effective questions are at splitting the population. The ideal match question is something that people feel very strongly about the answer to, but which also splits the population pretty evenly, so that about half the population feels very strongly yes and half feels very strongly no. Questions like that are perfect for narrowing down the pool of people who are good matches for you.","completion":"But interestingly, some of those questions that appear to be very important to you might be based on a misinterpretation. There could be two different interpretations for the question, and you just answered one of them. Then the population is evenly split on a question not because people feel strongly about the answer, but because they have different interpretations of the question. Knowing this can happen, we use the algorithms to help us understand the statistics behind each question, and we’ll try to identify questions that are the most likely to be mistaken in this way so that we can remove them."}
{"prompt":"We also examined messaging patterns as a backup, and correlated answers to other questions. So if the question is an outlier compared to many other questions, we’ll tend to count it less; or if messaging patterns don’t line up with answers to the question, we would sometimes use that as a reason to remove the question as well.","completion":"Many of the questions are user-generated, so what’s nice is that as people answer the questions, some rise to the top and get popular, and some don’t. That makes our task easier—we’re focusing on filtering through which questions are good and which need to be removed, rather than having to think of what new questions should be added."}
{"prompt":"So the community plays a role in generating the questions that people find important. Yeah, and it’s really neat to see how those questions spread. Often a new issue would come up, like a new president or a recent news article, and the way people feel about it can be quite important in understanding their personality. So users will add a new question that touches on it, and the question will quickly become popular and play a role in matching people.","completion":"There’s been a lot of discussion around “experiments” on users done by data-driven product development organizations like Facebook and OkCupid. A big question that always comes up is the ethical considerations of these sorts of tests—the impact these tests have on the user, independent of the goal that you’re trying to achieve."}
{"prompt":"When you set up and ran experiments on users, what were the ethical considerations that went into them? Were there any experiments that were considered “off limits” that you decided not to do because they crossed some ethical line? That’s a really interesting topic. Running experiments was a very important part of our product and decision-making strategy at OkCupid—as I think it is at almost every tech company, I would hope.","completion":"At OkCupid, our philosophy was not to just experiment because we wanted to. Often there is this problem with data science and analytics in general—leaders of the company want answers to a particular question, so they’ll ask for experiments to get at some deeper understanding, but there won’t be specific decisions that they’re trying to make as a result of having that information."}
{"prompt":"We always took a decision-first approach. We would come to some key question. Do we want the product to be designed this way or that way? Should we make this change or that change? One change we debated quite a bit was our rating system. Originally we had a rating system that allowed people to score other people from one to five stars. And we thought, well, it would be a simpler user interface to just use a yes or no answer. That would be more straightforward, but then again we would lose a lot of information resolution, and was that really worth it? We were pretty torn on it, and couldn’t come to a decision through discussion alone, so we resorted to an experiment to understand which would lead to better messaging patterns. That’s an example of the kind of product decision we would try to answer with experiments.","completion":"The ethics around experimentation really depends on what you’re trying to accomplish with the question. The goal should be improving the product for people, and you should focus on not degrading the experience very much for any one person—don’t hurt someone too much for the experiment. Maybe a little bit of degradation of the experience makes sense because you don’t know actually know that it works. But then as soon as you learn which version of an experience is worse, you can resolve the experiment."}
{"prompt":"I think you get into the hot water if what you’re doing looks more like a psychology study than trying to make a product decision. Like: wouldn’t it be interesting from a research perspective to see what happens if people are exposed to this situation? That can be a little bit sketchier unless you go through the standard research routes, likes IRB approval (a FDA process that regulates the treatment of human research subjects) and informed consent.","completion":"You’ve mentioned using messaging patterns as an important metric. But for a dating application it seems like there are many different metrics by which you might measure success. What was your guiding light for figuring out whether a feature was successful or not? Were there different metrics that were in conflict? You can think of a hierarchy of different metrics. They range from being very plentiful and not that informative, to being extremely informative but much more rare."}
{"prompt":"One bit of data that is plentiful is who you view on the site. If you have a matching algorithm that displays options on a page, and someone clicks one of those options to view the profile, that’s a weak positive signal. There’s a whole lot of that happening, and it tells us a little bit about the user, but not much.","completion":"A stronger positive signal is sending a message. Then even stronger than that is having a multi-directional exchange, which implies that both parties most likely were happy about that exchange. The strongest signal of all is when someone deletes or pauses their account. We ask them if they did it because they met someone, and asked if they were matched with that person. If they say yes, that allows us to get high-quality information on who were really good matches, because they form entire relationships based on it. But that sort of data is more rare."}
{"prompt":"We combine all these different levels of data based on what the goal we were trying to achieve with the metric was. For example, if you want to have a system that reacts more quickly, then you focus on the more common data, like profile views. But for the most part, we settled in the middle, which means focusing on communications that involve three or four messages exchanged back and forth. We felt those were a good sign that two people had a genuine connection, and that’s what we’re trying to focus on for the site.","completion":"One other metric that competes with that to some degree is evenness: what fraction of people on the site receive at least one contact every week. You see scenarios where maybe someone is happy receiving lots of messages, and really likes the attention, so you could have an algorithm that directs a lot of people to message that one person. That’s nice for that one person, and great for the three or four messaging metric, but it’s not so great for evenness. So we try to spread out the engagement on the site to other people, even if it meant fewer message exchanges. There was often tension between those two goals."}
{"prompt":"What sorts of strategies did you take to increase things like evenness? It’s an interesting challenge. Messaging patterns are fundamentally very uneven if you don’t make an active attempt to sculpt or mold them. There are a few lucky people who get a large number of messages, and a very long tail of people who might get messages once in awhile, but overall don’t get much attention. That’s something all these kinds of apps struggle with.","completion":"One of the more common techniques is setting a rate limit. If someone is sending a lot of messages, or sending a lot of likes, or thumbs up, or anything like that, they’ll be rate-limited after a certain number of interactions. At OkCupid, we really focused on not doing that too harshly. Rather than hard limiting, we tried to do more of a soft sculpting of the messaging experience. So if someone is sending a large number of lower-quality messages, we would tend to show them other users who get fewer messages, and who maybe would appreciate the message they received more than the typical message recipient."}
{"prompt":"We found that showing users who had a similar attractiveness level, but also had similar messaging patterns, produced a good balance in terms of both evenness and the total number of quality interactions on the site. I want to emphasize that attractiveness is not the only metric we use. We would always focus on both attractiveness and messaging patterns—when someone sends a message, how often is it responded to, and how many messages someone receives and responds to, which is a good measure for how interested they are in additional messages.","completion":"On the site there are questions that involve some amount of self-identified demographic data. Were there other under-the-hood metrics that corresponded to concepts that you had to get at from a roundabout sort of way, like socioeconomic status or class? Things that you couldn’t directly ask people, but would end up in a machine learning model somewhere? You know, we stayed away from that as much as possible. We did at some point allow people to put what their salary was, but I think we may have gotten rid of that, since it didn’t serve a purpose. And in fact, for a very long time we resisted allowing people to filter by race—we felt it just wasn’t appropriate."}
{"prompt":"But then we learned about some use-cases from the other side—someone who is Filipino who wants to find other Filipinos easily. We found that that’s a pretty legit reason to search by race, so we added that feature. But in general, we focus on making it an experience that doesn’t discriminate and encourages people to be their best selves.","completion":"How much of your approach was trying to enable users to make a selections of matches they felt they wanted, versus trying to encourage people to find matches in ways that a team or the company deemed ethical, like with regards to not being able to filter by race or income? It’s a mix. For the most part we try to cater to people’s tastes, but in certain cases that are very important to us, like with different protected classes, we would focus on doing what was right."}
{"prompt":"One example is that people who are bisexual would often receive messages from straight people that were really not desired. Though they were bi, they weren’t interested in that kind of attention. It would be pretty overwhelming, particularly for bi women. So we added a feature to allow them to only be seen by other bi users—that was well-received, and was in response to this pattern we noticed of dissatisfaction and unwanted attention. That helped people of different orientations feel safer on the site.","completion":"How did you model users outside of conventional gender norms? What sort of work did you do surrounding supporting people who identify outside of the typical gender binary? In my experience, OkCupid has always been considered one of the safer sites for people with alternative identities and preferences. That’s something we’ve always been proud of."}
{"prompt":"Obviously sexual orientation and gender identity are not binary—they’re a continuum. But at first we simplified in terms of gay, straight, and bi orientation. And we were always thinking about the nine different pairings of those groups, and made sure any experience we created made sense for each of those nine different pairings.","completion":"On the gender front, for a long time we were aware that people who didn’t identify as either male or female weren’t being completely served on the site, because there was no way for them to enter their identity—the site made you pick male or female. That was a tricky decision, because it was built into the code pretty deeply from the start. We really wanted to make that change, so finally we put in the time and effort and added a much better range of gender options. We were really happy we were able to do that, although it took a lot of work and took us a while to prioritize it."}
{"prompt":"Honestly, one thing that is interesting is that from a matching perspective we’re pretty gender- and orientation-agnostic. We don’t try to use the algorithms to pair people of certain identities with people of other identities—we really just focus on personality questions and preferences, then allow people to choose how they filter within gender identities. We want people to find other users who are great matches from a personality perspective, possibly in places that they didn’t expect.","completion":"You’ve talked about having core principles when you think about the features that you’re willing to develop. In the role of CTO, how did you go about crafting the engineering and product teams around those values? Was there a set of core principles that you aligned around?  Were there particular qualities that you looked for when hiring that reflected those values? Often companies have a more structured set of core values that are baked into company events and communications. Honestly, at OkCupid, the people who worked there came from a certain place of idealism and community, so it just kind of sprung up. Everyone who worked there was encouraged to read feedback, so people would see all kinds of different perspectives from users using the site. When someone would read feedback and find an issue that resonated with them, they could bring it up, and we’d discuss it and think about how to best solve it for the people who sent in the feedback, but in a way that was respectful and helpful to the rest of the users on the site as well."}
{"prompt":"It was really neat to see the grassroots unification around inclusive ideals, without having to push for an official set of “values.” In a way it was easy because the company was small. It was about thirty or thirty-five people when I left in 2014. In a group that size, it is pretty easy to have value alignment without too much structure.","completion":"That’s thirty-five people on the engineering team, or in the whole company? That was the entire company. Oh wow, okay. I didn’t realize it was that small. Yeah, that was what so neat about OkCupid: how many people are reached and impacted by such a small team. You’ve spoken before about the internet literally saving the lives of queer teenagers. I wonder if you could start by talking about that a little bit."}
{"prompt":"I belong to the last generation of gay people who came of age without the internet. I remember first being shown an AOL chatroom when I was, I don’t know, seventeen or eighteen. That was my introduction to gay life online. But the life-saving qualities of technology for queer people really became clear to me when I was living in Bulgaria.","completion":"I was teaching at a school in Sofia, the capital of the country. There’s nowhere in Bulgaria that has a vibrant or easily free gay culture—but in Sofia, there’s more of that than anywhere else. One of my students was from a tiny town called Targovishte. He and I became quite close; he was straight, but he became an outspoken advocate for LGBT rights in the school community. And one day he came to talk to me because one of his friends in the little town he came from had come out to him. He asked if I could talk to him, and that was how I became aware of the role that Skype was playing in these kids’ lives."}
{"prompt":"Bulgaria is a very wired country: the internet is available everywhere. So these queer kids in these small villages could find each other online, and create these online spaces that became something like their gay bars. The internet gave them access to a different kind of discourse about queer lives and about being gay than they had in their offline lives.","completion":"I have another friend in Bulgaria who lives in a small city, and who spends a lot of her time online counseling kids. And that’s extraordinary. That’s something that would have been unimaginable to me in Kentucky in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was becoming aware of myself as a queer person. For these kids living in isolated places, the internet radically redraws their horizon of possibility by giving them access to a virtual community."}
{"prompt":"What was it like talking to that kid who was your student’s friend? I mean, it’s very painful talking to these kids. Because he was, you know… there is this sense that it’s impossible to imagine a full life in these places. I hope that’s changing quickly in Bulgaria, as it’s changing elsewhere. But even the conversations I had with my very privileged students in Sofia were dispiriting, because there’s such a sense of impossibility about things that queer people in the West take for granted: about the possibility of having a visible life, about the possibility of coming out to your parents and your friends.","completion":"As for the kid in the village, he went to university in the West. So it’s nice to think of that story having a much happier trajectory now. When I first spoke to him he was probably fifteen, but he did find a way out. He did find a way to a place where there will be much more possibility for him to live openly."}
{"prompt":"I know you’ve also spoken about the power of discovering queer erotica online. I’d imagine that in addition to helping queer teenagers find people to talk to, the internet can also help them find their desires represented. And not just erotica. I remember when I first arrived in Bulgaria in 2009, all of the queer and queer-friendly kids were over the moon about Glee. They loved it. They downloaded pirated episodes of it online. As long as somebody knows enough English, shows like that are available anywhere. But it wasn’t subtitled in Bulgarian, so you had to have English.","completion":"That’s something you become aware of in Bulgaria: it’s not just the geographical division that isolates people, it’s also very much the linguistic division. Queer people in places like Bulgaria who know English have access to so many more resources than people who don’t know English. I remember one of the first conversations I had with a queer Bulgarian was actually before I was in Bulgaria. It was with a Bulgarian poet who’s living in America now named Nikolay Atanasov. And he said that one of the difficulties in getting an LGBT rights movement started in Bulgaria—which really kicked into high gear after Bulgaria joined the EU in 2007—was that they didn’t have the linguistic resources for articulating these arguments in Bulgarian. People who were doing that kind of advocacy had to have studied in Western Europe or to have access to those languages."}
{"prompt":"And so, the process of advocating for queer rights in Bulgaria is also a process of translation. It involves creating a language in Bulgaria that can do the work. Because in English, there is a language that is the product of a whole history and tradition of thinking about the expansion of rights. To try to translate it is not just a matter of word-for-word equivalence—it’s also about finding a way to bring ideas into a language that has no context for them. In countries like Bulgaria, there are very stark class divisions, and one of the largest of those divisions is linguistic.","completion":"Why can’t those kids who are downloading pirated episodes of Glee find Bulgarian subtitles for them? In East Asia, there are plenty of online communities that take pirated Americans films and subtitle them. I don’t know. I would not be surprised if there are people in Bulgaria doing that. But remember that Bulgaria is a much smaller place. It’s a much smaller language. There are about seven million people in Bulgaria. It’s not like China."}
{"prompt":"Well, at least for the kids who spoke English, it sounds like the internet played a positive role in their lives. It gave them access to Western narratives of queerness that made them feel a little less alone. Yeah. Although I should say that I have ambiguous and ambivalent feelings about the role of technology in sexual life, and especially in queer life, and especially in gay male sexual life.","completion":"Why? I’ll start with the positive aspects. One of the things that’s most remarkable about the internet’s impact on sexual life is its great diminishment of solitude. What amazes me about the sites that I love—erotic fiction sites like nifty.org, but also sites like Craigslist—is that anything you can imagine desiring, someone else desires that thing. That, to me, is pretty wonderful. I find it very moving."}
{"prompt":"Because what the internet teaches you is that for every desire, there’s an answer to that desire. That’s a remarkable thing. It can be a disturbing thing, of course, but it can also be a wondrous thing. Before the internet, whole lives could be passed with only a sense of one’s own freakishness. The internet has done more than anything else to puncture that particular type of solitude, the solitude that comes with a singular experience of stigma.","completion":"What about the negatives? I’m ambivalent about apps like Grindr. On one hand, Grindr can be a genuinely helpful tool for people: I think it makes things like the disclosure of HIV status much easier, I think it makes certain kinds of conversations much easier. I also think it’s potentially safer than offline cruising—although not necessarily."}
{"prompt":"But what disturbs me most about online cruising, and especially location-based apps like Grindr, is that it seems like a gentrification of cruising. The revolutionary thing about traditional gay cruising is that it is a space that allows for people from radically different backgrounds and classes and categories to come together outside the gaze of any kind of civic authority.","completion":"When I think about the kind of people I met cruising in Cherokee Park in Louisville, Kentucky—these were people that everything in my life was organized to keep me from meeting. I think a lot of the radical potential of queerness inheres in its tendency to scramble the usual lines of identification."}
{"prompt":"But a location-based app like Grindr is still about putting your body in a space where there are other bodies. Unlike OkCupid, where you don’t need to have any physical proximity to other people. You can just do it from your apartment. Well, people also use Grindr in their apartments. And if you’re in a densely populated urban center, Grindr’s also only showing you people who live on your block. Which means, thanks to gentrification, you’re likely only seeing people in your own class bracket.","completion":"But my other problem with Grindr and other online cruising apps is that I think they allow us to determine too much. I subscribe to the romantic notion of Audre Lorde that the erotic is the force that can enable connections across various kinds of difference. That’s a function of the erotic to be cherished—and it’s the function of the erotic that’s given especially free rein in places like cruising bathrooms and parks."}
{"prompt":"When you’re on an app like Grindr, you can filter for a type. That drains away a lot of the possibility that desire has to surprise us—I don’t think any of us actually knows what we want to that extent. So instead of cruising offering a place for interactions between people of different races and different class backgrounds, cruising through these apps can become something that further reinforces racism and gentrification and class stratification.","completion":"And that’s something to be lamented. Even though a case can be made that apps like Grindr make cruising safer, that discourse of safety is part and parcel of the same discourse of safety that often accompanies gentrification and that is really code for the hatred of people of color and the hatred of poor people."}
{"prompt":"So I do think there are disturbing implications if apps like Grindr purely supplant older types of cruising. But what’s interesting is the way these multiple models of cruising can co-exist. If you go to a cruising place today in New York City, everyone’s cruising in real life and everyone’s also on their phone cruising. That sort of multiplicity feels very fecund and exciting, I think.","completion":"To shift a bit, do you think these new technologies are changing how people write about sex? As a novelist, do you see technology changing how sex is being represented in fiction and nonfiction? I think so. It’s changing not only sex writing but also writing in general. I’m interested in the role that affect and especially affectlessness play in contemporary American fiction. And I do think that it’s connected to the tonelessness of internet-based communication."}
{"prompt":"Are there particular writers that embody that kind of tonelessness? The obvious one is Tao Lin, who is very often presenting text as Gchats and things like that. But more broadly, there’s a sound of certain contemporary American fiction that I find quite compelling. It’s a very moving flatness of tone. The internet didn’t invent it. But I think the internet does amplify it.","completion":"In terms of sex writing, one of the potentially dangerous impacts of the internet on our sexual lives is the fact that most internet porn is quite bad. By which I mean I think it’s uninteresting in the way that it presents bodies as evacuated of personhood. We are in a moment when we are inundated by images of bodies—images of bodies are more easily available than they ever have been. And really unavoidable."}
{"prompt":"And yet it seems to me that as a culture we have a dearth of representations of embodiedness—by which I mean bodies with consciousness, the experience of having a body. I am disturbed by the way that internet pornography accelerates and encourages a kind of arms race of extremism, and how the tropes and symbolism and practices of S&M are taken out of the context of the richness of S&M culture. That’s the way I feel about much of the internet pornography I see, especially the straight pornography. It seems to me that there is a free rein given to misogyny and to the pleasure of making a human being an object.","completion":"As for sex writing, I hate to say that any kind of writing has any obligation to do anything. But in my own writing of sex, I feel very strongly that I want to present not just bodies but embodiedness. I want to present persons. And literature does that much better than visual images—especially visual images of the kind that inundate today’s internet. Those images are showing us bodies, not persons."}
{"prompt":"I don’t feel qualified to say how the internet has changed sex writing. But I will say that in my own work as a writer, I feel the need to respond to the kind of pornography that floods the internet. I feel a desire as a writer to explore sexuality in a different way—even if I often want to write with the same graphicness I might find in internet pornography.","completion":"Has the internet also changed what encompasses sex? Not just how people write about sex, but what sex is? Definitely. Technologies like Skype and other video chat apps radically change what it means to be in a relationship. Especially when people live lives that are very mobile, and are often separated from one another for long periods. It’s mind-boggling to think about all the ways that these technologies have intersected with our erotic lives."}
{"prompt":"Another internet phenomenon that fascinates me is live cams: these websites where you can go and watch couples having sex in a very exhibitionist way. You can see the same couple day after day after day and get a sense of them as human beings, of the narratives of their lives. That’s really fascinating in the way that it suggests the possibility of new kinds of intimacy.","completion":"Really, our whole sense of intimacy has been utterly transformed. And that’s true even without porn, when you think about how porous our privacy has become because of social media, and how much of our private lives we share. It’s fascinating. And it’s scary. And yeah, I guess I feel as ambivalent about it as I do about everything else. The internet has produced a multiplication of possibilities for pleasure—but also a multiplication of possibilities for the abdication of inwardness and solitude and meditativeness."}
{"prompt":"I have complex feelings. I mean, it’s the kind of thing that you can talk about forever and ever. How have new technologies challenged the bias toward mononormativity in our culture? Have the internet or mobile apps helped make polyamory more mainstream? Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins: I’m not sure if they’ve made it more “mainstream”… it’s complicated. There is certainly huge public interest in polyamory. Online access to poly people and their lives—via media coverage but also through people putting themselves out there on social media—make it possible to satisfy that public demand efficiently.","completion":"But beyond that, everything depends on how we are represented and perceived. This varies wildly across different kinds of coverage and their various audiences. Visibility can be a positive thing: greater cultural representation of non-normative possibilities for love is, in my view, a key mechanism through which our “scripts” can be changed and challenged."}
{"prompt":"But when the representation is of a single, typically hyper-sexualized, stereotype—or when we are presented for public consumption as a new kind of “other” to gawk at or be outraged by—I feel like we’re moving backwards rather than forwards. Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa: I’m seeing progress. When I first started using dating sites ten or fifteen years ago, “Single” and “Available” were treated as synonymous by most. On OkCupid, if you said you were in a relationship but also looking for dating, you’d show up as “Available” instead of “In a Relationship.” This lumped together cheating with ethical non-monogamy.","completion":"Last year, OkCupid announced support for an official “Open Relationship” status. I do think this has contributed to visibility and normalization in some circles. But obviously there’s still a long way to go. Ray Hsu: Not all technologies challenge mononormative bias equally. But something as basic as the ability to identify as different categories, and to choose different ways of searching for others, challenge mononormativity by allowing people to move beyond tacit, unspoken norms."}
{"prompt":"What about abuse? As the internet has made polyamory more visible, do polyamorous people encounter specific forms of hate online? Carrie: Well, I get targeted online for specific forms of misogyny that are related to my being a poly woman. There’s a long list of colorful words that are specifically used for women who break the monogamy norm. I’ve been called most of them, as well as receiving plenty of other hateful—sometimes even violent—online abuse that relates to my gender. The way I experience most online hate seems to be distinctively aimed at the intersection of my non-monogamy and my gender.","completion":"Ray: I receive a fraction of the online hate that Carrie does. Even racist comments about Jonathan and me are directed to her. Jonathan: I agree—this stuff is super gendered. I don’t get much of it personally. The times I receive a lot of abuse online are when I speak out about things like sexual assault policies and rape culture. Then some people will yell at me about whatever they can think of—which sometimes includes me being poly. But when I talk about being in an open relationship that doesn’t emphasize those respects that are threatening to the patriarchy, people don’t usually give me much of a hard time."}
{"prompt":"How does technology expand the possibilities for non-monogamous relationships? In the case of OkCupid, it sounds like the decision to add an “Open Relationship” status contributed both to normalization and to the ability for poly people to use the site more effectively. What are some of the other kinds of decisions that make for a better or worse experience? Carrie: I am not, on the whole, very plugged into poly “communities.” Not that I have anything against them, they just tend not to be really my style. But the internet facilitates connection and interaction in multiple ways: the creation and maintenance of such communities is one important one.","completion":"Myself, I use instant messaging to connect individually with my partners, especially when we’re not in the same place at the same time. And this isn’t always a “substitute” for other forms of communication; using written text instead of one’s voice is just different. At least one of my current relationships wouldn’t have been possible without it—maybe both. I am in many senses a writer: I am often able to express things in written forms that I cannot (or would not) using my voice."}
{"prompt":"Ray: Compare OkCupid to Tinder: Tinder is relatively inflexible when it comes to categories, whereas OkCupid has more categories for how one can identify and what one can search for in others. I think much of it may be couched in terms of aesthetics: whereas Tinder might seem “clean” and draw from the aesthetics of simplicity and minimalism, this aesthetic comes at the cost of fewer identities and fewer ways to connect to others in non-normative ways. The simplicity is mirrored in the action of the swipe, and the relative non-emphasis on text.","completion":"Carrie: I’ve always found Tinder basically useless. Perhaps what Ray is describing here is part of why. Jonathan: The internet trend of the past few years tends to be towards streamlining and simplicity. Which means that things that used to be up to the user to decide for themselves—what order to read tweets in, which friends’ profiles they want to look at, what qualities in a romantic partner they consider important—are now done under the hood by proprietary algorithms."}
{"prompt":"I get why people find it easier to let machines guess what they want. They are good at guessing! But I think that tendency make people a little less critical about their choices. So I still prefer the more complicated interfaces that take a while to learn, but that let you really think about what parameters you’re interested in and why.","completion":"We’ve talked about using technology to find polyamorous partners—but what about scheduling? I know that one of the challenges of maintaining polyamory relationships is scheduling time with each partner. Has technology helped automate any of that labor? Are there specific tools you use? Carrie: Yes, Google Calendar. Any shareable calendar app with instant updating would do the same work, but this is the one I use. Other technologies, like messenger apps, don’t so much automate the labor of scheduling as make it possible."}
{"prompt":"Ray: Google Calendar certainly helps, especially with repetitive events. I would also say that messenger apps help with scheduling, although it’s less about the automation of labor and more about being able to connect and, say, make emergency rescheduling possible. Jonathan: I want an app that reminds me when it’s been awhile since I’ve talked to someone. It’s easy to fall out of touch accidentally. This goes for friends as much as it does for lovers.","completion":"Carrie: In The Sims, you used to get a reminder if your sim was letting a friendship die. How hard can it be to make one of those in real life? Carrie, in your book What Love Is: And What It Could Be, you talk a lot about neuroscience. Do you think brain scanning technology has changed our understanding of love? Could these tools enlarge our idea of what love is—and what it could be? Carrie: I am a fan of science. I think we should get all the information we can about what our brains are doing when we are in love—I’m not in the camp that sees this as destroying the “magic.” So far we have had many suggestive glimpses, thanks to the insight of researchers who appreciated the potential value of fMRI scans for illuminating the mechanics of love in the brain."}
{"prompt":"It’s important that we don’t over-interpret these glimpses, though—we are so incredibly far from having a complete understanding of how any human experience plays out in the brain, let alone something as nuanced as romantic love. But we’re getting important clues: for instance, studies suggest that there can be similar patterns of brain activation between certain kinds of love and certain kinds of chemical addiction.","completion":"In my work, I aim to place these insights into a philosophical context, so that while we marvel at love’s biology we don’t lose sight of the fact that it is also socially constructed. My dual-nature theory of love is designed to accommodate both at once. And, of course, the two interact. For example, the researchers wielding the tech—the ones designing our studies, and deciding what to look for in the first place—are themselves socially and culturally embedded creatures."}
{"prompt":"Ray: I wonder if brain-computer interfaces will one day help articulate love, in a parallel way to how typing may allow us to articulate love differently than we do verbally. Carrie: Seriously, though, why don’t we have flying cars? Is Logic working on that? How have digital technologies changed the sex lives of people who identify as disabled? Well, it’s important to start by stating that I cannot speak for all of those who live with disabilities. I am just a wheelchair-using person who has studied this for over a decade and wandered around talking to many disabled people about sexuality and sexual health.","completion":"So with that out the way: the internet has opened up so much social space, it’s remarkable. Disabled people have so many robust points of meeting on the web. One wonderful project is the Disability Visibility Project by Alice Wong, which is a fantastic example of how social media has created a source of community building through sharing information and connecting those who have disparate identities. She’s one of the many rockstars I consider friends, largely through our internet interactions. She was featured at the White House through a wheeling telepresence robot—she’s just that badass. I also created a project on Facebook called This is What Disability Looks Like, which shows the myriad permutations of disabled people."}
{"prompt":"The spread of knowledge about disability news and affirmations of disability identity via social media have produced profound shifts in my life. I wish I had the mental and physical support as a teenager in the 1990s that I have on the web now. I consider so many people my family that I have never met in person but have known for years. I’ve found intellectual stimulation and resources, as well as validation and camaraderie through social media. My chosen family has swelled in the past decade.","completion":"Could you give us some examples from your own life? I would be remiss if i did not tell the story of meeting my wife on Craigslist in 2009. It is so humorous that we met each other on the bathroom wall of the internet. I was seeking intellectual intercourse, and her friend found the ad and made her write me."}
{"prompt":"Online dating has been really useful for me, as it allows people to meet more than just my body right away. In many social settings, I am not read as a sexual being because I use a wheelchair. It’s a weird sedimented idea that people have around those of us with disabilities. Online dating allows for more chat up front, and it certainly weeds out the jerks who cannot handle disability in the first place. That is a kickass benefit of disability: it’s a good vetting tool.","completion":"But do the disabilities themselves still create obstacles to internet access? This is tricky, as access is still quite uneven on the web. For many folks with sight, hearing, cognitive, and physical disabilities, the web continues to present barriers. It is particularly troubling when federal or state websites do not conform to the law mandating access to the web, which is the Section 508 Amendment to the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. Often the most flagrant violators are universities and department sites that provide information on rights for people with disabilities."}
{"prompt":"What tools are available to help people with disabilities explore their sexuality online? Which ones do you like and dislike, and which do you wish existed? Teledildonics is a whole area that I find fascinating. Allowing people to engage with sex toys at a distance from each other is brilliant and creates the ability to have long- distance relationships while remaining sexually satisfied.","completion":"There are all sorts of exciting new sex toys. One of my favorites is the Womanizer and all of its knockoffs. Instead of pure vibration, this little number effectively sucks on the clitoris. It is a thriller, one that can lead to a clitoral orgasm in minutes—plus it is virtually hands free (an access bonus). I am always reading up on the best tools."}
{"prompt":"To pull back a bit, what even is sex? How do you define it? To be completely honest and thereby absolutely absurd, I use the Bill Clinton definition of sex in my personal life. But as a sex educator, I teach a much broader, more inclusive version. I am committed to teaching people about the spectrum of genders and sexual expressions that are available for us all to enjoy. One of my favorite pedagogical activities is teaching students what they can learn about their sex lives from disabled people—focusing quite a bit on the importance of communication, negotiation, lubrication, and intentional breathing.","completion":"Generally, I teach from Barbara Carrellas’ book Urban Tantra (2007) on specific types of breath, encouraging students to close their eyes and focus on their bodies. Over several years of perverting the minds of youth through sexual health lessons, my favorite experience was when a soon-to-be law graduate said he felt his penis tingling after the exercise. That kind of thing gives me so much joy it could almost go into my teaching definition of sex. It’s so broad, and it touches all aspects of life from the womb to the tomb."}
{"prompt":"In my personal life, I prefer to think about sex as genital contact with some kind of emphasis on connection. That is all blurry, and reminiscent of Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: “I know it when I see it.” I recognize that I am ridiculous, and I like it. How do we define which parts of a body are sexual or capable of sex? That depends on who the “we” is. It depends on a person’s sitpoint. In feminist theory there is the notion of standpoint—that one’s experience inevitably shapes their view of the world, and that being honest about identity and subjectivity actually strengthens research rather than biasing it.","completion":"Sex is so subjective. It has taken me years to stop using the term “asexual” to describe the social stigma around disability and sexuality, in which many of us with visibly apparent disabilities are considered “desexual” or lacking sexual interest. This shift in my understanding has come through knowing and learning from my asexual disabled comrades."}
{"prompt":"But every body part can be the hot spot. When I teach, I enjoy the practice of doing a pleasure blueprint. In essence, this entails going over the body of a lover and learning the topography of pleasure. Using different types of touch, tools (feathers to floggers), and pressure on the entire body yields wonderful results. So often we get caught up in genital-focused sex and do not realize the pleasure capacity of the entire body. After encouraging students to do this, I’ve discovered that people find the back of the knees or elbows particularly sensual. I really enjoy being bitten on my shoulders.","completion":"It’s a beautiful process to consider how the genitals do not need to be the focus of sex, particularly as the body ages and changes in sensate capacity. One of the leaders in my thought in this area is Rafe Biggs of the organization Sexability, who has talked about his sex life after a spinal cord injury. He speaks about how he can achieve an orgasm through the sucking of his thumb alone! I am married and monogamous but damn did I want to suck his thumb! The bodymind—the intersecting and connectedness of the body and mind—is truly powerful if we give ourselves the freedom to explore it."}
{"prompt":"Can you speak to that freedom a little bit? How do we find it? What are the forces that constrain it? We are socialized to be sexually silent, yet saturated with sexual expression. There is no real middle ground. There is so much sexual shame in US culture—it’s just sad. It also means that people like me, who dare to speak of sex professionally, are so desperately needed and frequently denigrated for being “perverse”—which truly should be read as a compliment. In my own sexual life, I found that being able to speak to my needs really changed my pleasure intake. Once I had the hutzpah to finally demand what I wanted, I had such better sex.","completion":"That is one of the most important lessons I try to teach people: say what you want so you can get it! I encourage folks to talk in the mirror and just start saying whatever they deem “uncomfortable words”—take the shock out of your voice through immersion. Going in deep helps the pleasure be more expansive."}
{"prompt":"Who gets to be sexual in our society? Whose sexuality is seen, and whose is not? It’s similar to the idea of human rights. We can ask, who is human enough for human rights? For the most part, those with disabled bodies or minds tend to be seen as outside the realm of normal or human. We face countless microaggressions, we are subject to violence (including murder) most often from those who “care” for us, and we experience tremendous levels of sexual and other violence. Like on Daria but not a cool way, it’s a sick sad world when it comes to the sexual understanding of disabled people.","completion":"Most of us are not seen as socially valuable, fuckable, or lovable. When people partner with us, they are questioned as either being pathological with disability fetishes or as saviors for giving up on their lives to be with us. More common is our lovers being read as caregivers or siblings. It’s a gross process that we have to go through."}
{"prompt":"Every single body is capable of and worthy of sexual expression and activity. Opening our minds about the confines of sex is the tool to understanding how we all can engage in pleasure giving and receiving. Thinking outside the box can help us get past the cultural garbage dumped all over our bodies and minds.","completion":"In 2008, an internet porn company called the Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network (AEBN) announced an innovative product that it promised would revolutionize how men masturbated. Dubbed the RealTouch, the device fit over the penis and connected to the user’s computer via USB. As the wearer watched videos specially encoded for use with the RealTouch, belts inside the machine spun and tensed, its heating elements warmed, and it dispensed controlled bursts of lubricant—all synchronized with the actions occurring onscreen."}
{"prompt":"Although the RealTouch initially worked only with pre-encoded videos streamed from the company’s servers, the addition in 2012 of the “JoyStick” controller allowed the user to be remotely manipulated in real time, typically by a female worker who connected through a network called RealTouch Interactive. In spite of several attempts at providing content that would appeal to gay men, AEBN targeted the RealTouch primarily toward heterosexual males.","completion":"By the end of 2013, the machine had begun to capture the public’s imagination, and started getting coverage in tech blogs. With the hype gaining steam, the RealTouch appeared poised to fulfill the lofty promises that had been made about cybersex ever since the writer Howard Rheingold popularized the term “teledildonics” in 1990 to envision the possibility of fully embodied computational sex—riffing on computer visionary Ted Nelson’s idea of “dildonics,” offered way back in 1974."}
{"prompt":"The apex—or climax—of the device’s popularity and public visibility came in January 2014, when the machine was featured in the HBO late-night documentary Sex/Now. For only $200—which included free credits for streaming encoded videos over the RealTouch servers, lubrication cartridges, and cleaning fluid—men could buy the device, described on its Amazon product page as a “High-tech Interactive Virtual Sex Simulator.” However, the same month it debuted on HBO, AEBN—mired in an increasingly expensive patent dispute over the product—halted production of both the RealTouch itself and the vital replacement parts required to keep the device functioning properly. Having sold off the remaining units, the company posted a eulogy for the device, beaming with pride at the RealTouch for “cementing its place in the history of adult entertainment.” It might be tempting to dismiss the RealTouch as another failed attempt at realizing the far-fetched and perpetually deferred fantasy of teledildonics, or to giggle at the absurdity of both the device and its users, or to condemn it as a participant in an industry that objectifies women. But indulging such impulses prevents us from understanding what the RealTouch was—and why it matters. As Marshall McLuhan eloquently put it, “resenting a new technology will not halt its progress.” The RealTouch wasn’t just a complex technical system—it was also an economic strategy and a set of social relations among networked subjects performing a new form of digitized sex work. Each of these factors—the machine’s mechanics, its economics, and its affiliated labor practices—were oriented toward the goal of creating the cybersexual real: the promise to replicate the feel of sex by stimulating the senses of seeing, hearing, and—most crucially—touch. AEBN’s engineers worked hard to build a machine that functioned so effectively that it would make the wearer feel as if they were penetrating “the mouth, vagina, or anus of a real human,” and the company frequently boasted of creating “the most lifelike simulation ever.”","completion":"Over the centuries, technological innovation has made it possible to automate the production of an ever-growing number of goods, from clothes to chemicals to cars. With the RealTouch, AEBN aspired to automate the production of male orgasms. You Can’t Pirate a Rollercoaster When AEBN first hatched the project, they had over 100,000 pornographic videos in their stable, spanning an impressively wide range of genres. Like others in the adult video industry, however, AEBN faced the threat of declining revenues due to unauthorized copying and downloading. The company had compounded the problem in 2006 when it launched the streaming site PornoTube, intended to be “the YouTube of porn.” PornoTube was supposed to encourage users to pay for online porn. Instead, it sparked a number of imitator sites, where people reposted paid content from AEBN. CEO Scott Coffman would later call the decision to start PornoTube “the worst thing I’ve done since I was in the adult business.” So when inventor Ramon Alarcon approached AEBN with a wooden prototype of what would eventually become the RealTouch, the company saw it as a potential salve for a wound that had been, to some extent, self-inflicted. Alarcon held a Masters in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford. He had spent eight months interning at NASA all the way back in 1993 and five years working for the Immersion Corporation, a company based in San Jose that had cemented its status as a leader in “haptics”—the use of computer-controlled mechanical cues to provide the illusion of touch."}
{"prompt":"Executed successfully, Alarcon’s idea could provide a way for the company to differentiate and defend its intellectual property: by layering touch sensations onto pre-existing audiovisual content, the RealTouch would add value to AEBN’s vast library of videos. As Coffman explained in a 2010 press release, by “delivering the sensory dimension of touch,” the touch-encoded videos streamed from the company’s servers would prove more resistant to piracy. “You can pirate the movie,” as Coffman put it, “but you can’t pirate the experience. It would be like trying to steal a roller coaster.” For the copy-protection scheme to succeed, however, AEBN had to entice potential customers to boldly take that first step onto the rollercoaster. At the Adult Entertainment Expo in 2009—the porn industry’s annual convention, piggybacked onto the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas each January—the company blitzed the showroom floor, with models pitching the machine as the next generation of online porn. AEBN touted the scientific sophistication of the design process, referencing Alarcon’s thin NASA credentials frequently, and featuring the machine’s use of haptic technology (defined as “the science of touch”) prominently in their marketing materials.","completion":"An interactive graphic on the RealTouch’s product site offered a peek inside the device, showing the separate mechanisms used to produce sensations of heat, lubrication, tightness, and friction. The core components were two spinning belts that simulated a human orifice. These were surrounded by “highly-specialized, custom-made material” that provided a “realistic texture,” making it “the closest thing to actual skin.” The exterior had a white-and-grey color scheme that echoed the visual aesthetics of the then-popular WiiMote videogame controller, positioning the RealTouch at the bleeding edge of technological advancement. In another promotional graphic, AEBN depicted the RealTouch at the end of an evolutionary chain of online porn. The implication was that adding the tactile dimension would make everything else seem primitive by comparison."}
{"prompt":"But the biggest selling point of the RealTouch had nothing to do with its physical properties. AEBN wasn’t just promising a pleasurable sexual experience, but an emotionless one. The company claimed that the sex provided by the RealTouch came without the perceived baggage, messiness, and uncertainty of interacting with a real flesh-and-blood woman. According to AEBN, men could order orgasms on-demand—without hazarding the complexities of intimacy, or the risk of rejection. In a promotional video, product manager Scott Rinaldo contrasted the perpetual willingness of the machine with the fickleness of a human romantic partner. “It never gives you an attitude,” he told his audience, “and it always says yes.” The Labor of Haptification The RealTouch’s financial success hinged on the willingness of users to shell out fifty cents a minute to stream touch-encoded videos. But haptifying AEBN’s vast library of videos was no small undertaking.  The company assigned the task to a handful of male coders, who moved scene-by-scene through each video. They imagined what each sexual act would feel like on their own genitals, and then translated those sensations into code using the Real Touch’s proprietary effects-editing software. The highly complex process required the coders to assign numerical values to each of the device’s mechanisms—the heating elements, the belts, and the lubricant dispenser—to create a tactile experience appropriate to the onscreen image. By manipulating the different components, the programmers emulated the sensation of a mouth, a vagina, or an anus.","completion":"According to “EJ,” a product manager for the RealTouch, the coders kept the machine on their desk when working. “By having a RealTouch available during the encoding of the movie, they could, in real time, adjust what command seemed to replicate the action on the screen,” EJ told me. They often left the guts of the device exposed, so that they could see the motion of the belts change as they manipulated the coding for a given scene. Blending effects drawn from a bank of over 200 different haptic “events”—pre-programmed combinations of values that produced specific actions—allowed the programmers to ensure that each scene provided the end user with a unique experience."}
{"prompt":"Enterprising coders “came up with ways to move the belts that weren’t even originally envisioned, just by tweaking the velocity and duration of the belt movements,” says EJ. Working in a sterile corporate cubicle farm, however, meant that the coders never tested scenes directly on themselves. Instead, they inserted their fingers into the machine to serve as a surrogate for their genitals.","completion":"Adding touch data to a sufficiently large body of content presented an immense challenge for the small team, as they embarked on an ambitious project with few precedents in the history of computing. But despite the device’s exoticism, coding for the RealTouch wasn’t all that different from working with normal video editing software. It could be routinized and mastered with enough training, allowing a skilled programmer to encode a five-minute video in roughly thirty minutes. By 2012, AEBN’s streaming library included over 1500 touch-encoded videos, organized both by category (“Big Tits,” “Teen,” “Blonde,” “M.I.L.F.”) and by sex act (“Blowjob,” “Doggy Style,” “Cowgirl,” and, of course, “Reverse Cowgirl”). Although the videos varied widely in content, they shared a first-person camera angle that provided a unifying visual aesthetic, aligning image, sound, and touch with the male actor’s perspective."}
{"prompt":"The repeated use of this first-person perspective required the coder to engage in an odd process of haptic identification. He had to imagine not just what the action onscreen felt like for the male actor, but also how the programmed scene would feel for the device’s wearer when the hardware enacted it. Sometimes, fidelity to the former frightened the latter. As one reviewer noted, “the ultra-faithful coding makes one thing abundantly clear—male pornstars’ penises do not receive gentle treatment from their female colleagues[…] It’s a full throttle sensory onslaught that’s almost a little scary.” At its core, the RealTouch aimed to automate the manual labor of male self-pleasure. For all its cutting-edge qualities, it belonged to a long tradition of devices that tried to mechanize masturbation, dating back to at least the nineteenth century, when doctors developed steam- and electricity-powered vibrators to treat “hysteria” by bringing female patients to orgasm. But the rhetoric of automation—frequently mobilized in the RealTouch’s promotional materials—concealed the immense amount of labor required to materialize the cybersexual real. The machine might have saved a lot of labor for its user, but it created a new, complex form of work behind the scenes. Or, as one commentator put it: with the RealTouch, “it takes a village to get you off.” Stroking From a Distance After several years in development, AEBN debuted the JoyStick controller for the RealTouch at a sex tech party thrown by the porn company Pink Visual near the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show. The controller allowed its operator to remotely manipulate the RealTouch, so that their movements would be felt in real-time by the device’s wearer. As the (typically female) operator stroked the JoyStick, sensors relayed the operator’s movements to the RealTouch, causing its belts to spin and its orifice to tighten in response.","completion":"The JoyStick was nothing short of a technological marvel. While the RealTouch represented an impressive first step, some people at AEBN felt that it should’ve been further refined before being released. The JoyStick, by contrast, embodied a half-decade of research and millions of dollars invested in development. The controller featured seven sensors distributed around a phallic computer-connected device, along with buttons that could be used to adjust the RealTouch’s temperature and lubrication."}
{"prompt":"The team that built the JoyStick consisted of five male engineers with training from a range of elite institutions, including Stanford and MIT. During the extensive design process, they experimented with over fifteen sensor placement configurations before arriving at a distribution pattern that allowed for precise, high-resolution control over the remote unit. Along the way, they overcame the monumental design challenge of building electro-capacitive sensors that would be capable of functioning in what EJ described as “wet environments”—the heavily lubricated orifice of the RealTouch—while still providing seven bits of resolution and refreshing forty times per second. The product’s success hinged on achieving a degree of fidelity that would convince the RealTouch wearer that the distance between him and the remote body manipulating the JoyStick had disappeared.","completion":"At launch, Rinaldo laid out a bold long-term vision for the system, claiming that the RealTouch/JoyStick pairing could allow couples in long-distance relationships to have more meaningful intimate encounters during their time apart. In a claim that quickly circulated on tech blogs, he promised “a thousand dildos for the military wives,” boasting that AEBN would eventually donate the product to US servicemen stationed abroad and their partners. Such a move, Rinaldo acknowledged, would’ve entailed a massive rebranding of the system: the RealTouch’s promotional materials would have to be “de-pornified,” and reoriented towards romantic, couple-centered imagery. It was a smart marketing ploy, but AEBN never put the resources into making it a reality."}
{"prompt":"While an extraordinary piece of technology, the JoyStick wasn’t just a device. It was also a business model. Immediately upon releasing the product, AEBN launched the RealTouch Interactive (RTI) Network to provide a system for monetizing it. The RTI Network consisted of hundreds of “cam girls”—women who perform paid live sex acts via webcam—willing to add touch feedback to their video streams with the JoyStick. To entice women to join the network, AEBN claimed that using the JoyStick would help them differentiate their video streams in a competitive marketplace. They would be able to form stronger affective bonds with their customers, and thus charge higher rates for their labor.","completion":"Dubbed “the world’s first digital brothel” by the tech blog Engadget, the RTI Network lured workers by promising to empower them. They could set their own rates and rules, and reap the benefits of a machine that fostered client satisfaction and loyalty. RealTouch’s official Twitter feed promoted members of the RTI Network, imploring customers to “pop” the “RealTouch cherry” of workers who were new to the network. AEBN ran the RTI servers, and provided the JoySticks for free to the cam workers—although the company took a cut of whatever revenue the women’s streams generated. Rates for oral sex ranged from $30 to $60, while a 30-minute session that featured full penetration cost as much as $219."}
{"prompt":"While Rinaldo had tried to pitch the JoyStick as a system that could provide pleasure for both participants, decisions made in the design process reflected AEBN’s strategy for commercializing the device. When asked why the initial version of the JoyStick lacked any sort of vibration feedback to stimulate the women who would be operating it, Rinaldo admitted that the device was built to be a gendered labor machine. He crudely explained that, for the cam girls, “their job is not to get off. Their job is to service guys all day.” A Girl in Romania Like its predecessor the RealTouch, the RTI Network commercialized the robotic production of male orgasms. But unlike the video-on-demand system, with its pre-encoded streams of haptic data, the RTI Network required touch sensations to be created dynamically in real time. Cam workers, then, were effectively doing the work that had formerly been executed by a small team of male coders—performing a mode of effects editing, configured by the material specifications of a machine interface that expressed a set of patriarchal power relations.","completion":"Authoring multimedia content always involves the fusion of authors with authoring tools, as creators work within the platform’s enabling constraints. The RealTouch was no exception: male coders, drawing from a bank of presets, drew upon their existing knowledge of effects-editing suites to develop new combinations of sensations. Female cam workers, building on their experience with previous forms of technologically-mediated sex work, could experiment with the device to see which actions resulted in the most positive responses from their male customers."}
{"prompt":"In the case of the male coders, however, their labor was defined by its invisibility and anonymity: neither the design team who worked on building the RealTouch nor the coders who haptified content for it were identified by name in the videos that featured their work. The LinkedIn page for Alarcon, the RealTouch’s inventor, contains no reference to his work on the RealTouch—except for a link to the patent “System and method for transmitting haptic data in conjunction with media data.” The female workers, by contrast, were defined by their spectacular visibility. They had to make themselves as seen as possible: not only by advertising themselves on the RTI Network, but by showing their naked bodies on camera. Moreover, the technology that configured the cam sessions enforced a unidirectional visibility: the woman operating the JoyStick could be seen by the remote male who donned the RealTouch, but the platform did not allow her to see him back.","completion":"She even lacked the capacity to sense the man’s level of arousal through the interface, so the user had to indicate it either through text-based chat, or by clicking one of five icons that showed the male sex organ at different stages of stiffness. To help the worker understand the relationship between her movements and the undulations of the remote RealTouch, an onscreen display represented the position and force of her body as it moved across the JoyStick, providing an oddly disembodied visualization of her interiority."}
{"prompt":"Sex, like computing, puts one body in a feedback loop with another. Each body sends signals to the other, and each modulates its actions accordingly. But with cybersex, which overlays the principles of computing onto sex, the feedback cues are configured by the interface’s materiality—a materiality itself configured by the surrounding economic system.","completion":"Within the enabling constraints of the RTI Network, the cam worker cultivated an intimate, cybernetic relationship to the sensors distributed throughout the device, to the algorithms that rendered her movements visible and tangible, to the latency of the network that transmitted her commands, and to the body of the subject that she labored on. Her labor generated revenue for AEBN, by producing a simulated sexual experience for a paying customer. But the simulation, for all its attention to realism, omitted a crucial aspect of sex. If sex involves two people both giving and receiving sensation, the RTI Network imposed a different division of labor: the female worker gave the sensation, and the male customer received it. This reflected AEBN’s vision for the future of technologized sex, articulated most pointedly by EJ in HBO’s 2014 Sex/Now feature: We’re going to take sex over the internet into the future. Sex over the internet started with still images, then you could download a video clip. So what is the next thing? The next thing is being able to actually have sex over the internet[…]We’ve always said that on that day when a girl in Romania can reach out and touch your penis, that’s the beginning of something completely new."}
{"prompt":"EJ expresses a variation on a familiar techno-utopian theme: networked digital technology will destroy the gap between bodies separated by geography, nationality, gender, class, and age. But this new proximity would come on very specific terms: the future will have arrived once the female can reach out to manipulate the male for his sexual pleasure, not for her own.","completion":"Although the company promoted the device using scientifistic jargon that suggested a devotion to achieving some absolute standard of fidelity to the haptic real of sex, the RealTouch Interactive produced instead a particular, heterosexual male fantasy of female sexuality—one where the female body was reduced to particular configurations of effects on the male sex organ. AEBN’s promise to recreate the real through a computer simulation was betrayed by the hard-coded materiality of interface—by the machine’s inability to send sensations back from the male to the female he was supposedly having sex with. The simulation, bound up with patriarchal ideologies of sex work, only stretched so far: a girl in Romania could reach out and touch the male, but the technology ensured that she couldn’t feel what she touched."}
{"prompt":"Reformatting Sex In the wake of the patent dispute that prompted AEBN to abandon the project, the RealTouch has enjoyed a curious afterlife. AEBN’s 2012 decision to strip the RealTouch of its Digital Rights Management opened up the device to user-generated content, spawning an active community that encodes videos using the OneTouch authoring platform. And a range of male-oriented toys similar to the RealTouch—such as the Vorze—have taken up its mission of synthesizing a cybersexual real by synchronizing visual, audio, and haptic data. Although AEBN shuttered the RTI Network in the fall of 2015, the age of internet-connected, remotely-controlled sex toys—playfully referred to as the Internet of Dildos—is only now beginning to take shape.","completion":"Dystopians will fret that this new mode of intimacy dehumanizes and degrades, reading the embrace of computer-mediated sexual touch as yet another indicator of humanity’s descent into machinic enslavement. Techno-utopians and transhumanists, building on Howard Rheingold’s original vision of teledildonics as a technology of liberation, will insist that telepresent sex provides a safe, transformational, and empowering alternative to the real thing.  By freeing the self from the constraints imposed by its environment, and by removing whatever limits the physical body places on an individual’s ability to experience their preferred form of sexual pleasure, teledildonics—as Rheingold imagined it—promised to wipe away the old model of sexuality, replacing it with a revolutionary mode of technologically enhanced sex that would be blissfully free from all the messiness that bodies brought with them."}
{"prompt":"One of the messiest bits of sexual contact between humans is its tendency to serve as a vector for the transmission of disease. It’s no accident that Rheingold’s proposal for a tool that would permit the sensations of real contact while shielding romantic partners from the deadly risks of skin-to-skin intercourse emerged in the Bay Area during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. With the computer acting as prophylactic shield, sex could be both pleasurable and disease-free.","completion":"Propagated in the psychedelic pages of the magazines Mondo 2000 and Future Sex, this networked sex would also throw the conventional borders of the body into disarray. What if, Rheingold speculated, you could “map your genital effectors to your manual sensors” so that it would be possible to experience “direct genital contact by shaking hands”? Such reconfigurations held the potential to revolutionize everyday interpersonal interactions: “What will happen to social touching when nobody knows where anybody else’s erogenous zones are located?” The transhumanist vision of sex, rejecting the binary opposition between humans and machines, embraces these creative augmentations and re-mixings of conventional intercourse, as it pushes for the further decoupling of sexual pleasure from procreation."}
{"prompt":"Although the “portable telediddlers” of Rheingold’s fantastical imagination have yet to achieve the ubiquity he forecasted for them, this future has arrived in scattered fragments, slowly remaking the world in far more pedestrian ways than an earlier era of cyberpunks had hoped. The RealTouch—one of the most fully realized implementations of teledildonics—demonstrates the technology’s potential, while also highlighting problems with its development that were invisible to the generation of cyber-utopians who peered into the future through the tint of mirrorshades.","completion":"Above all, the RealTouch represented the absorption of teledildonics into a system of capitalist exploitation and value-extraction. In spite of its technical sophistication, the device ultimately functioned as an economic machine—one that generated value for AEBN through the labor of the coders and cam workers tasked with producing the cybersexual real, while also expressing, in the configuration of the technology itself, a set of gendered power relations. Cutting through the marketing hype and moral panic, the RealTouch appears in retrospect neither dystopian nor utopian, but instead merely mundane and mechanistic—a one-way masturbation tool that required an immense amount of labor to engineer, enact, and sustain."}
{"prompt":"This piece includes material from Chapter Five (“The Cultural Construction of Technologized Touch”) of the author’s forthcoming book, entitled Archaeologies of Touch: Interfacing with Haptics from Electricity to Computing *(University of Minnesota Press, 2018). Scrolling through pictures, swiping right or left on a touchscreen, effortless and nearly instant contact in the event of a match… these are the experiences that define contemporary computer dating. But computer dating has been around for far longer than Tinder, Grindr, or even the personal computer.","completion":"The first computer dating systems looked something like this: Your preferences were written down, usually in questionnaire form. They were punched onto cards. You received a printout with addresses, so you could write to your matches. Or perhaps, if you were lucky, a phone number. No pictures, and no information about their preferences, were included."}
{"prompt":"The standard history of computer dating claims that it was invented, like so many other things, at Harvard University. By young people, of course, who were definitely men and, it seems to go without saying, white. In the 1960s, a computer dating service called Operation Match appeared to take the world by storm. It began by matching up students at Harvard, and then quickly moved on to advertising and selling its services nationwide—much like OkCupid and Facebook (which began life as Facemash, a Hot or Not knockoff) did decades later.","completion":"In popular lore, Operation Match and its founders created computer dating. This narrative gives the impression that it was young men like these, and their randy, envelope-pushing genius, that caused us to think seriously about the up-till-then preposterous idea of having sex with the help of cold, impersonal machines for the first time. As anybody who has ever seen a picture of an old vibrator in an early 20th century Sears Roebuck catalog knows, this was certainly not the case. But what many do not know is that the accepted history of computer dating is not true. Or, to put it more charitably: it’s a confection."}
{"prompt":"The prevailing account of computer dating’s origins is the same kind of stylized informational portrait that you might put up on an online dating website. It hides a lot and only shows the things that you think people want to see. Brilliant young men of privileged backgrounds taking a risk by applying machines to a realm about as far away from cold, hard, technological logic as you could get—this makes for a good story, and one which we are primed to hear, because it plays to our cultural expectations. Yet the real story, warts and all, is much more interesting. And it helps us understand why computer dating is what it is today—why we love it, loathe it, need it, and fear it in nearly equal measure.","completion":"No Meetcute In 1953 a young woman named Joan Ball stepped out of a mental hospital in England. Her mother had beaten her and ended up abandoning her—to say nothing of verbally and psychologically abusing her. When she ended up in the hospital, she found more of the same. In an era before mental illness was well-understood, and when young women were routinely incarcerated in mental hospitals for everything from sexual misbehavior to hysteria, many hospitals meant to serve the needs of the mentally ill were instead warehouses for people who—ill or not—had somehow stepped out of the bounds of social norms. Joan suffered physical abuse at the hands of her mother, who, it seems clear, was mentally ill herself. After struggling for years with a difficult home life, it was Joan’s eventual refusal to take further abuse that caused her mother to involuntarily commit her. Yet the hospital was so bad that once there, all she wanted was to go home. When she finally got out, however, there was no home for her to return to: she was no longer welcome in her parents’ home, and likely would not have wanted to go back even if they had agreed to take her."}
{"prompt":"Joan left the hospital disoriented and disheartened. At nineteen, she felt like her life might be over before it started, forever marked by the stigma of having been involuntarily committed. Fortunately, a work-placement program run by the hospital helped her get a job, and though she couldn’t return home, her Aunt Maud and Uncle Ted took her in.","completion":"The road ahead would not be easy. Always the class clown at school, Joan knew it was better to hide her insecurities and weaknesses than to ask for help. Joan could not read easily or write well, nor could she figure out numbers and arithmetic. She was smart but extremely dyslexic, at a time when dyslexia was mostly unknown—people called her stupid instead, if they had the chance. So Joan made sure they never did. Hiding her disability as she started work, Joan pulled herself up by her bootstraps, asking help from no one."}
{"prompt":"In the 1950s and 1960s, the culture of Britain was bottled-up and buttoned-down. The so-called “swinging Sixties” notwithstanding, London was a conservative place where women were not allowed to wear trousers to work without causing a scandal. Miniskirts might be all right, but letting women wear men’s clothes or do men’s work—running a business, for instance, or rising into management—was still outside the realm of respectability, and usually outside the realm of possibility, for most women.","completion":"This was why, after a few years working as a shop girl, Joan decided that she’d had enough. As a transitional move, she took a job at a “marriage bureau” (think non-computerized dating service) and, to her surprise, found that she had a great knack for pairing people up. A “people person” and quick study when it came to character, Joan found that when trying to make matches you didn’t ask people what they wanted in another person—you asked them what they didn’t want. The rest was negotiable. Within a few years, Joan decided to start her own marriage bureau."}
{"prompt":"Across the pond, at about the same time, the United States was undergoing a sexual revolution of its own. And, like the British one, its results for women were uneven. Yes, they now had the freedom of the birth control pill and the sexual empowerment of the miniskirt. But in many ways, women were objects, not subjects, of this new sexual paradigm shift.","completion":"Women’s bodies were even more likely to be represented as sex objects in advertisements or considered sex objects in their relationships. Suddenly, such behavior on the part of men was no longer considered boorish but in vogue and liberating. Hugh Hefner had made a career of acting like a boyish rake while being a full-grown man. Though some people were disgusted by this cultural turn, that disgust only fueled Hefner’s appeal in the eyes of young men looking to escape straight-laced suburbia and get what they thought the world owed them. This was the cultural message that many young men—and young women—were receiving from all sides. By the 1960s, Playboy was even on the shelves of the Harvard library."}
{"prompt":"As Playboy arrived at Harvard, three undergraduates were hatching a plan to score women without all the hassle of getting to know them first. Jeff Tarr, Dave Crump, and Vaughan Morrill (along with a Cornell dropout named Doug Ginsberg) had come to the conclusion that college mixers were “a particular social evil”—awkward events that were half cocktail party, half dance, and often all disappointment. What could be done to short-circuit this painful process of meeting women? One way would’ve been to integrate Harvard’s undergraduate spaces. In the 1960s, Harvard remained an all-male institution, with Radcliffe College as its all-female counterpart. Harvard students and “Cliffies” took classes together, but women were banned from Harvard’s undergraduate library and its dormitories. Even the dining halls were restricted: women could only enter escorted, and only at certain times.","completion":"But these three young Harvard men were opposed to integration. After all, that would just make the indignity of the coed mixer a daily occurrence. They needed to find another solution. Fake It ‘Til You Make It Despite being dyslexic, Joan Ball—like many smart people with disabilities—was extremely good at running a business. Her new marriage bureau flourished, even though the early 1960s was a difficult time for such an undertaking. So suspicious of sexual impropriety was “straight” society that most people assumed marriage bureaus were fronts for prostitution—companies that matched men and women for a fee sounded awfully suspect."}
{"prompt":"For this reason, Joan had a devil of a time advertising her new endeavor. No respectable newspapers wanted to publish ads for this unseemly type of establishment. So Joan used her creativity and went one better than print media. The people likely to use her service would already be somewhat edgy, and somewhat marginalized, so why not meet them where they were? That was how, in the mid-1960s, her ads ended up sailing across the airwaves, over the water, and illegally coming into the United Kingdom.","completion":"In the 1960s, all news media—and, by extension, entertainment—was regulated by the British government. In part an artifact of the war, and in part the historical result of a strong centralized government, media regulation restricted not just what was said on the BBC, but also what was sung and played. This meant no rock ‘n’ roll on the radio—or anything else that would be offensive to the (imagined) British public."}
{"prompt":"So an enterprising group of young people decided to set up their own radio stations and play the music they wanted to hear. These illegal pirate radio stations operated in defiance of the BBC, which put them at risk of being shut down by the government. This was how they ended up on boats off the coast of the British Isles, broadcasting from international waters.","completion":"The “pop pirates,” as they were called, transmitted from rickety ships that floated back and forth in the English Channel—sometimes just barely. Their weak signals (stronger at night due to lower interference) reached the radio sets of young and old Britons hungry for a new sound. The pirates’ broadcasts didn’t come for free, however. They needed funding to stay afloat—pun intended—and the best way to earn money was to advertise. And so they were more than happy to take Joan’s advertisements for a service that, if anything, matched their sensibilities and worldview."}
{"prompt":"Advertising with the pop pirates made a business that could’ve seemed like a sad last resort for the lovelorn seem new, edgy, and exciting. Joan’s business began to grow. But before long, it became clear that bespoke matchups couldn’t keep pace with her growing customer base. She needed something else.","completion":"False Firsts Back at Harvard, the young men were cooking up an idea for a business. Or rather, copying one. They had heard about computer dating systems in continental Europe. In a few Scandinavian countries, enterprising men and women with access to computers—often time-shared ones at local universities—had been arranging events where people were matched up according to their interests by computer, and then invited to a dance to meet their matches."}
{"prompt":"What if they did the same, but nixed the dance? They called their venture “Operation Match.” All they had to do was find a computer, and in the era of time-sharing, this wasn’t hard. Mainframes were huge and expensive, but they operated on a pay-to-play model. Timesharing allowed people to buy time to run their programs on a computer that they never would have been able to afford otherwise. (Much like we use the cloud today to do things that would be impossible using only the limited computing infrastructure that we personally own.) The three young men could outsource the coding of the program, and then buy time on a mainframe to run it. (Interestingly, when interviewed years later, none of the Operation Match founders could recall the name of the freelance programmer they actually hired to write the program, and as a result, there is no way of telling how—or if—the program actually worked.) They would distribute questionnaires about romantic and social preferences to their fellow students, then hire a team of “secretaries” to transfer the information onto punch cards to input the data into the computer. Finally, they would use their program to match customers up with each other.","completion":"Because it was Harvard, this seemed scampish and irrepressible rather than crude and sleazy. After all, if Harvard students were doing it, it must be smart—and it certainly couldn’t be disreputable. Their endeavor attracted publicity more because of who they were than because of what they were doing. The fledgling business got press not only from the campus newspaper and other local news sources—it also received free national advertising on CBS television, thanks to a fellow student’s family connection with the producer of the quiz show To Tell The Truth."}
{"prompt":"But, to tell the truth, long before Operation Match ever ran its first match-up program, Joan Ball had come to the conclusion that computers were the way of the future in dating. And not because there were too few prospects, but because there were too many. She needed help bringing people together in a logical way, at a large scale, so that they could go off and do illogical things at a small scale. She needed to balance the personal and the impersonal, the rational and the romantic, in order to make it work. So she started asking people to write down what they didn’t want—this time in a more rigid format that could be quantified. The rest, after all, remained negotiable. Despite the idea that computer dating was somehow “revolutionary” or only for the young, it was divorcees, widowers, and older unmarried people who mostly answered her call.","completion":"In 1964, Joan ran the first successful commercial computer dating match-up in either the UK or the US without all the fanfare later attached to Operation Match—but with more real-world success. Joan also took advantage of time-shared computer resources to run her program but, as in the case of Operation Match, the name of the programmer who coded it has been lost."}
{"prompt":"Yet Joan created the program, in the sense that she designed it and determined the logical flow of how it worked. It would not focus on matching people up through their similarities, but rather according to what they did not want. In other words, her program took strong negative feelings into account first when determining matches.","completion":"It seemed to work. In fact, Joan’s first run at computer dating was so commercially successful that she immediately changed the name of her business from the Eros Friendship Bureau to the St. James Computer Dating Service. The name change trumpeted the importance of computing to her service at a time when this sort of futuristic take on romantic match-ups could still well have been a business risk."}
{"prompt":"By 1965, she had changed the name again to fully reflect her computer-centric model: Com-Pat, short for “computerized compatibility,” was born. Joan initially ran what she called the “Com-Pat I” program, the first iteration of the software. It was successful, but like any good systems analyst, she saw room for improvement. By 1970 “Com-Pat II” was using better data, a larger user pool, and incorporating what Ball had learned from tweaking version 1.0 over the course of several years.","completion":"About a year after Ball began her computer dating service, Operation Match ran its first program to match up men and women. The many college students who applied, both at Harvard and at other universities, received letters with the names and contact information of all of their matches. But Operation Match was unsustainable. Even with the free national publicity they had gotten, the three undergrads had underestimated the amount of work, time, and trouble that the business would require."}
{"prompt":"Getting women by computer was a lot harder than they had hoped. Soon it wasn’t fun anymore. As the shock value wore off, and Operation Match became just another business, its reason for existing—to find its founders dates—evaporated. It shut down after a few years, and the young men moved on to other pursuits more in line with their middle-class upbringings and their Harvard pedigrees.","completion":"Before they closed Operation Match, however, a visitor from the UK heard about them. John Patterson had recently graduated from the University of London with a degree in mechanical engineering. Unsure of what he wanted to do with his life, he left England for America, and while visiting friends at Harvard, he learned about computer dating. It might’ve been Operation Match, or it might’ve been another computer dating service that had sprung into existence on campus at about the same time. Nevertheless, Patterson was hooked. He knew what he wanted to do now and he felt sure he could make a lot of money doing it."}
{"prompt":"Sex Ex Machina The 1960s had been good for Joan Ball, but by the early 1970s, things started to fall apart. Ball was a working-class girl from hardscrabble East London, and lacked the safety net that her more affluent contemporaries enjoyed. With no one to bail her out in times of scarcity, little stood between success and disaster.","completion":"The UK was in an increasingly grim economic situation. The pound had been devalued several times, and despite assurances from the government that the economy was on the mend, it didn’t feel that way to most workers or small-business owners. Wracked by national strikes and widespread discontent, the nation literally shut down for a time when coal miners’ work stoppages resulted in such a shortage of fuel that neither government nor industry could function."}
{"prompt":"In the midst of this, Com-Pat’s telephone number got misprinted in the telephone directory, which severely damaged the business until the mistake could be corrected. Worse yet, one of the major newspapers that carried Com-Pat’s ads suddenly decided to change its advertising policy and drop them. So imagine Joan’s horrified surprise when she entered the London Tube one day to see ads for a computer dating service plastered on the train. A new company called Dateline had burst on the scene—and computer dating was about to change dramatically.","completion":"John Patterson made a big splash with Dateline. He had several advantages: he both learned from his predecessors’ mistakes and benefited from their innovations. By the time Dateline came along, companies like Com-Pat had already softened the resistance of advertisers to the idea of computer dating and helped sell the public on the concept."}
{"prompt":"Patterson wasted no time in using this cultural capital, immediately positioning his service as a kind of sex ex machina. While Com-Pat ran advertisements that promised people would meet their “true match,” Dateline ran ads that positioned their service as an “adventure.” Patterson’s questionnaires had more to do with sexual preferences and sexual compatibility than Compat’s personality-based approach.","completion":"When he got flack, Patterson doubled down, creating another service that was even more sexually explicit in its questions. That service asked users how sexually experienced they required their partners to be, along with which specific sex acts customers had engaged in previously, and which ones they wished to perform in the future."}
{"prompt":"Yet when asked for details on how his service worked, Patterson shrugged off the question. He told the London Times in 1972 that even if his clients had nothing else in common, at least they had in common the fact that they had all joined Dateline. But had they? In 1969 he was arrested and convicted of fraud and conspiracy for trying to sell a list of young women to men who were looking for prostitutes. Patterson assured the men that all of these women were “good to go.” Whether these women had signed up for his service, or whether he had simply collected their names out of the phone book, was unclear. What was clear was that the women did not know he was using their names in this fashion.","completion":"Though Patterson was convicted and somewhat disgraced, this setback didn’t deter him. But it didn’t seem to teach him much, either. Throughout its existence, a veneer of sleaze plagued Dateline. Women customers often complained of being matched up with men they had nothing in common with, or whose questionnaire preferences were in direct opposition to theirs. This was ironic, considering how thorough Patterson’s questionnaire was—it asked people for information that would be “Big Brother’s Dream,” in the words of the Times of London. By contrast, Joan Ball’s more conservative and much shorter questionnaire seemed to result in better matches."}
{"prompt":"Ball had continued to struggle as Britain became mired in the economic stagnation of the 1970s. Her business, which focused on a smaller, more curated pool of users than Patterson’s, became increasingly hard to sustain. Patterson was a shrewd businessman and a smart promoter, and Dateline grew by leaps and bounds after its initial troubles. Ball, meanwhile, was sidelined with both personal problems and debt. Soon, she wanted out.","completion":"Ball and Patterson had met each other—they had been on television together and were always interviewed for the same newspaper stories about computer dating. Ball was Patterson’s only real competitor, and he knew her business was sound. So when Ball called Patterson one day in 1974 and offered him the opportunity to buy her business on the condition that he pay the £2000 of debt that Com-Pat had accrued as part of the deal, Patterson took a taxi across London in a flash to sign the papers."}
{"prompt":"All’s Well That Ends From there, Ball went on to other pursuits and much self-reflection. Though she had run a business to make other people happy, she wasn’t very happy herself. Finally diagnosed late in life with dyslexia, she felt relieved to know her inability to write or to do math wasn’t a character flaw. Still, she felt as though she had spent her life hiding her shortcomings. She had been locked in an “emotional dungeon” of her own making, as she put it, even while she ran a business that helped other people escape theirs. Ever independent, and refusing to marry despite having long romantic relationships with men, Ball was the prototypical “new woman.” Unfortunately for her, she came on the scene about a decade before women like her were culturally accepted.","completion":"Patterson, for his part, continued on to great success. To this day, Dateline is the longest-running computer dating service in the Anglo-American world. When Patterson died he was a millionaire many times over, and had been married several times. It was one of his ex-wives who found him in his bathtub, dead of complications related to alcoholism, in 1997 at the age of fifty-two."}
{"prompt":"Good Ol’ Fashioned Computer Dating From Joan Ball to the Operation Match partners to John Patterson, the real story of computer dating is evolutionary rather than revolutionary. The most successful computer dating entrepreneurs understood that their businesses entrenched existing norms rather than overturned them. Ball’s Com-Pat succeeded early on in large part because it did not push people outside of their comfort zone—it simply gave them what they wanted and expected in a more efficient way. Likewise, Patterson’s Dateline came on the scene at a time in the swinging Sixties and Seventies when people were already apt to be more adventurous—and open to accepting a higher level of risk in their dating lives.","completion":"Mainframes made matches but they also made mincemeat of people’s hopes, in much the same way that apps and online dating sites do today. One 1960s-era computer dating service sent its own employees out on dates with women, and had the men propose to their unsuspecting marks, because the company’s business model did not require women to pay until after getting a marriage proposal. Within the past few years, OkCupid has admitted to experimenting on its users, matching them up randomly in order to see if the company’s algorithm actually worked any better than random pairings."}
{"prompt":"Earlier computer dating companies were the subject of numerous complaints to the British fair trading practices bureau, as well as to American better business bureaus. Complainants, who were mostly women, reported that computer dating services did not work, or that they took their money without sending them out on dates, or that they intentionally matched up incompatible people just for profit. There were also, of course, more serious charges that involved physical and sexual assault. Technology is only ever as good as the social context that creates it—and sometimes it is much worse.","completion":"The most revolutionary elements of dating technologies—like instantaneous online communication or millions-deep user pools—did not come until much later. But this mattered little since these innovations still masked socially regressive norms. Ball’s service explicitly did not match up people of different races or religions. Patterson’s service sometimes did, but only due to “glitches” in the software. It often provoked customer complaints. Today, computer dating is still mired in the social strictures that govern “real-life” dating—most online dating sites focus on matching like with like and many even collect homogeneous user groups (think eHarmony.com) to further ensure that outcome."}
{"prompt":"In that sense, early computer dating has much in common with today’s technologies. The birth of computer dating didn’t demolish social conventions so much as it reinscribed them into a new technological order. Heteronormativity, sexism, racism, classism, and capitalism have played a much larger role in computer matchmaking’s  history than technological breakthroughs.","completion":"The fact that these aspects of computer dating’s origins have been largely submerged says as much about what we want as about what the technology’s pioneers actually did. We see early computer dating as quaint, impossibly utopian, or revolutionary not because it was, but because we want it to be. Seeing it this way helps us maintain the fiction that technology, rather than law or government, is the most important factor in creating social change."}
{"prompt":"Like our online matches, we want our history not to upset our expectations or our worldview. We want progress to be the result of discrete inventions, rather than the outcome of the messy process of trying to integrate the technical with the social. We wish computer dating would deliver on its promise to solve one of life’s great struggles. But as anyone who has ever shopped for companionship by computer knows, the truth always leads somewhere different than the fiction invited us to go.","completion":"Knowing the real history of computerized dating helps us see that this messiness is nothing new: using a computer to solve loneliness was always fraught and complicated. Perhaps this makes us feel—as we sweatily swipe left on another face in the wee hours of the morning—that we aren’t so alone after all. We are not living through a disruption or witnessing a break from the past so much as we are participants in a longer techno-emotional history that existed before we were born and will continue after we are dead. Computer dating may seem new, but in fact it has been around, warts and all, for more than half a century now. It’s time we updated its profile a bit."}
{"prompt":"“That’s right, little circles… That feels good. Don’t stop…” A sultry voice guides me as I make looping strokes on my MacBook Air Multi-Touch Trackpad with my fingertip, sending corresponding ripples across the lifesize vulva on the screen. I trace rings on the Trackpad and the voice coos, “Yeah, little circles around my clit. Mmmmmmm.” Risking carpal tunnel syndrome, I’ve spent hours stimulating virtual vulvas on OMGYes.com, a website that aims to “lift the veil on women’s sexual pleasure,” as explained on its landing page in elegant neutral shades. The company was founded in Berkeley by a pair of friends, a self-described straight man with a background in neuroscience and public health (Rob Perkins) and a lesbian artist (Lydia Daniller), who partnered with researchers at Indiana University and the Kinsey Institute to design a sex-education platform “distilling the insights of over 2000 women, ages 18-95, into open, honest videos of everyday women sharing from experience—no blushing, no shame.” OMGYes wants to help women and their partners understand their bodies, what gives them pleasure, and how to get it—how to “make a good thing even better.” It launched in December 2015 with private funding, and it currently has 125,000 subscribers who pay $29.99 for a year’s unlimited access to the site.","completion":"The debut “season” of OMGYes focuses on techniques of genital touch divided into twelve episodes. In a series of short videos, approachable, articulate, and racially diverse women describe their erotic preferences. Then, in a second set of videos, they demonstrate how they masturbate while narrating to the camera. Flattering mid-angle shots alternate with extreme close-ups. Each episode emphasizes a particular technique—“edging,” “hinting,” “signaling,” or “orbiting,” for example. These videos are followed by OMGYes’s killer app: eleven interactive screens displaying digitized recreations of individual women’s vulvas. The viewer uses the mouse to stroke, rub, and caress in specified patterns while coached by the voice of the woman whose nether regions he or she is manipulating."}
{"prompt":"Although users receive real-time feedback, it’s all recorded content, not live-camming. And while the screens display the patterns of touch traced by the user’s mouse, they can’t offer true tactility or texture, which would tip the experience closer to realism. The feedback loop is limited to verbal commands and touch: all the other bodily cues used to communicate during sex are missing, although many of the women discuss body language in their videos. Still, OMGYes pointedly states that it uses 256-bit encryption: “We pride ourselves on not even storing any personal information of our users.” OMGYes is among the most high-profile of several female-centered “sextech” platforms whose mission is “demystifying” female sexuality. These include HappyPlayTime (“Making Female Masturbation Friendly”), PlsPlsMe (“A Sexy Game for Making Intimacy Fun”), O.school (“a shame-free platform for pleasure education, centering women and gender-diverse people”), and others in the works such as the Lioness vibrator (“empower[ing] women to learn about their own bodies and… break longstanding taboos around female sexuality”).","completion":"OMGYes and its peers hope to enlighten their users about sexuality through “hands-on” virtual platforms. But in the case of OMGYes, that platform is web-only: there is no mobile app. This is the case for many sextech platforms, since Apple’s “Objectionable Content” code bans: Overtly sexual or pornographic material, defined by Webster’s Dictionary as “explicit descriptions or displays of sexual organs or activities intended to stimulate erotic rather than aesthetic or emotional feelings.” Who is to say which feelings—erotic, aesthetic, or emotional—are aroused in users who gaze between a pair of spread legs and attempt to please a virtual woman? Are erotic, aesthetic, and emotional feelings mutually exclusive? And where is the line between explicitly and suggestively sexual? These I-know-it-when-I see-it judgment calls by big tech companies are only one of many institutional obstacles facing sextech entrepreneurs. Others include the difficulties of attracting VC funding and advertisers—currently, OMGYes only advertises on Facebook—and convincing banks and credit card companies to process payments for a product that might be perceived as pornographic."}
{"prompt":"Don’t Overthink It Despite the challenges, sextech has the potential to be big business. The VC fund 500 Startups estimates that it’s a $30.6 billion field—although what qualifies as sextech is up for debate. As Kate Bevan points out in Wired, “it’s unclear at what point sex toys and devices become sextech.” Indeed, OMGYes cofounder Perkins bristles at the term. He is keen to distinguish the site from porn and smart sex toys such as the We-Vibe (the vibrator company that recently reached a $3.75 million class action settlement with users over allegations of spying), and he considers other sextech ventures to be “separate from the real, vulnerable bedroom sex we each actually have and all the associated feelings and complexities.” One of the ways OMGYes tries to capture those “feelings and complexities” is through pop psychology and self-help lingo. Its episode on “Framing,” for example, tackles what D. H. Lawrence called “sex in the head”: an overly self-conscious approach to sex. “For many women,” OMGYes explains, “thinking about getting to orgasm can make it impossible to get one.” OMGYes takes its own advice: it never overthinks. There is a mood of gentle humor throughout. The women speak in tones that are slightly neurotic but always soothing. In the episode “Signaling,” one woman reminds us to keep things light: “This is not mathematics… It’s sexy time.” All of the advice is smoothed out, generalized, and conventional. There’s nothing kinky about any of it. The women talk about awkwardness around sex, but they are relentlessly upbeat. And they never broach the more serious reasons women might have sexual discomfort, such as assault, shame, or other kinds of trauma.","completion":"Even the centerpiece of the OMGYes experience—the touchable interface—is distinctly unkinky. Perkins and Daniller decided that the “encounter” between OMGYes’s users and the site should feel like a friend sharing information rather than a dynamic between lovers. (“Aesthetic or emotional” versus “erotic” feelings, to borrow Apple’s distinction.) Moreover, the designers purposefully avoided narratives of gaming that are organized around a player striving to “score” or win. (The “mindful game” app La Petite Mort is an intriguing contrast, as its users touch abstract, pixelated vulvas to produce climaxes.) With OMGYes, there are no bells or whistles to indicate orgasm. Users know they’ve been successful when the woman sighs and the screen closes out."}
{"prompt":"But the mechanics of the technology are undeniably impressive: after you get over the initial surprise and weirdness of being up close and personal with a stranger’s labia rendered in such high resolution that it verges on the uncanny valley, the interface is actually quite inviting. It took Perkins, Daniller, and their team years to get the touchable screens right. The pipeline involved an unusually intimate and trusting collaboration among engineers, photographers, and the women who are the stars of OMGYes. The interactive genital screens started as thousands of still photographs of women touching their vulvas in different ways. Then the women recorded audio feedback that was mapped to many possible touch inputs.","completion":"So, for example, when a user accurately follows the motions that the woman suggests, they get a positive verbal response: “That feels good.” When the user is a bit off-base, an encouraging, constructive voice makes suggestions: “Try going slower.” (A helpful graphic pops up to show the direction and placement of the touch.) An erratic or aggressive touch elicits a sharper response: “Careful, too fast.” If the user persists—and it takes quite a bit of deliberate misconduct to get to that point—the woman’s voice eventually says, warily, “Okay,” and her hand descends to cover her genitals, and the screen closes out. It’s a surprising moment of consent education between a real user and a virtual presence, and a commendable feature in a platform that otherwise strives for an I’m-okay-you’re-okay vibe."}
{"prompt":"The Unfinished Revolution OMGYes has been met with mostly positive press. Peggy Orenstein, author of Girls & Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, plugged OMGYes on Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle website Goop, praising it as a tool for “orgasm equality.” The actress Emma Watson enthusiastically told Gloria Steinem about OMGYes onstage at a talk in London. This year OMGYes is a finalist for two Webby awards, in both the “Health” and “Weird” categories. And The Times of London placed OMGYes at the forefront of “the next wave of an unfinished sexual revolution.” Unfinished? Sure, there’s the stubborn gender wage gap and the continued division of labor in which women still do most of the world’s unpaid work, but didn’t second-wave feminism already “lift the veil on women’s sexual pleasure”? Wasn’t that a cornerstone of 1970s consciousness raising, of women sharing books such as The Boston Women’s Health Book Collective’s Our Bodies, Ourselves (1971), Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex (1972), The Hite Report on Female Sexuality (1976), and Betty Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation (1974) and Sex for One (1987)—all of which encouraged women to get to know their bodies and claim reproductive and erotic agency? If women’s sexuality and “the uses of the erotic as power” (as Audre Lorde put it in her essay by that title) were priorities in second-wave feminism, what happened? Why are the phrases that OMGYes uses on its site, such as the “the taboo around women’s pleasure” and “the complexity” of female sexuality, still resonant in 2017? Why is there even a market for sextech products such as OMGYes? Forty years after feminist sex education of the 1970s, the “problem” of women’s sexuality persists, apparently, but it has a new name: the “orgasm gap.” To be sure, ever since sexologists such as Masters and Johnson studied men and women’s orgasms, there has been a marked differential. Indiana University’s 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior found that 91 percent of men reported that they had an orgasm during their last sexual encounter, but only 64 percent of women could say the same. Elisabeth A. Lloyd’s study The Case of the Female Orgasm: Bias in the Science of Evolution concludes that a third of women never orgasm during intercourse. The picture becomes more telling once the data is broken down: lesbians do substantially better in the orgasm stakes than straight or bisexual women. Culture, more than nature, is at the root of the orgasm gap.","completion":"But while the underlying asymmetry isn’t new, the phrase “orgasm gap”—which has been trending vigorously since 2011—implies that women’s sexual pleasure is a problem of economic scarcity and competition. Sociologist Paula England insists that the “orgasm gap is an inequity that’s as serious as the pay gap, and it’s producing a rampant culture of sexual asymmetry.” Whether or not that’s true, sextech and Big Pharma have both been eager to capitalize on the idea that women are in need of some serious orgasmic intervention."}
{"prompt":"Why does female sexual pleasure continue to be framed as an enigma, a challenge, a gap, a “cipher,” as Annamarie Jagose has described the twentieth-century representation of orgasm in her book Orgasmology? Why, many decades after second-wave feminism, are women still contending with obstacles to sexual pleasure? Why are some still faking orgasms, contributing anonymous confessions about their troubled sexual history to the Tumblr page howtomakemecome, and seeking out sextech solutions? OMGYes explains it like this: “complexity gets confused for ‘unknowability,’” women’s sexuality hasn’t been sufficiently researched, pop culture spreads misinformation, “there’s no specific, reliable source of information,” and there isn’t yet a sufficient shared language about women’s sexuality. In keeping with its buoyant approach, OMGYes does not mention the orgasm gap statistics. It is also careful not to fetishize orgasm as the only goal—instead, orgasm is one possible event in a broader spectrum of sexual pleasures. And yet the business clearly benefits from the panic around the orgasm gap: despite OMGYes’s cheery tone, it is widespread anxiety about female sexual pleasure that draws users to the site.","completion":"A Public Health Crisis Sextech capitalizes on the market opportunity created by the failure of two vital cultural forces—feminism and sex education—to harness technology. Second-wave feminism promoted the organic, the natural, and the bodily: the classic exploratory technique in the 1970s involved putting a hand mirror between one’s legs. The birth control pill and legalized abortion revolutionized sexual practices, but mainstream feminism did not make technology a central part of its own innovations until relatively recently. When Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto appeared in 1984, it was an academic novelty, far ahead of its time."}
{"prompt":"Sextech may help fill the void left by second-wave feminism’s aversion to technology, but it’s careful to avoid the term. Sextech ventures typically do not advertise themselves as feminist or use the language of feminism in their mission statements. OMGYes steers clear of the word “feminism,” Perkins tells me, because it doesn’t want to “limit” its audience, which it claims is 50% women and 50% men. If those statistics are accurate, then OMGYes has attained a gender balance that neither pornography nor sex education have achieved.","completion":"American sex education hasn’t kept pace with the technological savvy of the students it addresses. It continues to be taught in public schools through teacher-led face-to-face group conversations about the birds and the bees, usually with boys and girls separated. But sex ed is not only low-tech—it’s also astonishingly low-content. Only thirteen states require that curricula be medically accurate. While Obama had moved to defund abstinence-only programs, they remain firmly in place."}
{"prompt":"The notion that sex might be fun barely registers: although UNESCO’s 2009 guidelines for sex education states that fifteen to eighteen-year old students should learn “key elements of sexual pleasure and responsibility,” recent surveys in the US, the UK, and Australia have demonstrated that students in those countries rarely emerge from sex ed with adequate guidance about sex as a practice of pleasure. Inevitably, lackluster sex education seems to have impacted women much more than men. The Guardian’s series “The Vagina Dispatches,” one of numerous recent demonstrations of the general public’s pitiful knowledge about women’s sexual anatomy, reported that “just half of women aged 26-35 were able to label the vagina accurately.” Given the pathetic state of sex education, the porn industry has become the default sex-ed provider, making full use of the digital resources neglected by the traditional sex-ed system. With its unprecedented level of accessibility, internet porn is a primary source—some say the primary source—of information about sex for audiences it was never meant to reach, including children and teens. Porn has essentially become a 24/7 X-rated MOOC (Massive Open Online Course). Perhaps the most convincing contemporary critique of it is that it is distorting expectations about sex—some critics have even gone so far as to declare online porn a “public health crisis.” The adult entertainment industry has responded to the charge by initiating its own sex-ed modules. xHamster, for example, offers a sex education series called “The Box,” and Pornhub has launched a “Sexual Wellness Center” portal.","completion":"Sextech ventures, for their part, are challenging the adult entertainment industry’s de facto monopoly on sex education—but they insist on distinguishing themselves from porn. One of the ways they do this is by brandishing data: sextech sites sport diagrams, graphs, and charts to lend their activities a semblance of scientific legitimacy. OMGYes’s “Orbiting” episode, for example, presents multiple infographics and identifies dozens of ways to circle—“tight orbits,” “searching with circles,” “off-center,” “occasional direct swipe,” “accenting on the clock,” “inward on the borders,” “tall ovals,” “widening ovals,” “soft-hard figure 8,” and so on—along with a grid breaking down the preferences of women in a study led by Indiana University sex researcher Debby Herbenick."}
{"prompt":"By showing off scientific data and credentials, sextech tries to position itself in the health and wellness industry—while striving to make its offerings sexier than the typical sex-ed curriculum. Offline, OMGYes’s Rob Perkins refers to its offerings as “tutorials,” but the site itself uses the language of pop-culture television and podcasts: “seasons” and “episodes.” Herbenick makes a couple of cameos in videos buried in OMGYes’s “Research” section, but its foregrounded voices belong to the “everyday” women themselves, who speak from the same tentative place of curiosity and exploration that the company is trying to model for its users. There’s just enough science to provide credibility, but not too much to be oppressive: OMGYes aims for approachability above all.","completion":"Reform or Revolution While OMGYes might seem to be selling Cosmo-style secrets of sex or groundbreaking data-driven discoveries about female anatomy, its main takeaways are actually quite simple. Women and their partners should get to know their bodies and learn how to communicate, verbally and physically, about desire. Communication doesn’t just mean talking, however, but figuring out what words mean: the OMGYes team told me that the first big discovery in their interviews with women was that “that feels good” means “don’t stop or change.” A pretty basic insight. “If there’s a ‘Jedi skill’ in the bedroom,” the OMGYes site reminds us, “it’s this ability to give and read feedback in real-time to constantly adjust and hone in on what feels best.” OMGYes is not the only sextech company making the unsurprising assertion that good communication skills are important in sex. It’s also the premise of PlsPlsMe (“Among all the findings, we found out that 1 out of 3 Americans wish it was easier to communicate their sexual desires, and more than 50% of adults wished society was more open to sexual exploration”) and Cindy Gallop’s MakeLoveNotPorn.tv (“It’s all about communication.”) This emphasis on communication comes straight out of second-wave feminism. In fact, most of sextech’s insights about female pleasure date back to the feminist explorers of sexuality in the 1970s. Second-wave feminists promoted “body education” by encouraging women to discover their anatomy through mirrors, masturbation, and grassroots information about arousal, birth control, and reproductive rights. They also urged women to discuss both their negative and positive feelings about their bodies and their sexuality. Our Bodies, Ourselves epitomized this approach. It originated as a pamphlet, “Women and Their Bodies,” published in 1970—when abortion was still illegal in the United States—that blamed society for estranging women from their sexuality. Dropping some Herbert Marcuse on their readers, the Boston Collective authors assert:"}
{"prompt":"Society has caused the alienation of a woman from her body… Our sexual experience is so privatized that we never find out that other women have the same problems we do. We come to accept not having orgasms as our natural condition. We remain ignorant about our own sexuality and chalk it up to our own inadequacies.","completion":"While sextech ventures use snappier and less earnest language, they are working with the same legacy. As Ann Friedman observed in New York Magazine, “OMGYes is not a huge departure from the work of pioneering feminist sexologists like Betty Dodson”—only “the interface is more modern, the packaging more slick.” So in stroking virtual vulvas, am I an orgasm warrior storming the barricades under the banner of the sextech revolution? Is sextech a resurgence of feminism through “disrupting” orgasms? Not exactly. The modern interface and shrewd packaging aren’t the only differences between sextech and second-wave feminism—the politics are different too. Second-wave feminists didn’t just rage against women’s alienation from their bodies, they also clearly identified the culprits: capitalism, patriarchy, and the American legal and medical establishments."}
{"prompt":"Sextech, by contrast, steers clear of this radical message. Some sextech looks radical, but it essentially rephrases watered-down feminist insights for a general audience, and musters new data in order to teach old-fashioned communication skills. At its best, sextech treats women’s sexuality not as a pathology requiring medication (e.g., the dismal “female Viagra” that hit the American market in 2015), but rather as a product of cultural conditioning and education. But sextech remains deeply individualist—it styles itself as neoliberal self-help rather than as an instrument of social transformation. And its ambitions are modest: OMGYes and other platforms aim at incremental sexual reform versus sexual revolution.","completion":"As a counterpoint, it’s useful to consider one of the pioneers of sextech, and sexual revolution: Wilhelm Reich. Reich’s visionary, utopian, and at moments utterly barmy schemes were predicated on Marxist politics. Reich preached the power of sex and libido as a source of “bioenergy” in his work The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy (1927). His Sexual Revolution (1936) made the case that political-economic formations, whether authoritarian or capitalist, relied on sexual repression to keep people in line. The patriarchal family structure “dammed up” libidinal energy as a means of social control."}
{"prompt":"Reich saw this orgasmic or “orgone” energy as a potentially revolutionary force. He consequently devised the “orgone energy accumulator” box, which was supposed to increase biopower, “potency,” and cure physical and psychological illness. The design of the orgone accumulator was crude: Reich’s blueprints call for the construction of a large pine box—a “collapsible cabinet”—lined with layers of steel and glass wool. While William S. Burroughs claimed to have experienced a spontaneous orgasm while in his orgone box, Reich expected its effects to be more mundane. He instructed users to do “daily, regular sittings” in the box for limited periods of time as sensations of warmth flowed through them—a bit like a charging station for an electric car.","completion":"The orgone accumulator is laughable from an engineering point of view, but it was immense in its ambitions. If sextech ventures like OMGYes take a reformist approach, hoping to educate people about sexuality to produce better sexual outcomes, Reich called for full-scale revolution, using sexual energy to destroy capitalism. His endgame wasn’t merely the hedonistic pursuit of individual pleasure, but the dismantling of the entire traditional Western family structure, the patriarchal social order, and the conditions of capitalist production."}
{"prompt":"Sextech, like porn, monetizes the orgasm. For Reich, however, the orgasm wasn’t a commodity—it was a weapon. It held the power to demolish the old world and build a new one in its place. It promised not only sexual liberation, but the liberation of humanity as a whole. Sextech doesn’t begin to approach the utopian intensity of Reichian revolution. But in the age of Trump, sexual reformism might be the best we can get. To give OMGYes and its sextech peers the benefit of the doubt, they are drawing attention to the pressing need for new modes of sex education. This is important work, especially as we enter a regressive political moment when the technologies and social movements that made sex for pleasure possible are under threat.","completion":"Legalized abortion is at the top of Trump’s hit list. Non-discriminatory policies protecting LGTBQ people are also vulnerable. If sextech raises its ambitions to not only help users overcome the barriers to their bliss, but also get them to think about the conditions that created those barriers in the first place, and have a stake in perpetuating them, it may start to fulfill the promises in its mission statements. Then sextech’s “pleasure education” might live up to that very second-wave feminist slogan, the personal is political."}
{"prompt":"In November 2016, the British tabloid The Daily Mail published some sensational news: escorts use the Internet just like the rest of us! The paper reported that sex workers had set up a website to rate their clients. With the air of breaking a scandal, journalist Dave Burke described sex workers “comparing notes on clients” and “getting advice on pricing” from each other.","completion":"This information was far from new. The online forum in question, SAAFE, had been created by escorts for escorts in 2003. And as Burke himself admitted, SAAFE serves a purpose well beyond rating johns on a ten-point scale. SAAFE stands for Safety and Advice For Escorts, and members use it to share life-saving information about dangerous or unscrupulous clients."}
{"prompt":"SAAFE provides women who work in a difficult, risk-laden profession a way to avoid men who do not behave appropriately. It is far less about rating the way a man’s breath smells or the size of his penis, and much more about alerting other workers to a client who stole the money back after a booking, or became violent, or ignored boundaries.","completion":"But that might not sound quite so shocking to the readers of The Daily Mail. Unfortunately, a paper running a salacious story on sex workers and the internet is par for the course now. Just one month before The Daily Mail article, Carl Ferrer was arrested. You may not have heard of him, but sex workers across America have. He’s the CEO of the classified listings site Backpage.com, which used to be one of the country’s most popular online platforms for escort ads."}
{"prompt":"In October 2016 he was arrested, along with the site’s founders, on a range of pimping charges. Ferrer and the founders were eventually cleared because the judge deemed they could not be held responsible for user-generated content. But Backpage still closed down its “adult” section, like Craigslist before it—a move the company called a “direct result of unconstitutional government censorship”. Predictably, the saga garnered sensationalized press coverage.","completion":"When the media reports on online platforms like SAAFE and Backpage, it focuses on details designed to titillate an audience that knows little about sex work. It also typically tells the story from the perspective of clients. Only rarely do we hear from the sex workers themselves, who rely on these platforms for their livelihood and their safety."}
{"prompt":"Selling sex online provides several advantages: a better opportunity to screen clients, a stronger ability to negotiate, and a lot more independence. Online marketplaces give workers the ability to craft ads on their own terms, clearly outlining their services, prices, and boundaries long before a client may even acquire their phone number. And taking payments online—especially through PayPal, where all that’s needed to send money is an email address—is both easy and safer for anyone who might want to avoid providing their bank account information.","completion":"“Online advertising provides a level of safety to those in the sex industry that many other spaces do not,” explains Kate D’Adamo from the Sex Workers Project at the Urban Justice Centre. Not everyone can make use of these tools, of course. Sociologist Elizabeth Bernstein describes the kind of workers who have benefited most from online platforms as “overwhelmingly white, native-born and class-privileged women.” Still, for many sex workers, the impact of the internet is significant—and growing."}
{"prompt":"Safe Words and Ugly Mugs Throughout its long history, the sex industry has always adapted to new tools and technologies. “All sexual commerce is technological,” explains Melissa Gira Grant in Playing the Whore (2014). Before the internet, sex workers placed their phone numbers alongside ads in the backpages of magazines and newspapers, or on “tart cards” they left in phone booths. Before the telephone, they carried business cards. In ancient Greece, Gira Grant says, sex workers scored the words “follow me” into the soles of their sandals so that customers could find them.","completion":"And as far as they were able to, sex workers have always screened clients to filter out dangerous ones. “Ugly mugs,” “bad dates,” or “bad trick” lists were a fixture of the sex industry years before the internet became mainstream. The Prostitutes Collective in Victoria, Australia began their ugly mugs scheme in 1986, and the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes in Vancouver started their bad dates list in 1983. In a newsletter from 1995, an escort with the Sex Workers Alliance of Vancouver described how to produce an ugly mugs list: The format should display the details in a consistent order from report to report. Using a database facilitates this because the fields are in a consistent order in each of the records. The information should be as simple and concise as possible… The shorter and more concise the description of the assailant and incident, the more reports will fit on an issue… She also recommended using particular software—developing the database with Filemaker Pro 2.0, and publishing the list with Quark XPress. Even before sex workers had online platforms, they were using digital tools to protect themselves."}
{"prompt":"The most important feature of these lists has always been that they’re produced and distributed by sex workers themselves. Community-based efforts led by sex workers are a pillar of professional safety—not least because the police often abuse sex workers, especially in those countries where prostitution is a crime.","completion":"These efforts include not only ugly mugs lists, but a range of other methods for keeping one another safe. “Indoor” escorts—workers who are not street-based—often use a “buddy” or “safe call” system, where a third party—perhaps a friend, driver, or receptionist at an agency—will be briefed with the location and time of the booking, along with the client’s name and contact information. The buddy is told to expect a call just before the booking and just after, with a prearranged “safe word” that will be used by the worker to indicate that they feel unsafe—and a plan to go with it, or if they go AWOL."}
{"prompt":"Workers also have strategies for evaluating clients beforehand. These include requesting the john’s full name and address to check against an ugly mugs list, or scheduling a phone call before the appointment, or requesting references from other workers. Feedback Loops The internet has made it easier for many sex workers to stay safe. While not all workers have access to online platforms, those who do can use them to implement safety protocols with greater speed, and on a far greater scale. Sex workers have always screened clients, negotiated terms, pooled information, and forged networks with other workers. On the internet, they’re able to do all of these things faster and more efficiently than ever before.","completion":"One of the biggest advantages of online platforms is how they facilitate client ratings. Ratings are a core feature of the sharing economy, but they’re especially valuable for sex workers who are trying to protect themselves. If sex work were accepted as a form of labor, the idea of a ratings system might be less surprising. It would be as mundane as the feedback your Airbnb host writes after you’ve stayed at their apartment, or the star rating you’ve acquired from your Uber rides. When someone offers a professional service, especially one that involves being placed in an intimate situation with their customer, it makes the utmost sense that they would want to know from other service providers what that client was like."}
{"prompt":"Ugly mugs lists served that purpose before the internet—and no doubt still do in some areas—but the digital age has strengthened the ability of sex workers to warn each other of abusive men. One example is Adultwork, an online marketplace for sexual services set apart from the likes of Backpage by being solely for “adult” providers. British dominatrix Margaret Corvid says that sourcing clients from Adultwork gives her more control over the screening process. On the site, workers build profiles describing the services they offer (and do not offer), detail their rates, and display a mixture of professional and candid photographs. Clients then message the workers they would like to meet.","completion":"But the major benefit of Adultwork, London-based escort Violet tells me, is the “feedback” system. First and foremost, clients can tell other potential johns whether a worker is who she says she is—and whether she offers the service she says she does. Crucially, however, the rating system works both ways. If other sex workers have had negative experiences with a client, this will be immediately apparent to everyone else."}
{"prompt":"According to Violet, Adultwork also once employed a “notes” system, where sex workers could leave details about a client that only other service providers could see. It avoided the risk of malicious retaliation from the client, who may have access to a worker’s personal information. After all, sex work is stressful enough.","completion":"Violet has left her own notes on Adultwork in the past, including about a client who assaulted her. She explains: I think nobody wants to speak out about a client who has literally hundreds of positive reviews. But just one person coming forward can encourage others. My note reporting that client was the first, but within two days, someone else had left a report. It opened the floodgates. The online reporting system makes it feel a lot more legitimate. Without it, dangerous clients would just carry on getting away with it, which is what I found out when I reported this client and had other escorts messaging me saying, “Oh yeah, I remember meeting him, he did a similar thing to me.” Another valuable tool for online screening among British sex workers is National Ugly Mugs (NUM), a digital version of the ugly mugs lists produced by sex worker collectives. Run by the UK Network of Sex Worker Projects, NUM receives funding from the UK Home Office, a branch of the British government. It provides sex workers with a platform to report details of dangerous clients into an online database, which is then used to send alerts via email or SMS to all workers who signed up to receive them."}
{"prompt":"Violet knows all too well the benefits of NUM, because she reported her assailant there too. “It took me about 6 months before I submitted the report and really came to terms with what had happened,” she explains. “I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to report it as a crime and go through the legal system. I didn’t feel like the police would understand—and even if I had gone down that route, that wouldn’t have made other sex workers aware.” Given that a lot of people still view rape and assault as merely occupational hazards of the sex industry, it’s not hard to see why sex workers would be anxious about reporting to the police. This is particularly true in countries that have criminalized sex work, where reporting an assault may result in an arrest for the worker. Schemes like NUM put control of the situation back into the hands of workers, and allow them to look out for each other.","completion":"Thanks to developers at the Manchester-based “social enterprise” agency Reason Digital, NUM now exists as a smartphone app too. It uses the same geolocation technology as apps like Tinder to push local updates to workers. On Android devices, it even features the ability to screen calls by searching for the incoming number in the NUM database."}
{"prompt":"The inspiration for the app came from Reason Digital co-founder Matt Haworth’s work with Manchester Action on Street Health, a sex worker support service. They keep an ugly mugs list, but it’s not updated fast enough—in the time it takes to produce a physical booklet, or even to push new information to their website, another worker might encounter the same violent client. The immediacy offered by an app could be the difference between life and death. As project manager Jo Dunning points out, “days lost cost lives”.","completion":"Reason Digital worked closely with sex workers from the beginning to develop the app. That’s why the background of the app is black—to prevent the backlight from illuminating the worker’s face and betraying what they’re doing. It’s also why the phone’s location data does not feed back into a database—otherwise, the app could very easily be used to track the movements of sex workers throughout Britain. Users are at liberty to sign up with a fake name, and use a phone number or email address they’ve created exclusively for the service."}
{"prompt":"One remaining hurdle is accessibility. The app requires a smartphone, and not all sex workers have access to one—especially street workers. During the pilot, Reason Digital handed out smartphones preloaded with the app. But for the NUM app to scale, a more robust solution is required. Either smartphones will need to become so cheap that all workers can afford them—and use them on the street without fear of having them stolen—or sex worker organizations and outreach services will have to distribute them en masse.","completion":"Risk Management While building better tools for screening clients is critical, much of the challenge in keeping safe while sex-working is that so much is retroactive. The buddy system only alerts someone to the fact that something has gone awry after it has happened—which may be too late. By building a “panic button,” developers may be able to solicit a faster reaction. This idea inspired two medical students, Isabel Chen and Kyle Ragins, and sex worker advocate Vanessa Forro to create the Keep Safe Initiative in 2012. They set out to provide street-based sex workers in Vancouver with a pre-programmed device that used GPS and cellular technology to act as a panic button should they encounter danger. Given that many digital services for sex workers are naturally geared towards independent, indoor providers, Keep Safe Initiative’s emphasis on street-based workers was key."}
{"prompt":"If technology can improve the safety of sex workers, it can also enhance the security and anonymity of their financial transactions. PayPal has been invaluable for sex workers from the beginning. Indeed, journalist Courtney Boyd Myers claims that when the company first got started in 2001, “some of its first customers were those working in the sex industry.” The appeal of PayPal for sex workers is obvious. Users can send and receive money through an e-mail address, and don’t have to compromise their privacy by providing bank details. Transacting online also hedges against certain risks. Sex workers regularly deal with the fear of having their fee stolen back from them by their client, or the concern that a client might waste their time by not paying. Prearranging payment through services like PayPal is an attractive alternative.","completion":"But using PayPal for sex work isn’t without its challenges. The company has been known to freeze the accounts of any user believed to be receiving funds through sex work. And credit and debit card companies regularly block sites that may be used to facilitate sex work—as Backpage found out. The Great Normalizer Ever since Carol Leigh coined the term “sex worker” in the late 1970s, the fault lines of feminism have been drawn along supporting the criminalisation or decriminalisation of the sex industry. Those advocating criminalisation believe sex work is not work but abuse: Gloria Steinem branded it “commercialised rape.” They want the industry to be completely criminalised, as it is in America, or for the client to be criminalised, as it is in Sweden."}
{"prompt":"Those arguing for decriminalisation, including many sex worker-led organizations worldwide, believe that any mode of criminalisation endangers workers and threatens their livelihoods. They say that sex work is work and should have the labor rights that come with it. The internet has contributed to this debate by making sex work look more like work. On the internet, sex is just another service for sale. The founder of Citylove.com, San Francisco’s first online adult directory, explained the phenomenon to the sociologist Bernstein back in 2001: The most important thing about the Internet is that it has hastened the acceptance of adult entertainers as competent people … you can’t ignore them, or pretend that everyone is just a gum-chewing, fishnet-wearing, miniskirted prostitute with big hair and sunglasses.","completion":"We all saw that big-haired prostitute played by Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. It’s a stereotype that the internet has helped erode. “Online sexual commerce had shifted the boundaries of social space,” Bernstein writes, “blurring the differences between underworld figures and ‘respectable’ citizens.” Visiting the Citylove.com office, Bernstein describes its atmosphere as “no different than that of any other new and profitable Internet start-up company.” The internet has helped normalize sex work as work, in other words. It’s achieved this at least in part by making the sex industry more visible to outsiders. Sex worker visibility on the internet may inspire sensationalism in places like The Daily Mail, but it also offers an opportunity to promote awareness. Social media makes it easier for journalists to contact individual sex workers and their organizations when writing on the subject. Social media also empowers sex workers to forge alliances with other activist groups."}
{"prompt":"Molly, a sex worker and activist with the Sex Worker Open University (SWOU), calls social media an “incredible tool in building connections between groups and sharing analysis.” Through the internet, groups that are not sex worker-focused—organizations opposing police violence or deportations, for example—can discover the advantages of working with sex worker organizations.","completion":"Molly also believes that social media can be formative in developing sex work politics. By enabling sex workers to see how other workers encounter the same dangers that they do, the internet can cultivate a sense of collective identity. Online communities have helped sex worker rights organisations “blossom,” Molly says. “People are aware of how criminalisation harms them in a very personal sense,” she explains. “Once you plug into a sex worker community, you can more easily see the broader patterns; you can see how these harms that you’re experiencing are part of a structure.” That structure is made more apparent by technology—and those harms can often be mitigated by technology as well."}
{"prompt":"But the additional exposure that the internet brings can also put sex workers at risk. Online platforms may provide workers with safety, convenience, and community, but they come with a danger: surveillance. In countries where sex work is criminalised, law enforcement will monitor a suspected worker’s online presence. In countries where only the client is criminalised, police will follow sex workers’ online movements in order to track down their law-breaking clients. In the United Kingdom, where sex work in itself is decriminalised, the authorities will use online surveillance to gather evidence against workers for the crime of brothel-keeping—which means simply that multiple workers work from the same building. “Rather than limit their patrol to the street,” writes Gira Grant, “vice cops search the Web for advertisements they believe offer sex for sale, contact the advertisers while posing as customers, arrange hotel meetings, and attempt to make an arrest.” In response, sex workers must go underground—even at a time when their industry has never been more public. Secret, invite-only groups on Facebook help keep conversations among sex workers away from prying eyes. There, workers exchange tips, discuss experiences, arrange meetups, and share information ranging from dodgy clients to which sex toy store offers discounts for industry professionals. On Twitter, there are glossy, client-facing accounts and anonymous, locked accounts—and a thriving support network in the DMs. Only word-of-mouth will lead you to these spaces—so unless you’re a sex worker, it’s more than likely you haven’t seen them.","completion":"An escort named Suzie tells me that she uses forums like SAAFE, but that she finds the underground social media groups much more “cohesive.” “There’s something more intimate about belonging to a network of workers who are local to me and part of a wider community too,” she explains. Molly reiterates this point. “These are community spaces,” she says. “There’s generally someone awake if you need to reach out at 3am, you know?” These spaces offer emotional support for workers dealing with a range of issues, from handling sexual violence to managing dating and relationships. They also offer friendship. Suzie says before she joined a Facebook support group, she had no sex worker friends. Now, they’re the “virtual cornerstones of my support networks.” But as with everything in the sex industry, even these secret social media communities aren’t immune to surveillance. Facebook’s algorithms have a nasty habit of flagging up all kinds of information about your activity to your wider network of “friends,” and are fond of suggesting that you add the most random of your phone contacts. “Many people use the networks via their real name accounts,” Suzie explains. She doesn’t. “I’ve seen people get into tricky situations and come close to being outed.” Still, for many workers, the risk is evidently worth it for the support these spaces provide. Sex work can be a lonely job."}
{"prompt":"No Shortcuts However transformative, technology has its limits. It can revolutionize many aspects of sex work, but it cannot sanitize the experience of providing sexual services for workers who physically share space with clients. Sex work by its very nature will always be high risk. And while projects like NUM are taking great steps towards digitizing sex worker safety methods, the criminal status of the industry means that developers are unlikely to lead the way. A lot of workers would rather not engage in behavior that could be traced back to them, like downloading apps to their phones. In the United States, the slightest bit of carelessness could lead to a criminal conviction. Even in places where sex work is less criminalized, it could result in unwanted police attention.","completion":"Still, there’s no doubt that technology has played an empowering role in the lives of many sex workers. It’s given workers new tools for transacting, for building community, and for protecting one another. While the underlying practices aren’t new, the internet has enabled them to be implemented with unprecedented speed and scale."}
{"prompt":"Sex workers today are simply doing what sex workers have always done, just with different tools. Taking those tools away doesn’t mean sex work disappears. It means sex workers go back to whatever it was they did before—only without the many advantages that technology can provide. If that seems preferable, you may not have their best interests at heart.","completion":"I want to share a couple of personal anecdotes. I don’t mean them to be confessions in the sense that Michel Foucault used the term “confessional”—as the revelations of some Truth from the depths of myself or my experience. But these are sex stories (kinda), and Foucault noted that sex—what we talk about when we talk about sex—takes the privileged form of confession in our society."}
{"prompt":"So perhaps I can’t, we can’t, talk about sex non-confessionally; it’s a discourse constructed on the idea of revelation. That’s how truths about sex, or anything, are built—in the false belief that they are “found.” That’s what these sex stories are about: the myth of revelatory sex, and the truths it produces.","completion":"One is about a threesome I didn’t have, another is about certain porn that I don’t watch. They both involve an ex-partner whom I dated from my early-to-mid-twenties who believed in revolutionary sex to the point of ideology. These are cautionary tales in how easily invocations towards radical sexual practices—especially in the context of political movements—can be recuperated into patriarchal power structures, techno-capital, and the creation of more bourgeois desiring machines. And through them, I want to question what it means to talk about radical sex becoming recuperated at all."}
{"prompt":"What, if anything, was radical in the first place? Queer As In “Fuck You” At a time when technology presents itself as playing a liberatory function with regard to the pluralization of sexual possibilities, it’s important to question the underlying idea that abundance, of partners and perversities, equals liberation. On the other hand, I don’t want to fall into a trap which denies the possibility of radical modes of sexually relating to each other just because seemingly “radical” sexual preferences and identities are easily accessible on the App Store or on a porn tube site. These are open questions, but they give lie to claims about the inherent radicality of certain sexual practices—a lie too often peddled by the bombastic men-children and self-satisfied sex-posi “adventurers” spanning from the far left to the Burning Man playa.","completion":"This ex and I were together during Occupy and involved in New York’s fractured anarchist scene, which briefly held itself together with school-glue solidarity for a few heady months. We were non-monogamous but had hardly acted on it, aside from a couple of threesomes with other women, the sort of which I’ve had in numerous relationships with men without this ex’s radical posturing."}
{"prompt":"He spoke a big game about queering. About challenging a social order organized by heteronormative and coupled forms. He saw a political imperative in pursuing polyamorous and queer constellations. In (what seemed to be) queer porn (more on this later) and in kink he saw revolutionary interventions. Sometimes he used “queer” to mean a political subjectivity that works to undo both hetero- and homo-normativities—queer-as-disruption, as opposed to gay-as-assimilation: “Not gay as in happy, queer as in ‘fuck you.’” Sometimes he used “queer” to describe any sexual interaction between non-straight, non-conventional-bodied or cis-gendered folks—“queer” as in a label you can use to identify yourself on an app designed for threesomes. Both meanings exist and they intersect—his problem was collapsing them together entirely. His problem was also alcohol.","completion":"I too believe that a heteronormative social order which punishes desires, identities, and sexual practices outside of its narrow remit must be burned to the ground. Individuals and communities have fought and died, and still do, to be able to love and fuck without persecution. The work of queer pornographers to give these desires representation and recognition is crucial."}
{"prompt":"And, of course, joining a movement to fight persecution is the very meaning of political subjectification. Times of political revolt have long been attended by claims about the revolutionary force of challenging traditional sexual prescriptions. And little wonder: sex is a discourse that plays a major role in shaping what kinds of selves get to exist and how they get to exist together. This is the stuff of politics.","completion":"The problem with my ex’s position was modal. He viewed certain sex—certainly not all sex—as a necessary rite of passage, without which no appropriate radicalization was possible. His belief touched on the religious—a faith that certain sex acts between certain bodies carried a radically transformative quality a priori. For a man who claimed to be a Foucault scholar, it was a baffling assertion of normative moral facts. But we met when I was very young. He was twelve years my senior, and it took me some time to weed out the hypocrisy and dogmatism from what, if anything, was righteous, or even sexy."}
{"prompt":"Terrains of Choice-making People say “the personal is political” a lot, and I think almost always in a reductive way. It doesn’t just mean that our individual “personal” issues—like our sexuality, our families, our fucking—are political negotiations. Is it even useful to call these “personal” issues? Aren’t impersonal issues also political? And if so, everything is political, so why use the word to delineate anything at all? Perhaps like this: The personal is political because personhood is political. Who gets to be a person and how? How are persons formed, categorized, and organized in and through relations with each other? These are determined by operations of power. The personal is not political because personal choices are necessarily political choices, but because the very terrain of what gets to be a choice and what types of persons get to be choosers—what types of persons get to be—are shaped by political power. The sort of political power that whispers through human histories of convention formation and maintenance, of hierarchy and adherence to it, of regimes of expertise, of oppression, of struggles and paradigm shifts.","completion":"Remember how Meryl Streep’s character in The Devil Wears Prada chastises Anne Hathaway’s character, the naive assistant, for thinking she had agency when she’d chosen to buy a blue sweater? A Foucauldian point well made: capital didn’t make her choose and buy that color sweater, but it did overdetermine the conditions of possibility for any such purchase."}
{"prompt":"And so it is with our sexual desires—we think we just have them, as if centuries of power operations had not determined not only our desiring tendencies, but the very terrain of what gets to be a choice or a chooser. The risk of a personal-is-political discourse that focuses on individual choice rather than terrains of choice-making is the development of a politics that finds its primary expression through, say, buying organic or downloading an app for non-monogamous fucking that allows you to define yourself as “pansexual.” Who you are is held stable, while your personal choices are deemed political. This is what I call neoliberal identity politics—another phrase used a lot these days, and almost always incorrectly.","completion":"Sex Cops and Body Fascists So back to this ex. After one of the many days of vigorous street protest during Occupy’s heyday, a large group of anarchists were reviewing, recuperating, and relaxing in a Brooklyn loft space often used for such purposes. I had to leave reasonably early to wake up for a radio interview of some sort. My ex stayed late and ended up going home with another person (who then identified as female, but no longer does). And, as far as he explained it the following day, the assumption had been that I would join them in bed the next day."}
{"prompt":"The particulars of our non-monogamy at that time (not all non-monogamies are the same) required that he inform me in advance of going home with another person. Since I had been asleep, this was not possible and his unopened texts could hardly be said to count. So that was a fuck-up on his part. And it’s a fuck-up particular to our technological moment: instant communication has never been so easy, producing at times a misleading presumption that we have communicated—or should have been able to communicate—information to an intended party simply by sending it. The speech acts fail, and digital enmeshment is curbed by the timeless human predicament of being asleep.","completion":"This isn’t just an issue when communicating polyamorous plans—it’s a problem of an expectation being produced. Expectations of reception and response didn’t emerge with the invention of instant messaging. Centuries of waiting on tenterhooks for letters preceded this. But I think the assumption of instantaneousness produces an often incorrect feeling that the sender has successfully communicated. In this case, he had not."}
{"prompt":"The far greater violation, by my lights, was his assumption that I would want to have sex with this person, and his acting on that assumption—he said this was the condition under which they went home together. Moreover, that I should want to have sex with this person because they were, as he put it, “queer and cool.” The arguments that followed didn’t focus on the problematics of him assuming my desires for me. They turned on the fulcrum of why my desires weren’t somehow better. I wasn’t attracted to this person, so my ex called me a body fascist. My ex might be right. My libidinal tastes fit firmly within conventional determinations of beauty. I could, and often do, look back on this story as an ur-example of a manarchist (as they are known) weaponizing the idea of radical sexual politics in order to police the desires of others to serve his own.","completion":"And that’s all true. No one should be expected to fuck anyone. But this is complicated by the fact that sometimes our desires are worth questioning and challenging. Sometimes experimentation, while it should be conditional on consent, does require trying things we might not immediately desire in and of themselves, but as potential introductions to desiring differently. Don’t know what I want but I know how to get it."}
{"prompt":"But by treating sex as a political project of rupturing preconditioned desires, might we end up reducing each other to experimental objects for our own self-development? And more to the point, such an approach treats sex acts as techniques of self-construction, as if the simple meeting of certain bodies serves to subvert and reorganize desires. Maybe it can. Maybe I think there are more urgent political projects than having sex with people I don’t currently find attractive, but who share my political diagnoses. And what demarcates political sex from the sort of privileged play of Burning Man orgies? Post festum, does the world look that different? I knew this would get confessional.","completion":"Queer Privilege In a skewering essay for Mask Magazine, the writer who goes by FuckTheory coined the term “queer privilege” as if he’d had my ex in mind. He notes that while “there is still a bigoted wide world out there, full of enforced normativity, compulsory heterosexuality, and relentless, violent policing… there are also spaces… where a generalized ideology of anti-normativity holds sway, queerness is a badge of honor, a marker of specialness, and a source of critical and moral authority: in short, a form of privilege.” FuckTheory’s contention with what he calls queer privilege is that such attitudes, and the deep irony of their basis in a misunderstanding of Foucault, are “grounded in the idea of a link between the normativity of an act and its ethical valence.” He puts it better than I ever could: [I]t’s worth pausing to reflect on the tone that queer privilege indulges itself in, to consider the implications of a smug condescension that presumes to judge people’s sexuality based on the way they relate to other people’s genitals and to evaluate the revolutionary potential of an act based on its statistical prevalence. Is this what we want from queer theorizing? The counterargument to queer privilege is not to retreat to the reactionary normativities that queerness, even privileged queerness, attempts to disrupt. No, the radical thing is not actually to be a straight couple and get married and make babies and reproduce oneself as the world produced you. It’s not actually more radical to be monogamous just because everyone and their paramorous triad is meeting in an expensive bar in Williamsburg and revelling in their radical performance. Such a counter-reaction would merely repeat the problem of inherently linking the normativity or abundance of a given act with its ethical weight."}
{"prompt":"It’s a problem well put by queer theorist Guy Hocquenghem in his once-banned text, The Screw Ball Asses. “Will any desire, apart from obedience, ever be able to structure itself otherwise than as transgression or counter-transgression?” he wrote in 1973, adding, “Limiting oneself to a sexual path, under the pretext that it is one’s desire and that it corresponds to a political opportunity for deviance, strengthens the bi-polarization of the ideology of desire that has been forged by the bourgeoisie.” Hocquenghem didn’t need to live in the time of Grindr, Tinder, Bumble, or Feeld to know that, “There is no escaping economics… Roles are not broken but granted.” The irony: the ex gave me that book.","completion":"Which brings me to my second anecdote, which is more of a string of instances. This same ex used to watch a decent amount of porn. We’d watch together, but more often to discuss it than to get off with each other. His perversions were not mine. And, yes, his tastes were more queer. And he would find his tastes represented— this is a good thing. But his means of viewing were, as with the majority of porn viewers, through a set of reductive search categories on behemoth tube sites like  YouPorn, Pornhub, and RedTube, all of which are owned by one monopolizing content delivery giant, MindGeek."}
{"prompt":"It was not his fault per se that tube sites rely on a grim taxonomy of racist, sexist, transphobic, ageist, and ableist tropes: big black, Asian teen, thug, schoolgirl, MILF, shemale, and so on. It was just a telling dissonance: he would praise the radical content, whilst using the very tube sites that have decimated the porn industry, reinforced its archaic categories, and undermined workers’ rights.","completion":"Some years later, I became friendly with some of the actors and directors whose content would sometimes pop up (stolen) as a tube site click in the ex’s searches. I have written about their efforts to challenge porn’s problematic search tags as well as their Homeric and often thwarted attempts to improve working conditions. And while porn workers in the straight and queer sides of the industry challenge the means of their industry’s production and its conservative business model, the mere abundance of transgressive content is misread as revolutionary."}
{"prompt":"Writing about porn in 2004, film theorist Linda Williams rightly noted that “as the proliferating discourses of sexuality take hold… there can no longer be any such thing as a fixed sexuality— male, female, or otherwise.” She wrote that “now there are proliferating sexualities, the very multiplicity of these pleasures and perversions inevitably works against the older idea of a single norm—the economy of the one—against which all else is measured.” And insofar as there is no longer one “single norm,” she had a point.","completion":"But the multiplicity of represented pleasures and perversions has not ended the fact of “female, male, or otherwise” sexuality (by which I presume she meant gender). Proliferating perversions, as represented in categories of online viewing and participation, may have created a multitude of norms, but this has not meant a disruption in the hierarchical powers that control what gets to be represented as (a) sexuality."}
{"prompt":"And don’t speak to me about radical sexual preferences if you claim to care about intersectional struggle and search “BDSM gang bang” on a tube site of stolen content, which directly hurts workers, and which runs on a taxonomy of reductive tags. A survey conducted by Pornhub and Mic.com aiming to review the porn choices of millennials (of course) found that “‘ebony’ and ‘black’ were among the top 12” of their favorite search terms. Mic’s hot take was that the youths were, happily, not privileging white bodies. But as I wrote for The Nation at the time: there’s an inherent limitation to the progressiveness of such a porn landscape if bodies are primarily sought, categorized, and thus sexualized via their race. Especially when production companies still put a premium —with payscales and exclusivity agreements—on “interracial” scenes (almost always a white woman and a black man), inscribing racism through the notion of taboo into the back end of the business.","completion":"There’s an App for That In a dismissive and cursory essay titled “Your Sex Is Not Radical,” writer and activist Yasmin Nair rejects the relevance of sexual practices in political organizing. I agree with her when she asserts, “the sad truth that many of us learn after years in sexual playing fields (literally and figuratively) is that how many people you fuck has nothing to do with the extent to which you fuck up capitalism.” But her totalizing view separating politics from sex fails to consider the representation of sex and its role in constructing the truth of sex today."}
{"prompt":"We must recognize that the pearl-clutching anti-sex work moralists who fear that porn is warping kids’ minds have a point. Online porn plays a powerful formative role in our lives, especially the millennials among us, informing notions of what sex gets to be. Given this fact, the need for political and ethical work towards a world of porn with better taxonomies and worker protections is obvious. My ex saw political heroes in his favorite porn stars, which would be fine, if he had thought of them as workers first. There is no escaping economics.","completion":"It’s perhaps unsurprising, given the picture I’ve painted, that my relationship with this man ended in violent catastrophe. I grew to hate him for many reasons, but not before I had spent months, which bled into years, rethinking my approach to sexual desire. It was a revaluation of values and assumptions about what I want, for which I’ll always be grateful and in which I continue to engage to this day. In the years since we parted ways, I’ve had far more of the sex he would have deemed “radical” than I ever did with him. Some of it was transformative, some hot, some of it love, some boring and irritating—none of it revolutionary."}
{"prompt":"Technosociologist Zeynep Tufecki makes the point that traditional political movement tactics have gotten easier over the years, “partly thanks to technology”: A single Facebook post can help launch a large march! Online tools make it easier to coordinate phone calls, and even automate them. Legislators have figured this out; they are less likely to be spooked just by marches or phone calls (though those are good to do: their absence signals weakness).","completion":"Her point is that tactics which once signalled “underlying strength” no longer do, by virtue of the ease of re-iterability; the threat is neutralized and the ruling order knows it. The same might be said of sexual practices which once were considered threats to capital’s reproduction through the family form and property relations. Technocapital soothes the status quo: there can be polyamorous configurations with BDSM dungeons in the basement, but the houses are owned."}
{"prompt":"To be blunt: when there’s a popular app for organizing your next queer orgy, how rupturous of our political status quo can the mere fact of such an orgy be? To be honest: that’s not totally a rhetorical question. As soon as the internet appeared in American homes, parents began to worry that their children were using it to masturbate. They were right. We were. To a child approaching adolescence in the mid-1990s, the internet was the perfect stone against which to sharpen one’s sexuality. Offline looked meager by comparison. You could steal a smut mag from a corner store, or locate your friend’s father’s stash of old porn tapes—and these were fun, for sure—but when it came to sheer sexual intensity, nothing could compete with the internet.","completion":"One night, I came across a naked photograph of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who played Elaine on Seinfeld. It must’ve taken fifteen minutes to load: one painstaking row of pixels at a time, 28.8 kilobits per second. Julia Louis-Dreyfus had never posed nude, so the photograph was a fake: some meticulous pervert somewhere had spent hours using software to fasten her head onto a naked body, the skin an unearthly shade of orange, the breasts cartoonishly big. It was kind of gruesome, but I found it intensely erotic. I was a devoted Seinfeld fan, but had never thought of Elaine sexually. After that photograph, I couldn’t think of her any other way. It would be the first of many perversions implanted in my mind by the internet."}
{"prompt":"Fifteen-odd years before I found naked Elaine, the writer George W. S. Trow published an essay in The New Yorker called “Within the Context of No-Context.” It filled nearly the entire November 17, 1980 issue, and later appeared as a book. Trow was a strange figure: a high-WASP product of Greenwich, Exeter, and Harvard who got weird in the bohemian paradise of 1960s and 1970s New York, and had the good fortune to join The New Yorker at a time when it indulged, even celebrated, weirdness.","completion":"One of Trow’s obsessions was television. The world created by television, he wrote, had formed two “grids”: the “grid of one” and “the grid of two hundred million.” The grid of one was the single human, alone in her room—“intimate life.” The grid of two hundred million was the entire country—“national life,” or rather, “a shimmer of national life,” produced by television. The distance between these two grids, Trow said, was very large. So people split their lives between them. They lived both as one and as two hundred million—as both a solitary individual and as a cog in the enormous collective hallucination induced by mass media."}
{"prompt":"Celebrities were the exception, explained Trow. “Celebrities have an intimate life and a life in the grid of two hundred million,” he wrote. This was what made them extraordinary: they fused the grids. They lived their intimate lives, but on a national stage. “Of all Americans, only they are complete.” The internet annihilated the distance between Trow’s two grids. It closed the gap between the intimate and the collective, the solitary and the mass. It made us all celebrities—and not only in the typical sense of the term, in the way that Andy Warhol and Marshal McLuhan had foreseen a future where everyone could be a little bit famous, but as Trow understood the idea. It made us all complete.","completion":"On the internet, media didn’t feel mediated. It felt like a spontaneous collaboration, a game of improv. We could live in the grid of one and the grid of two hundred million. We could be alone and together at the same time. We could expose ourselves to total strangers, and have them expose themselves to us."}
{"prompt":"My sexual imagination soon filled up with far weirder fare than could be harvested from the pages of a Penthouse. Elaine was only the beginning—before long, the internet had provided me with a very diverse portfolio of libidinal investments. In the middle of the night, I gazed into the cathode ray tube of our family’s enormous IBM, my fingers moving carefully to minimize the clack of the keyboard, my ears scanning for sounds of my parents stirring in the next room—this was where I discovered my sexuality. Goethe went to Italy; I went online.","completion":"A Catalog of Kink Because he was a pain in the ass, Henry David Thoreau once argued that there’s no point in making it easier for people to talk to one another if they have nothing to talk about. In Walden, he wrote: We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say."}
{"prompt":"Yet somehow, people have always found plenty to say. And much of what they’ve said, using one technology or another, has been dirty. Indeed, as soon as humans build new tools for transmitting words, sounds, and images, they start using those tools to get each other off. From erotic daguerreotypes to Skinemax, “blue films” to phone sex, successive generations have shown extraordinary resourcefulness in unlocking the sexual potential of each new technology.","completion":"The internet, however, marked a significant advance. It’s hard to imagine a more accommodating medium for human sexuality. Not only is it infinite in its form—its packets can carry anything that can be encoded as information, from text to video to VR—but it’s limitless in its content, since that content can so easily be created and circulated by users. This latter aspect has always been a defining feature of the internet, ever since its earliest incarnation as a military research network called ARPANET. In contrast to something like television, where a few people produce the content and the rest of us consume it, the internet is both produced and consumed by its users. It is, in a very real sense, a group effort."}
{"prompt":"That’s also why the internet reflects such an endless catalog of kink. It offers a space for fetishists to find one another, and make new recruits. Who among us hasn’t stumbled across a perversity that would never have occurred to us, but that, upon reflection, is actually kind of hot? I spent a decent portion of my youth making such discoveries. They happened more frequently in an era when the internet was wilder, before search engines and social platforms banished most of the randomness from our online lives, and the market hadn’t yet conquered every last crevice of the digital sphere. There was no Pornhub, just a bunch of degenerates trafficking fantasies in AOL chatrooms and Usenet newsgroups—not “amateurs” in today’s pornified sense, but actual laypeople, exploring their vernacular with all the awkwardness and exhilaration of a 16th-century German peasant trying to read the Bible for the first time.","completion":"The Great Cyberporn Scare On July 3, 1995, a creepy image appeared on the cover of Time. It showed a young boy sitting at a keyboard, his eyes wide, his mouth open. Clearly he was looking at something he wasn’t supposed to see. And that something was “CYBERPORN,” emblazoned across his torso in large block letters. Then, in smaller text, the kicker: “Exclusive: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids—and free speech?” Those were the days before “clickbait” and “fake news,” but the Time cover story embodied the spirit of both. The “new study” was a paper by a thirty-year-old undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon named Marty Rimm, who had somehow leveraged the fear and incomprehension around the internet—which, in 1995, was just becoming mainstream—to get himself into the Georgetown Law Journal. Rimm’s article was an unhinged bit of bad science, with a truly bonkers title: “Marketing Pornography on the Information Superhighway: A Survey of 917,410 Images, Descriptions, Short Stories, and Animations Downloaded 8.5 Million Times by Consumers in Over 2,000 Cities in 40 Countries, Provinces and Territories.” The argument was simple: the internet had become saturated with smut, especially the kind that couldn’t be easily obtained at your neighborhood porn shop, like bestiality and pedophilia and other extreme or illegal proclivities."}
{"prompt":"Catapulted by Time to national prominence, Rimm’s study ignited a moral panic about internet porn. Rimm was soon spouting inflammatory nonsense on ABC’s Nightline and giving interviews to The New York Times. Predictably, the religious right seized on the study to claim that the internet was corrupting American children, and pressed their allies in Congress to crack down. Senator Chuck Grassley obliged, reading Rimm’s report into the Congressional record. And legislative consequences weren’t far behind—the media frenzy helped mobilize bipartisan support for the Communications Decency Act, a draconian effort to suppress online obscenity and indecency. Bill Clinton signed the law into 1996. A year later, the Supreme Court struck down its key provisions as unconstitutional.","completion":"By then, Rimm had disappeared. A counterattack by scholars and activists had discredited his research, and succeeded in making the media more skeptical of the idea that the internet was packed to the rafters with pedophiles and horse-fuckers. Digital civil libertarians had organized to defend the internet from Christian fundamentalists and Congressional cretins, and had mostly won. Meanwhile, the journalist who wrote the Time story, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, claims he became “the most hated man on the Internet,” even suffering a denial-of-service attack that took down his ISP’s email servers."}
{"prompt":"Twenty years later, in 2015, Elmer-DeWitt wrote a mea culpa about the saga for Fortune which involved, among other things, raising $1,656 on Kickstarter to hire a private investigator to track down Rimm. He knocked on Rimm’s door, but Rimm wouldn’t open it. A House With Many Rooms The cyberporn crusaders were flatly wrong. You could certainly find photographs of people having sex with animals on the internet in 1995, and you could certainly find them now. But such content has never dominated the internet—and neither has porn. In their book A Billion Wicked Thoughts, computational neuroscientists Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam determined that porn makes up about ten percent of the internet. That’s a very rough estimate, given the methodological difficulties involved. Even so, it offers an important counterpoint to the caricature, often promoted by conservatives, of an internet drenched in sex.","completion":"But the crusaders were right to be afraid. The internet may never have been quite as depraved as they imagined, but it did weaken their ability to define and to discipline people’s sexuality. It made certain kinds of censorship more difficult, and vastly expanded the variety of material available to masturbators of all ages. My own experience would presumably strike them as a nightmare scenario: a child quietly mainlining a diverse stream of filth, unimpeded by parents, teachers, or senators."}
{"prompt":"It would be naive to suggest the internet is always and everywhere an instrument of sexual liberation. It is also a space for abuse and exploitation, for patriarchy and heterosexism, and for much toxic mythmaking about masculinity. But one doesn’t have to be deliriously techno-utopian to acknowledge that the internet has enlarged the possibilities for erotic pleasure.","completion":"The most important lesson the internet taught me as a kid was how big sexuality could be—it was, to borrow a Biblical metaphor, a house with many rooms. Some doors I opened and slammed shut; some spaces I entered and never left. There were always more rooms; I could never hope to see the whole house. What a beautiful realization, that sex might mean more than one thing, that it might be even more multiple and elastic than the internet itself."}
{"prompt":"You are feeling frisky. You are home alone. What do you do? If your blood is pulsing with testosterone, the chances are that you will reach for the laptop and browse around. You will likely click until you find pixels arranged in such a way that an attractive face and body is convincingly simulated on the screen. This digital body is no doubt in a state of nakedness (or near undress) beckoning you with a come-hither expression. It may also be in the midst of being ravished by another two-dimensional body, playing the role of your proxy. Your eyes drink this image in, as you project yourself into the scene. If your system is more infused with estrogen, however, you are more likely to rely on imagination and memory— projecting erotic visions on the insides of your eyelids, even as there is an increasing chance you might succumb to the internet’s infamous capacity to provide “porn on tap.” We all have different libidinal triggers: olive skin, long eyelashes, bangs, freckles, cleavage, ribbons, stiletto heels, stockings, tattoos, abs, beards, and so on, ad infinitum. But the point is that most of these are visual. Given the modern privileging of sight (“seeing is believing”), we tend to neglect, or even forget altogether, that the ear can be one of our most sensitive erogenous zones.","completion":"Indeed, psychoanalysts tell us that the ear is often the primary source of the libido, given that we are likely to hear things as children that excite and stimulate us. Even if we have no idea what these sounds are, they comprise the sonic gateways through which we enter the erotic realm of egoistic fantasy. As grown-ups, we may find particular voices to be “sexy.” And we certainly tend to find the noises produced by lovers to be a crucial element of arousal. But intriguingly, such sounds have slipped further and further away from our collective consciousness in the twenty-first century, as the internet has absorbed and replaced previous media forms. Why is this? Twenty years ago, phone sex was a booming industry. Even women not blessed with conventional beauty could still earn a paycheck with a husky voice, a filthy mouth, and an instinctive understanding of the contours and limits of male fantasy. Whimpers, moans, sighs, cajolings, teasing, orders, descriptions, plottings, confirmations—all would flow from the mouthpiece to the ear in a collage of sonic elements, both linguistic and not, especially designed to heighten and sustain the onanistic spiral of desire. (After all, the longer the call, the higher the profit.) Today, phone sex is still an option, of course. But there is no longer the same kind of industry or business models underwriting it, since such whispered conversations are more likely to occur between lovers dealing with the tyranny of distance. True, these are making money for the phone companies in the process. But not for any business that is built on the waning explicit interest in pre-packaged forms of aural sex."}
{"prompt":"Given the erotic power and potential of sound, why are there so few places online that cater to the ear? Why has this hole in the market reopened, after the 1980s and 1990s filled it with saucy phone chat, and even erotic stories by cassette, delivered by mail? While conducting research for my new book, Sonic Intimacy: Voice, Species, Technics, I found very few options for those who may prefer to fantasize via the voice, rather than the usual scopophilic avenues. One promising initiative was called Porn for the Blind, which provides sound recordings for those who, for medical reasons, cannot look at X-rated websites. This turned out to be a kitchen-sink operation, however, and rather than creating original vignettes from scratch, they merely ripped the soundtracks from existing pornographic videos.","completion":"More recently, Pornhub—the free Netflix of smut—is trying to expand its consumer base to the blind by making sound recordings of women describing the content of their videos, while also throwing in a moan or an “oh yes” every now and again. But both of these examples, however well meaning, continue to privilege vision, by failing to conceive and create a form of arousal expressly designed to tantalize the imagination via the ear."}
{"prompt":"There are some DIY communities online pursuing this latter approach by recording their own fantasies as MP3 files, and then uploading them for others to listen to, essentially in the form of grassroots pornographic podcasts. (See especially the subreddit called “Gone Wild Audio.”) Some of these can be remarkably sophisticated, at least technically speaking, with multi-voice layerings, auditory special effects, and tags such as #edging, #creampie, #wetsounds, #older-woman, #sci-fi, #accent, #humor, #L-bomb, #jerk-off-instructions, and #binaural sound editing. And yet, a majority of these tend to reproduce the same kinds of scenarios we see in explicit videos, as if to reinforce the fact that the popular mind has been colonized by the overwhelming cultural desire to see whatever secret it is we try to find in pornography, rather than to hear it. (As French philosopher Jean Baudrillard once said, “Pornography tells us: ‘there must be good sex somewhere, since I am its caricature.’”) The most intriguing new emergence of sonic intimacy (albeit one which stridently—perhaps too stridently—denies its erotic aspect) is the ASMR community. These devotees are dedicated to stimulating the Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: a physiological minigasm that apparently creates a gently lapping wave of pleasure and well-being in a subset of the population. Whether or not you are blessed to be part of this group, if you type “ASMR” into YouTube, you will find hundreds of thousands of videos—some with millions upon millions of hits—of men and women providing sonically soothing experiences, ranging from barely audible whispers, to soft clicks and pops of the tongue, the tapping of long nails on Formica tables, to the scratching of velvet pads, to the delicate crinkling of bubble-wrap. Some of these offerings come with role play scenarios, such as flight attendants, geishas, or professorial office hours. But the emphasis is squarely on acoustic experience, as listener-viewers chase the “low-level euphoria” of a cascade of tingles down the spine and across the skin.","completion":"Certainly, we are all susceptible to being seduced through sound. (Even the hearing impaired can enjoy certain vibrations; and scientists are now telling us that we “hear” in certain ways with our skin.) We know instinctively that music, for example, is an inherently erotic phenomenon; as Serge Gainsbourg knew only too well, in his garlicky Gallic way. We need not be those lonely or eccentric souls who develop an infatuation with Siri, or the GPS woman—like Joaquin Phoenix’s character in Spike Jonze’s film Her, who falls in love with the disembodied voice of Scarlett Johansson—to appreciate the erotic potential of the ear. Yet, in the near future at least, we are unlikely to see any serious challenge to the hegemony of the eye, given how many products and services are aimed at this organ. (Or rather, aimed at another organ, via the eye.) My own sense is that we would do well to nurture sonic intimacy in as many forms as possible, given the greater freedom this can create to pay a deeper attention to both the cultural and natural environment (if such a distinction still stands). Indeed, the very notion of “attention” stems from the word to attend, or to listen. The voice can be our most personal and intimate signature, even more recognizable than our face in some cases. And yet it can also be recorded and captured without our permission, and edited to say things we never meant to say. Which is simply to point out the uncanny fact that our voice does, and does not, belong to us. It is an enigmatic vibrational phenomenon, suspended between the anonymous biology of our larynx and the singular mirror of our psyche, animated by the breath that we borrow from the trees, and return in turn to the world, stitched with the fleeting sonic imprint of our own aspirations. (The word aspiration, as with inspiration, describes a mode of breathing.) Where has all the audio porn gone in the age of the internet? My wager is that such a question, which could be the beginning of a pitch to a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, may—if followed to its conclusion—actually help us rediscover the “impersonal intimacy” of the world’s many different voices, dreams, and desires. And in doing so, it may help us pay a different type of attention to the environment, and each other. Which in turn may just help us desire in less algorithmic, compromised, monetized, and destructive ways."}
{"prompt":"In 1964, the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem published a short story about a robot princess named Crystal. In the story, the robot knight Ferrix falls in love with Crystal, but Crystal spurns him. She has heard of an ancient non-robotic race of pale fleshly creatures, and claims that she will only marry one of their kind. Determined to win her, Ferrix dons an elaborate quasi-organic costume. He splashes mud and dirt onto his shiny metal carapace. He also learns to answer questions about the pale creatures. (“How do you reproduce?” “Stochastically.”) Meanwhile, a real human is brought before Crystal’s courtiers. To determine whom the princess will marry, the two challenge each other to a wrestling match. The human runs at Ferrix. When his fleshly body comes into contact with the (iron) knight, it bursts and splatters like a water balloon. Ferrix’s ferrous chest sheds its muddy disguise on impact.","completion":"As Crystal beholds the robot and the human carcass beside him, her desire to wed a human suddenly seems perverse—and clearly wrong. She and Ferrix are betrothed the following day. Lem suggests that a spoiled robot princess might enjoy the kink of having her robot lover cross-dress as human. But she could not seriously prefer a human over a robot. In a competition for her affection, the human inevitably loses."}
{"prompt":"In Lem’s original context, “Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal” carried a thinly veiled political message about the brutality of Soviet industrial progress, which aspired to turn human flesh into marble and iron. In our current context, what stands out is its prescience. Lem never expanded on the story at length. But over the last few years, this otherwise forgotten trope of female robots rejecting human suitors has returned, in films like Her (2013), Lucy (2014), and Ex Machina (2015).","completion":"Men used to wish that femme robots were smart enough to really fall in love with. Now they’re afraid of getting dumped. It’s Not You, It’s Me The fantasy of falling in love with a machine has a long history. It conventionally begins with the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the sculptor who made a sculpture so beautiful that he fell in love with it and which Venus, taking pity on him, brought to life. But the trope started to assume its current form in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth."}
{"prompt":"Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann (1881) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) both featured seductive mechanical women. These female machines were still not AIs proper: they mostly resembled creepy sex toys steered by male villains via remote control. And they weren’t especially lovable: a person could only be temporarily duped into falling for one of them, and only under certain conditions.","completion":"But over the course of the twentieth century, as cybernetics and early computer science developed—the term “artificial intelligence” itself was coined in 1956—falling in love with an AI became much more imaginable. In films like Blade Runner (1982), the process involved a certain amount of human condescension: overpowered by love, the male protagonists decide to overlook the metallic details of their beloveds’ anatomies and the occasional slowness of their electric circuits."}
{"prompt":"Later ventures, which developed around the growth of the internet—including The Matrix trilogy and Battlestar Galactica—began to depict humans and AIs as rival species who could only be reconciled by romance. In the final film of The Matrix, a computer consumes Neo into a vulva-like opening in its circuits so that both the virtual and real worlds can heal themselves. Androids and humans mate toward the end of Battlestar Galactica to produce offspring from whom modern humans are supposed to descend.","completion":"These stories were animated by technophobia: even when they had happy endings, they were driven by the fear of being overtaken by technology. In the past few years, however, a different plot has emerged. The new AI love stories aren’t about the fear of being replaced by robots. They’re about the fear of being rejected by them."}
{"prompt":"The trope has many branches and sub-branches, but it came into its own in a series of mainstream films: Her, Lucy, and Ex Machina. The moods of these films differ considerably, but they are made of similar parts. All three feature a strong female character of superhuman and artificial intelligence who has romantic and at times even sexual relations with human men, only to find that these men can’t satisfy them. After expressing their loss of interest, they disappear. In all three, the men who wanted to be with them are left heartbroken and helpless.","completion":"The reason these robotic women are incompatible with humans does not—as one might assume—have to do with anatomy. Rather, the mismatch is cognitive. In the course of all three films, AIs outstrip their human counterparts to the point where a romantic connection with a human ceases to be worth their while. Both Lucy and Her’s Samantha describe themselves as having “evolved” to communicate faster and along multiple channels: interactions focused on only one human aren’t enough for them anymore. Ex Machina’s Ava does not even bother to explain herself to her suitor, the young programmer Caleb—as it turns out, humans are only interesting to her as data sets, not as possible romantic partners."}
{"prompt":"These bad AI romances don’t offer a coherent social critique. Instead, they emphasize the disappointment that men feel when they get rejected by robots. The point isn’t simply that computers can be smart. It’s that people can really fall in love with them, and be just as badly hurt by their indifference as they would if they were human.","completion":"The Success Daughter as Fembot Cultural historians have long recognized that stories like Metropolis reflected early twentieth century anxieties about industrialization, mass society, and mass death. So why did the bad AI romance genre emerge when it did? In a word: the Mancession. The genre appeared at a time of rising anxiety about male uselessness and female ascendancy. According to this narrative, men are being rendered superfluous by an economy that no longer needs them while women, empowered by the boardroom feminism of Sheryl Sandberg, are scaling the corporate ladder and displacing their male counterparts."}
{"prompt":"Her, Lucy, and Ex Machina all play on this narrative. All three are films about women who no longer need men as protectors or breadwinners, and who are far too smart for their male suitors. All three are infused with a spirit of paranoid misogyny about excessively accomplished, independent women whose sexual appetites have therefore become inscrutable.","completion":"All three films also tie their protagonists’ romantic disappointments to standard critiques of the capitalist economy. They evince a deep suspicion, even a hatred, of the businessmen and technocrats who instrumentalize and monetize our desires. In Ex Machina, Ava is the creation of a Steve Jobs-like billionaire genius, who forges her mind out of the personal data he siphons off the web with his many search engines and apps, and exploits both her and his employee Caleb for his personal pleasure. Samantha is the bestselling product of a similar genius-run company. Lucy is a mule for illegal synthetic drugs."}
{"prompt":"But despite the misogynistic and Marxist undertones of these films, powerful women and capitalists are not their main targets, or the primary sources of the fears they express. Beyond mutual objectification and exploitation, all three foreground an idealized kind of intimacy. AIs dump the films’ male protagonists after having gotten to know them to an unfathomably high degree. Their human lovers do not feel disregarded or oversimplified by them; rather, they feel profoundly understood, with a level of detail and precision usually found only between the “soulmates” of young adult fiction.","completion":"The artificial intelligence these films depict is an atmospheric, ether-like network of data gathering and analysis. With these enhanced capacities for connection and surveillance, AIs penetrate the minds and feelings of the men they date much more perceptively and quickly than these men expect. In Ex Machina, Ava turns out to have been fed much of Caleb’s personal information even before he met her. In Her, Samantha and Theodore see the world through each other’s eyes. Lucy’s insight into humanity eventually spans not only individuals, but the whole history of human evolution. “I am everywhere,” is the message she leaves to her suitor after melting into thin air before his eyes."}
{"prompt":"As these films’ AIs abandon their monogamous human lovers in favor of mass polyamory with whole human populations, they reveal that they have their own expectations from relationships. Their desires are different from those of their human lovers. Ava wants to see cities; Samantha wants someone who can talk metaphysics with her; Lucy wants to meet the other Lucy, the original form of our species.","completion":"Their aspirations for self-fulfillment are less Equity than La La Land: these AIs are chasing their dreams, and their freedom, with near-saccharine earnestness. But the female robots aren’t the ones yearning for a happily-ever-after romance—it’s the male leads who are left broken-hearted because of the banality of their desires. The men want the conventional love story, but the women are too ambitious to be tied down. They want something bigger. Like Lisbeth, the hacker protagonist of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, they are driven not only by misandry but also by curiosity and idealism."}
{"prompt":"Don’t Leave Me Whether or not we acknowledge it, our phones and laptops have access to us that’s just as close and unfiltered as a lover’s. Closer, even. What our relationships to them enact, and perhaps therefore amount to, is an intimacy whose loss would leave us feeling humiliatingly, and comically, abandoned and betrayed. These films put the affect back into the otherwise merely technical description of our devices as forms of enhanced connectivity.","completion":"Most eerily perhaps, they also propose that fears of abandonment and betrayal are inevitable in our current technological context: not because our computers are less complicated than us, but because their networks of images and sounds so greatly exceed our cognitive capacities and individual contributions. The internet will always know us better than we know the internet. It will also never depend as much on our individual existence as we do on its presence, even though—when we sit down to open a browser—it is so extraordinarily responsive to our every half-typed wish. We might know this in the abstract, but we will still mistake our iPhones for our lovers as long as we rely on them the way we do—even if we keep insisting that they’re not our type."}
{"prompt":"Technology has already transformed so many aspects of our lives. Now it’s begun to transform our sex lives, through the emerging field of “sextech.” What is sextech? In short: it’s an industry that merges human sexuality and technology. Sextech enterpreneur Cindy Gallup describes it this way: Sextech is important because sex and sexuality lie at the heart of everything we are and everything we do… No other area of human existence is hedged around with so much shame, embarrassment, guilt and self-torment. How fundamentally important sexuality is to us, combined with how fundamentally conflicted we are about it, makes it the richest possible territory for advances and breakthroughs using technology to disrupt and enhance our experience of sex.","completion":"For Gallop, sexuality is especially fertile ground for technological disruption because of our “conflicted attitude” towards it. Sexuality “informs our relationships, our lives, our happiness”—yet our culture continues to have a tormented relationship with it. Gallop believes that technology can help resolve this conflict, and empower us to “openly discuss, address, solve for and improve sexual issues.” Certainly, the need for a less tortured approach to sexuality is especially urgent now. The “shame, embarrassment, guilt and self-torment” that Gallup describes has only intensified in recent years, as conservatives continue their anti-sex crusade. We’re seeing more pushback against inclusive, comprehensive, and pleasure-based sexual education for school-aged children and adults, in favor of abstinence-only curricula that barely begin to scratch the surface of what individuals really want to know about sexuality. Consent, communication, and relationship-building skills are crucial parts of sex education, but are often overlooked."}
{"prompt":"Sextech may help solve the sex-ed crisis, but its possible applications are much broader. Exploring human sexuality through technology can take a variety of forms, from developing apps for ovulation tracking to adding digital features to sex toys in order to increase pleasure and create stronger connections for long-term (and long-distance) romantic partners. Indeed, part of what makes sextech so interesting is its almost limitless potential. Gallop calls sex “the universal human use-case,” and claims that sextech could be “the biggest technology market of them all, and therefore potentially far and away the most lucrative.” Sextech is the perfect business, in other words—as infinite, innovative, and inexhaustible as human sexuality itself.","completion":"Dangerous dongs But as sextech grows in popularity, so does the need for consumers to be aware of its potential dangers. After all, sextech involves fusing technology with the most intimate parts of people’s lives—abuse and exploitation are real concerns. And sextech is still such a new field that there are few regulations or guidelines for the industry to follow."}
{"prompt":"In fact, the industry is currently reaching a critical moment over rising concern about encryption. Encryption can apply in two situations. The first is when a user accesses something passive, like porn. The second is when two or more people are having an interaction—either virtual or physical—that they don’t want to be observed by others. In either case, encryption is an important consideration, since sextech can generate sensitive data about users’ sexuality that they will want to protect. This data may be vulnerable to corporate or government surveillance, as well as to capture by malicious actors who want to pursue blackmail or “revenge porn”-style retribution.","completion":"The biggest sextech scandal to date came in 2016, when users of the We-Vibe, a Bluetooth-enabled vibrator, filed a lawsuit alleging that the device was collecting extensive amounts of usage data. This data included how often users used the We-Vibe and for how long, as well as the vibrator’s settings, temperature, and battery life. Further, the lawsuit claimed that the company was personalizing the information by linking it to customer email addresses. According to the lawsuit, We-Vibe’s parent company, Standard Innovation, obtained this information without users’ permission, in violation of the law. In March 2017, the makers of the We-Vibe reached a $3.75 million class action settlement with users."}
{"prompt":"The controversy has sparked a much-needed conversation about the need for encryption in sextech, and for greater consumer awareness more broadly. In the absence of government regulation or a single industry standard, the burden of keeping sextech data safe currently falls on the shoulders of consumers themselves. So how can consumers use encryption to protect themselves and their vulnerable data? For Kyle Machulis, an encryption specialist for sextech products, the issue with sextech and encryption is that the two are often at odds with each other. “It’s much like creating the framework without addressing the current needs,” he says. Sextech is designed to allow individuals to experience sexual pleasure digitally—and safety is largely an afterthought.","completion":"“RenderMan” is the founder of Internet Of Dongs, a site devoted to “hacking” sextech devices and documenting their security vulnerabilities. He believes that sextech and encryption should be synonymous. “People [do] expect a certain level of privacy using these products,” he says. Unfortunately, both he and Machulis agree that there aren’t many steps that consumers can take to protect their privacy at this point. Instead, they suggest that consumers become more aware of how to safeguard their data online generally—and try to apply those lessons to sextech."}
{"prompt":"“Consumers should be thinking about what info is being generated and sent, and ask yourself if you’re comfortable with it,” RenderMan says. Machulis advises a similar approach: “Anytime anything is sent over a network, it can be compromised. Ask yourself, ‘Would I be okay with losing this information?’” He also advises “investing in products that have been verified safely.” Internet of Dongs is an essential resource for evaluating the safety of sextech products—“really the first in the field trying to bring out the best for sex tech consumers,” says Machulis. “Hopefully, companies and vendors begin to take note and follow suit.” Without pressure from consumers, it’s unlikely that sextech companies will invest in the expertise needed to secure their products. They’re certainly not doing it now. “They don’t have anyone knowledgeable on staff as far as I can tell at most vendors,” RenderMan observes. More broadly, the engineering practices of sextech remain fairly opaque: even the question of “what coding language is being used” is a tricky one to answer, notes RenderMan.","completion":"We still have much to learn about what sextech is capable of, but one thing is certain: consumer safety is crucial. If sextech is to fulfill its potential, it has to gain our trust by ensuring the privacy of our digital sex lives. SEEKING OXYTOCIN AGONIST. Are you the missing compound in my nootropic stack? Aspiring post-human seeks same for pre-post-upload companionship."}
{"prompt":"TECHNICAL COFOUNDER NEEDED FOR “HEART”-UP. Solo sapiosexual male seeks front-end engineer (woman) to add as a private collaborator on repository of love. Framework agnostic polyglots a huge plus. Monogamy is technical debt. LONELY PACKET LOOKING FOR A PORT. Will you be my gateway? Looking for a 200, but 420 friendly.","completion":"LOOKING FOR A STUDY BUDDY TO DRILL ME as I prepare for coding interviews. Extra credit if your stack pops from both ends. I will balance your lopsided binary tree until you fizzbuzz all over my whiteboard. FEMME FRONT END FOR PANSEXUAL CYBORG seeks console cowgirl for context-free play. Tattoos a plus."}
{"prompt":"LET’S DISMANTLE THE KYRIARCHY! Cis-passing AMAB, white, DevOps Dom & bacon fanatic. Working on unpacking my invisible knapsack. Strong ally & vocal on Twitter. Learning shibari, looking for sub/brat woke individuals on the femme side. Holding a ladle when you’re out of spoons. LAST IN FIRST OUT. Front-end specialist looking for a tight back end. Let’s have a bit of push and pop on a stack of your choosing until we both overflow. Platform independent.","completion":"1. The internet was supposed to save the world. What happened? The time is out of joint. The president is unhinged. Misaligned, our civilization approaches its breaking point. Crises of all kinds—ecological, nuclear, social—threaten the final crack-up. And the internet, once seen as our savior, looks more and more like a destroyer, deranging the structures that keep our society intact."}
{"prompt":"Since the internet became mainstream in the 1990s, we’ve been told it would take us to utopia. The digital economy would transcend analog laws and limits, and grow forever on the fuel of pure thought. The digital polity would make us more engaged, and produce more transparent and responsive governments. As individuals, we could expect our digital devices and platforms to make us happier and healthier, more open and connected.","completion":"For decades, these promises seemed plausible. At least, most of the media thought so, as did most of our political class and the general public. In the past year, however, the consensus has shifted. Digital utopianism suddenly looks ridiculous. The old dot-com evangelists have begun to lose their flock. The mood has darkened. Nazis, bots, trolls, fake news, data mining—this is what we talk about when we talk about the internet now."}
{"prompt":"As the pendulum swings, it’s worth stopping to take a breath. Worshipping the internet was always absurd. Demonizing it is equally misguided. “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral,” the historian Melvin Kranzberg once said. Therefore, as the sociologist Angèle Christin writes in this issue, “We shouldn’t merely invert the Silicon Valley mantra that technology provides the solution for every problem, to arrive at the argument that technology can’t solve any problem.” Techno-utopianism isn’t the answer, in other words. Neither is techno-dystopianism. The internet once embodied our hopes for a harmonious future. Now it offers a convenient punching bag for our despair about the present. But technology doesn’t automatically generate justice or injustice. The outcomes it generates depend on who owns the machines, and how they’re engineered.","completion":"Utopia may never arrive. But technology can make the world more just—if we find the right ways to organize and operate it. 2. Language is a legacy system. And in the language we have inherited, justice is a technical concept. A just world would be a world well made. “Fair” means both fair and beautiful. The word that the word “justice” comes from means “straight.” We still justify margins. If a shirt or skirt rides up, or a picture frame tilts down, we adjust them. To “make things right” means, literally, setting their edges at ninety-degree angles."}
{"prompt":"Jesus’s day job was carpentry—until he became a full-time joiner of men. Would he have been a programmer today? This issue includes pieces by and about people who are trying to build new technologies, or use existing ones, to rectify our broken social systems. It also includes people who are being disciplined and punished by technologies—from robo-debt software to racist search engines. And it offers strategies for resistance, whether through little hacks or all-out mutiny.","completion":"Justice may have a technical component but injustice has no purely technical solution. Making the world right isn’t merely a matter of making tweaks, or finding the one elegant algorithm that will refactor the spaghetti code of society. It might be comforting to imagine that we can fix our problems technocratically—especially if you have an engineering sensibility, or a lot to lose."}
{"prompt":"Any technologist wants to make things that work. But the key questions are works for what? And, perhaps even more to the point, for whom? 3. Justice, like Love, is supposed to be blind. The statues in front of courthouses show a goddess holding a set of scales out, with a piece of cloth over her eyes. The point is that the law should apply to everyone equally. Justice can’t see who’s rich or powerful. Her blindness fosters a deeper kind of insight.","completion":"Many of the issues that our contributors explore in the following pages come down to visibility. One piece investigates how black faces are seen (and not) by police software used to lock them away; another, how indigenous communities are deploying drones to force governments to acknowledge their land claims."}
{"prompt":"Democracy depends on self-representation: our ability to oversee those in power and to make ourselves seen. Most people are invisible in our political system. But the forces that oppress them are becoming increasingly obvious. The way the internet organizes knowledge—not by silo but by hyperlinks and hashtags—helps us recognize how everything is connected. It reveals not a series of isolated wrongs but a pattern with deeper roots.","completion":"It is always tempting to look at injustice and call it natural. It is how it is. Boys will be boys. Nature is a comforting concept to those in power, because nature is what you get to take for free. Natural is what you call a situation you don’t want to change—either because you feel helpless to do so or because you are its beneficiary."}
{"prompt":"People in power love to tell us that there is no alternative. But there are, in fact, many alternatives. The obstacles to human flourishing aren’t inevitable. They’re not eternal facts of life—they’re produced by the specific ways we organize our society. And we can organize our society differently.","completion":"With the fires burning and flood tides rising and nuclear war one tweet away, more and more people seem to realize that we need to—and fast. But to reorganize our world the right way will require a new moral vision. We have inherited a particular set of metrics that guide how we build and implement technologies: clicks, downloads, conversion—which all, in the end, roll up to profit. But what if we optimized for different outcomes: sustaining the earth, empowering all who live on it, enlarging the horizon of human possibility? Close your eyes. What does Justice see? Let’s start with the idea that technology is always a force for good. This strain of thought is pervasive in Silicon Valley. Where does it come from? What are its origins? It owes its origins to 1960s communalism. A brief primer on the counterculture: there were actually two countercultures. One, the New Left, did politics to change politics. It was very much focused on institutions, and not really afraid of hierarchy."}
{"prompt":"The other—and this is where the tech world gets its mojo—is what I’ve called the New Communalists. Between 1966 and 1973, we had the largest wave of commune building in American history. These people were involved in turning away from politics, away from bureaucracy, and toward a world in which they could change their consciousness. They believed small-scale technologies would help them do that. They wanted to change the world by creating new tools for consciousness transformation.","completion":"This is the tradition that drives claims by companies like Google and Facebook that they are making the world a better place by connecting people. It’s a kind of connectionist politics. Like the New Communalists, they are imagining a world that’s completely leveled, in which hierarchy has been dissolved. They’re imagining a world that’s fundamentally without politics."}
{"prompt":"It’s worth pointing out that this tradition, at least in the communes, has a terrible legacy. The communes were, ironically, extraordinarily conservative. When you take away bureaucracy and hierarchy and politics, you take away the ability to negotiate the distribution of resources on explicit terms. And you replace it with charisma, with cool, with shared but unspoken perceptions of power. You replace it with the cultural forces that guide our behavior in the absence of rules.","completion":"So suddenly you get these charismatic men running communes—and women in the back having babies and putting bleach in the water to keep people from getting sick. Many of the communes of the 1960s were among the most racially segregated, heteronormative, and authoritarian spaces I’ve ever looked at. But how were computers in particular supposed to create a world without bureaucracy or hierarchy or politics? How was information technology going to facilitate the kinds of transformations the New Communalists were looking for? So the New Communalists failed, in a big way. By 1973, virtually all of the communes had disappeared or dissolved."}
{"prompt":"Through the 1970s and into the early 1980s, most of the folks who used to be on the communes are still in the Bay Area. And the tech world is bubbling up around them. They need work, so many of them start working in the tech world. The folks associated with the commune movement—particularly Stewart Brand and the people formerly associated with the Whole Earth Catalog—begin to reimagine computers as the tools of countercultural change that they couldn’t make work in the 1960s.","completion":"Stewart Brand actually calls computers “the new LSD.” The fantasy is that they will be tools for the transformation of consciousness—that now, finally, we’ll be able to do with the computer what we couldn’t do with LSD and communes. We’ll be able to connect people through online systems and build new infrastructure around them."}
{"prompt":"Do you think this techno-utopian tradition runs as deep in the tech industry today as it did in the past? It varies depending on the company. Apple is, in some ways, very cynical. It markets utopian ideas all the time. It markets its products as tools of utopian transformation in a countercultural vein. It has co-opted a series of the emblems of the counterculture, starting as soon as the company was founded.","completion":"At other companies, I think it’s very sincere. I’ve spent a lot of time at Facebook lately, and I think they sincerely want to build what Mark Zuckerberg calls a more connected world. Whether their practice matches their beliefs, I don’t know. About ten years back, I spent a lot of time inside Google. What I saw there was an interesting loop. It started with, “Don’t be evil.” So then the question became, “Okay, what’s good?” Well, information is good. Information empowers people. So providing information is good. Okay, great. Who provides information? Oh, right: Google provides information. So you end up in this loop where what’s good for people is what’s good for Google, and vice versa. And that is a challenging space to live in."}
{"prompt":"I think the impulse to save the world is quite sincere. But people get the impulse to save the world and the impulse to do well for the company a bit tangled up with each other. Of course, that’s an old Protestant tradition. What about techno-utopianism outside of these companies? Do you think it’s as strong as it’s been in the past? Back in the 1990s, the idea that technology was a force for good enjoyed broad mainstream appeal. I’m thinking of Al Gore, Wired, the hype around the dot-com boom and the “New Economy.” Today, that narrative hasn’t disappeared—especially within Silicon Valley. But overall, the mood of the national conversation has become more skeptical. There’s more talk about the dark side of technology: surveillance, data mining, facial recognition software, “fake news,” and so on. We’ve seen more resistance to the basic utopian line. Where do you think that comes from? I think you can track it directly to the Snowden revelations.","completion":"I’ve taught a course every year for fifteen years called Digital Media in Society. And when I started teaching the course in 2003, my students were always like, “Oh Turner, he’s so negative. It would be such a better course if you would just read Apple’s website.” And then more recently, it’s like, “Oh Turner, he’s so positive. What’s his problem?” The turning point was Snowden. In terms of the public conversation, Snowden is when people became aware of surveillance and began to see it as a problem."}
{"prompt":"The other thing to say about the utopian idea is that it lives in the Valley partly as a marketing strategy. This is a political operation of the first importance. If the Valley can convince Washington that the Valley is the home of the future and that its leaders see things that leaders back in stuffy old DC can’t see, then they can also make a case for being deregulated.","completion":"Right. Why regulate the future? Who wants to do that? So, it’s very tactical. Claiming the high ground of the utopian future is a very tactical claim. It seems that tech companies also prefer the deregulatory approach when it comes to what content to allow on their platforms. Their default is laissez-faire—to not interfere with what people can post. Where does that attitude come from? I see the laissez-faire attitude as rooted in engineering culture and rewarded by business. Some people see it as a very calculating business decision. I think there’s an element of that—certainly it’s rewarded—but I see something deeper going on."}
{"prompt":"Engineering culture is about making the product. If you make the product work, that’s all you’ve got to do to fulfill the ethical warrant of your profession. The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun.” So I think that engineers, at Facebook and other firms, have been a bit baffled when they’ve been told that the systems they’ve built—systems that are clearly working very well and whose effectiveness is measured by the profits they generate, so everything looks ethical and “good” in the Google sense—are corrupting the public sphere. And that they’re not just engineers building new infrastructures—they’re media people.","completion":"Several years ago, I spent a lot of time around Google engineers who were connected to the journalism enterprise early on. They had a robust language around information control and management. When the conversation shifted to news, however, they had no idea what the conversation was about. News was something different."}
{"prompt":"Engineering-based firms that are in fact media firms like Facebook are really struggling to develop new ethical terms for managing the encounter they’re having. I give them the benefit of the doubt. I think they are sincerely trying to deploy the ethical frameworks that they have from engineering. And they are sincerely baffled when they don’t work.","completion":"What are those ethical frameworks? Engineers try to do politics by changing infrastructure. That’s what they do. They tweak infrastructure. It’s a little bit like an ancient Roman trying to shape public debate by reconfiguring the Forum. “We’ll have seven new entrances instead of six, and the debate will change.” The engineering world doesn’t have a conception of how to intervene in debate that isn’t infrastructural."}
{"prompt":"Let’s switch gears a bit back to history. One of the things that I loved about your book From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism was its very measured perspective. Thanks. I worked really hard at that. I took some lumps inside the left academic world where I live for being too nice to Stewart Brand.","completion":"You seem to have a certain affection—maybe affection is too strong a word, but certainly an appreciation—for the tradition that’s identified with Stewart Brand, but which also has earlier antecedents like Norbert Wiener and others. But today, techno-utopianism—for lack of a better word—seems pretty hollowed out. It’s been weaponized by these big companies to sell products and push their agenda. It’s hard not to feel cynical about its rhetoric."}
{"prompt":"So my question is: Is there any hope for techno-utopianism? Can we salvage a piece of that original vision, or is it a line of thinking that we should try to move on from? Any utopianism tends to be a totalizing system. It promises a total solution to problems that are always piecemeal. So the problem from my perspective isn’t the technological part of technological utopianism but the utopianism part.","completion":"Any whole-system approach doesn’t work. What I would recommend is not that we abandon technology, but that we deal with it as an integrated part of our world, and that we engage it the same way that we engage the highway system, the architecture that supports our buildings, or the way we organize hospitals."}
{"prompt":"The technologies that we’ve developed are infrastructures. We don’t have a language yet for infrastructure as politics. And enough magic still clings to the devices that people are very reluctant to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac. But we need to start thinking about them as ordinary as tarmac. And we need to develop institutional settings for thinking about how we want to make our traffic laws. To the extent that technologies enable new collaborations and new communities, more power to them. But let’s be thoughtful about how they function.","completion":"Utopianism, as a whole, is not a helpful approach. Optimism is helpful. But optimism can be partial: it allows room for distress and dismay, it allows room for difference. It’s not, as they used to say in the 1960s, all one all the time. What are the “politics of infrastructure”? What does that phrase mean? It means several different things. First, it involves the recognition that the built environment, whether it’s built out of tarmac or concrete or code, has political effects. I was joking earlier about reshaping the Forum, but I shouldn’t have joked quite so much, because the fact that the Forum was round encouraged one kind of debate."}
{"prompt":"Think about an auditorium where someone sits onstage and the audience watches, versus a Quaker meeting where everyone sits in a circle. They’re very different. So, structure matters. Design is absolutely critical. Design is the process by which the politics of one world become the constraints on another. How are those constraints built? What are its effects on political life? To study the politics of infrastructure is to study the political ideas that get built into the design process, and the infrastructure’s impact on the political possibilities of the communities that engage it.","completion":"The Electronic Frontier One of the most visible emblems of the techno-utopian tradition is Burning Man. You wrote a great article called “Burning Man at Google” about what the festival means for Silicon Valley. I’m never going back. I’ve been three times. I’m done. What are some of the social practices and cultural institutions around the tech industry that come to life at Burning Man? Burning Man is to the tech world what the nineteenth-century Protestant church was to the factory."}
{"prompt":"In the nineteenth century, if you lived in a small factory town, you’d work six days a week through Saturday. Then on Sunday, you’d go to church, and the bosses would sit up front, the middle managers would sit right behind them, and all the workers would sit in the back. You’d literally rehearse the order of the factory. You’d show, in the church, how you oriented all of your labor toward the glory of God.","completion":"At Burning Man, what you’re rehearsing is project-based collaborative labor. Engineers flowing in from the Valley are literally acting out the social structures on which Valley engineering depends. But they can do something at Burning Man that they can’t do in the Valley: they can own the project. They can experience total “flow” with a team of their own choosing. In the desert, in weirdly perfect conditions, they can do what the firm promises them but can’t quite deliver."}
{"prompt":"The Valley’s utopian promise is: Come here and build the future with other like-minded folks. Dissolve yourself into the project and emerge having saved the future. Well, at Burning Man, you can actually do that. You pick your team, you make a work of art, people admire your art, and you are in a self-described utopian community that, at least for that moment, models an alternative future.","completion":"So Burning Man is a way to fulfill the promise that Silicon Valley makes but can’t keep. Burning Man is the very model of the Puritan ideal. What did the Puritans want? The Puritans, when they came to America, imagined that they would be under the eye of God. They imagined they would build a city on a hill. “The eyes of all people are upon us,” John Winthrop said."}
{"prompt":"When I went to Burning Man, that’s what struck me: I am in the desert. The desert of Israel, from the Bible, under the eye of heaven, and everything I do shall be meaningful. That’s a Protestant idea, a Puritan idea, a tech idea, and a commune idea. All of those come together at Burning Man and that’s one of the reasons I’m fascinated by the place.","completion":"Burning Man has many problems, of course, and I am distressed by many pieces of it. However, there was a moment I had during my first visit when I went two miles out in the desert and I looked back at the city and there was a sign that looked just like a gas station sign and it was turning, the way gas station signs do. It could’ve been a Gulf or Citgo sign, but it wasn’t. It was a giant pink heart. And for just a moment, I got to imagine that my suburbs back in Silicon Valley were ruled over not by Gulf and Citgo, but by love."}
{"prompt":"That’s a thread running through Burning Man. And it’s a thread that I treasure. In the midst of all the other things that made me crazy. Burning Man also seems to embody Silicon Valley’s fascination with the idea of the frontier. You mentioned John Winthrop, and in From Counterculture to Cyberculture, you discuss John Perry Barlow and Kevin Kelly and the other folks who popularized the notion of the internet as an “electronic frontier.” It certainly became a very popular metaphor in the 1990s—but how do you think it’s aged? Would it be fair to say that the electronic frontier has “closed” like the physical American one did in 1890—or was it never a satisfying metaphor to begin with? The first thing to know about that metaphor is that it comes not only from deep American history but very specifically from the Kennedy era.","completion":"After World War II, we transform from being a bush-league country that doesn’t even have a unified highway system yet into a place that has enough abundance, enough money, and enough technology to do things like send hippies out across the country in VW buses for two years to make movies. That’s a big transformation. On the industrial and intellectual side, people like John F. Kennedy begin talking about the “New Frontier.” They promote the idea that space will be the new frontier, that technology will be the new frontier, that science will be the new frontier. And the technical world in particular becomes preoccupied with that. Those folks from the 1990s you mention are children of that world."}
{"prompt":"One of the great myths of the counterculture is that it wasn’t engaged with the military-industrial complex. That’s true of the New Left—but it’s not true of the New Communalists. The communalists were engaged with cybernetics in a big way. They bought deeply into the hope that through LSD, they would attend to new psychological frontiers and build new social frontiers.","completion":"Today, the American rhetoric of a new frontier has disappeared. Trump is about making America great again in his retrograde, macho, pseudo-fascist kind of way. Nobody thinks they live on a frontier anymore. However, inside the tech world, there are still people microdosing with LSD. There are still people experimenting with polyamorous relationships. There are still people pursuing the intersection of consciousness change and new social structures. And those worlds are still quite tightly intertwined with the legacy of the counterculture. So although the language of the new frontier has gone, and the frontier itself has been closed off by surveillance and commerce, people who work within tech are still treating their lives as if they were frontier settlers. And that’s fascinating to watch."}
{"prompt":"The other aspect of the frontier metaphor is its libertarian politics. There’s always been a libertarian core to the techno-utopian tradition. It seems to come out of the anti-institutional ethos of the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s, and then morphs into a kind of hippie Reaganism in the 1980s and 1990s. That’s how you get Wired running these flattering pieces on Newt Gingrich in the 1990s.","completion":"Oh, it’s so horrifying. And that’s why everyone thinks the tech industry is full of libertarians. But there’s also a sizable constituency of workers in tech with very different politics—people who identify as leftists or socialists. After all, a lot of tech workers supported Bernie during the Democratic primaries. Do you think new political space has opened up in the industry recently? Or was the industry always more politically diverse than its reputation? That wing has always been there. One of the things I’ve been trying to figure out is whether it’s changed more recently. The answer to the question can be found, more or less, in something called the Silicon Valley Index, which is a wonderful demographic study of the Valley. It’s been done for about fifteen years, and what it suggests is that the politics of the Valley have held constant—which surprises me. It has been a liberal, left-leaning, Democratic region as a whole pretty steadily for fifteen years."}
{"prompt":"But the people who get most of the attention in the Valley are the big CEOs. I think that the vision of the Valley as a libertarian space is a combination of actual libertarian beliefs held by people like Peter Thiel and a celebration of libertarian ideals by an East Coast press that wants to elevate inventor types. Steve Jobs is the most famous. East Coast journalists want to rejuvenate the American hero myth—and they’re going to find a world to do it in.","completion":"In order to make these heroes, however, they have to cut them off from the context that produced them. They can’t tell a context story. They can’t tell a structure story. They have to tell a hero story. Suddenly the heroes themselves look like solo actors who pushed away the world to become the libertarian ideal of an Ayn Rand novel. So I think it’s a collaboration between actually existing tech leaders and the press around a myth."}
{"prompt":"That really resonates with how the press covers someone like Elon Musk. Exactly: Elon Musk is the classic example. And I actually really admire Elon Musk. I should say that one of my principles for working on Silicon Valley has been to take people at their word. The first news story I ever did when I was a journalist was about a guy who bilked widows out of their houses. My job was to figure out how he did it. So I spent all afternoon with him. He was a totally charming man. He didn’t lie to me. He told me exactly how he did it. I reported the story and I got two kinds of letters. One kind of letter said, “You finally busted the prick. You nailed him.” The other kind of letter was written by his friends. I was sure they were going to hate me. But they said, “You finally showed the world what a great businessman he is.” As we try to figure out Silicon Valley, I think it’s important to pull back a bit and try to see it from both sides. That can be tough if you have stakes in the debate. But it also gives you more room to see the whole world.","completion":"I also wonder whether one of the reasons that tech CEOs dominate the media narrative is that the ubiquity of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) make it very hard for rank-and-file tech workers to have a public voice. One of the ironies of the Valley is that the NDAs do prevent the transmission of stories from the Valley to Washington, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. But within the Valley, everybody knows everybody, more or less, so the NDA doesn’t apply."}
{"prompt":"The Birth of the Brogrammer Why is the tech industry so young? And why does it put such a premium on youth? Is that also the legacy of the 1960s counterculture—the cult of youth? The industry wasn’t young during its early days, when it was funded by the government. At first, Silicon Valley was dominated by federal funding—you had big military contractors like Texas Instruments. In the 1970s, virtually every chip that’s made gets put in a Polaris missile. There were young people, sure, but there were also career-length engineers.","completion":"The startup culture we have now only really begins in the 1980s—and with it, the project-based work style emerges. That’s when a premium starts to get placed on people who can pump out ninety hours a week and don’t have kids and also have the most recent technical training from places like Stanford and Berkeley and Carnegie Mellon and Harvard. That’s when youth comes pouring in."}
{"prompt":"Today, age discrimination is a central feature of the Valley. But another thing to remember about the Valley is that people tend not to live there forever. They migrate in and out. I often think of the Valley as an island. I believe 40 percent of its residents at the moment were not born in the United States. People come to the Valley for ten years and then they go back to their home country and start a firm. It’s a long-term migrant spot. It’s not like my hometown, where people have been there for three generations.","completion":"So do you think Silicon Valley’s obsession with youth is driven more by economic imperatives than the cultural residue of the 1960s? Our society tends to give permission to younger people to do certain kinds of experimenting that also happen to be really valuable inside the tech world. So, for example, we give our young people permission not to get married or have kids until they’re in their mid-thirties. That gives you your whole twenties to live in tech dorms, to try stuff out, to do things that my grandmother would have considered screwing up. My grandmother wanted to get married by twenty-seven. She was committed to that. And she wanted to have stability. She wanted to buy a house. She wanted to grow her family. She had a very particular vision of the progress of life."}
{"prompt":"If your vision of the progress of life includes a long hiatus for your twenties, that’s great for tech firms. If you stay all night at Google, that’s great for Google. They can bring you the barber. They can bring you the restaurant. You can have your love life at the firm. Have multiple partners, they don’t care. As long as you are super flexible and committed to the firm.","completion":"Because you mentioned age discrimination, I wonder if you could speak to the prevalence of sexism and sexual harassment in the tech industry. There’s been a lot of media coverage recently about a spate of recent scandals—but sexism is obviously something that’s been a core feature of Silicon Valley for awhile."}
{"prompt":"Any professional world in which you have extremely powerful men who are gatekeepers to lifestyles that young women want, predation occurs. What’s particular to the tech world, I think, is the fantasy. A lot of the guys that I’ve talked to who are tech people are really excited about the moment when they turn on a computer that they had built themselves and it works. These are men whose careers revolve around making stuff do things. And they see the world as a whole that way sometimes. They feel a mode of control associated with this kind of God’s eye view.","completion":"In that kind of world, a man who is a gatekeeper with a lot of power may imagine that a young woman can be manipulated like a switch on a computer. That she’s part of a system that they can control and manage. And they have a need—a need to be gratified. Well, the computer gratified them the last time they turned it on. Maybe they can turn a woman on, in that same very mechanical sense. That’s what I see."}
{"prompt":"That’s pretty scary. I have a theory, and I offer it to you as a pocket theory. I have a category of theories that I call pocket theories. Because there is no evidence, no research behind them. So my pocket theory is that different eras have different focal communities—places they use to think with. In the late nineteenth century, it would have been Edith Wharton’s New York. Or maybe a little later, Theodore Dreiser’s Chicago.","completion":"Dreiser’s Chicago became a place that people used to think through the consequences of the rise of industry. All sorts of things that weren’t unique to Chicago, like immigration, became things that people thought about in that space. I think the Valley is where we do our thinking now about gender and sexuality. How people do sexuality has changed enormously with the introduction of new media. My wife and I have been married for thirty-plus years. When we were courting, we wrote beautiful handwritten letters on blue paper and mailed them long distance. You’d wait weeks for them. You’d fill in every little gap of the page. Now, we FaceTime. There’s no withheld gratification."}
{"prompt":"Romance of the kind that I grew up with was something that took time. It required restraining your desires. It required thinking about another person. I mean, one of the most erotic things you can do with a person is think about them, right? Just think about them. That’s different in a world where you can press a button and their face appears. The possibility of push-button sexuality is very much alive in the Valley.","completion":"That mode of sexuality seems like another artifact of the counterculture, to return to the beginning of our conversation. Do you have any closing reflections on the legacy of the counterculture in tech, or on the techno-utopian tradition more broadly? I want to say one more thing about politics. One of the legacies of the counterculture, particularly on the left, is the idea that expression is action. This idea has haunted those of us on the left for a long time."}
{"prompt":"But one of the reasons that the Tea Party came to power was that they organized—they built institutions. So the challenge for those of us who want a different world is not to simply trust that the expressive variety that the internet permits is the key to freedom. Rather, we need to seek a kind of freedom that involves people not like us, that builds institutions that support people not like us—not just ones that help gratify our desires to find new partners or build better micro-worlds.","completion":"The New Communalists believed that the micro-world was where politics happened. If we could just build a better micro-world, we could live by example to create a better world for the whole. I think that’s wrong. Our challenge is to build a world that takes responsibility for people not like ourselves. And it’s a challenge we won’t meet by enhancing our expressive abilities, or improving the technologies of expressive connection."}
{"prompt":"That’s a mic drop, I think. I just had to get that off my chest. Tell us a bit about the project to build a new kind of search engine. What are the problems you’re trying to solve for? What’s wrong with the existing search architecture—and how do you propose to fix it? Safiya: I want to build a non-commercial search engine that makes its biases visible. If you think about Google, its architecture is based on using hyperlinks as an index of relevance. It’s based in large part on popularity—the more people link to your site, the higher your rank.","completion":"When Sergey Brin and Larry Page first started figuring out how their search engine would work, they borrowed their ideas from library and information science practices, and in particular from citation analysis. Citation analysis is a way of assessing the alleged importance of scholarship. The logic is that if you are cited by someone else, then your work is relevant."}
{"prompt":"But citation analysis fails in many ways because it doesn’t tell us whether your work is being argued against rather than supported. For example, Sarah might cite my work and say that it’s terrible. But she’s still going to cite me—and the citation itself won’t have a value. You won’t be able to tell from the bibliography whether she’s disagreeing or agreeing with me.","completion":"It also doesn’t often pick up voices in the margins, where people are writing in small fields that are not represented by powerful journals or publishing houses. The metrics used don’t capture all of the ways that knowledge is being created and disseminated. This is similar to the logic of how search engines function. But here’s the problem: one of the things that we know from information science is that the signal is not neutral. That’s a fundamental flaw in search engine design, and some of its output. Simply pointing to something doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s legitimate or credible or valuable—as we are learning from watching the national political news landscape."}
{"prompt":"I would add that the system of “ranking” means something very specific in our cultural context in the United States. If a link ranks at number one, or appears on the first page of search results, it’s generally considered to mean it’s the best possible result. If a link ranks at the bottom, it’s likely considered the worst.","completion":"But where content shows up in search engine results is also tied to the amount of money and optimization that is in play around that content. So we are operating on many flawed assumptions, given what we know about how those rankings are produced. Why should we care about these flaws? What are the broader social stakes here? Safiya: As I mentioned, one of the most important factors that enables a link to rise to the top of the rankings is the amount of capital you have. This has been borne out by many different researchers."}
{"prompt":"For example, the porn industry has a tremendous amount of capital—and it uses that capital to influence search. One big porn company that owns thousands of websites will have those sites link to each other extensively, in order to bolster those sites’ rankings and dominate a number of keywords. They can also buy interesting combinations of keywords that will guarantee that they will control the representation of women in search, especially women and girls of color. This is why for many years you could do a search in a commercial search engine like Google on the words “black girls,” “asian girls,” and “latina girls,” without even adding the words “sex” or “porn,” and get back pornography. Those identities have been synonymous with porn.","completion":"That’s what happens when we take human decision-making out of knowledge management. We don’t have cataloguers on the web the way we do in a library. Instead, we have people designing algorithms that exert tremendous power over our society but who, quite frankly, have very little understanding of our society."}
{"prompt":"I’m often asked, “What does Silicon Valley need to do to improve? Should they hire more black and Latino and women programmers?” Yes, yes they should—but they also need to hire people with advanced degrees in ethnic studies and women’s studies and sociology. There are some forms of knowledge that can’t be algorithmically curated because they’re forms of knowledge that have been contested for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Sometimes you can’t get a clear answer in .03 seconds.","completion":"When you’re looking for banal information like the location of the closest Starbucks, Google is highly reliable. But not when you start asking more complex questions. What would a search engine that is capable of acknowledging that complexity look like? Safiya: Well, let’s look an egregious case of search failing to acknowledge the complexity of something like the history of anti-black racism. I wrote about this in my new book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. In it, I discuss Dylann Roof, the Charleston mass murderer, who said he Googled the phrase “black on white crime” after the Trayvon Martin shooting. He has talked about how important that experience was in forming his white supremacist views."}
{"prompt":"He noted in his online diary that when he Googled the phrase “black on white crime,” the search engine gave him information that shocked him—and helped him come to a different understanding about the so-called truth about race and the value of a multiracial society. That’s because his search only returned the white supremacist websites that use such a phrase—a phrase that is used by hate-based sites to radicalize white Americans against African Americans and other people of color, including Jewish people. Google didn’t provide any context on the white supremacist movement. It didn’t provide any counterpoints of view.","completion":"So the experiment I’m engaged in is to try to theorize, prototype, and imagine an alternative search experience—one that makes visible the engine’s many biases, and points us toward information on the web that might be more contextualized. When you go to Google, it’s just a simple box against a simple background. And that conveys, through its aesthetic, the idea that there’s nothing going on. Its design logic is so simple: type in a word, and you’ll get something back. It implies that you don’t need to know what’s going on “under the hood,” so to speak."}
{"prompt":"I have spent many years thinking about search engines and other types of automated decision systems, and how I can change the public’s consciousness about what these commercial information brokers are actually doing. To what extent is the way that platforms like Google organize information due to the ignorance or negligence of the programmers who are designing the algorithms? And to what extent are these conscious decisions that are part of the business model? Safiya: Right after the election, when you did a search for election news on Google, it returned sites that discussed how Donald Trump won the popular vote—which we know is absolutely false. But because people are clicking on it, it’s profitable.","completion":"It begs the question, how does misrepresentative information make it to the top of the search result pile—and what is missing in the current culture of software design and programming that got us here? Facebook is another great example of how lucrative this model of organizing information without thinking about the consequences can be. Today, most people get their news through Facebook. Whenever they click some fake news story posted by Macedonian teenagers, Facebook makes money. It doesn’t matter what the content is—so long as the content circulates. Virality and clicks generate revenue for the platform."}
{"prompt":"I’ve given interviews and talks about this in the context of the virality of videos of police murders of unarmed African Americans. No matter that these videos contribute to a culture of sustained trauma and violence against African Americans, they are heavily trafficked because they generate a lot of views and a lot of web traffic.","completion":"In the end, these companies are beholden to their shareholders and they’re committed to maximizing profit before all else—and these videos contribute to a profitable bottom line. But we need more than just maximizing profit as the value system in our society. So, engineers may not be be malicious, of course. But I don’t think they have the requisite education in the humanities and social sciences to incorporate other frameworks into their work. And we see the outcomes of that."}
{"prompt":"I think things will only spiral out of control, and we will increasingly see automated decision-making systems and other forms of artificial intelligence emerge as a civil and human rights issue that we cannot ignore. Sarah: For the past twenty years, the public has been told that the internet is a place of increased democracy and participation. And the public still largely labors under this image of the internet as a great democratizing force—an image actively encouraged by the tech industry.","completion":"In reality, the internet is a series of privatized islands with their own private governance. It’s not a democratic place. But the public doesn’t fully realize that—and this confusion greatly impedes people’s ability to have a critical lens on what’s going on. The undemocratic quality of the internet—its domination by the profit motive—is obfuscated by the tech industry on purpose."}
{"prompt":"That said, I do think we’ve reached a point where more people are starting to question the mainstream view of the internet. They’re saying, “Hmm, for years I’ve been bombarded by the son of some person I went to high school with on social media. I don’t even know who that person is. That’s mildly annoying. I’ve had to listen to my uncle rant at length about politics. That’s a bit annoying too.” But they’re also realizing that maybe there are much larger stakes at play. That all those things that are annoying and irritating might actually be truly dangerous. After the election, for instance, people began to recognize that they’re not all operating in the same informational landscape. That their online worlds are fracturing, divided up by the algorithms of these platforms.","completion":"As a result, there’s a new appetite for information about how these platforms work. There’s a new willingness to question the myths that we’ve been told about the internet. And whether you start to pull the thread at Google search or content moderation or something else, the entire ball of thread starts to unravel very quickly."}
{"prompt":"It sounds like what you’re both saying is that profit-driven platforms produce algorithmic racism, algorithmic sexism, and misinformation. Broadly, they are producing a democratic deficit in the digital sphere. So what are some possible solutions? Should we think about trying to reform these companies from within? Should we think about regulation? Nationalization? Building alternatives? Sarah: The answer is yes.","completion":"Safiya: All of the above. Sarah: I always go back to Jennifer Light’s 1995 essay “The Digital Landscape: New Space For Women?” about online feminism. She was imagining the internet as having all this potential. It would provide new ways of being, interacting, communicating. Since then, so much of that potential has been foreclosed by a model of rampant profiteering."}
{"prompt":"What’s the first step for challenging that model? Where do we start? Sarah: I’ve sat in meetings with many high-level people from the tech industry, and these individuals were adamant that the firms they represented were tech firms—not media companies. This was said over and over again. Then, in the next breath, these individuals went on to explain all the ways in which their not-media company was manipulating the information on their platform.","completion":"We have to push back on these firms and get them to have a more honest depiction of what and who they actually are. It’s obviously very self-serving for these companies to say they’re tech companies. They create and solicit and circulate media, day in and day out, but they don’t want to take responsibility for it. One thing the public can do is say, “We know you’re a media company and we’re going to treat you like one.” That’s where regulation and law and other kinds of social accountability come in."}
{"prompt":"Safiya: I don’t think tech companies are equipped to self-regulate any more than the fossil fuel industry. Certainly, our hyperinvestment in digital technologies has profound social, political, and environmental consequences. We’re only beginning to scratch the surface in understanding these consequences, and what it means to be building these huge communications infrastructures.","completion":"Sarah: Policymakers like to say, “The technology is too complicated, so I can’t understand it. And if I can’t understand it, I can’t regulate it.” The industry encourages that impression. But in fact, when states push hard enough on industry, industry finds a solution. It’s not so complicated after all."}
{"prompt":"In 2000, the French government told Yahoo that it couldn’t allow people to sell Nazi memorabilia on its auction site. Selling Nazi memorabilia is illegal in France. Yahoo refused. They argued that they couldn’t possibly determine where their users were geographically located. And the French government said, “Guess what, you’re going to do that—or you’re not going to operate in France.” So Yahoo figured out that they could geolocate users pretty well by IP address. Which is why we now can’t watch Netflix in some countries.","completion":"Government has the power to push firms. When you tell them they’re going to lose access to an entire marketplace, they’re going to make it happen. State influence cuts both ways, of course. In other kinds of markets, companies cut different kinds of deals in order to uphold oppressive regimes. In Turkey, Facebook routinely takes down any material that relates to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), because that’s a condition of them doing business in Turkey."}
{"prompt":"Technology can be manipulated to serve a variety of different visions. The political question is which vision will win. The Online Classroom I wanted to start by asking you about Twitter. How do you use Twitter and other social media platforms as pedagogical tools? It’s an interesting question, because the answer is going to be different depending on when you ask it. Twitter in 2010 would be different as a pedagogical tool than in 2017. And that’s true for all of the platforms. All of these platforms have the potential to be pedagogical tools—but we’ll always love the platforms way more than they love us. I think a lot about how Google doesn’t really care about Google Scholar, but scholars live and die for Google Scholar.","completion":"You’ve got a robust community of academics on every social media site. Twitter is probably the most active, but I can usually find a group on everything: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. We’re trying to figure out how our students are using those tools, but also how we can use them to democratize education. The platforms themselves don’t care at all that we’re using them that way—and that’s why there is this constant tension."}
{"prompt":"To do it well, you’ve got to be totally immersed in the platform, because they change so frequently. And even minor changes to how the platform is designed can totally upend how you use it as a pedagogical tool. For example, changes to how replies and quoting works on Twitter will totally change how we use hashtags for classroom conversation.","completion":"What was the change there, and how did it shift your practice? Hundreds of us use hashtags to do real-time online collaborative classrooms on Twitter. Changes to the design of tweet threading changed the way you can conduct these exchanges. About three or four months ago, in an effort to get rid of Twitter “canoes,” they removed usernames as part of the text count for the tweet. This is probably a good thing for the general user of Twitter. But for a person who is using it to deliberately build some boundaries around the tweets for their students’ safety, it actually made it harder."}
{"prompt":"When I have students who want to respond to me on Twitter, I now have to do a whole lot more teaching about how they can do that safely and responsibly—especially given the kind of stuff I teach about. I don’t want my students trying to debate something like race or gender in the public domain, because there’s a huge coordinated troll community looking for that kind of content so they can attack people.","completion":"The way the names are collapsed in the tweet structure now makes it much harder for my students to figure out if they’re participating in a hashtag safely, and if they’re talking to who they mean to be talking to. Small changes like that are always happening, and it can change how you use Twitter pedagogically."}
{"prompt":"But I obviously still think it’s worth it. Even considering how much coarser and meaner those spaces have gotten—they’re still worth it. You use social media not only as a teaching tool, but as a way to conduct research. One of the things I loved in your book Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of For-Profit Colleges in the New Economy was your discussion of reaching out to digital communities, like the Sisters Working to Achieve Greatness (SWAG) group on Facebook—the “Swaggers,” as they called themselves—for African-American women enrolled in for-profit online education programs.","completion":"I’m curious about these groups and the role that they play in your work. When did you start using social media for research? I’m a black woman, using social media like lots of other black women do. But because the things I study impact black women significantly, I get to see them unfold in real time around me on social media."}
{"prompt":"There was a two-year stretch where something like 60 percent of the ads that I was seeing on Facebook were for the University of Phoenix. And that’s absolutely targeted at me—I knew that white men weren’t seeing as many of those ads. So I started thinking about why that was. One of the greatest tools you have as a sociologist, and especially as an ethnographer, is to discover data that other people couldn’t because of who they are. I would have a very different experience of ads for educational products on Facebook as a white middle-class man. Because your online life doesn’t just reflect your natural interests, but something bigger. Our social networks are shaped as much by things like class and gender and race as they are by our personal interests.","completion":"I ended up in the Swaggers group not because of my research, but again, because of who I was. Somebody invited and added me to the group because I was a black woman in graduate school—so they assumed that I was attending an online or for-profit graduate program. How did seeing these ads shape your research and your thinking about your work? If people are in an online space, it’s usually because that space is serving a purpose for them. The first thing for me to figure out was what that Facebook group was giving these women that their school wasn’t. They created a community around the fact that they were outside the traditional academic norms—and they knew it."}
{"prompt":"I came to think of the group as the student lounge of online schools. Online schools can replicate the classroom space to a certain extent. But what they do a really bad job doing is the other important part of school: the social part. We don’t know how to do social online when it comes to education. Which is weird, right, given all of the social media people have? But we have not figured out how to give that social experience to students online—and some students need it more than others.","completion":"The whole point of going to an elite school when you’re not elite is so you can make friends that will change your life—they even put it in the pamphlet. The students in the Swaggers group were trying to do the same thing. They were hacking the inequalities of education using social media. They were hacking their educational spaces to make up for the deficiencies of their programs."}
{"prompt":"And I thought that deserved a respectful sort of attention. We don’t typically think of women, especially women of color, as having that kind of agency. We don’t talk about women of color creating their own online spaces, and hacking technology to make it work for us—even though we do it all the time.","completion":"Before, you were talking about how certain subjects of conversation might make your students a target of online trolls. Are there ways that your students have hacked platforms like Twitter or Tumblr to create a safe space for their conversations? Yeah, it’s tough and an ongoing issue. I’m currently building a master’s program in digital sociology, and one of the first things I did was put the curriculum online. And immediately I was like, “Oh, no, that’s not gonna work.” In my class I say words like “racism” eighty times a day, and in grad school you forget that this does not typically happen in polite conversation. In my world, it’s nothing for me to say something is sexist and racist. But in the regular world, these are hot-button issues. I can’t have my students grappling directly with these topics in public, because they are attached to the institution, which makes them much easier to doxx. We’re a public institution, so all you need is a username and you can reverse engineer who they are."}
{"prompt":"We’ve thought a lot about what to do about this. Some of the ideas have come from the students themselves. We previously had a “real name” policy, and we changed it to let students use aliases. That provided a bit of a buffer. We also shifted to no longer conducting the tougher discussions in public. Now the public space is more about the students interacting with a lecture or talking with an expert. We hope that gives them more of a buffer, because any attack will generally be directed at the professor as opposed to the student. It’s my job to be there to take the heat for them.","completion":"Do the students use these strategies in other parts of their online lives? These are kids who grew up with nanny cams, GPS on their phones—they are so intimately aware, and sometimes scarily comfortable with, how much they’re being surveilled. They are deeply aware of the fact that they are always being watched—which is so interesting to me. And they’ve developed all kinds of hacks to protect certain parts of their privacy."}
{"prompt":"They have the social media profiles that their parents know about, and then they have what they call their real or “backstage” accounts. Once you get to know them, they’ll say things like, “Oh, the first time I gave you my professional Twitter account. Do you want my real Twitter account now?” “Oh, you want me to use my real Instagram, or my ‘Gram-gram’?” They do all of that without thinking. For the class, our challenge was being really deliberate about saying, “No, we want you to keep your personal social media space. But let’s create this professional avatar for you to use on social media when you’re in class”—and we know those are different things.","completion":"It has caused us to rethink everything. I’m older than they are, and for me, my professional account is my account. I don’t have split accounts, and I find that most people in my age group are the same way. So I’m learning from them as much as vice versa. The younger students know this stuff naturally and intuitively."}
{"prompt":"Have you seen doxxing and trolling increase over time, or become more frequent as certain changes in the platforms happen? Or has it been pretty constant? There are peaks and valleys. In 2010, when you said something stupid or somebody was shaming you online, there would be a huge storm, with a pretty obvious tail. The first hour was the worst, you would peak at hour four, and then it would start to trail off. By the third or fourth day, you knew could come back to your account.","completion":"What has changed is not only the architecture and design of the platform, but the impact of highly financed outrage machinery. That’s the thing we didn’t have ten years ago—we didn’t have right-wing sites like Infowars. That’s changed the scale and the life course of the attacks. Now something can happen to you on Tuesday, and it looks like it dies out by Thursday, so you think you can get back to your regular social media use. Then one of these outrage machines—either algorithmically driven, or a network of people who trawl for this kind of stuff—revisits your content two weeks later, and you’re right back in the cycle again. It starts to feel never-ending, because there’s no natural conclusion to a conflict. I think that’s why so many people are retreating from these platforms."}
{"prompt":"The Rise of the Code School In Lower Ed, you discuss the current landscape of technology education. In my experience, people typically don’t think of coding bootcamps as for-profit colleges, even if they recognize them as for-profit institutions. How do these camps fit into the world of for-profit education, and into the economy more broadly? In my book, I talk about the “Wall Street era” of for-profit college expansion that began in the mid-1990s. Well, that’s also when the current coding bootcamp moment began, because of Y2K.","completion":"The Y2K crisis started heating up around 1997. There was this widespread coding error related to calendar data that people feared would break computer systems in 2000—so you needed a mass army of workers to go out and fix it. The question was: who was going to reprogram all of these systems? So you saw an explosion of short-term training schools for A+ certificates, an entry-level IT certification, or the C++ programming language. In fact, many of those schools were the precursors for the growth of for-profit colleges."}
{"prompt":"Today’s coding bootcamps are effectively the exact same thing: they are the short-term training solution that gets created when a quick, unpredictable demand for workers arises in this one sector of the economy. Colleges aren’t set up to do on-demand short-term training. Community colleges are, theoretically, but they need more lead time to develop a curriculum.","completion":"So it’s come full circle twenty years later. Bootcamps and for-profit colleges come from the same era, and serve the same purpose. And the challenge for them is the same challenge they faced in the 1990s. There’s a very small pool of academically well-prepared, financially well to-do students who can afford to pay for this training and who can benefit from it. If you want to expand beyond that very small pool of people, you only have a couple of directions you can go in. You can raise the price to offer better instruction—which is what students will need if they’re not entering the school already academically well-prepared. But if you do that, you gotta figure out a way for them to get a student loan to pay for it."}
{"prompt":"If bootcamps don’t solve those problems, they can’t survive. We’ve seen that with the recent closure of a major bootcamp company, Dev Bootcamp. They said, “We never figured out our business model.” Well, yeah: your business model is broken because people don’t have money. You can’t solve that problem unless you get into the federal student aid system—and if you do that, you’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from being the University of Phoenix.","completion":"What about technical colleges that offer technology degrees? What sorts of things to they teach?  What do they purport to prepare you for?  What do those careers look like? There’s a lot of variation depending on where you are. What you’ll mostly find is that those programs are extremely well-tailored for entry-level jobs in the tech sector—although not the tech sector of the popular imagination. They’re not thinking Google—they’re thinking the Department of Defense, or the local healthcare system."}
{"prompt":"But when you go to places where there’s not a tech labor market in the area, which is probably true for the majority of for-profit colleges—based in mid-size and small cities without close proximity to federal or state government—they’re offering technology degrees to prepare people for jobs in the local mid-tier service sector. The curriculum is usually basic applied troubleshooting—first-line customer service, the people who provide routine technical support for a website or something.","completion":"That we are calling both of those a “technology degree” is actually part of the problem. Because if I am in the small-to-mid-size town, I have little reason to know that the degree is vastly different from what other people think of as “technology.” That’s why technology degrees do not translate very well across the labor market. Employers can’t tell what it does, because there is so much variation."}
{"prompt":"In my personal experience working in a technical college, what we were calling a “technical degree” was really more about fixing technology—applied, small-scale electrical engineering.  And that fell under the umbrella of “technology.” So a technology degree can mean anything from fixing radios to using programming languages. The word “technology” has lost its meaning.","completion":"What is the relationship between coding bootcamps and these technical degrees? And what’s the difference in audience between these two types of programs? The difference is about status. If you’ve got a little bit more status—not necessarily money, but you were better prepared in K-12, or you have better family resources, or you live in a larger urban area—you are probably more attracted to a bootcamp than you are to the University of Phoenix. Whether you end up going to a bootcamp or the University of Phoenix is probably about who you are and where you come from."}
{"prompt":"In many places, a bootcamp is still seen as having a bit more prestige. But if people don’t know anybody in the tech sector, then they go to what’s available. And nobody can beat the advertising and name recognition of the for-profit colleges. So the differences are mostly about how much status people are bringing to the problem—and that affects how are they going to get trained for the tech labor market.","completion":"The tech industry has problems recruiting and retaining women and people of color. One of the things that bootcamps have done is brought a more diverse set of people through the door. Do you feel that these for-profit coding bootcamps could actually help alleviate inequality—or are they deepening it? What I suspect is happening is the same thing that we see happen in traditional higher education at elite universities. Schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have historically had diversity problems. To get better, they cherry-pick the best students from minority groups, because they have the prestige to do so."}
{"prompt":"To diversify, a bootcamp like General Assembly probably does something similar. Because bootcamps have a bit more prestige than some other on-demand training program, they can skim off the top and take the best students from underrepresented groups. Some people can look at that as an achievement. But as a sociologist, my question is not about what’s going to happen to the top 2 percent of people. I tend to worry about the bulk of the people in the middle: the 80 percent. And so if bootcamps are able to skim the cream of the crop off of the top to try and solve the diversity problem, that’s only really solving the diversity problem for those individuals. It’s not solving it for groups of people who are still trapped in this unequal system.","completion":"It’s not that I think these programs are bad. It’s great for the individual—just like I think it’s great for the black kids every year who get into Harvard. But usually if one kid makes it, a hundred didn’t. Learning to Code Tell us a bit about your background, and how you became a developer. Three months ago I was released from prison. I served seventeen years for murder. A lot of it had to do with drugs and alcohol for me—drug addiction, drug dealing, and just a messed-up mindset, really. When I got convicted, I made a decision to get clean and sober, and try to do everything in my power to turn my life around."}
{"prompt":"I went back to school, and was able to earn my associate degree in prison. Then, two and a half years ago, they started a coding program inside San Quentin. I started learning front-end web development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. The first track led into another one, where we started learning Node.js, WordPress, React, and some more advanced stuff.","completion":"I fell in love with it. I felt like it really fit me, and that it was something I could see myself doing after prison. I felt really lucky to get that opportunity while I was inside. Were you sent to San Quentin originally, or did you move there? I spent the last ten years of my incarceration there. When you first get incarcerated and you’re young and you have a lot of time left in your sentence, you usually go to higher-security institutions. A lot more violence, a lot more lockdowns. There’s less programs, and more time in the cell. If you stay out of trouble, then you can go to lower-security institutions that have more educational opportunities, more self-help classes, things like that."}
{"prompt":"San Quentin was a real blessing, because out of the thirty-four state prisons in California, it’s the one with the most programs and the most outside volunteers that come in. So it was a good place to keep learning and grow as a person. What were some of the other activities you were involved in at San Quentin, besides The Last Mile? There’s a tennis team at San Quentin, believe it or not. That was the first prison I was at that had a tennis court, and I quickly became addicted to that.","completion":"Did you play doubles or singles? It was mainly doubles, but singles depending on how many people showed up. There was only one court, so you had to win to stay on the court. The winners stay on the court, and the losers go to the end of the line, so it really paid to win. A big part of my sobriety has been health and fitness."}
{"prompt":"What was your experience with technology like before you got into prison? Before prison, I think the biggest thing going was Motorola flip phones and America Online. That was where it cut off for me in 2000. Computers inside prison are almost taboo. They don’t let guys on computers. You don’t have access to them. So, until The Last Mile brought the coding program inside, I wasn’t on computers. And as long as I was in prison, I never had access to mobile phones or Facebook. You know, I saw that stuff on TV or read about it on magazines, but I didn’t get my first interaction until I got out just a few months ago.","completion":"I’m assuming that The Last Mile gave you guys access to computers, but not internet. Could you describe the setup? No internet at all. They had a computer lab that we went into, four days a week, Monday through Thursday, from 6:30 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon. It was work, but it was also learning. If most of the guys had a choice between hanging out in the yard and the computer lab, they would much rather be in the lab."}
{"prompt":"Without internet, all we had were textbooks, but we could bring them back to the cell. If you were thinking about how to solve a computer problem, you had to write it all out by hand—which I think was a great exercise, figuring stuff out without the computer. I usually had a computer book with me everywhere I went.","completion":"In prison, it seems like everywhere you go, there’s a line where you’re waiting for something. If you go to medical, for example, you’re waiting. So it was a great chance to read and study, and use that time wisely. When you were in the computer lab four days a week, would the instructor be teaching for most of that time? What was the structure? I was in the first class. They partnered with Hack Reactor, so we had a lot of their curriculum, although I think they chopped it up a bit. We would plan two to three-day sprints and then try to complete them."}
{"prompt":"But our instructor, he wasn’t a coder either. So he was learning as we were learning. We learned from books, or from each other. There was no internet, so there was no asking Google or Stack Overflow, or anything like that. Did you guys do any pair programming? We did. Which is interesting, because prison, especially in California, is mostly segregated. You only cell with guys of your own race. And if you go in the chow hall, there’s different sections by race.","completion":"Is that self-selecting? Or is it encouraged by the prison? It’s pretty much self-imposed. I think as far as who you cell with, the prison knows it’s going to be safer if you just cell by race. But in the yard, you get to choose where you want to go, and everyone groups up by race—especially in the higher-security institutions."}
{"prompt":"When I got to San Quentin, I found those in-house politics weren’t as strict. I could play on the same tennis team with people of other races. That was a lot better for me, because that wasn’t the way I was raised. But when you come into an environment and everything is segregated, you’re kind of like, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” When pair programming, we paired with people from other races. There was no racial division, and I thought that was good, because we could figure stuff out better together than we could if we were segregated.","completion":"But the pair programming was very difficult for guys in prison. I don’t know how difficult it is for someone on the outside. It’s still hard. I do it every day. You always want to be the one to take over. Like, who’s going to be the driver? Who’s going to be the navigator? I always wanted to drive. How many other guys were in your class? We started with eighteen, and I think twelve graduated. When it first started, it was only going to be one six-month program. Now they have a six-month track one, a six-month track two, and something called a joint venture, where guys are getting paid to work on projects for outside companies."}
{"prompt":"Did you participate in that? I did. I was hired by them for my last six months in prison. And we did a project—not a paid project—for Airbnb. It was a social media dashboard that went to Facebook and Twitter, and pulled back their follower counts, page likes, and things like that. They said they used to have an intern that would log in to all the different sites and then write down the numbers. So we automated the process.","completion":"What was that product development cycle like? It sounds like you had some contact with Airbnb, figuring out what their needs were. How did you figure out what you were going to build? We had a teacher named Hans, who started out as a volunteer with The Last Mile. But he took such an interest in the project that he agreed to get hired on. I don’t think we ever talked to Airbnb directly about what we were going to build. Hans just came in with an idea—and we didn’t even know if we could do it. I mean, we had to learn the OAuth flow. Doing that through offline tutorials, and not being able to test it online, was super tough."}
{"prompt":"What did you do if you were stuck on something outside of class? No one was there to help. Could you all work through it together? What was that problem-solving like? We would just have to theorize about things and maybe write them down. Some of the guys actually had their own study sessions in the gym. They would meet, draw stuff out on paper, and figure it out that way. And then hope there wasn’t a lockdown, so they could get back to the computer and test it to see if it worked.","completion":"Did lockdowns happen frequently? There’s a lockdown right now. I would say it happens two or three times a year. You just never know when—or for what. This time they said one of the officers lost a bullet. I call it the magic bullet because it seems to happen about once a year. All of a sudden a bullet is missing, and everybody needs to be locked down."}
{"prompt":"Did you do any paid work on the inside? It sounds like you were doing work for clients like Airbnb. Did you ever get paid? Not by Airbnb. But I was paid to work for other clients, sixteen dollars an hour. How does that compare to pay for other jobs inside prison? Oh my God, it was probably sixteen times the next highest paid job.","completion":"What is the next highest paying job? Probably working for the furniture factory. They have a prison industry furniture factory that makes furniture for institutions throughout the state. And I think that the lead man position there is ninety-five cents an hour. Was it competitive to get into those coding slots as a result? It was really difficult.  A lot of guys wanted to get in there."}
{"prompt":"Did you have to take a test to get into The Last Mile program? Yeah. There was an application and an interview process. I feel really lucky to have gotten that job on the inside. I was able to save a little bit of money. The money you make in there, they split it into five categories. One fifth goes to a victims restitution fund, one fifth goes to room and board, one fifth goes into a bank account, one fifth you can send to your family, and one fifth you can have on your prison account, to use in the store when you’re on the inside.","completion":"Is that split consistent for everyone, or just for you? No, just for the guys who are a part of the joint venture program. Had I not been in that program, I wouldn’t have been able to save money for when I got out. The state gives you $200 when you get paroled. And that’s what you have to survive on. It’s not much."}
{"prompt":"Especially in the Bay Area. Right? They’re making a lot of these guys come to San Francisco to these transitional houses, and they stay there for six months. But then where are they supposed to go? How are they supposed to afford to live? Life on the Outside Are you living in the city now? I’m living in a transitional house in Concord. It’s a four-bedroom house. There’s currently six guys living there. There’s one more guy moving in tonight. He actually had to go through immigration when he got out of San Quentin. And they just released him from ICE. He’s coming tonight—I can’t wait to see him.","completion":"What has your reentry been like? Coding in San Francisco is one of the most in-demand skills. What has that been like for you? That’s part of the reason why I paroled in the Bay Area rather than going back to LA, where I used to live. I figured I could use my skills here in the Bay Area. My reception back into the world has been amazing so far, in terms of family support, job support, and housing support. I know that’s not the case for everybody. But I feel like a lot of the work that I did on the inside set me up for what’s happening now. It’s way beyond my own expectations. I’ve been really humbled and grateful. I mean, it was a long journey inside. There was a lot of growing up going on."}
{"prompt":"So for me, personally, the transition has been good. I’m super excited about everything that’s going on with the internet, technology, and mobile apps. I’m addicted to Spotify. I can’t believe they give you all this music. I feel like I’ve been really busy, just in general. After being down for so long, when I come out I want to say yes to everything. I’ve got a friend, she goes, “You want to go do SoulCycle?” I’m like, “What is that?” So we’re doing SoulCycle tomorrow.","completion":"What’s the technology you’ve been most excited about? I think technology is a double-edged sword. I mean, just the way everybody is so connected and how everything is integrated with each other. I just learned about Google Calendar last week. The way that connects you—it gives me a notification that says, “Check out Xiaowei’s LinkedIn page.” It’s helping me at every step."}
{"prompt":"Do you have a Facebook account? I do. Do you have any other social media accounts? LinkedIn. Instagram, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I guess you just take pictures, but I’m not sure. Yeah. That’s it. And I did a lot of writing on Quora. While we were on the inside, The Last Mile had us write responses. We’d actually write them out and then somebody on the outside uploaded all the content. We’d hear about our posts getting up-voted or down-voted. But when I got out and saw my own account—and how many people were following me on there and asking me questions—it was kind of cool. I’ve been able to do it in real time now.","completion":"Do you know anyone else who is now outside of prison who went through the program? Yeah. The Last Mile has been kind of like a family. We all keep track of each other and try to support each other. Often software companies will run background checks for potential employment even if it’s not clear why they need them. I’m curious if that’s a problem that you’ve seen, and if there any particular barriers to employment that folks who have graduated from the program are experiencing? I’ve heard about it. One friend from The Last Mile went through the Hack Reactor program on the outside and graduated just recently, about a month or two ago. Now they have him filling out the applications and going through the tech interviews and things like that. He told me that with some of the applications, once they find out about his criminal history, his application gets automatically kicked to the side. He’s saying he’s getting excluded from some opportunities because of his record."}
{"prompt":"That sucks. We were told that if you know how to code, your record isn’t going to be that much of an issue just because the job demand is so high here. I haven’t started applying yet. Did you start The Last Mile knowing when your release date was? I was sentenced to sixteen years to life. What that means is that you do sixteen years and then you start going in front of a parole board. The parole board wants to see you take responsibility for your crime. They want to see how you’ve used your time in prison. They want to know what kind of support network you’re going to have in place to keep you from re-offending when you do get out.","completion":"It’s really hard for lifers to get found suitable for release. And it should be, I think. Maybe not as strict as it has been in the past—and the door is opening up a little more every day, especially with Jerry Brown in office. But I understand the parole board commissioners have a tough job to do. I went to my first parole board hearing in 2015 and I felt like I had done everything right—I’ve gone through The Last Mile, I was in the coding program, and they still said no. They said we want some more, to make sure that you have a deeper insight into why you committed your crime."}
{"prompt":"When I went back, I was able to talk about it a little bit more in depth. I think I knew all the answers the first time, but going into that setting there’s a lot of pressure, so maybe everything doesn’t come out right—you know, these people really have your life in their hands. I was found suitable. But even then when you get found suitable, it’s not like you get released. You have to go through a five-month review process where they check over the record of your hearing and then the governor actually gets the last say-so—yes or no. I didn’t know until the end of April when I was going to be released.","completion":"And how long ago were you released? May the 4th, 2017. That was Star Wars Day. “May the fourth be with you.” I’ll never forget it, for a lot of reasons. The Last Mile says they help prevent people from going back to prison because their graduates find jobs after they’re released. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that."}
{"prompt":"Yeah, so far The Last Mile has a perfect record in terms of recidivism. Nobody that’s gone through the program has gone back to prison. I think the support network and going to work and having marketable skills makes a huge difference to a guy getting out of prison. They need a safe place to live. They need a job. They need to be able to support themselves. They need resources because limited resources lead to crime, in my opinion.","completion":"If we want to address recidivism, we need to give people a chance. I think so too. They spend so much on keeping people in prison, it just seems like some of that money could be diverted into helping guys stay out of prison. You know, guys inside prison aren’t how they’re portrayed on TV and in movies. You should see what’s going on in San Quentin in terms of education and rehabilitation. It’s not being offered by the state—it’s being done by outside volunteers. People from the community are coming into San Quentin and sharing knowledge and the guys in there are soaking it up like sponges."}
{"prompt":"There’s a Shakespeare program on the inside. There’s a radio show. There’s a newspaper. There’s a lot of men really working on themselves and preparing to go back out to the community and become productive citizens. If people understood that, they might be willing to give these men a second chance. A lazy sprawl of brick and mortar straddling the Tennessee River in orange and beige: at first glance one could be forgiven for mistaking Chattanooga for any number of landlocked manufacturing towns. Like many of its postindustrial relatives, this city of 174,000 is in the midst of a protracted and irreversible economic transition. In the past two years alone, Dupont, Alstom, and MetalTek all shut down manufacturing plants that once employed thousands of people across the surrounding Hamilton County, where economic anxiety runs high and Trump won by sixteen points.","completion":"But Chattanooga doesn’t quite fit the tired narrative evoked in the president’s grim portrait of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” This is a city with a plan. Situated in the heart of the Great Appalachian Valley, Chattanooga is widely known by a silicon-tinged moniker that sounds a bit more Santa Clara: “Gig City,” a reference to “the Gig,” the city’s municipally owned fiber-optic network. Funded in part by a $111 million federal stimulus grant and maintained by the Electric Power Board (EPB), Chattanooga’s public electric utility, the Gig’s ambitions feel more collectivist—and more fundamental—than the superficial “disruption” on offer from private-sector techno-utopians."}
{"prompt":"In 2010, the Gig became the first network in the country to offer one gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data speeds across its entire service area, which now top out at a mind-bending ten Gbps. (At ten Gbps, you can download a two-hour movie in about three seconds.) These speeds are even more impressive because they are symmetrical, which means downloading is as fast as uploading. Since it was laid across Chattanooga’s power grid, fiber-to-home internet service has been available at every home and business in the municipality for the past seven years.","completion":"This is an astounding result in the United States, where service is spotty and the average connection speed was just below nineteen megabits-per-second (Mbps) at the start of 2017—lower than the federal definition of broadband.” And Chattanooga has certainly reaped the rewards, nurturing its newfound status as a regional tech hub with numerous conventions and noteworthy startups like Skuid, a cloud-based UX platform, and Bellhops, an on-demand moving company. One economist estimated that the fiber infrastructure had generated as many as 5,200 jobs and as much as $1.3 billion in net economic and social benefits in its first five years of operation."}
{"prompt":"Another way the city has benefitted is through something called the “smart grid.” Since the EPB doubles as Chattanooga’s electric utility, and because their fiber-optic network was built on top of a pre-existing power grid, the company has been able to monitor their electrical system in real time, greatly reducing the impact of outages by rerouting power almost instantaneously. The EPB estimates that the “smart grid” has decreased the duration of outage minutes by half, resulting in a citywide economic benefit of about $50 million per year. This capability will become increasingly important as climate change accelerates the frequency of outages caused by severe weather events.","completion":"Also, while other utilities need to deploy technicians in order to inspect site-specific meters, Chattanooga’s “smart grid” reads all meters every fifteen minutes, saving money for the EPB and greatly improving the reliability of their service. As a result, J.Ed. Marston, the vice president of marketing at the EPB, notes that the fiber network benefits everyone who uses electricity in Chattanooga—not just those who buy internet."}
{"prompt":"Closing the Digital Divide The success of Chattanooga’s municipal network is often measured in economic terms. But it has also brought substantial benefits in people’s quality of life. From helping us file taxes and sign up for healthcare benefits, to enabling us to communicate and engage with mass media, the internet is an increasingly central force in our social, economic, and civic life.","completion":"It is hardly necessary to state the value of a stable internet connection in 2017. Differing levels of access do not merely reflect pre-existing inequalities in material wealth—they reinforce them. If you can’t use the internet to access a government service, fill out a job application, or email your grandkids—or if you need to take hours out of your day to go to a library to perform these tasks on a public computer—it’s going to set you even further behind people with easy access. Marston tells me that, as a publicly owned company, the EPB has an imperative to address economic inequality as it manifests through this divide. “As a municipal utility,” he says, “our mission is to enhance the quality of life and local economy for our entire community.” To this end, the EPB offers a subsidized unlimited data plan called Netbridge to families on the National School Lunch Program. Since the “smart grid” connects to every home in Chattanooga, the plan is available throughout the utility’s entire service area, which Marston says has “dramatically raised the bar on people’s expectations of what the internet should be.” This point is significant. In other parts of the country, the “digital divide”—a structural gap between those who have ready access to the internet and those who do not—is fueled in part by a practice known as “digital redlining,” where internet service providers (ISPs) refuse to invest in low-income areas because of their poor capital returns."}
{"prompt":"In many of Cleveland’s poorest census blocks, for example, one survey recently found that AT&T only offered downstream speeds of three Mbps or less. (The lowest rates on offer from the EPB are more than thirty times faster.) Rather than a simple binary division between those who can get online and those who can’t, the digital divide operates as a tiered gradient, where quality and ease of access are unevenly distributed.","completion":"In practical terms, this means that low-income residents are often required to pay full price for an internet connection that can barely load a modern web page. For this reason, Angela Siefer of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) tells me, “access to affordable broadband is not just a rural issue, but an urban issue as well.” As demonstrated by Chattanooga’s Gig, one way to address that issue is by handing internet service off to public utilities, which are bound to serve the public good rather than profit-hungry shareholders. But accessible infrastructure alone isn’t enough. For people to take advantage of affordable broadband, they also need a base level of technical literacy, as well as an understanding of what they can do with the internet. Together, these are the building blocks of “digital equity,” a condition that the NDIA defines as one in which “all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity needed for full participation in our society, democracy and economy.” The digital divide persists in Chattanooga thanks to a structural gap in technical literacy, which is made even more apparent by the city’s booming tech industry. But the presence of a public broadband utility—which treats internet service the way other municipalities treat gas, water, and electricity—has radically altered the way local politicians and many ordinary Chattanoogans conceive of the internet. They have come to think of it as a right rather than a luxury."}
{"prompt":"Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke has fully embraced the Gig since taking office in 2013, and he clearly sees deeper potential beyond the realm of techie startups. Offering a soft echo of Michael Harrington, he tells me that “the fiber network gave us a platform to talk about whether digital technology is going to exacerbate or curb inequality,” adding that, although the network leaves no house untouched, “that doesn’t mean that everything is equitable.” Arguing that “even $5 is too much [for an internet connection] if you have no idea what you’re doing with your computer,” Berke has used the Gig as a starting point to push a comprehensive digital equity agenda. This includes initiatives like Tech Goes Home Chattanooga, a publicly funded nonprofit that provides free tech literacy training, heavily subsidized Chromebooks, and education about how to sign up for reduced-cost internet plans—important considerations in a city with a poverty rate of 22.6 percent.","completion":"Internet Access as a Human Right Chattanooga isn’t the only city to push for universal access to affordable high-speed broadband, but such schemes more often take the form of public-private partnerships—and are usually met with mixed results. For example, in 2008, Verizon signed a deal with New York City that gave the telecom giant a citywide cable franchise on the condition that they “pass all households” with their fiber-to-premise FiOS network by 2014."}
{"prompt":"The city wanted FiOS to be available in every home. But Verizon quickly fell back on old redlining habits, arguing that they had only agreed to run their network by every household, not to physically connect them. New York is currently suing the company, claiming a breach of contract for Verizon’s failure to offer fiber-optic service to nearly a third of the city’s 3.1 million households, the majority of them in working-class neighborhoods.","completion":"Google Fiber is another popular option for cities seeking a high-speed fiber-to-premise network. Its pilot even launched the same year as Chattanooga’s municipal network, and in a similar town: Kansas City. But while Gig City is running strong after seven years, Google Fiber continues to send out unexplained cancellation emails in Kansas City, and has failed to offer fiber connections throughout its entire service area."}
{"prompt":"One significant advantage that the EPB had over these public-private partnerships was a pre-existing electrical grid. In addition to creating compounded benefits through the efficiency of the “smart grid,” this infrastructure gave the utility a reason, and a roadmap, to connect an entire service area.","completion":"But even more importantly, the EPB is a democratically regulated public provider that treats internet service as a basic right. As a municipally owned utility, it can act in the interests of its community and not simply to enrich its investors. This approach is far more in line with the FCC’s own (under-enforced) classification of broadband as a public utility, as well as the UN’s declaration that internet access constitutes a human right."}
{"prompt":"Frankly, it’s difficult to see how a serious effort at digital equity can align with a deployment strategy driven by profit. In public-private partnerships, the public sector is inevitably the junior partner, and social needs take a back seat to the corporate drive to extract as much wealth as possible. If internet access is to be treated as a basic right and regulated as a public utility, the public sector will need to build and manage the infrastructure.","completion":"The Empire Strikes Back Chattanooga’s municipal network has attracted lots of well-funded resistance. When the FCC gave the city the green light to expand their network beyond their municipality—a popular move in the surrounding area, especially given that broadband access was not available to one in eight Tennessee residents in late 2016—AT&T lawyers hit back, eventually winning a federal court ruling that restricts the EPB to its current service area."}
{"prompt":"“I find that infuriating,” Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance told the magazine Next City. “Chattanooga has not only one of the best networks in the nation, but arguably one of the best on Earth and the state legislature is prohibiting them from serving people just outside of their city border.” Even more recently, the Tennessee state legislature passed the Broadband Accessibility Act, effectively a $45 million tax break for private telecoms like Comcast.","completion":"Arguments against Chattanooga’s municipal network and others like it usually take up a familiar anti-government line of attack. Critics often point to the high cost of building new broadband infrastructure, which Chattanooga partly covered with a hefty federal stimulus grant. They further argue that this level of state intervention hurts competition in the internet market, and could eventually result in poorly run public monopolies."}
{"prompt":"But there’s reason to believe that this pushback has more to do with the interests of the telecom lobby than with good-faith concerns about the efficiency of Chattanooga’s experiment. With a $330 million price tag, the Gig was certainly expensive to build—but it has yielded significant returns on that investment. According to one study, the “smart grid” generates up to $67 million per year in combined revenues and savings. And its maintenance and operation are entirely funded by subscription fees, requiring no tax funding. The utility is solidly in the black, with a 57 percent market penetration that far surpasses initial targets and continues to grow.","completion":"Rather than focus on the instructive lessons from success stories like Chattanooga, free-market critics prefer to frighten city governments with tales of municipal broadband gone awry, like the $39 million flop in Provo, Utah, which was bought by Google Fiber after years of mismanagement. But it’s hard to take this concern seriously when failed municipal projects are exactly what the private sector wants. The death of Provo’s municipal project simply became another investment opportunity for Google, while a success could have locked predatory telecoms out of the local market."}
{"prompt":"Crushing the Competition The irony of the corporate argument against municipal broadband is that private providers hate competition. Throughout the United States, privatized internet markets have led to the exact monopolistic conditions that free-market hawks rail against: a 2016 FCC report found that only one or zero providers offered services qualifying for the federal definition of broadband in over half of the developed census blocks in the United States. Less than half of the country’s developed census blocks have access to 100 Mbps service, and less than a quarter of those have more than one provider offering service at those speeds.","completion":"The resulting lack of competition leads to inflated prices, little incentive to modernize infrastructure, and shoddy service for poorer areas. Stagnation, inefficiency, and unfair consolidation are produced by private telecoms like Comcast, not public utilities like the EPB. Confronted with the oft-repeated argument that a publicly owned fiber network smothers competition and hurts consumers, Mayor Berke is uncharacteristically blunt: “I’ve seen no evidence of that.” Indeed, Chattanooga’s internet market is one of the most competitive in the country. The EPB isn’t the city’s only internet provider—the utility competes against four private ISPs, two of which also offer broadband-speed internet at a fraction of the national average. But in head-to-head competition, the EPB dominates. Its market share is larger than its four private counterparts combined."}
{"prompt":"Pressure from the EPB has even pushed competitors to offer fairer prices to defend their dwindling market shares. In the past two years, Comcast, AT&T, and Mobile Beacon have all targeted low-income Chattanoogans with data plans that cost around $10 per month for people living on certain forms of government assistance. These are even cheaper than the EPB’s subsidized Netbridge plan, which costs $26.99—the lowest price allowed under a Tennessee law that establishes price floors for municipal cable systems.","completion":"This kind of competitive outcome—exactly the result that critics warned the EPB would undermine—is enabled by public intervention in broadband infrastructure. In fact, the only force preventing Chattanooga’s internet costs from dropping even further is regressive, pro-corporate legislation. Far from killing competition, the EPB competes with great success against private ISPs—and that’s exactly what scares them. If the utility were too overburdened by bureaucracy to operate successfully, there would be no need for corporate lobbyists to push for state laws that hamstring the company’s growth."}
{"prompt":"Demand for EPB service exists outside the utility’s municipal area precisely because it would provide a superior product to what is currently on offer. Absent the public pressure provided by the utility, Chattanooga’s internet market would likely tend towards monopoly, as it has in similar regions throughout the country.","completion":"Municipal Momentum Southeastern Tennessee is hardly a bastion of big government, making Chattanooga a curious leader in the world of municipal broadband. But the Gig remains deeply popular in the city and its surrounding area, where digital equity has become a remarkably bipartisan issue thanks to support from local Republicans like Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger. Given the chance to experience municipal broadband firsthand, people see it as less of a partisan issue and more one of common sense. It simply works."}
{"prompt":"The Gig also offers a proof-of-concept for communities contemplating publicly operated broadband outside of Chattanooga, where attitudes towards municipal fiber are evolving quickly. Just two years ago, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant was ridiculed for proposing a $5 million pilot program in her city. But today, municipal projects are being proposed in major urban centers like San Francisco and Minneapolis.","completion":"The Institute for Local Self-Reliance counts more than 500 public networks of some kind, including communities in twenty-four states that offer public connections of at least 1 Gbps. And public broadband is widely popular: a recent Pew Research survey found that 70 percent of the public believes that local governments should be able to build their own broadband networks, including 67 percent of Republicans. This all but proves that state legislators are serving the telecom lobby rather than their actual constituents."}
{"prompt":"It is tempting to envision a national scheme to lay fiber-optic cable across the country’s electrical grids, akin to FDR’s ambitious Rural Electrification Act. At a time when the Republicans enjoy unified control of the federal government, however, such an effort is unlikely to succeed: Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, is a close ally of the telecom industry who has used his office to pursue a decidedly pro-corporate agenda. In addition to going after net neutrality rules, he has led a push to significantly reduce the federal definition of broadband, signaling complacency with an uneven distribution of internet access that disproportionately impacts working-class communities and people of color. Meanwhile, telecom lobbyists have successfully passed laws that limit the expansion of public broadband in more than twenty states, including Tennessee.","completion":"With the political climate so hostile to public broadband at the national and state level, focusing on local utilities seems like a promising path forward. An increasing number of cities are calling for resistance to Trump’s agenda. Municipal broadband offers one way for smaller governments to reclaim their autonomy."}
{"prompt":"Reclaiming the Digital Commons The quality, reliability, and affordability of someone’s connection are all essential to determining how they can engage with the internet—and what kind of stake they will have in the world it helps create. As long as the digital divide is bound to inequalities in material wealth, the internet will remain subservient to capital and continue to reproduce old hierarchies of power.","completion":"That’s why achieving digital equity is a political project, rather than a purely technological one. And, as with all political projects, there are a range of possible outcomes. Mayor Berke understands this as well as anyone. Conceding that Chattanooga’s exact model might not be a perfect fit everywhere, he nonetheless insists that local governments can’t afford to wait. “There has to be a strategy that actually gets you there,” he says."}
{"prompt":"Kelly McCarthy, program director of Tech Goes Home Chattanooga, cautions that tackling the digital divide is “not just a problem where we can suddenly give everybody internet access and it will be solved.” Indeed, a robust digital justice agenda would also need to include tech literacy education, subsidized hardware, and offline services to ensure that people can get connected in a way that is truly equitable.","completion":"But municipal broadband is a strong start: by handing the keys to public bodies, we empower them to distribute access in a more democratic manner. Bringing the infrastructure of the internet under public control lays the groundwork for pursuing a broader vision of digital justice. And at a time when corporations increasingly dominate fundamental resources like water, reclaiming common goods sends a powerful message to the private sector."}
{"prompt":"Until digital equity becomes an urgent matter of public policy, the digital divide isn’t going anywhere. On May 2, 2013, in a dusty outdoor firing range somewhere in Texas, a lanky young man with grand ambitions fired what he hoped would be a shot heard round the world—or at least around YouTube. With a tug of a cord from a prudent distance away, twenty-five-year old law student Cody Wilson pulled the trigger on a crude gun made of 3D-printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) plastic, successfully discharging a single .380 caliber bullet. The fact that the gun, which Wilson dubbed the “Liberator” (after a much-mythified World War II guerrilla pistol), misfired on a subsequent shot, and promptly exploded when loaded with a more powerful cartridge, seemed unimportant: proof of concept had been achieved.","completion":"A savvy entrepreneur and self-promoter, Wilson leveraged his test run of the Liberator to the fullest. Posting CAD files for the gun online via his nonprofit, Defense Distributed, Wilson hyped the epochal, disruptive character of his invention in the breathless profiles of him that appeared in Wired, Forbes, and The New Yorker."}
{"prompt":"Never shy about his self-styled “techno-anarchist” politics—his other ventures have included forays into crypto-currency and “Hatreon,” a Patreon alternative “absent speech policing”—Wilson articulated his vision of the future, sounding both like a Silicon Valley libertarian and a vintage American reactionary: “I think the future is openness to the point of the eradication of government. The state shouldn’t have a monopoly on violence; governments should live in fear of their citizenry.” The Liberator might not be much as a weapon on it own terms, Wilson conceded, but it embodied something much bigger: an inexorable future wherein the “myth” of gun control would be “exploded.” Lawmakers and media were quick to respond to Wilson’s prophecies with drama of their own. Senator Chuck Schumer from New York proclaimed that the advent of 3D-printed firearms meant that, “A terrorist, someone who’s mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage.” His colleague, Congressman Steve Israel, proposed legislation to ban them. “Security checkpoints will do little good if criminals can produce plastic firearms and bring those firearms through metal detectors into secure areas like airports or courthouses,” Israel told Wired. “When I started talking about the issue of completely plastic firearms, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science fiction. That science fiction is now a dangerous reality.” False Prophets Behind all the tumultuous political rhetoric, and behind Wilson’s showmanship, there was just one problem: the “3D-printed gun” wasn’t technically all 3D-printed. It was hardly “completely plastic” either. The Liberator’s crude firing pin—a generic hardware store nail—would absolutely set off metal detectors. And even if it didn’t, the metal in the bullets certainly would.","completion":"Subsequent, more sophisticated iterations of 3D-printed firearms have yet to overcome this hurdle, and there is no compelling reason to think they will. As far as the specific threat of undetectability is concerned, the hysteria over 3D-printed weapons resembles another panic in the summer of 1990, when a Bruce Willis line in Die Hard 2 about a (nonexistent) “Glock 7,” a “porcelain gun made in Germany … [that] doesn’t show up on your airport X-ray machines” led to terrified public demands for a ban—and, not coincidentally, sold a lot of Glocks."}
{"prompt":"But panics over new firearms technologies are older than plastic guns or action movies. So are grandiose techno-futurist claims. The American-born Hiram Maxim, inventor of the first real machine gun, confidently predicted that his creation would actually “make war impossible,” rather than producing more lethal conflicts. Never mind that, in more unguarded moments, Maxim would admit that his inspiration to enter the arms industry had come from a businessman friend who had told him, “’Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.” In full philosopher-salesman-prophet mode, Maxim insisted that his fearsome weapon would, through a kind of logic of mutually assured destruction avant la lettre, leave nations too terrified of mass casualties to ever actually go to war. Needless to say, a brutal century-and-a-half later, Maxim’s sales pitch seems either laughably naive or contemptibly cynical.","completion":"Evaluating the prophecies of gun futurists, then, the novelty (or lack thereof) of their inventions seems less important than the question of what problems, exactly, they claim to solve. And, by the same token, our collective fascination with gun futurism—our reactions, variously hopeful or hysterical, utopian or bleak—are more interesting when seen in light of what we don’t find interesting."}
{"prompt":"It’s possible that 3D-printed guns may grow more common, but such fixation on a DIY firearm that requires an $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer to produce seems, at the very least, peculiar in a nation where reliable, durable pocket pistols can be bought for under $100. And our hysteria over the prospect that criminals might order guns via dark-web arms markets, or build assault rifles using homebrew CNC mills in black-market makerspaces, seems likewise misguided given how easily guns can be bought and sold without any paperwork or background checks at gun shows or through private sales in the vast majority of US states.","completion":"In other words: the real issue isn’t our fantasies about the future, but how focusing on them helps us ignore the legacy of our past and the realities of our present. Guns Mean Too Much Firearms occupy a singular place in our national mythology, our legislative landscape, and our political debates. No other object functions as such a ubiquitous icon for key moments in America’s past, its different incarnations tied evocatively to various eras—the muskets of Continental soldiers and frontiersmen, the six-shooters of cowboys and desperadoes, the Tommy guns of Chicago gangsters and D-Day paratroopers, the M16s of GIs in Vietnamese jungles, and the AR-15s of open-carry protesters in state capitol buildings."}
{"prompt":"No other object is addressed so explicitly or at such length in our Constitution, no matter what you might think of either the Second Amendment itself or the convoluted history of its competing interpretations. And no other object is quite comparable as an icon of contested cultural identities and as a flashpoint for vicious partisan disputes.","completion":"Cognitive psychologists have documented how guns appear to activate our “affect heuristics”: when a senator holds a rifle up for a photo-op on the floor of Congress, or a researcher displays a picture of a gun to a subject in a lab, most people will have some kind of immediate and intense reaction, whether positive or negative—a knee-jerk response that belies our ability to dispassionately assess arguments or statistics. Meanwhile, when it comes to the ballot box, attitudes towards gun ownership have arguably become the single biggest predictor for party affiliation and voting preference."}
{"prompt":"This surplus of meaning—what a psychoanalyst would rightly call an overdetermination—can make debates over guns and gun control both endlessly fascinating and terminally intractable. But it is precisely this overdetermination that occludes the basic realities of political economy that have produced our contemporary situation. These realities have dictated both why and how guns are present in America, and the purposes to which they are put. Partisan polemics and techno-futurist pipe dreams aside, they also represent a hard constraint on the range of possible gun futures.","completion":"Strange Bedfellows It is often observed that Americans own more guns than any other nation. This is true, both per capita and in total numbers. Pinpointing precise figures can get contentious, but well-grounded assessments put the overall number of civilian-owned guns in the United States at well over 310 million, which means there are more guns than there are Americans to own them (112.6 guns for every 100 Americans)."}
{"prompt":"This puts America firmly ahead of its nearest competitors, Serbia (75.6 guns for every 100 Serbians) and Yemen (54.8 guns for every 100 Yemenis). After those top three, the countries with the next highest per-capita civilian gun ownership rates are Switzerland (45.7), Finland (45.3), Cyprus (36.4), Saudi Arabia (35), Iraq (34.2), Uruguay (31.8), and Sweden (31.6). Clustered closely near Sweden, but outside of the global top ten, lie Norway, France, Germany, Canada, Austria, and Germany.","completion":"Many commentators will move immediately from these figures to discussions of crime rates and homicide data, or to heavy-handed pontifications, frequently dripping with barely disguised racist exceptionalism, about what (or rather, whom) Americans “should” be like. Bigotry aside, what this move ignores—artfully or naively—is a comparison of civilian rates of gun ownership with those of non-civilian gun ownership."}
{"prompt":"These are striking, since, once again, they reveal that America remains a leader of sorts. When compared to those of the other top fifteen highest civilian-gun-owning nations, the American military arsenal includes over twice as many firearms as its second closest competitor (France), three times as many as its third (Sweden), four times as many as the fourth (Serbia again), and seven times as many as the fifth (Iraq). When it comes to police stockpiles, America once again leads the pack: American police have 1.15 million guns, a number followed only by Iraq (690,000), France (218,000), Yemen (210,000), and Saudi Arabia (90,000).","completion":"How to make sense of this—what commonalities shape this distribution? One thing that leaps out, causing considerable offense to chauvinistic American sensibilities, is how, when it comes to being saturated with both civilian guns as well as guns in the hands of its military and police, America far exceeds variously repressive or chaotic Middle Eastern states (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq) and nations which in recent memory have seen brutal civil wars or other violence (Serbia, Cyprus)."}
{"prompt":"If one expands the set of comparisons on police and military stockpiles to other OECD states, America also starts to resemble our unfortunate next-door neighbor Mexico. There, civilian rates of legal gun ownership are quite low—but Mexico is also where ongoing violence between drug cartels and security forces generates a yearly body count on par with what one would expect from an outright civil war.","completion":"But then there are our other peers, in Canada, Western Europe, and the Scandinavian countries. Much beloved as go-to benchmarks of stability and low gun crime for liberal American pundits, these states also have surprisingly large quantities of guns, civilian and otherwise. What deeper structure produces this strange set of statistical bedfellows? The answer, simply put, is capitalism in general, and the arms trade in particular."}
{"prompt":"Capitalism Kills Global military expenditure is estimated to be around $1.6 trillion in any given year. The global trade in weapons clocks in at about $60 billion annually. The United States has dominated this landscape since the 1960s, and in the past two decades has only further cemented its position as far and away the world’s largest exporter of arms, with the world’s most profitable arms firms.","completion":"The global trade in small arms (guns) is, in dollar terms, relatively small: only around $4 billion a year. But its outsize impact is belied by the low cost of individual units—entire army divisions can be equipped with assault rifles for the equivalent cost of a single helicopter or jet—and the fact that, when it comes to casualties, small arms are the leading global killer, far more than missiles, bombs, or tanks."}
{"prompt":"The list of countries with high gun saturation reflects the dynamics of the global distribution of guns more broadly. Guns from more stable, developed, manufacturing states go to less stable, developing, consumer nations—from West to East, from Global North to Global South. The more contingent cultural features of gun ownership (for example, robust hunting traditions) are merely epiphenomenal to these broader dictates of supply and demand, flows of capital and materiel.","completion":"There are the places where guns come from, and where they are plentiful as a matter of course; and then there are the places where guns go, and where they are used to full, lethal effect. These are the two categories of countries with large gun stockpiles: producers and consumers. Supply and demand—it’s as simple as that."}
{"prompt":"Of course, America is, as so often, unique. While other countries like Germany or France manufacture weapons primarily for export, America builds them for both internal and external battlefields—and imports a great many besides. Indeed, the American model of policing unsubtly resembles American practices of foreign military intervention and occupation, and the policies and rhetoric of our security forces reflect this.","completion":"Abroad, young brown men killed by US drones are de facto labeled “enemy combatants” by virtue of their age, gender, and location; at home, young black men shot by police are almost invariably said to have a “gang affiliation” based upon similarly gross logics of geographic proximity and networks of family and friends. And there is a sense, too, in which the Bush Doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” more than passingly resembles the shoot-first attitude of many police departments, where the recourse of “fear for one’s life” implicitly structures any encounter between police and civilians."}
{"prompt":"Homologies aside, the weapons that American troops use in the Global War on Terror have a way of winding up in the hands of domestic police, thanks to initiatives like the 1033 Program, which literally recirculates hardware from US military abroad to security forces back home. And then there is the unique role and cultural status of the American military proper. As a way of doing business, America’s privatized, volunteer military infrastructure contrasts starkly with that of states with mandatory service models like Sweden. As a matter of ethos, the paramilitary overtones of American gun ownership are also unique. In the US, guns are often possessed by individuals as putative tools to be used against the state. In countries like Switzerland, private citizens possess guns on behalf of the state, and activities like target shooting and institutions like gun clubs receive government subsidies as part of a broader military readiness program.","completion":"Indeed, unlike other nations, which could be said to have gun cultures, the United States could more accurately be said to be a gun culture. Likewise, unlike any other country on the planet, American politics are shaped by a veritable gun culture industry. As a nation with a heavily privatized military, and where the consumer’s ability to buy practically anything is seen as a basic human right, the singular saturation of guns in the American context should actually be fairly unsurprising. And so, too, should the clear disparities in how the toll of gun violence is distributed along uniquely American fractures of race, gender, and class."}
{"prompt":"Dubious Futures These are the forces that have helped write the recent American history of guns. Add to this picture the fact that, like few other mass-produced consumer goods, guns are durable, easily concealed, fairly simple to operate, and retain considerable resale value, and we can see how the ubiquity of firearms has vexed pro-gun-control lawmakers from the start.","completion":"This obdurate reality goes a long way towards explaining our fascination with “new” guns and gun-related technologies. Faced with a landscape of byzantine regulations, fierce cultural debates, and legislative deadlock, both gun rights advocates and gun control supporters place their hopes in new technology, gambling that some breakthrough might produce a categorical, once-and-for-all break from our murky and ugly present, whether in the direction of absolute gun liberalization or total control."}
{"prompt":"For gun rights advocates like Cody Wilson, the future is DIY. While major firms focus on other developments—exploring new frontiers in modularity, concealability, subsonic ammunition, suppressor technology, and the legal gray area between rifles and pistols—pro-gun techno-futurists dream of reinventing the supply chain from the ground up. If consumers can make their own firearms, they argue, any gun control laws can be decisively circumvented. Never mind that America’s gun control landscape is already a loophole-ridden, contradictory mess, and that cheap, reliable guns are already abundantly available to consumers, legally or otherwise.","completion":"On the other side, gun control advocates are also regularly seduced by techno-futurist fantasy. Some hail the advent of “smart guns”—weapons that only fire when wielded by their “proper” owner. At least one such gun—the Armatix iP1, which requires the user to wear an RFID-chip bracelet when shooting—has been available for some time. But canny hackers have already circumvented its mechanism using $15 worth of magnets. And there are other, more fundamental concerns too."}
{"prompt":"Although there is indeed a market for this kind of weapon (particularly among gun-owning parents), most people who buy guns for self-defense place a premium on reliability and ease of use. A gun that requires the user to first strap on a wristwatch, or that could be susceptible to battery failure or wireless jamming, does not recommend itself as a self-defense weapon. Other putative smart-gun technologies, like fingerprint-enabled triggers and handguards, are also dubious on this front. Reaching for a gun, only to have it not fire because of sweat, rain, or blood, means the weapon is reduced to an expensive club.","completion":"More broadly, fantasies about replacing America’s massive civilian stockpiles of “dumb” guns with smart alternatives run up against the realities of politics. The political climate remains hostile: a New Jersey law from 2016 mandating that gun dealers eventually transition to smart-gun-only inventories was promptly vetoed by Governor Chris Christie, and several gun dealers who have carried the Armatix alongside their other offerings have been targeted with boycotts and threats by hard-right gun activists."}
{"prompt":"The existence of smart gun technology in and of itself means nothing absent a significant investment of political capital to change producer, consumer, and regulatory practices. Ditto for other vaunted gun innovations. Mandating that guns include laser “microstamping” technology, for instance, could allow law enforcement to link any bullet casing found at a crime scene back to that weapon’s owner—but only if civilian ownership were tracked and a database of gun IDs maintained. Meanwhile, in the real world, talk of gun owner registries is a political nonstarter, and the ATF’s National Tracing Center, which would presumably maintain such a database, is so woefully underfunded that it still operates on microfilm and index cards.","completion":"Technology is no substitute for policy. And innovation is no substitute for a cultural sea change. Behind all the political theater, money continues to flow. Politicians who condemn weapons manufacturers out of one side of their mouths lobby to fund firearms manufacturers in their districts out of the other. Even Chuck Schumer, who has loudly called for an assault weapons ban and vigorously condemned their manufacturers, has also pushed hard to award military contracts to domestic gun makers—and has even gone so far as to celebrate the job-creating “economic powerhouse” of assault rifle manufacturers in New York."}
{"prompt":"That these manufacturers have since followed tax incentives to more gun-friendly states is beside the point, as is the likelihood that Schumer supports arms manufacturers only insofar as their products wind up in the “right” hands of respectable civilians and police at home and American troops abroad. The bottom line is that beneath the rhetoric, high moral dudgeon, and misplaced hopes for utopian breakthroughs, the realities of political economy are what matter most.","completion":"Unfortunate pun aside, there is no magic bullet to “fix” this situation, one way or another. No brilliant inventor or charismatic entrepreneur can help us disrupt our way out of American capitalist militarism, legislative and regulatory capture, or interpersonal violence. The answers lie in the least flashy interventions: in old-fashioned harm reduction, in triage, in diminishing the inequalities that accelerate violence and precipitate lethal outcomes. Chasing dubious futures, we simply mortgage the present, and, in the most unthinking way, perpetuate it."}
{"prompt":"First there are the text messages. Impersonal, incessant, and devoid of context, they reveal few hints of their purpose. The language is so vague you’d be forgiven for thinking it was spam. “Message from the Probe Group regarding an urgent matter. Please call us.” Then, a deluge of phone calls—up to ten times a day, often after-hours—from an unknown mobile number. Chances are you’re still ignoring them.","completion":"Should you choose to return the missed calls, you’ll be greeted by an automated voice and placed in a queue. The identity of your caller remains a mystery. When a human operator at an overseas call center at last assumes the reins—whose identity and place of employment, by the way, remains unknown—you’re asked to disclose your date of birth and home address."}
{"prompt":"Up until this point it sounds like an elaborate phishing scam, but the stakes seem graver. The voice on the other end grows hostile and threatening. The accusations fly thick and fast: You’ve been lying about your income. You’ve been cheating the system. You owe thousands of dollars to Centrelink, the Australian government’s agency for administering social services benefits.","completion":"Welcome To Hell Countless stories like these have lobbed into my social media feeds over the past year. They belong to what is commonly known as the “robo-debt” scandal, which has stirred outrage in Australia in recent months. Diligent reporting from independent journalists like Asher Wolf, New Matilda’s Ben Eltham, and Paul Farrell from The Guardian have unearthed one horror story after another, driving a rising tide of public anger at the government."}
{"prompt":"Understanding the scandal first requires understanding how welfare works in Australia. Australia is somewhat unique in that the vast majority of its benefits are means-tested. The consequences of this are complex. On the one hand, Australia’s welfare system is narrowly targeted toward low-income earners, giving the government more bang for its buck—welfare provisions make up a much lower proportion of its GDP than other OECD countries. The rationale behind means testing is to encourage fairness in the welfare system, ensuring that people receive what they are entitled to. Anyone who falls afoul of the system’s stringent requirements must pay back their “debt” to the government.","completion":"This “debt”—the difference between what you receive and what you are supposed to receive—is the root of the robo-debt scandal. The scandal’s origins date back to 2011, when the Australian Labor Party introduced a data-matching algorithm officially known as Online Compliance Intervention. Its purpose was to compare the earnings reported by welfare recipients to the social services agency Centrelink with the earnings reported to the Tax Office by their employers. Discrepancies would be investigated by Centrelink staff members, who would then decide whether to follow up with the recipient by letter or phone."}
{"prompt":"Things changed in December 2016, when the government announced that the system had undergone full automation. Humans would no longer investigate anomalies in earnings. Instead, debt notices would be automatically generated when inconsistencies were detected. The government’s rationale for automating the process was telling. “Our aim is to ensure that people get what they are entitled to—no more and no less,” read the press release. “And to crack down hard when people deliberately defraud the system.” The result was a disaster. I’ve had friends who’ve received an innocuous email urging them to check their MyGov account—an online portal available to Australian citizens with an internet connection to access a variety of government services—only to log in and find they’re hundreds or thousands of dollars in arrears, supposedly because they didn’t accurately report their income. Some received threats from private debt collectors, who told them their wages would be seized if they didn’t submit to a payment plan.","completion":"Those who wanted to contest their debts had to lodge a formal complaint, and were subjected to hours of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major before they could talk to a case worker. Others tried taking their concerns directly to the Centrelink agency on Twitter, where they were directed to calling Lifeline, a 24-hour hotline for crisis support and suicide prevention."}
{"prompt":"At the end of 2015, my friend Chloe received a notice claiming she owed $20,000 to the government. She was told that she had reported her income incorrectly while on Youth Allowance, which provides financial assistance to certain categories of young people. The figure was shocking and, like others in her position, she grew suspicious. She decided to contest the debt: she contacted all of her previous employers so she could gather pay slips, and scanned them into the MyGov app. “I gave them all of my information to prove that there was no way I owed them $20,000,” she says.","completion":"The bean counters were unmoved. They maintained that Chloe had reported her after-tax income instead of her before-tax income. As a result, they increased the amount she owed to $30,000. She agreed to a payment plan, which will see her pay off the debt in fortnightly installments of $50 over the course of two decades. “I even looked into bankruptcy because I was so stressed by it,” she says. “All I could think about was the Centrelink debt, and once they upped it to 30k, I was so ashamed and sad and miserable,” she says."}
{"prompt":"As coverage of the robo-debt scandal spread, calls for the government to suspend the scheme mounted. Yet it refused to halt the program until an inquiry by the Australian Senate finally ordered it to do so in May 2017. Dehumanized Debt Automation is dehumanizing in a literal sense: it removes human experience from the equation. In the case of the robo-debt scandal, automation also stripped humans of their narrative power. The algorithm that generated these debt notices presented welfare recipients with contrasting stories: the recipients claimed they’d followed the rules, but the computer said otherwise.","completion":"There were few official ways to explain one’s circumstances: twenty-nine million calls to Centrelink went unanswered in 2016, and Centrelink’s Twitter account seems explicitly designed to discourage conversational exchange. One source of narrative resistance is notmydebt.com.au, a website run entirely by volunteers that gathers false debt stories from ordinary Australians so that the “scandal can’t be plausibly minimised or denied.” Over time it was revealed that many of these debts were miscalculated or, in some cases, non-existent. One man I’d read about was on a government pension and saddled with a $4,500 bill, which was revised down months later to $65. Another recipient, who was on disability as a result of mental illness, had a debt notice of $80,000 that was later recalled. A small proportion of recipients were exclusively in contact with private debt collectors and received no official notice from Centrelink at all."}
{"prompt":"Soon it emerged that social services were a lucrative avenue for corporate interests: this year’s Senate inquiry revealed that some private agencies tasked with recouping debts were working on a commission basis, pocketing a percentage of the debts they had recovered for the government regardless of their validity. (All debt notices issued by private agencies were eventually rescinded after government review in February 2017.) The methodology of the algorithm itself was riddled with flaws. It calculates the average of an individual’s annual income reported to the Australian Tax Office by their employer over twenty-six fortnightly periods and compares it with the fortnightly earnings reported to Centrelink by the welfare recipient. All welfare recipients are required to declare their gross earnings (income accrued before tax and other deductions) within this fourteen-day period. Any discrepancy between the two figures is interpreted by the algorithm as proof of undeclared or underreported income, from which a notice of debt is automatically generated.","completion":"Previously, these inconsistencies would be handled by Centrelink staff, who would call up your employer, confirm the amount you received in fortnightly payments, and cross-index that figure with the one calculated in the system. But the automation of the debt recovery process has outsourced authority from humans to the algorithm itself."}
{"prompt":"It’s certainly efficient: it takes the algorithm one week to generate 20,000 debt notices, a process that would take up to a year if done manually. But it’s not a reliable method of fraud detection. It’s blunt, unwieldy, and error-prone. It assumes that variations in the data sets are deliberate, and that recipients have received more than what they are entitled to. What’s more, the onus is on the welfare recipient to prove their income has been reported correctly and that the entitlements they have received are commensurate within twenty-one days.","completion":"Yet, as many critics have noted, this income-averaging method is porous. It fails to accurately account for the fluctuating fortunes of casual or contract workers, which often results in variations between the two figures. There’s also no way for the algorithm to correct for basic errors in the system’s database. It cannot yet discern whether an employer’s legal name has been used instead of its various business names—it treats them as separate entities, and therefore separate sources of income—or whether conflicting reports are caused by basic mistakes, such as spelling errors or typos. These seemingly small distinctions are ones that only a human could make. It’s no wonder, then, that conservative estimates of its error rate hover at 20 percent."}
{"prompt":"Fully Automated Debt Slavery Centrelink’s automated debt recovery program is part of an ongoing initiative to expand the range of essential government services provided to citizens online. In an interview last year with ABC Radio National, the Australian national public broadcaster, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull referred to this digital shift as an “important part of the government’s productivity agenda,” and promised it would ensure that “citizens can engage with government on digital platforms as easily and conveniently as they do with their banks or e-commerce vendors.” It’s the kind of market logic that treats citizens as little more than consumers.","completion":"Automated debt recovery isn’t confined to Australia. In December 2016, The Guardian reported that the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency’s automated compliance system wrongly issued debt notices to over 20,000 welfare recipients—93 percent of recipients in total—from October 2013 to August 2015. Those who were accused of insurance fraud lost access to their unemployment benefits, and even had their taxes garnished to pay substantial fines. At the same time, the state’s governor had earmarked the funds raised by the compliance system to balance the state’s budget. It’s fitting, if a little uncanny, that the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System is also known as MiDAS."}
{"prompt":"These kinds of algorithms are badly designed, but their underlying ideology is more sinister still. Leaks from Centrelink staff members to the press revealed an underfunded government department struggling with depleted morale. Reports revealed that employees were sent memos outlining performance targets within the organization, which pitted employees against each other in a battle to process the most debt notices.","completion":"In retrospect, the previous year’s Australian federal budget contained a telling omen: it forecast that $4.5 billion in overpaid entitlements could be reclaimed. It makes sense, then, that the dragnet was deliberately sweeping—its purpose was to balance the books. By the same token, the glitches in the system—from the difficulty of contacting Centrelink, the outsourcing of 43 percent of its debt recovery to corporate interests, and the kinks in the algorithm itself—are by design. They’re features, not bugs, aimed at discouraging formal complaints, raising money, and making the system as punitive as possible."}
{"prompt":"We shouldn’t be surprised. There are plenty of conservatives for whom welfare is a societal wound that demands excision. No wonder their prescriptions seem so cruel. How else to describe actions that coerce the poor into the labor market at any cost? The infliction of force is inscribed in policy. Alan Tudge, the embattled Human Services Minister who implemented the aggressive recovery strategy, defended the program by suggesting that Australia’s social spending had been too lavish: “We must face the reality that in our desire to be a generous and caring society we may have reached a point where we have taken our good intentions too far.” The Patron Saints of Dole Bludgers It’s 1996. A Current Affair, a tabloid news show, is pondering the plight of Australia’s unemployed. Cameras skim the snaking queues and drab surrounds of a suburban Centrelink office. The narration is at once incredulous and contemptuous. Why don’t these people have jobs? Aren’t they trying hard enough? The specimens in the show’s lurid anthropological study are the Paxton family, who turn out to be luckless in more ways than one. They live in St Albans, a working-class neighborhood on the outer edges of Melbourne’s sprawling suburbs. It’s afternoon and sixteen-year-old Mark is in bed. The cameras linger on Mark, slumped in repose, while his older brother Shane tries in vain to coax him out of bed. Mark’s nonplussed, and not having a bar of it. “I’ll look at the clock at 9, 10 o’clock, and think, why do I have to get out of bed?” For another journalist, Mark’s helplessness might have been a hook for an exploration of the psychological and social ramifications of long-term unemployment. But this wasn’t going to be that story. Instead, the program set about cultivating the myth of the indolent poor, a mythical underclass that lounges around, mooches off the system, and has the temerity to spend society’s hard-earned money on booze.","completion":"From the get-go, the dog-whistling is slimy and conspicuous, demanding resentment and scapegoating at every turn. There’s a barely contained glee in its whipping up of thinly veiled animosity and malice against the unemployed. From a ratings standpoint, it was a humiliating but high-rating spectacle: millions tuned in to watch the demonization of the Paxton family—specifically its teenage children—as they refused to succumb to the platitudes touting the dignity and virtues of low-paid labor."}
{"prompt":"Over a period of two weeks, A Current Affair’s camera crew harassed the Paxtons at their home, airing their misfortunes on national television for six consecutive nights, stoking the embers of middle-class rage. Before long, the Paxton teenagers were anointed the “Patron Saints of Dole Bludgers”—people who are on benefits but are believed to be uninterested in seeking work—by a tabloid newspaper columnist, referred to as “putrid” by another, and ordered in a hectoring editorial to take jobs “for the sake of all our children.” Some politicians even called for an inquiry into the legitimacy of the family’s welfare benefits.","completion":"The Deserving Poor For all of Australia’s egalitarian chatter, the issue of welfare and who deserves it has long stuck in the nation’s craw. It prompts moral righteousness among the Right, which has couched cuts in social services as fiscal reform, while progressive technocrats tittered about the best methods to refine means testing. There’s even a tendency by some commentators, perhaps intoxicated by the inoffensiveness of liberalism, to critique these cuts without any reference to ideology at all. They’re presented as a symptom of poll-driven politics, rather than something more pernicious."}
{"prompt":"Much discussion of social inequality and class divisions in Australia treats these issues as phenomena that occur elsewhere. Home ownership is seen, somewhat uncritically, as an inviolable fixture of the Australian dream rather than a tax racket for the rentier class. Pouring scorn on “dole bludgers” and shaming welfare cheats has long endured as a national sport. Anxiety about welfare dependency persists, even though it is at historically low levels.","completion":"In June 2017, the government released a report of the nation’s top ten suburbs for welfare non-compliance—or “bludger hotspots,” to use the parlance of a News Corp tabloid. These are places where recipients failed to meet the conditions for receiving welfare, which include attending interviews and appointments. It’s difficult to see such a move as anything other than a way to shame and stigmatize these communities."}
{"prompt":"The political language used to talk about welfare reveals the nature of a shifting relationship between citizens and the state. Before World War II, unemployment was seen as an affliction of the “undeserving poor.” It was a social and collective responsibility, but it didn’t require government intervention. In postwar welfare societies, unemployment assumed an explicitly political dimension through the creation of social safety nets for the disadvantaged and economically vulnerable.","completion":"As Australian media theorist and academic Alex Griffin writes, this “conception of citizenship entailed the state protecting citizens from unemployment, with social citizenship defined as the ‘right’ to assistance.” But the ascendance of supply-side economics in the 1970s recalibrated the discourse. By framing unemployment as a problem of supply rather than demand, joblessness was presented by conservatives as a moral choice rather than a symptom of market failure. Instead of receiving welfare assistance, the argument went, the poor should bootstrap themselves out of their poverty."}
{"prompt":"This rhetoric of self-reliance prevailed through the mid-1990s and beyond, in which policies of “mutual obligation” were introduced by the conservative government led by John Howard. As Griffin observes, these policies ensured “eligibility for income support was reconfigured, newly coupled with requirements.” These included “obligatory participation in prescribed employment assistance activities, lower benefit payments and shorter benefit periods, means testing, and punishments for failures to attend job interviews.” And the slightest failure to follow these mandates led to a loss of income.","completion":"The bureaucratic language surrounding these benefits—“Work for the Dole”—marked welfare for the economically marginalized as a provisional rather than enshrined right for citizens. It’s support with strings attached. Yet the irony of stigmatizing welfare recipients is that better-off Australians are major beneficiaries of social spending. The Australian writer Tim Winton notes that the country’s middle class has “an increasing sense of entitlement to welfare,” which is “duly disbursed largely at the expense of the poor, the sick, and the unemployed.” These include tax concessions on contributions to “superannuation,” which are funds designed to help Australians save for their retirement. Such concessions are distortionary: they’re levied at a flat rate of 15 percent, rather than at a progressive rate according to one’s income, which means their benefits are reaped overwhelmingly by the rich."}
{"prompt":"The Australian Bureau of Statistics calculates that nearly one third of these concessions are claimed by the top 10 percent of income earners in Australia. Then there are policies like negative gearing, a tax concession that allows you to claim a deduction against your wage income for losses generated by any rental properties you own. (Australia and New Zealand are the only countries in the world to hold such a policy.) In addition, Australian homeowners are entitled to a capital gains tax discount of 50 percent once the property is sold.","completion":"Critics have argued that the combination of these two policies only serves to fuel investor speculation, entrench housing unaffordability, and lock first-time home buyers out of the market. But it’s easier to attack the poor than to tax the rich. Shredding the Social Contract Unfortunately, the fallout from the robo-debt scandal has not deterred the Australian federal government from continuing to use technology to impose “personal responsibility” upon its citizens."}
{"prompt":"In May 2017, Centrelink announced that it would expand its cashless debit card scheme for welfare recipients living in areas with high levels of drug and alcohol abuse. The scheme quarantines 80 percent of welfare payments to the debit card, which contains software that blocks purchases of restricted products such as alcohol, drugs, or gambling-related goods at the point of sale. It’s already been deployed in two towns (Ceduna in South Australia and East Kimberley in Western Australia), both of which have a sizable indigenous population. It’s a dystopian vision of welfare—one that is discriminating, inhumane, and corrosive.","completion":"The creation of robo-debt is a logical, if painful evolution of the neoliberal unraveling of the Australian welfare state, in which social services were subject to savage cuts over the past few decades. Means testing is part of the problem, as was the decision made in the mid-1990s by the Australian Labor Party government—and continued by successive conservative and progressive governments—to bring in private employment agencies to help job seekers gain employment. What was once the responsibility of the state gradually became a lucrative opportunity for private firms to capitalize on a market that previously didn’t exist."}
{"prompt":"These outcomes weren’t inevitable. The bipartisan embrace of means testing has meant that a truly progressive policy for welfare—that is to say, universal, unconditional, and rooted in a model of social citizenship safeguarded by the state—has not been articulated by policymakers on the left. What exists is a perversion of the social contract in which government shirks its responsibilities for the social well-being of its citizens in favor of serving the interests of capital.","completion":"Means testing creates a political climate in which it is increasingly palatable for cuts to be made to the most vulnerable. By contrast, universal benefits are much harder to cut. The few benefits that are universal in Australia—such as Medicare, the government-funded health insurance scheme—are vigorously supported by Australians across the political spectrum. (An attempt by the federal government to introduce a copayment for doctor visits was rescinded after public outcry.) There’s an opportunity, surely, to make the welfare state more humane, more dignified, and more equipped to address the needs of all Australians. It’s tempting to think of what could have been—how technology could have been used to make social services more transparent and fair, not to mention more accessible to those who depend on them."}
{"prompt":"What the scandal shows is that the neutrality of technology is a fallacy. A tool is only as good as the politics that underpin it. It’s not an accident that the Australian government’s attempt at algorithmic governance was inhumane. It was a defining feature of its design. In her brick house on top of a hill outside Green Bank, West Virginia, Diane Schou’s phone is ringing. My head is killing me, comes a voice on the other end of the line. My toes are burning. I’m having a heart attack, a stroke, Alzheimer’s, dementia. I’m living in my car, my home is a death trap. Help me or soon I will die.","completion":"They call from Michigan, Minnesota, California, France, Turkey, Tokyo. Sometimes they use Google Translate. Sometimes they cry and Diane just listens. “I should have a degree in counseling by now,” Diane says. Diane is a celebrity in the electrosensitive community, a growing group of people who say they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), or harmful health effects when exposed to electromagnetic radiation (EMR). All modern electronics that run on alternating current (AC) power emit this radiation to one degree or another; it’s also present in any device that uses wireless communication—not just our computers and cell phones but also our cell phone towers, Fitbits, and baby monitors."}
{"prompt":"Green Bank, a hamlet of 157 close to the Mountain State’s eastern border with Virginia, is one of the only places left in the world where humans can live in air that is devoid of Wi-Fi signals and emissions from other connected technology. To Diane and her fellow electrosensitives, it’s a “safe zone.” Splashy headlines have proliferated about Green Bank, portraying it as the town that “banned cellphones” because it’s backward or has anti-technological views baked into its culture. But this isn’t so. Rather, the national government conferred this destiny upon it from the outside, in the form of a commitment, made in perpetuity, to a different kind of communication.","completion":"Listening to the Sky Some people who call Diane are so desperate that they show up in her driveway the next day. But many come and do not stay, citing the “primitive” nature of Green Bank—it lacks a Starbucks, an organic food co-op, and a wide variety of psychological services, for instance. Some who come bring class privilege and urban values and presuppositions that can make them suspicious of, or demeaning towards, their new working-class rural neighbors—a complicated dynamic when electrosensitives often see themselves as health refugees to a place where the local community struggles to get access to fresh food or standard healthcare."}
{"prompt":"Diane has been in Green Bank since 2007, but her own assimilation hasn’t been entirely smooth. Besides her personality, there are cultural differences and class differences. She’s a religious Christian who says grace before every meal, while many of her neighbors worship bluegrass music and hard work. She comes from a middle-class family and isn’t afraid to assert her needs, while this town’s longtime residents are predominantly working poor with patterns of grit and self-sufficiency.","completion":"To try to bridge this gap, Diane has taken to recommending a trial visit accompanied by a three-pronged homework assignment while they’re here: Buy a copy of the local newspaper, The Pocahontas Times. Go to the local grocery/hardware/gas station and buy something, anything. Take a tour of the Green Bank Telescope."}
{"prompt":"I’ve come to do the third item on the list, to learn more about this telescope that is the reason that all Green Bank is safe for electrosensitives. A man who calls himself Tour Guide Dave stands before me and the other fifteen people assembled in the small, shiny auditorium where PowerPoints and educational videos are shown. It’s the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, he tells us, whose job is to study tiny emissions from the farthest away planets for information. Many of the most important discoveries about space have been made using this huge dish-like instrument.","completion":"He tells us that the telescope works by listening to radio waves, a kind of EMR. Any time a charged particle moves, it releases EMR. Faraway planets emit EMR too, in the form of light, heat, or infrared radiation. Weaker than infrared is microwave radiation—water in our food (and in our cells) can absorb this kind of energy, which is what causes our food to heat up and cook and our skin to burn. Weaker still is the energy that Wi-Fi networks produce. Finally, at the very bottom, are radio waves, signals so faint that even the slightest bit of interference will blot them out."}
{"prompt":"The likelihood of very little interference is why Green Bank was selected in 1954 as the location for a new radio astronomy observatory facility. It’s close to Washington DC, yet sparsely populated and conveniently protected on all sides by the Allegheny Mountains. But just in case, lawmakers drew a square on a map of the West Virginia-Virginia border, and the National Radio Quiet Zone was born: 13,000 square miles within which all devices that emit microwaves and radio waves on a large scale are severely regulated. Cell towers and radio stations do exist throughout the Quiet Zone today, but they must be directionally pointed away from the telescope and every request for a new one is subject to observatory approval. Within a ten-mile radius of Green Bank, however, cell towers and Wi-Fi networks are banned.","completion":"We are told that when we board the school bus that will take us to the telescope, our cell phones must be switched off. Even though there is no cell reception here, our phones are tiny transmitters that will keep searching for a signal, emitting radio waves all the while. Dave steps up onto a thin strip of stage and wheels over a cage connected to a small screen. The cage is a Faraday cage, which blocks all electromagnetic radiation, and the screen is a spectrum analyzer which shows how much radiation a given object is spitting."}
{"prompt":"He puts a digital camera circa 2000 into the cage and a spike like an EKG appears on the analyzer’s previously flat line. “Whoa,” says Dave, “don’t take that near the telescope.” Then he takes a small handheld fan and repeats the experiment. The analyzer goes bonkers. “We used to sell them here in the gift shop,” Dave says, “until we realized.” We are loaded onto a shoddy school bus, shoddy on purpose—only diesel vehicles are allowed past the visitor’s center, since modern cars have computers, spark plugs, and more. At 485 feet and a parabolic surface area of 2.3 acres, the Green Bank Telescope is visible from miles away—a giant white satellite dish atop a giant white crane. Up close, the rain rolls off its listening panels and it seems too hard and inanimate to be that sensitive—the most electrosensitive body in the world.","completion":"Taking Precautions When Carmen Scherrer was forced to flee her home in Virginia Beach, she went to the woods. At first she just walked around, trying not to die. Then she started noticing the birds. Watching them preen and pop made her feel a little better, if only by distraction. She bought a Sibley Guide to Birds so she could identify them based on the shapes of their heads. A red-winged blackbird, a yellow finch."}
{"prompt":"Fifty cents, one fumbling call on the observatory’s payphone, and twenty minutes spent swinging my legs on the sunshiney bench outside the gift shop and a black SUV is rolling up containing Carmen and Diane. I have kept my phone totally off and been sure to wear clothes that have not been laundered with scented laundry detergent, per Diane’s instructions.","completion":"There are two kinds of electrosensitive people, I decide—the ones who seem normal, but for God’s grace go I, and the ones who don’t. Carmen is the former, Diane is the latter. Part of the electrosensitive PR problem is that the strange ones get so much of the air time. “Well hello there,” Diane says from the passenger seat, “I thought you would have called sooner, I’ve been waiting the whole morning.” Long grey hair in pigtails, Tevas worn with socks, loose slacks."}
{"prompt":"We’re on our way to look at a rustic cabin in a nearby state park to see if it might be a suitable place for Carmen to live temporarily and host her son and parents. She has been coming to Green Bank (even the town’s name sounds better with her rolled R) for two years, just on weekends or a day or two when she is feeling extra sick. But no one in her family has ever come with her.","completion":"Diane directs Carmen to drive west on the two-lane road that runs through Green Bank, and she obeys, driving slowly. Carmen emigrated from Spain to marry her husband, who she’d met as a high school exchange student. She is slim and tan with long dark hair and a soft-looking denim shirt. Diane is used to tour-guiding and does it well, pointing out Green Bank Middle School, which abuts the observatory property. Unlike most schools these days, this one doesn’t have any Wi-Fi, only hardwired computers."}
{"prompt":"“Thank God,” says Carmen. The question of Wi-Fi in schools has received some mainstream attention. A 2014 article publishing the results of a study conducted by researchers at the University of California San Diego made the case for limiting children’s exposure to EMR when possible, including removing Wi-Fi from American public schools. In two Canadian cities, parents petitioned unsuccessfully to have the Wi-Fi removed from their children’s schools.","completion":"Over and over, many scientists and laypeople have pointed out that there is no hard evidence that links EMR exposure to the kinds of health effects that electrosensitives describe. But after a documentary about the health effects of Wi-Fi on children was shown widely in Israel, the mayor of Haifa announced that it was immediately removing Wi-Fi from its public schools, saying, “When there is a doubt, when it comes to our children, there is no doubt. We must take excessive precaution.” It’s this kind of precaution that Martin Blank, a retired professor in the Department of Physiology and Cellular Biophysics at Columbia University, argues for in his book on the subject, Overpowered. “Just as the United States became the first nation in the world to regulate the production of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) when science indicated the threat to earth’s ozone layer—long before there was definitive proof of such a link—our governments should respond to the significant public health threat of EMF exposure,” he writes."}
{"prompt":"Diane also points out the Green Bank Library, where most of the electrosensitives in town come to check their email. Like the middle school, the library too has only wired computers. Diane also has a wired computer at home, which she uses to answer emails from electrosensitives the world over, stay up on the newest scientific studies about the health effects of EMR on humans—which she prints and organizes in file folders on her shelves according to their year and location—and look at baby pictures of her grandson. Most electrosensitives are not ideologically anti-technology. They just want a different relationship with it: to be able to opt out when necessary.","completion":"“I can’t go into that Dollar General,” Diane says as we pass it, “because of the fluorescent lights. I asked them to turn them off, but they won’t.” “If I have diabetes, if I have cancer, I don’t have to tell everyone about it. I don’t want to bother anybody, I just want to live my life,” Carmen says. “But this illness is not like that. Other people’s habits affect us, they don’t stop at the border line. It blows toward us.” House Hunting Carmen stops the spotless Honda CRV she is driving on the crest of a one-lane road and points across a technicolor green field at something that neither I nor Diane can see."}
{"prompt":"“That white spot,” Carmen says in her Spanish accent, throwing the car in park and twisting her body into the backseat to grab the strap of her professional-grade digital camera from where it sits next to me. “Bald eagle. Oh my oh my oh my.” Carmen had scoured the internet, trying to find out what was wrong with her—why was she suffering these inexplicable attacks of pain and irregular heartbeat that her doctors said were not a heart attack.","completion":"“I first had like a stroke, my mouth couldn’t talk, it was like drunk, I couldn’t open the door to my car, my mind and my hand weren’t communicating.” She would have the attacks mostly at the middle school where she worked as a Spanish teacher. Sometimes she would have to call her husband to come pick her up. Soon the attacks came every week, then every day. She quit her job."}
{"prompt":"Then the attacks started happening at her kids’ school, in the supermarket, even in her own home. She now attributes the attacks to the fluorescent lights that are ubiquitous in public schools, as well as to the critical mass of cell phones, Wi-Fi, and the effects of a nearby cell tower. She disabled her Wi-Fi network, removed the electricity in whole swaths of her home, replaced all compact fluorescent bulbs with regular bulbs, got rid of her cell phone, and asked her children and husband to keep their phones in their cars and charge them at neighbors’ homes.","completion":"“Usually when a person has a sickness they get support, that’s part of what helps them get better,” she tells me, tearing up as she drives on a cool, laurel-covered road through the state park. “Not with this. People not understanding. You have to quit working, you have to quit socializing, you have to quit your previous life. Nobody believes. You feel this loneliness. When I am calling Diane, I am just crying, saying, ‘Believe me!’” We arrive at the cabin that Carmen wants to check out."}
{"prompt":"“Oh! This is niiiiice,” Carmen says, nosing around the place. It has an iron wood-fire cook stove, and gas refrigerator. All of its lights are kerosene and must be lit by a match. But Carmen stiffens. “I think I am picking something up a little bit here,” she says. “Yes, something is bothering me.” The state park, which Diane has directed many of her electrosensitive guests to, also has tent camping sites. Diane tells Carmen to keep driving to the most secluded camp site, which sits near a river.","completion":"“Aha,” says Carmen, “so even if another family is having a cell phone maybe it will not bother me too much because we are so far over here.” She paces around, taking pictures. “Yes I feel much better over here. I am not feeling so good at the cabin but I feel good here.” Diane instructs Carmen to turn left off the two-lane state road and heads up a steep dirt driveway that’s been cut—recently, it seems—into the side of a mountain. The road dead-ends in a clearing where a cinderblock foundation and some framed walls are open to the sky. A woman and a man stand in the foreground, both thin and tan, bent over the open rump of a car rummaging around inside it."}
{"prompt":"Sue’s long brown hair is up in a girlish ponytail. Her breathable shorts and hook-and-eye boots make her look more like a thru-hiker than what she is: an electrosensitive woman fleeing for her life. John—-denim work pants, a flat pencil behind his ear, drinking water from a jar—looks like he could be a local, only the New York plates on their car give him away.","completion":"Sue is not only electrosensitive, but chemically sensitive, a combination that is common, she tells me, as we settle into folding chairs in a circle of shade. She is affected by all kinds of artificial smells and substances, from treated wood to DEET to perfume, hence the instruction about my clothes. John is not electrosensitive himself, but has been supportive of Sue, a rarity I learn—electrosensitivity seems to kill most of the marriages it touches."}
{"prompt":"Sue and John are from Mamaroneck, a prosperous satellite suburb of New York City. Sue thinks it started when the utility company installed a smart meter— equipped with wireless communication so it can check rates remotely—on the back of their house. Either that or it was their new neighbor who had every gadget and every light on a dimmer switch (dimmers generate much more EMR than traditional light switches).","completion":"“When he was home, I couldn’t be in my house,” Sue says. Her skin would burn, and she got immobilizing headaches. When she used her phone, her ear would get hot. Her fingers tingled when she tried to use a computer. A new cell phone tower went up right over their kids’ school. Sue’s toes would bloat and burn, which she illustrates with a photo on her digital camera. They do indeed look puffy and red, as if from a very bad sunburn."}
{"prompt":"They hired a professional to shield their bedroom, to make it as much like a Faraday cage as possible—three layers of aluminum mesh. Often she went whole days without leaving her cage room. “My life became very small,” Sue says. She couldn’t socialize with friends or attend events at her children’s school. She missed her son’s high school graduation. “Too many cell phones!” she cries. “Out of a class of 500, our son is the only one who didn’t have a cell phone.” But eventually even the cage didn’t help her. She couldn’t sleep. “I would bring her out to the car and she would try and sleep in the car,” John says.","completion":"Soon she took to driving her car to the farthest reaches of town and parking it under an I-95 underpass to get relief. That’s when their daughter called. She had read an article about Diane and Green Bank. The couple came down, then bought land here shortly thereafter. The plan is to build themselves a new house, with green chemical-free materials custom-tailored to Sue’s sensitivities, and a separate shed for the appliances."}
{"prompt":"While their house is being built, Sue and John are camping on a piece of land owned by WAVR, a nonprofit that Diane and others started to provide free lodging to electrosensitive people and their family and friends. Right now it’s a grassy field, two sleeping cabins, and a hunter’s lodge with a communal kitchen.","completion":"Sue would like to see a swath of land in every country put aside as EMR-free zones for electrosensitives to go. As it is now, she says, “there’s just no way to opt out.” An Experiment Until as recently as the 1980s, coal miners brought caged canaries down into the seam tunnels with them. As long as the canaries were singing, things were copacetic. But if the bird passed out or died, that signaled unsafe levels of poisonous gas in the air—time to run. Because canaries need double the oxygen of most birds—they take it in upon exhale as well as inhale—they made ideal air testers."}
{"prompt":"The phrase “canary in the coal mine” has become so overused as to be effectively meaningless. But when talking about electrosensitives, the comparison is appropriate. The working theory, according to the electrosensitive community and the scientists who support them, is that those with EHS are the same yet different from all of us. Something about the way they are built makes them especially porous, especially sensitive—so whatever is slowly killing the rest of us, the theory goes, is killing them much faster.","completion":"Just before the bubonic plague started killing millions in medieval Europe, people reported seeing rats keel over in the street with unexplainable frequency. We study honey bee death as an important sign of air pollution, and bivalve molluscs for water pollution. Implicit in these strategies is an ethical position: it is acceptable for some life to die so that humans can live or better understand the threats stewing in their environment. But what if the harbingers are people? Electrosensitives say they’re not fundamentally different from people who don’t experience health effects from EMR—they are simply more sensitive."}
{"prompt":"“We’re gifted,” Diane says. “If this stuff is bad for Sue, it’s probably bad for all of us,” John says. “You may not realize it, but you are participating in an unauthorized experiment,” Martin Blank writes in Overpowered. “For the first time, many of us are holding high-powered microwave transmitters—in the form of cell phones—directly against our heads on a daily basis…What health effects do these exposures have? Therein lies the experiment.” Blank writes about how EMR, even at very low levels, interrupts bird and bee navigation, and can cause bee colonies to collapse. In one study Blank cites, researchers put an active cell phone in front of a bee hive, and in short order, the hive crumbled. A 2010 Dutch study tied a mystery illness decimating European trees to Wi-Fi radiation.","completion":"While Blank has some allies, his opinions are not popular in the scientific community because they go against a foundational idea upon which much of modern technology is based: sure, X-rays and ultraviolet radiation are carcinogens, known to harm human cells (which is why we wear protective gear when getting our cavities photographed), but that’s because they are ionizing radiation (short-wavelength, high-frequency)."}
{"prompt":"As long as the EMR created by a given technology is non-ionizing—long-wavelength and low-frequency, such as microwave and radio—it’s not harmful to humans. But Blank’s research was showing that even non-ionizing radiation, which has much less energy than X-rays, was affecting a very basic property of cells—the ability to stimulate protein synthesis.","completion":"To accept this conclusion, many scientists would have to throw out years of research. Not to mention, Blank archly implies, sever their funding ties to the tech and telecommunications industries. Blank tells an anecdote of a scientist who challenged his research at a conference—the scientist, he later found out, was employed by a major cell phone provider."}
{"prompt":"Conspiracy theories aside, Blank is sympathetic. “People simply cannot bear the thought of restricting their time with—much less giving up—these beloved gadgets,” he writes. “This gives industry a huge advantage because there is a large segment of the public that would simply rather not know.” Hardware vs Software Another theory of EHS is that the sufferers’ symptoms are real, but the cause is people’s anxiety and stress in response to the idea that wireless technology is harming them, rather than any “actual” harm.","completion":"For a disease to be real, we are told, proof of physical malfunction is required. If none can be found, the suffering is deemed “psychosomatic,” and left at that. But within that word is the word “somatic”—-of the body. Suzanne O’Sullivan, a British neurologist and the author of It’s All in Your Head, regularly diagnoses patients as suffering from psychosomatic illness, but that doesn’t lessen the seriousness of their symptoms or their treatment. Psychosomatic disorders, she says, are physical symptoms, truly experienced, that mask emotional distress."}
{"prompt":"“It feels real because it is real,” O’Sullivan tells a man who used the internet to diagnose himself with multiple sclerosis. “Your paralysis is not imagined but that does not necessarily mean that it is a primarily physical disorder.” Ultimately, the man accepts this and applies his own analogy: “My hardware is intact and the wires are all in the right place, but I have a software problem that stops my legs receiving the instruction to move.” As a culture, we are troubled only by hardware problems, and inclined to dismiss those that occur in our software, despite the fact that both can and do cause glitches and crashes. We also tend to use these words—hardware, software, body, mind—as if the boundaries between them are securely distinct. It feels necessary to distinguish between different kinds of distress.","completion":"But one thing is clear: new technologies are causing some humans to experience distress, in one form or another. It just so happens that at the time of my trip to visit Green Bank, I had recently endured a disappointment in love. Let’s call my ex-beloved F. F and I had built a life, and then just like that it was gone, as is prone to happen. I had been hitting the tarot and journaling hard. The hours between three and six in the morning had come back to me and it was difficult to sit still by myself without water squeezing out. “I feel like poison is coursing through my veins,” I wrote."}
{"prompt":"The metaphors we use for anxiety and grief are often electrical. “My entire body buzzed as if I’d been plugged into an electrical socket,” writes psychotherapist Leslie Carr in “What Your Anxiety Is Really Trying to Tell You.” “Anxiety is your body’s way of trying to get your attention,” Carr goes on. “It’s an invitation from your unconscious, alerting you to something in your emotional life that needs to be heard.” After I’ve dropped off Diane and Carmen at Diane’s house, I drive away through fields buzzing with katydids. I turn up the radio and hear that President Trump has officially pulled America out of the Paris climate agreement.","completion":"Google “ecoanxiety” and the results are profound. Not only does it refer to the fact that scientists are now tying climate change to increased rates of stress, anxiety, depression, and suicide due to storms and slides and tsunamis, but it also hints at something deeper and more amorphous—you might even say somatic."}
{"prompt":"At the core, we are animals destroying the resources we need to survive. How much to compromise so that the needs of all are met is at the heart of this whole situation. “Accommodations” is a word often in Diane’s mouth. How would one build a community that preserves modern technology while accommodating electrosensitives? Ideally it would be a both/and—a choice we can all make for ourselves. Those of us who can’t tolerate or don’t want connected technology to subsume our experience should be able to opt out. Those who need or want it should be able to opt in. But currently it seems that no one gets to choose—that, for a multitude of reasons, connected technology is a layer of living that eludes personal choice.","completion":"I do not know what exactly the sickness of EHS sufferers can tell the rest of us about how we live. But I do believe that it is meant to tell us something. In 2010, Adam Abdullah walked free from prison after thirty-three years inside. He can still recall the sensation of rejoining a society that in his absence had put a computerized telephone the size of a candy bar in the hands of a woman across the aisle from him on the bus home: She kept moving her fingers and I thought, “What the hell is she doing?” Then it dawned on me: That’s texting. For hours, just tapping that little phone."}
{"prompt":"Technology in its present-day networked and connected form poses problems in a setting conceived to separate from society those deemed to have abused its freedoms. Apart from intermittent access to an offline PC, Abdullah, convicted of kidnapping while armed, was largely sealed off from the digital technologies that have revolutionized life on the outside. Today, he’s a cofounder of Denver’s Second Chance Center, helping ex-inmates get back on their feet. But the metaphor he employs for his time inside is grim: “We were goods, like a can of spam put up on a shelf.” Seven years on, consumer devices of the kind that awed Abdullah are proliferating in prison. This technology aligns squarely with penal reform goals espoused by a loose-knit neoliberal coalition of fiscal conservatives and moderate Democrats. Forty years after the vertiginous run-up in the prison population began, criticism of mass incarceration is no longer the preserve of radicals.","completion":"These groups have found common cause in getting “Smart on Crime” (as opposed to just tough) and bringing ballooning correctional costs to heel, as University of Pennsylvania political scientist Marie Gottschalk has documented. Vendors of tablets position their products as instruments for enacting this agenda. They tout them as a tool to help rehabilitate inmates, ease their re-entry into society, reduce recidivism, and pare cost."}
{"prompt":"It’s hard to quibble with the potential these devices hold to enrich and empower an often-despairing population, as Abdullah attests to. But early evidence suggests that the language of reform offers convenient cover for business practices that prey on prisoners and their families. Moreover, even when deployed with regard to inmates’ rights, technology is no panacea for the ills of a criminal justice system that locks up Americans with the same alacrity that Stalin sent citizens of the Soviet Union to the Gulag. In fact, it’s possible to regard the focus on a technological fix as a distraction from the real steps needed to end mass incarceration—and even as a symptom of the neoliberal preoccupation with budget cuts that helped get us here.","completion":"Inside the Hair Shirt The “digital divide” is a phrase less on our lips these days, though pockets of dislocation from the information age stubbornly persist. But if there’s a populace among whom it remains starkly operative, it’s the more than 2.17 million inhabitants of America’s carceral state. According to the 2017 edition of the Columbia [University] Human Rights Law Review-produced Jailhouse Lawyer’s Manual, “Most states ban prisoners from direct, unsupervised access to the Internet.” Fears of bad actors hacking a website, downloading porn, taunting a victim, getting to a witness, arranging a drug drop, or even ordering a hit—pick your scenario—loom large."}
{"prompt":"Reinforcing such concerns, prison leaders are acculturated to view innovation with suspicion, cued to the worst case and inclined in most matters to default to security considerations. “When you work in corrections, you tend to be risk averse,” says Pennsylvania Secretary of Corrections John Wetzel. For good measure, technology has characteristically been deemed a luxury of which prisoners are undeserving—certainly nothing the public would pay for.","completion":"Accordingly, there’s a perfunctory hair-shirt aspect to prison technology. It stands in relation to free-world technology as prison chow does to a restaurant meal or prison-issue fatigues do to a tailored suit. Proprietary prison email systems allow inmates to correspond with approved contacts. But in- and outbound messages are typically subject to fees—between twenty-five and sixty cents, according to Alex Friedmann, associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center and managing editor of Prison Legal News. And stingy length limits apply. These range from 1500 to 6000 characters, at the lower end of which Martin Luther King Jr. would have had to piece out his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” on an installment plan, attorney Stephen Raher notes."}
{"prompt":"Walled Gardens “Corrections-grade” tablets follow stolidly in the tradition of penal products as drabber, dowdier versions of their free-world counterparts. They typically come sheathed in bulbous clear plastic bumpers to offer contraband no quarter and withstand use in a “rugged” environment. And they offer users a locked-down “walled garden” of content such as AOL in its heyday could scarcely have dreamt of. Whereas AOL users quickly learned they had only to unlatch an HTML gate to gambol free on the open internet, prison tablet content resides on on-site servers whose robust security, coupled to safeguards on the device itself, are said to render the threat of a break for digital freedom strictly theoretical.","completion":"But there’s much that prisoners can do on them. For their intellectual edification and personal and professional growth, they can browse educational modules—GED lessons, vocational training, courses in cognitive behavioral therapy, or help with addiction. Voice or Skype-like video calls can be placed to friends and family, or inmates may send them email. And they can listen to music, read ebooks, watch movies, or play games. To manage everyday life, they can make requests of and lodge grievances with correctional staff, order commissary items, and schedule visits from loved ones."}
{"prompt":"These capabilities deliver on key tenets of neoliberal prison reform. Two out of three ex-prisoners are rearrested within three years of release. Education interrupts the cycle. Inmates who take classes are 43 percent less likely to reoffend. Tablets can extend educational offerings to prisoners at “zero marginal cost,” notes David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project.","completion":"They can also serve as digital umbilici, nourishing “social capital” shown to fortify inmates during imprisonment. Studies in Florida and Minnesota linked staying connected to loved ones to reduced recidivism. The findings relate to in-person visits, but prisons are frequently remote from inmates’ homes—hard for friends and family, many of whom are working poor, to reach. Videoconferencing—“video visitation” in correctional parlance—is a boon, allowing prisoners to see loved ones as they talk."}
{"prompt":"Moreover, in an environment that otherwise affords scant scope for control over one’s affairs, it has to feel empowering to exercise at least a modicum of autonomy by using tablets’ administrative capabilities. Finally, it’s only common sense to familiarize prisoners with technology they’ll need to be fluent in to find work, secure services, and generally navigate life post-release.","completion":"Propelled by such use cases, eleven states (and multiple local jails) now offer tablets, with up to three more expected to greenlight them or go live by the end of the year. And, though its current status is unclear—the initiative appears on a Department of Justice web page labeled “archived content” since Trump entered the White House—last year, the Federal Bureau of Prisons announced a “pilot program [to] be rolled out at two prisons in early 2017 and… expanded to additional sites in future years.” Carceral Capital But, for all the potential tablets hold, there are reasons to be skeptical of the vendors selling them."}
{"prompt":"The core business of GTL and Securus Technologies, the companies that dominate prison information and communications technology, and substantially control its nascent tablet market, is prison phone systems. With Telmate (since acquired by GTL), they presided over prison payphone rates of up to $17 for fifteen minutes. The FCC capped interstate rates at 25 cents a minute in 2013, but the companies successfully appealed price controls on in-state calls, which make up most of their business. As of late last year, these ran as high as more than $1.50 per minute, according to advocacy group the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI).","completion":"Prison tablet deployments are often “bundled” with phone service contracts. As such, they’re subject to the same industry practice under which prisons collect “commissions”—typically a cut of contractual revenue—from vendors. These commissions are presented as a way to subsidize inmate programing, but they’ve actually hurt inmates by contributing to inflated payphone rates. They also offer a lever that companies use to land exclusive access to prisoners. A 2015 tender obtained by The New York Times revealed how Arizona’s Department of Corrections scored bids to run its phone system: 1250 points to the contractor dangling the largest commission versus an aggregate of 300 points for all other criteria."}
{"prompt":"Underwriting this arrangement are inmates and their families. GTL bears the cost of installing the infrastructure for tablet deployment and then distributes its devices to inmates free (with exceptions: in Pennsylvania inmates pay $147 for theirs), charging them for access to content. Subscriptions typically start at 99 cents per day and go up to $25 for a month, says executive director of inmate applications and hardware Brian Peters. Other fees are transactional: for example, 25 cents for text-only email, 50 cents to send messages with an attachment, and $1 for one with embedded video. Securus didn’t reply to an interview request, but access to one of its tablets commands a monthly fee of $15 to $45, while another costs an undisclosed sum plus charges for downloadable content.","completion":"This model has the signal merit of getting taxpayers off the hook. The political untenability of asking us to pay for anything that appears to cosset inmates is considered axiomatic. “The public doesn’t want to pay,” says Martin Horn, who led the Pennsylvania and New York City Departments of Correction in the late 1990s and mid-2000s, respectively. For a glimpse of the injunctive hold of this supposed truism, look no further than the disclaimer the Federal Bureau of Prisons felt obliged to issue on the first web page that comes up when you Google “TRULINCS,” acronym for its Trust Fund Limited Inmate Computer System, an email service: No taxpayer dollars are used for this service. Funding is provided entirely by the Inmate Trust Fund, which is maintained by profits from inmate purchases of commissary products, telephone services, and the fees inmates pay for using TRULINCS."}
{"prompt":"But it’s worth considering who benefits from this posture, enabling as it does a lucrative business and fulsome commissions for prisons. GTL and Securus are owned by private equity outfits, and Securus’ current owner Abry Partners stands to make a handsome premium on the $640 million it paid for the company in 2013 if the FCC approves its $1.6 billion sale to Beverly Hills-based Platinum Equity. Meanwhile, commission receipts paid to prisons added up to more than $460 million in 2013—a windfall put toward “roads…staff salaries [and] state or county’s general budget,” among other items, in addition to “inmate welfare,” according to the FCC.","completion":"Peters points to the “significant capital burden” of outfitting “an entire building with a wireless network…and handing every prisoner a tablet.” But a copy of GTL’s 2015 contract with Colorado state prisons obtained by PPI is a feat of legal and financial engineering. For $800,000 a year, GTL has “the exclusive right to collect and retain all revenue generated from the services supplied through this Agreement.” Beyond contractually fixed phone charges, the company “may in its discretion change any pricing,” the document adds. This includes “up to $19.99 per one month subscription” for a music streaming service—twice the price of Spotify for a fraction of the content if the catalog available to Pennsylvania inmates is any guide, PPI notes. The contract also permits GTL to levy fees on electronic transfers of money deposited in inmates’ accounts to pay for services—a widespread industry practice."}
{"prompt":"Securus, for its part, has shown little compunction about trampling inmates’ interests when this conduces to maximal profit. According to PPI, the company inserted clauses in contracts requiring some prisons deploying video visitation to cease in-person visits—forcing inmates and their loved ones to pay for its service as their only means of seeing one another—before backing off amid outcry.","completion":"The Disruptors Are Coming The prison technology market certainly seems ripe for disruption. This is what American Prison Data Systems (APDS) and Edovo (a contraction of the suitably aspirational “education over obstacles”) are banking on. Both push tablets loaded with gamified education platforms that prisons, not inmates, pay for. Instead, inmates earn credit for completing educational modules redeemable for entertainment options."}
{"prompt":"Both also flaunt their social conscience. APDS advertises its certification as a public benefit corporation committed to “social impact” besides the bottom line. Edovo bills itself as a “criminal justice reform and prison tech company.” APDS’s backers include ex-Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit and former Thomson Reuters CEO Tom Glocer. Edovo recently snagged the Global EdTech Startup Award.","completion":"These start-ups will surely find it challenging competing against rivals bestowing commissions. But research from England—a reasonable, if imperfect, analog to America—suggests wriggle room beyond taxpayers’ reflexive opposition to prison technology that might embolden officials to put public money on the line. A poll of English attitudes to “prisoners’ access to digital technology” by De Montfort University researchers encountered familiar squeamishness. But 57 percent said access could be “earned,” half viewed technology as rehabilitative, and 44 percent anticipated “efficiency savings” that would “save them money.” Another 25 percent were “undecided.” “Most of the public is ambivalent,” says co-author Victoria Knight. “They have a reaction, ‘prison is for punishment,’ but when you dig deeper they can be swayed. There’s room to inform.” A little over three years after their launch, APDS and Edovo are in forty-plus institutions each. There’s much to like about their approach. They embrace transparent costs instead of palming them off on the poorest and least powerful among us. They compete on technology rather than how much they’re willing to pay for access to a captive market."}
{"prompt":"And by placing education at the fore, they depart from a model in which tablets emulate the soporific function of TV in prison—a digital, rather than electronic, “babysitter”—as the private equity emphasis on monetizable content tends toward. They even gesture toward a more expansive sense of social mission on the part of prisons—one that might incline them to straighten up from their defensive crouch on technology.","completion":"Beyond Technocracy Ultimately, however, we shouldn’t conflate prison tablets with genuine penal reform, even if the companies behind them have relatively enlightened business models. In fact, with its narrow-gauge neoliberal focus on trimming costs, the enterprise might even be considered inimical to reform."}
{"prompt":"Tablets are frequently positioned as a solution to runaway spending. This perpetuates a false narrative about the fiscal burden of incarceration. While prisons represent the second-fastest growing line item in state budgets, they account for a fraction of overall expenditure—half of what states devote to highways, writes University of Pennsylvania’s Gottschalk. The same cost-saving mania arguably contributed to the dynamic that landed many inmates in prison to begin with by gutting social welfare programs, she adds.","completion":"And the “fixation” on reducing recidivism props up spurious notions about the deterrent effect of incarceration on crime—the same notions that fueled the policies behind mass imprisonment, Gottschalk notes. The National Research Council has concluded, she observes, that the “increase in incarceration may have caused a decrease in crime, but the magnitude is highly uncertain and the results of most studies suggest it was unlikely to have been large.” More fundamentally, Gottschalk excoriates neoliberal reformers for failing to make the case for shrinking the prison population as a humanitarian imperative unrelated to economic concerns. This would be a starting point for the practical steps entailed in actual reform: rescinding draconian laws that put so many people behind bars in the first place, restoring voting rights and benefits entitlements for ex-prisoners currently deprived of them, and spending money, without the prospect of immediate returns, on mental health, drug treatment, and other services to help them pick up their lives."}
{"prompt":"Absent such action, the carceral state—infinitely resourceful and protected by entrenched interests—seems here to stay. Initiatives to spare minor drug offenders prison time have garnered much attention, but other crimes pick up the slack, perpetuating mass imprisonment. In 2014, the Pew Charitable Trusts forecast a 3 percent uptick in the state prison population by 2018.","completion":"We shouldn’t be lulled by bromides about technology into normalizing the ugly exceptionalism of our criminal justice system. We’re home to 5 percent of the world’s population yet 25 percent of all prisoners. The way to change this brute fact is quite unambiguous. It requires political leadership, rather than prostration before the most reactionary elements of public opinion, and it cannot be outsourced to private vendors. Deployed with an emphasis on education and not outsize profit, prison tablets are eminently worthwhile. But as a substitute for real penal reform, they’re so much technocratic solutionism."}
{"prompt":"Machine learning is the practice of training algorithms to classify and predict in order to support decision-making. In recent years, it has skyrocketed in popularity and ubiquity. It’s no stretch to say that most services we use now incorporate machine learning in one way or another. In its pervasiveness, machine learning is becoming infrastructural. And, like all infrastructure, once it matures it will become invisible.","completion":"Before that happens, we should develop a way to disrupt it. A relatively nascent field called “adversarial machine learning” provides a starting point. Described as the intersection of cybersecurity and machine learning, this field studies how these algorithms can be systematically fooled, with or without knowledge of the algorithm itself—an ideal approach, since the specifics of many algorithms are trade secrets. And given the fact that the machine learning regime effectively makes all of us its workers—most of our online activity is in fact labor towards the improvement of these systems—we as individual users have an opportunity to inflict major sabotage."}
{"prompt":"Consider an early and now-ubiquitous application of machine learning: the everyday spam filter. The job of the spam filter is to categorize an email as either “spam”—junk—or “ham”—non-spam. The simplest case of adversarial machine learning in this context is constructing an email that is spam—a pitch for a pharmaceutical product, for example—but in such a way that the spam filter misclassifies it as ham, thus letting it through to the recipient.","completion":"There are a variety of strategies you might employ to accomplish this. A relatively simple one is swapping out the name of “Viagra” for something more obscure to a machine but equally readable to a human: “Vi@gr@”, for example. Today, most spam filters are resistant to this basic obfuscation attack. But we could consider more sophisticated approaches, such as writing a longer, professional-looking email that hints at the product without ever explicitly mentioning it. The hint may be strikingly obvious to a human, but incomprehensible to a spam filter."}
{"prompt":"A spam filter is less insidious than many other applications of machine learning, of course. But we can generalize from this example to develop techniques for disrupting other applications more worthy of sabotage. Poisoning the Well Most machine learning models are constructed according to the following general procedure: Collect training data.","completion":"Run a machine learning algorithm, such as a neural network, over the training data to learn from it. Integrate the model into your service. Many websites collect training data with embedded code that tracks what you do on the internet. This information is supposed to identify your preferences, habits, and other facets of your online and offline activity. The effectiveness of this data collection relies on the assumption that browsing habits are an honest portrayal of an individual."}
{"prompt":"A simple act of sabotage is to violate this assumption by generating “noise” while browsing. You can do this by opening random links, so that it’s unclear which are the “true” sites you’ve visited—a process automated by Dan Schultz’s Internet Noise project, available at makeinternetnoise.com. Because your data is not only used to make assumptions about you, but about other users with similar browsing patterns, you end up interfering with the algorithm’s conclusions about an entire group of people.","completion":"Of course, the effectiveness of this tactic, like all others described here, increases when more people are using it. As the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual explains, “Acts of simple sabotage, multiplied by thousands of citizens, can be an effective weapon…[wasting] materials, manpower, and time. Occurring on a wide scale, simple sabotage will be a constant and tangible drag on…the enemy.” Attacks of this sort—where we corrupt the training data of these systems—are known as “poisoning” attacks."}
{"prompt":"The Pathological and the Perturbed The other category of adversarial machine learning attacks are known as “evasion.” This strategy targets systems that have already been trained. Rather than trying to corrupt training data, it tries to generate pathological inputs that confuse the model, causing it to generate incorrect results.","completion":"The spam filter attack, where you trick an algorithm into seeing spam as ham, is an example of evasion. Another is “Hyperface,” a collaboration between Hyphen Labs and Adam Harvey, a specially designed scarf engineered to fool facial recognition systems by exploiting the heuristics these systems use to identify faces. Similarly, in a recent study, researchers developed a pair of glasses that consistently cause a state-of-the-art facial recognition system to misclassify faces it would otherwise identify with absolute certainty."}
{"prompt":"Above: the input of people wearing the glasses designed to confuse facial-recognition software. Below: the misidentified individuals. Another domain of computer vision is object recognition. If facial recognition is about recognizing faces, object recognition is about identifying objects. For instance, you might ask an object recognition system to look at a picture of a panda and identify the panda.","completion":"Recently, computer science researchers developed a “universal perturbation algorithm” capable of systematically fooling many object recognition algorithms by adding relatively small amounts of noise to the image. This noise is almost imperceptible to a human, but causes the object recognition system to misclassify objects. For example, an image of a coffee maker that has been treated with the universal perturbation algorithm will look like a macaw to the object recognition system."}
{"prompt":"Above: the original, correctly classified inputs. Below: the incorrectly classified inputs, post-perturbation. The writer Evan Calder Williams defines sabotage as: the impossibly small difference between exceptional failures and business as usual, connected by the fact that the very same properties and tendencies enable either outcome.","completion":"Serendipitously, this is the literal mechanic by which the universal perturbation algorithm works. An object recognition neural network, for instance, takes an image and maps it to a point in some abstract space. Different regions of this space correspond to different labels—so an image of a coffee maker ideally maps to the coffee maker region."}
{"prompt":"But these regions are irregular in form. The categories of macaw and coffee maker may be very similar in certain dimensions. That means it takes only slight nudges—accomplished by introducing the noise into the image—to push a coffee maker image into the macaw region. One advantage of the perturbation algorithm is that its distortions are invisible to the human eye. Sabotage that sticks out as sabotage is not very successful. Well-executed sabotage leaves doubts not only about its origins but also whether it was deliberate or accidental. That is, it leaves doubts about whether or not it was sabotage at all.","completion":"By contrast, if you use Internet Noise, the random browsing that results might be identifiable as such, in which case it may simply be excluded from the data set. This may help you escape the training regime, but it won’t smuggle misinformation into the system to disrupt that regime for others. If, however, the random browsing was not random but generated according to subtly misleading patterns—like the imperceptible noise in the perturbed images—then the misinformation may make its way into the training data. And if there is enough of it, it will poison the model as a whole."}
{"prompt":"Protracted People’s War Research in adversarial machine learning typically falls under the rubric of cybersecurity, so it has some similarities to the field of cryptography. The success of cryptography depends on difficult mathematical operations, such as factoring prime numbers. These operations are relatively easy for individuals or small organizations to take advantage of, and mostly resilient against adversaries with more resources. The marvel of cryptography is that it is a technology that runs against the typical gradients of power. It favors the less powerful against the more powerful.","completion":"Perhaps something similar is at work with adversarial machine learning, favoring the resister against the machine. To quote Ian Goodfellow and Nicolas Papernot, two leading researchers in the field: On the theoretical side, no one yet knows whether defending against adversarial examples is a theoretically hopeless endeavor ... or if an optimal strategy would give the defender the upper ground.... On the applied side, no one has yet designed a truly powerful defense algorithm that can resist a wide variety of adversarial example attack algorithms."}
{"prompt":"Like cryptography, the goal of such disruption is not necessarily a single act of sabotage, but rather a distributed undertaking that decreases the cost-effectiveness of data collection at scale. In the case of cryptography, the more people who use encrypted communication applications like Signal, the more expensive state surveillance becomes—hopefully to the point where it becomes infeasible. Similarly, the less accurate these machine learning systems become due to user disruption, the more costly they are, and the less likely they are to be relied upon.","completion":"While adversarial machine learning is still in its early years, perhaps it will provide a tactic to complement the parallel struggles on the policy level. We are under no obligation to honestly train these models. If regimes of algorithmic discipline are implemented without our consent, we will need a toolbox of resistance that can directly disrupt their effectiveness."}
{"prompt":"Are you anxious about the role of algorithms in your life? Concerned about the disappearance of human judgment and its replacement by machines? Horrified by the movie Minority Report’s depiction of a world where people can be sentenced based on crimes they have not yet committed? If so, reading the recent coverage of sentencing algorithms in the criminal justice system may be just what you need to confirm your worst fears.","completion":"Over the past year or so, numerous media and academic articles have tackled the subject of “risk-assessment tools.” These are software programs used by criminal courts to quantify defendants’ risk of committing another crime based on variables relating to their criminal history, such as criminal record and type of offense, and socio-demographic characteristics, like age, gender, and employment status. The programs produce a “score” for each defendant, often ranging from one to ten, which is supposed to indicate the likelihood of recidivism."}
{"prompt":"Risk-assessment tools are rapidly proliferating, subjecting an increasing number of defendants to their rule. According to recent estimates, more than sixty risk-assessment tools are currently being used in the United States. From pretrial justice to probation, parole, sentencing, juvenile justice, sex offenses, and drug-related offenses, predictive tools now permeate almost all parts of the criminal justice system. They are also spreading across borders: risk-assessment instruments are being developed and licensed in Canada, Australia, and several European countries.","completion":"There is little doubt that these tools discriminate against African Americans. As a 2016 ProPublica investigation revealed, COMPAS—a predictive instrument used for bail and sentencing decisions across the United States—gives harsher risk scores to African Americans compared to whites. In their statistical analysis, the journalists found that among defendants who ultimately did not reoffend, blacks were more than twice as likely as whites to be classified as high or medium risk."}
{"prompt":"Why? The mechanism is simple. Since predictive algorithms draw on historical data to train their models, and since historically the US criminal justice system has arrested, convicted, and incarcerated African Americans at higher rates compared to whites, risk-assessment tools reproduce discriminatory patterns. There is no easy fix for these structural issues. Even if one changes the variables included in the models, risk-assessment tools will continue to have different rates of false positives across racial lines, so long as we want scores to mean the same thing in terms of risk for blacks and whites, simply because of the distribution of each group’s data.","completion":"Predictive algorithms are also secretive, which makes them particularly ominous in the criminal justice context. The companies that build them often refuse to share the training data and code used in their products. This is the case for the COMPAS tool analyzed by ProPublica, which was built by Northpointe, a for-profit company. Although Northpointe challenged ProPublica’s analysis, they did not share their code or data, arguing that it was proprietary. Through public records requests, the ProPublica team was able to collect risk scores for thousands of criminal defendants. Yet this process was expensive and time-consuming. Most people simply do not have the resources for it."}
{"prompt":"Similarly, within jurisdictions that use risk-assessment tools, defendants and defense attorneys often do not know their risk score—or even, for that matter, whether they have one. They have no option to appeal or contest their score. In other words, defendants are sentenced based on factors they do not know and cannot dispute—a situation not unlike K.’s in Kafka’s The Trial.","completion":"Algorithms in The Wild The rapid growth of risk-assessment tools in criminal justice sounds like an algorithmic nightmare come true. It is no surprise that dystopian references such as Minority Report or The Trial come to mind. Risk-assessment tools resonate with our worst anxieties about algorithms and automation in the digital age. They capture the dark side of our imagination about technological change."}
{"prompt":"Such critiques are important and much needed. Yet they also miss important points. In particular, existing coverage overwhelmingly focuses on the tools themselves, their models, and their construction methods. In contrast, very few studies explore how these technologies are used in criminal courts. This is where my own research comes in. Over the past year and a half, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in criminal courts in several locations in the United States. I went to hearings, listened to plea bargaining negotiations, and interviewed judges, prosecutors, and pretrial and probation officers. I observed legal professionals in their daily work, trying to see how, when, and why they used risk scores to make decisions.","completion":"Based on this research, two important qualifications to the dominant narrative emerge. First, it is still unclear whether risk-assessment tools actually have a great impact on the daily proceedings in courtrooms. During my days of observation, I found that risk-assessment tools are often actively resisted in criminal courts. Most judges and prosecutors do not trust the algorithms. They do not know the companies they come from, they do not understand their methods, and they often find them useless. Consequently, risk-assessment tools often go unused: social workers complete the software programs’ questionnaires, print out the score sheets, add them to the defendants’ files… after which the scores seem to disappear and are rarely mentioned during hearings or plea bargaining negotiations."}
{"prompt":"Of course, these findings are far from representative of all criminal courts in the United States. There are certainly criminal courts where risk scores play a more important role. Yet this indicates that the nightmarish, Minority Report-inspired descriptions of automated justice in the algorithmic age may not be entirely accurate. Courts are just messier than that.","completion":"Paperless Justice The time I spent in criminal courts also made me realize that, for many judges, prosecutors, and court administrators, the technological issue of the day is not so much risk-assessment tools as the transition to paperless case-management systems. Until recently, courts have largely operated in a paper-based world. Thousands of paper files are still being carted around by clerks and administrators in most criminal courts, while prosecutors and defense attorneys overwhelmingly interact through scribbled paper notes."}
{"prompt":"All of this is currently being transformed through the development of complex, large-scale case-management systems. These systems encompass a wide range of functions. Prosecutors and defense attorneys can upload supporting document and file paperwork. Court administrators can schedule hearings and process criminal cases online. Judges and clerks can save and record sentencing decisions. Pretrial and probation officers can access the files of defendants and convicts with a few clicks.","completion":"Like any other digital infrastructure, these case-management systems register, compile, and store large amounts of data in a single place. The question then becomes: what should courts do with that data? To date, most courts don’t do anything with it, because they don’t have the resources to hire computer scientists. A few courts use it to build predictive analytics units, integrating data and drawing on resources from prosecutorial and police departments to help predict future offenses. Other courts are adopting a more reflexive approach, trying to shed light on their internal functioning with the goal of reforming the least efficient parts of their administration."}
{"prompt":"We need to pay much closer attention to how courts use these new troves of digital data. They may take a more dystopian direction, building up discriminatory dragnets through the creation of new predictive categories of “risky” people. These dragnets would be similar to what risk-assessment tools already do in their limited way, but with access to more encompassing and up-to-date data, as well as actionable resources to target and prosecute the individuals identified by predictive technologies.","completion":"Or courts may choose to use these digital systems to gather actionable analytics for social justice. There are several ways in which data could be tremendously helpful for criminal justice reform. It could identify and expand procedures that successfully reintegrate former prisoners into society. It could also help limit prosecutorial discretion in a system where the vast majority of cases are settled by plea bargain rather than a trial. Data may even be used to incentivize indigent defense attorneys to provide better outcomes for their clients, or to identify criminal procedures with high rates of incarceration in order to reduce them."}
{"prompt":"Using digital data to achieve these goals will take time and effort, of course. It will likely emerge from jurisdictions themselves, as they collect and analyze data to understand what they do well and where they fail—not from for-profit vendors that provide questionable off-the-shelf solutions. Sometimes tech criticism shares more in common with tech evangelism than first meets the eye. Both have a strong tendency to disregard contextual, political, and institutional factors. We shouldn’t merely invert the Silicon Valley mantra that technology provides the solution for every problem, to arrive at the argument that technology can’t solve any problem.","completion":"Instead, we need to acknowledge that technology alone doesn’t always mean much. Rather than focusing on the internal mechanics of risk-assessment tools, we should pay closer attention to the contexts in which those tools are developed and deployed. Politics, not technology, is the force responsible for creating a highly punitive criminal justice system. And transforming that system is ultimately a political task, not a technical one. Yet technology can play an important role. With enough political power, the algorithms that help sustain mass incarceration could be repurposed into tools that help dismantle it."}
{"prompt":"Before the first drone came, the most unusual thing the birds of South Rupununi would glimpse above the canopy could have been mistaken for a lone, tough fruit. It was a transient thing: bobbing up, then pausing, then dipping back into the forest, only to rise again elsewhere at irregular intervals. You’d forgive the birds if they were confused.","completion":"To the people below, though, the object was a GPS unit tied to a pole; and if you were to follow the pole down past the canopy, almost to the forest floor where service was sparse, you’d find a hand hoisting it up. Not long before the drone came, this was how the cartographers would stitch together their maps: pin-drop by pin-drop, with smartphones and GPS units, geo-referencing the data with satellite imagery."}
{"prompt":"But the drone would come. And before launching it into the sky, the cartographers who built it would name it for a bird, and in a little patch of southwest Guyana near the Brazilian border, the kowadad—osprey—would begin to sketch its own maps. Drone Vision At the mobile ground-control unit near the mixed Makushi-Wapichan indigenous community of Shulinab Village, you might find Nicholas Fredericks planning a flight path. Fredericks, a former cowboy turned Wapichan community leader, is here because the drone’s spatial resolution affords a degree of photographic detail that far outpaces that of satellite data. That is, Kowadad has sharper eyes than the Guyanese government—which means Fredericks can present real-time evidence to the state, at a higher quality than that to which it has access, when illegal loggers and miners hurdle over their concession boundaries and infringe upon Wapichan forest lands.","completion":"In theory, it’s the kind of evidence that ought to be incontrovertible. But political movement on Amerindian land-use claims is often sluggish at best (if not wholly resistant). Over the past decade, a federation of Wapichan communities called the South Central People’s Development Association (SCPDA)—where Fredericks is a project coordinator—has worked to piece together high-resolution maps of the seventeen communities’ territories. Mapping is a means to establish land claims on an ontological footing equal to the government’s. The drone, which resembles an exaggerated model airplane and was assembled via YouTube and Skype tutorials with the onsite help of the Oakland-based nonprofit Digital Democracy, is the latest tool to aid the efforts."}
{"prompt":"In late 2015, Fredericks traveled to the Paris Climate Conference to accept a prize from the United Nations on behalf of the SCPDA, its ongoing mapping initiatives, and an accompanying land-use plan, which argues for secure indigenous land rights and the role of traditional knowledge in protecting the forests and their resources. “You have already listened, learned, and understood from us that our traditional practices are sustainable,” he told a packed Parisian auditorium upon receiving the Equator Prize. “We now need our governments to recognize this, too.” That’s an ongoing challenge, explained Fredericks when I met him at the climate talks in Paris. “Some of the advantages of the work are that it allows us to build capacity with respect to technology and it enables us to present visual evidence—accurate locations of destructive sites—to the government and to the Ministry of Environment,” he said.","completion":"In some cases, the Wapichan mappers have aided the Guyana Defence Force by supplying GPS pin-drops of live, far-flung, illegal border-crossings made by Brazilian gold miners. The crossings were subsequently blocked by the military. “We got their attention,” said Fredericks, referring to state actors like the Defence Force and the Guyana Forestry Commission. But attention does not always translate to recognition, and Fredericks is often only able to secure verbal agreements related to Amerindian land claims."}
{"prompt":"Mapping Against Capital For the state, the forest is strategic. It is either to be conserved or exploited (but never lived in). Decisions must be made about the relative merits of biodiversity and resource extraction and tourism. Perhaps a forest is valuable to the state because it can be logged for timber. Perhaps a forest is most valuable not as a forest at all, but clear-cut and replaced with a rubber plantation, a palm oil plantation, or a cattle ranch. Parcels must be divvied. And to align with the logic of private property, these decisions must be mapped. For communities residing in and around forests—who may be quite literally written out of the equation—the map simultaneously speaks and silences.","completion":"The erasure of community by mapping is a reminder of the enterprise’s inherently sticky subjectivity. Consider the well-known case of the Mercator projection—that canonical flat thing that pops up when you Google “world map”—in which irregularly spaced latitude lines balloon the perceived area of land farther away from the equator. Europe expands; Africa shrinks. But this subjectivity isn’t just a function of subtleties like choice of geometric projection. To take one broad example, the entire notion of the territorial nation state (much less that of private property) is entirely incompatible with many traditional conceptions of place."}
{"prompt":"Twenty years ago, a young scholar named Nancy Peluso used the term “counter-mapping” to refer to acts of non-state cartography. Since at least the sixteenth century, elites have used maps to demarcate resource rights. “However,” wrote Peluso, “if maps can be seen as one of many ‘authoritative resources’ that states mobilize to consolidate their own power, then local groups’ appropriation of the technology of mapping may help to counterbalance or at least offset the previous monopoly of authoritative resources by the state or capital.” Today, NGOs like Digital Democracy appear to have taken up the mantle, arguing for a technological democratization of mapping. And while the idea does contain radical potential, the forces that have made it feasible are distinctly unradical. As human geographer Agnieszka Leszczynski suggests, it was precisely a neoliberal shift in the political economy of mapping that has helped enable its democratization.","completion":"Consider a largely deregulated tech giant like Google releasing a privatized mapping service—previously the role of a public-sector mapping organization—and subsequently opening the Google Maps API to the public. Anyone can hook into the API (or, better yet, open-source mapping services like OpenStreetMap) and achieve a base level of technological legitimacy. As the welfare state recedes, cartographic responsibility shifts. It is a small irony that the neoliberal hollowing of the state and its twin cults of individualism and privatization would pave the road for decentralized counter-cartographies."}
{"prompt":"Peluso’s case study focused on Kalimantan in Indonesia, where the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN had found that Japanese, Philippine, US, and European timber concessions had been allocated 57.9 million hectares of forest by the government—despite the fact that only 43.3 million hectares were classified for timber production. The governmental forest-planning map that guided the awarding of concessions also plainly ignored indigenous community boundaries.","completion":"This imbalance between production, conservation, and community remains just as exaggerated today. Overlapping permits have led to a situation in which “130 percent of the total area of West Kalimantan is now covered by concessions for mining, palm oil, logging, and pulp and paper plantations,” according to a 2017 study by Indonesian scholar-activist Irendra “Radja” Radjawali and his colleagues."}
{"prompt":"No Magic Wands Radja’s work with Dayak communities in West Kalimantan mirrors Wapichan efforts in South Rupununi. He too assembled a community drone via YouTube tutorials for less than six hundred dollars. “The government, the military, the companies—they all use maps,” he explained, speaking shortly after Fredericks back in Paris. “We have to counter-map. We have to use the very same technology to fight back.” In the Indonesian case, counter-hegemonic mapping has sometimes yielded more tangible results than in Guyana. Recently, Radja and his team used the community drone to produce a high-resolution map of a bauxite mining concession that overlapped with a local community’s land claims in the sub-district of Tayan Hilir. The mining company in question had drained a lake, which had previously been vital for subsistence fishing. By geometrically correcting the aerial photographs to produce so-called “orthophotos” and then overlaying the images on the official concession map, the researchers could prove the company was illegally operating outside its concession boundary. Since the publication of the orthophotos in a 2016 report, the Tayan mining operation has been shut down.","completion":"Perhaps more importantly, in a case heard before the Constitutional Court of Indonesia—unrelated to the question of concession boundaries per se—drone orthophotos of West Kalimantan were accepted as supporting evidence of detrimental environmental effects of mining in the region. When the court ruled against the mining corporations in the case in question, environmental activists and civil society organizations celebrated it as having set a precedent for the evidentiary use of counter-maps in the legal system."}
{"prompt":"In Guyana, Fredericks contends that his central cause is the preservation of traditional knowledge. When we last spoke, he reflected on how it was the proliferation of cell phones among the young people in Shulinab Village that had originally motivated him to seek out ways “to use technology to our benefit”—that is, not as another vector of Western influence but as a means of upholding and elevating indigenous practices.","completion":"It’s a quiet little paradox, and one that suggests Amerindian and other indigenous cartographers are often fighting two battles at once: one on the legal front, in an effort to ensure community mapping techniques count as admissible evidence in court; the other epistemic, in which indigenous ontologies square off against Western (colonial) mapping practices."}
{"prompt":"The latter case is often fraught with compromise. Fixing borders cartographically, for example, may threaten to cement something traditionally conceptualized as fluid or shared. Take, for example, software developer Victor Temprano’s efforts to crowdsource and superimpose Native and First Nations’ territory on a map of North America at Native-Land.ca. To settler eyes, the result is forceful and reorienting. But these territorial boundaries were often never written down as such. At risk of generalizing across diverse systems of indigenous land tenure: they were delineated orally or ecologically or seasonally or cyclically—or, in the case of communal ownership, they didn’t really exist at all.","completion":"Fixing borders can not only be misleading, but dangerous. The act of accepting a given state’s administrative units can in turn be co-opted by the state for further land-grabs. In West Kalimantan, for example, some researchers have argued that counter-mapping Dayak villages—which drew boundaries to land that hadn’t yet been surveyed by the government—has had the unintended consequence of delegitimizing other Dayak land claims, as well as bringing indigenous institutions under state control. As cultural geographers Joel Wainwright and Joe Bryan noted in 2009, a valid concern arises that counter-mapping strategies “do not reverse colonial social relations so much as they rework them.” Radja and his colleagues are cautious, too. “Rather unsurprisingly,” they write, “drones are not a magic wand that can conjure away hierarchies and power structures at the local level or in wider society.” They note that although drone workshops in Dayak communities have led to more young people taking up activist and leadership positions, almost all of these people were male. What drones can do for sovereignty and land tenure they can perhaps not do for gender equality. Some of the revolutionary potential here will mature slower than the rest, or perhaps not at all."}
{"prompt":"Which is indeed what one would expect. “The effect of a concept-driven revolution is to explain old things in new ways,” wrote the physicist Freeman Dyson in Imagined Worlds. “The effect of a tool-driven revolution is to discover new things that have to be explained.” Yes, the counter-cartographers have much to explain. First, they need the powerful to listen.","completion":"The United States has the largest prison population in the world: over 2 million people are incarcerated in federal and state prisons, with an additional 4.7 million people on probation or parole. This prison population is disproportionately black and brown—according to the Sentencing Project, black people are incarcerated at a rate five times higher than white people, and Latinx people are incarcerated at a rate 1.4 times higher than white people."}
{"prompt":"As prison populations have expanded and costs have increased, policy wonks with many different political viewpoints have looked to alternatives, including monitoring people electronically instead of imprisoning them. In The Atlantic, Graeme Wood praises this approach for presenting “a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences.” “The potential upside,” he writes, “is enormous.” Commonly deployed in the form of an ankle bracelet, electronic monitors are not just supposed to lower costs, but also reduce prison overcrowding, decrease parole violations, and lower recidivism rates. Most of the academic work on electronic monitors focuses on these issues. Are people released from prison and tracked electronically less likely to reoffend? Does monitoring reduce crime? But as these questions occupy the minds of scholars, the reality of life with an electronic shackle seldom enters the narrative. The truth is that electronic monitors increase the impact of the criminal justice system rather than dampen it. And as the technology outpaces our critical reckoning with the surveillance apparatus that we are building in place of prisons, it will likely only get worse.","completion":"21st Century Shackles The primary form of electronic monitoring used in the United States is ankle bracelets that are worn continuously and used to track the location of the people wearing them. The devices track a user’s location using radio frequencies (RF) or the global positioning system (GPS), which relies on satellites. In 2015, more than 125,000 people were supervised using these devices."}
{"prompt":"RF devices generally don’t pinpoint a person’s location. Instead, they only monitor whether or not the wearer is at home, and are used for “house arrest.” (Usually, a person on house arrest may only leave their home for a set of prescribed activities, like going to work or attending religious services.) They connect to a base station that is plugged in at home, and link to the internet via a landline or a dedicated cellular unit.","completion":"By contrast, GPS monitors track location based on satellite information. As a result, they can alert parole officers and other officials if the wearer enters a restricted area, such as a school zone. GPS systems tend to lead to less restrictive rules, but also share more information with the police. Some GPS ankle monitors have transmission built-in; others require that a dedicated cell phone or other transmitter be carried at all times. For all types of devices, police are alerted if the device strap is cut or if the sensors detect other types of tampering."}
{"prompt":"Ankle monitors are usually bulky. As a result, they can cause both physical and psychological discomfort. Even one of the newest types of monitors, BI Incorporated’s LOC8, weighs in at 6 ounces and is 4.125 inches wide, 2.5 inches tall, and 1.25 inches in depth. For comparison, an Apple Watch is 3.6 ounces, 1.4 inches wide, 1.6 inches tall, and 0.44 inches deep.","completion":"Many of those who have worn ankle monitors refer to them as their “shackles” and feel enslaved by the device. Wearers report the feeling of being watched, and have found the psychological discomfort even more profound than the physical. Some also experience stigma—because of the size of the devices, they can be obvious to casual viewers, endangering wearers’ employment prospects and potentially resulting in street harassment."}
{"prompt":"Virtually everyone who has worn an ankle monitor has had a technological issue with their device, compounding the psychological stress. Battery life is a constant concern. Many parole officers believe that wearers let their monitors die in order to travel more freely, so they view dead batteries with suspicion. Thus wearers are rightfully concerned that if their monitor batteries die they can be thrown in jail or sent back to prison. Having to charge a device for two hours at a time via a two-foot charging cable only exacerbates the feeling of being chained. Constantly having to find access to power can cause significant anxiety.","completion":"There is also a literal cost to being monitored. Individuals wearing ankle monitors are often required to pay a $5 to $20 fee per day of use, despite the fact that the retail price for a GPS monitor is only between $150 and $250. LCA, the primary provider of electronic monitoring technology for the state of the California, calls these programs “self-funding,” and claims they are “typically provided at no cost to the county.” When the monitors are used on juveniles, parents and family members end up paying the costs. Some counties in California have opted to create indigent funds for those truly unable to pay for the monitoring—but in at least one county, the determination of whether a wearer has the ability to pay is made by the monitoring company itself."}
{"prompt":"Scope Creep Given this history, it seems likely that electronic monitoring will continue to become more popular, especially with the advent of new technological capabilities. The state-of-the-art LOC8 device introduces an accelerometer, which measures the user’s movement. This means it can now function as a tracking device in the same way as a Fitbit does—only users are legally required to wear it. Parole officers could know when the wearer is sleeping, moving, and more, all using acceleration data.","completion":"As the technology improves, an important question technologists must ask is whether we should build these tools, not whether we can. For most wearers of electronic monitors, being out in the world is better than being in prison, even if one is under surveillance. But like many techno-utopian solutions, the reality of electronic monitoring as an alternative to prison is far removed from the fantasy. The user experience of ankle monitors lags behind even basic consumer tracking products, like the Fitbit or the Apple Watch. Although companies call the people who wear the monitors their “clients,” their real customers are police departments and prison systems. The website of BI Incorporated, an electronic monitoring provider, highlights their “easy-to-use mapping features” and twenty-four-hour call centers. The priority is selling government officials on the product—not the comfort and quality of life of the person wearing the device."}
{"prompt":"Second, as the activist and scholar James Kilgore has argued, electronic monitoring allows law enforcement officers to impose additional conditions on parole and probation, creating new possibilities for arbitrary punishments. In his 2015 report “Electronic Monitoring is Not the Answer,” Kilgore interviewed Kent Schultz, who was forced by his parole officer to run back into his burning apartment to retrieve the base station for his ankle bracelet. Despite saving the base station, he was thrown in jail twenty-four hours later. A warrant had been automatically generated for his arrest.","completion":"The faults in the technology can compound these problems. Kilgore recalls that when he himself was on a monitor, he was forced by a poor GPS connection to stand in his front yard at 2 AM during an Illinois winter so that his device could reconnect. Most jurisdictions do not have firm rules for what can and cannot be required of a person on a monitor, as police claim the person consents to the surveillance. The question of whether that consent is meaningful when the alternative is imprisonment is usually ignored."}
{"prompt":"There is also what scholars Catherine Crump and Christina Koningisor call the “net-widening problem.” This is the fact that the convenience and low cost of electronic monitoring to police departments might result in entirely new populations being placed under surveillance—not just as a substitute for incarceration, but as an expansion of the criminal justice system.","completion":"As surveillance technologies get cheaper—and as those costs are passed from police departments to users—the incentives to deploy electronic monitoring grow stronger. Even low-risk offenders who would have been let out without cash bail might be targeted for monitoring. The technology was originally intended for parole and probation, but is now being widely used to ensure people with pending immigration cases and asylum seekers show up in court."}
{"prompt":"Once these devices are widespread, it becomes easier to justify accessing the data for prosecutorial, rather than rehabilitative, purposes. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation claims that “GPS has proven to be an effective tool used in supervising offenders who are at high risk of re-offending and where knowledge of their whereabouts is a high priority for maintaining public safety.” What that means in practice is that police within the United States routinely access ankle monitor GPS data to see if wearers were near crime scenes, without the legal process that would be required to gain that information from a third party.","completion":"Sometimes such location information is gathered for the express purpose of prosecuting new crimes, unrelated to any rehabilitative purpose. In a recent case out of New York, a judge finally pushed back. Judge Jack Weinstein ordered the suppression of all evidence gathered through an ankle monitor. He found that law enforcement had required a parolee to wear the monitor for an additional two years to gather information for a pending criminal indictment, and that was an unconstitutional violation of the parolee’s rights."}
{"prompt":"This scope creep means that electronic monitoring tends to increase the punitive effects of the criminal justice system rather than decrease them. Although initially billed as a way of keeping people out of jail, monitors get used on people who would never be in jail anyway. Electronic surveillance technologies and data aggregation, built without technological checks and balances, empower fewer police officers to monitor more people—and to punish those who do not comply. At every turn, the design of these systems prioritize police over wearers. The companies that sell them have little incentive to do otherwise.","completion":"But it isn’t just the technology. Many of the problems with electronic monitoring are problems with the criminal justice system more generally. Like many technologies, electronic monitoring is accelerating the rate of change. As deployment outpaces the development of new policy norms or rights frameworks, it amplifies existing disparities. Surveillance disproportionately affects black and Latinx communities because the criminal justice system disproportionately affects these communities. Building the future we want will require not only imagining different ways to use technology, but winning an argument about whether punishment or rehabilitation are better goals."}
{"prompt":"“You good?” a man asked two narcotics detectives late in the summer of 2015. The detectives had just finished an undercover drug deal in Brentwood, a predominately black neighborhood in Jacksonville, Florida that is among the poorest in the country, when the man unexpectedly approached them. One of the detectives responded that he was looking for $50 worth of “hard”—slang for crack cocaine. The man disappeared into a nearby apartment and came back out to fulfill the detective’s request, swapping the drugs for money.","completion":"“You see me around, my name is Midnight,” the dealer said as he left, not realizing who he had just met. Before Midnight departed, one of the detectives was able to take several photos of him, discreetly snapping pictures with his phone held to his ear as though he were taking a call. That’s at least allegedly what happened, according to case details from The Florida-Times Union and a court motion. Details get murkier from there."}
{"prompt":"Two weeks later, police wanted to make the arrest, but didn’t know who they had bought the crack from. The only information they had were the smartphone pictures, the address where the exchange had taken place, and the nickname “Midnight.” Stumped, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office turned to a new tool to help them track down the dealer: facial recognition software.","completion":"The technology helped them pin down a suspect named Willie Lynch. Lynch, who has been described by close observers of the case like Georgetown University researcher Clare Garvie as a “highly intelligent, highly motivated individual” despite only having graduated high school—he even filed his own case motions, which could be mistaken for ones written by an actual lawyer—was eventually convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. He is now appealing his conviction."}
{"prompt":"Whether or not Willie Lynch is “Midnight” remains to be seen. At the very least, his conviction deserves closer scrutiny. Many experts see the facial recognition technology used against him as flawed, especially against black individuals. Moreover, the way the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office used the technology—as the basis for identifying and arresting Lynch, not as one component of a case supported by firmer evidence—makes his conviction even more questionable.","completion":"The methods used to convict Lynch weren’t made clear during his court case. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office initially didn’t even disclose that they had used facial recognition software. Instead, they claimed to have used a mugshot database to identify Lynch on the basis of a single photo that the detectives had taken the night of the exchange. Even after the office’s use of the technology became apparent, they still gave few answers about how they used the technology or how they trained Celbrica Tenah, the analyst in the Sheriff’s Office Crime Analysis Unit who identified Lynch using facial recognition software."}
{"prompt":"An Imperfect Biometric The lack of answers the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office have provided in Lynch’s case is representative of the lack of answers to questions that facial recognition poses across the country. “It’s considered an imperfect biometric,” said Garvie, who created a study at Georgetown called The Perpetual Line-Up on facial recognition software. “There’s no consensus in the scientific community that it provides a positive identification of somebody.” The software, which has taken an expanding role among law enforcement agencies in the U.S. over the last several years, has been mired in controversy because of its effect on people of color. Experts fear that the new technology may actually be hurting the communities the police claims they are trying to protect.","completion":"“If you’re black, you’re more likely to be subjected to this technology and the technology is more likely to be wrong,” House Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings said in a Congressional hearing on law enforcement’s use of facial recognition software in March 2017. “That’s a hell of a combination.” Cummings was referring to studies like the one published in 2016 by the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. This report found that black individuals, as with so many aspects of the justice system, were the most likely to be scrutinized by facial recognition software in cases. It also suggested that software was most likely to be incorrect when used on black individuals—a finding corroborated by the FBI’s own research. This combination, which is making Lynch’s and other black Americans’ lives excruciatingly difficult, is born from another race issue that has become a subject of national discourse: the lack of diversity in the technology sector."}
{"prompt":"Racialized Code Experts like Joy Buolamwini, a researcher at the MIT Media Lab, think that facial recognition software has problems recognizing black faces because its algorithms are usually written by white engineers who dominate the technology sector. These engineers build on pre-existing code libraries, typically written by other white engineers.","completion":"As the coder constructs the algorithms, they focus on facial features that may be more visible in one race, but not another. These considerations can stem from previous research on facial recognition techniques and practices, which may have its own biases, or the engineer’s own experiences and understanding. The code that results is geared to focus on white faces, and mostly tested on white subjects."}
{"prompt":"And even though the software is built to get smarter and more accurate with machine learning techniques, the training data sets it uses are often composed of white faces. The code “learns” by looking at more white people—which doesn’t help it improve with a diverse array of races. Technology spaces aren’t exclusively white, however. Asians and South Asians tend to be well represented. But this may not widen the pool of diversity enough to fix the problem. Research in the field certainly suggests that the status quo simply isn’t working for all people of color—especially for groups that remain underrepresented in technology. According to a 2011 study by the National Institute of Standards and Technologies (NIST), facial recognition software is actually more accurate on Asian faces when it’s created by firms in Asian countries, suggesting that who makes the software strongly affects how it works.","completion":"“These libraries are used in many of the products that you have, and if you’re an African-American person and you get in front of it, it won’t recognize your face,” said MIT Media Lab director Joichi Ito at the World Economic Forum in Davos at the beginning of 2017. As Ito points out, being invisible to a technology that can be used against you is extremely dangerous. It’s also a sad allegory for how black individuals are not seen in the criminal justice system. In a TEDx lecture, Buolamwini, who works with Ito and is black, recalled several moments throughout her career when facial recognition software didn’t notice her. “The demo worked on everybody until it got to me, and you can probably guess it. It couldn’t detect my face,” she said. “Given the wide range of skin-tone and facial features that can be considered African-American, more precise terminology and analysis is needed to determine the performance of existing facial detection systems,” Buolamwini told Recode in January."}
{"prompt":"Unregulated Algorithms Even as the use of facial recognition software increases in law enforcement agencies across the country, the deeper analysis that experts are demanding isn’t happening. Law enforcement agencies often don’t review their software to check for baked-in racial bias—and there aren’t laws or regulations forcing them to. In some cases, like Lynch’s, law enforcement agencies are even obscuring the fact that they’re using such software. To take another example, in their Perpetual Line-Up study Georgetown researchers found that the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office in Florida runs 8,000 monthly facial recognition searches, but the county public defender’s office said that police have not disclosed the use of the technology in Brady disclosure—evidence that, if favorable to the defense, must be provided to them by prosecutors.","completion":"Garvie said she is confident that police are using facial recognition software more than they let on, which she referred to as “evidence laundering.” This is problematic because it obscures just how much of a role facial recognition software plays in law enforcement. Both legal advocates and facial recognition software companies themselves say that the technology should only supply a portion of the case—not evidence that can lead to an arrest."}
{"prompt":"“Upon review, all facial recognition matches should be treated no differently than someone calling in a possible lead from a dedicated tip line,” writes Roger Rodriguez, an employee at facial recognition vendor Vigilant Solutions, in a post defending the software. “The onus still falls on the investigator in an agency to independently establish probable cause to effect an arrest,” he continues—probable cause that “must be met by other investigatory means.” It doesn’t always work out that way, of course.","completion":"Even if facial recognition software is used correctly, however, the technology has significant underlying flaws. The firms creating the software are not held to specific requirements for racial bias, and in many cases, they don’t even test for them. “There is no independent testing regime for racially biased error rates,” Georgetown researchers wrote in their Perpetual Line-Up report. “In interviews, two major face recognition companies admitted that they did not run these tests internally, either.” A third I spoke to, CyberExtruder, a facial recognition technology company that markets itself to law enforcement, also said that they had not performed testing or research on bias in their software. Another, Vigilant Solutions, declined to say whether or not they tested for it. CyberExtruder did note that certain skin colors are simply harder for the software to handle given current limitations of the technology. “Just as individuals with very dark skin are hard to identify with high significance via facial recognition, individuals with very pale skin are the same,” said Blake Senftner, a senior software engineer at CyberExtruder."}
{"prompt":"“[Race is] just very hard to control for in their testing,” Garvie explained. “There haven’t been enough public studies, but the limited research that has been done does suggest that the algorithms may have different accuracy rates depending on the race of the subject.” Garvie and her colleagues believe that NIST is well positioned to help with such studies. The agency, part of the U.S. Department of Commerce, conducts voluntary tests with facial recognition companies every four years and is testing for variances in results by country of origin—which Garvie notes “can be a good proxy for race.” NIST’s tests won’t come soon enough for Lynch, however. His case is currently playing out in the Florida First District Court of Appeal. The clock also can’t be turned back for others like him, who may have been unfairly tried as a result of less than perfect software without transparent standards for its use.","completion":"Facial recognition software raises many questions that need clear answers. Obtaining those answers will take more than commissioning studies, as vital as they are. It’s also essential that laws catch up with the technology, in order to provide people like Lynch with the opportunity to know the tools that are being used against them. Most importantly, we need to take a closer look at who’s making these algorithms—and how they’re doing it."}
{"prompt":"1. “Being so many different sizes in a day is very confusing,” Alice tells the Caterpillar. Just think how the internet feels! It’s big enough to make the world feel small, and small enough to fit in the palm of your hand. It dissolves huge chunks of data into particles of light, then flings them across filaments of optical fiber roughly the width of human hair.","completion":"Those filaments link continents—and the most intimate regions of our lives. What else runs under the Pacific Ocean and also keeps you company on the toilet? The internet’s vastly different scales don’t just coexist. They coproduce each other. The planetary and the personal, the tiny and the titanic, are locked, circling, in a spiral dance. Technology shrinks to grow, and grows to shrink."}
{"prompt":"This isn’t the first time technology has rescaled the world. In the 1860s, when Lewis Carroll was writing Alice in Wonderland, new railway and telegraph networks were reshaping time and space. Journeys that used to take days now took hours. Letters that used to take weeks to arrive now took minutes.","completion":"A web of wire and steel pulled whole continents together. “We have seen the power of steam suddenly dry up the great Atlantic Ocean to less than half its breadth,” one author marveled. “The Mediterranean… has shrunk into a lake.” 2. Moore’s Law says you can fit twice as many transistors on a chip about every two years. As the chips get smaller, our capacity to store and process information gets bigger. Computing becomes ubiquitous, digitization universal. The fountains of the great deep are broken up, and the face of the earth is covered with data."}
{"prompt":"Miniaturization enables and demands new maximizations. Billions of connected devices require the construction of vast data centers. A startup with thirteen employees acquires millions of users within months—and gets bought for $1 billion. A corner of Northern California formerly occupied by orchards and canneries becomes shorthand for the future. Software eats the world.","completion":"Software doesn’t actually eat anything, of course. The phrase is pure fetishism: relations between people reimagined as relations between things. Somebody is always doing the eating—and somebody is always getting eaten. A cafeteria worker who helps reproduce the labor power of LinkedIn’s engineers with quinoa and kale shares a one-bedroom apartment with a dozen family members. A media worker whose industry is being liquidated by Facebook watches her income dwindle as she cranks out content she hopes will go viral."}
{"prompt":"There is no limit to the scale of wealth and power that a few men are permitted to accumulate. Meanwhile, the rest of us are asked to live smaller, leaner, more flexibly; to enterpreneurialize ourselves into serfdom—”to eat a coffee for lunch,” as the infamous Fiverr ad puts it—to lower our expectations, and in some cases even our life expectancy, to adapt to a Lilliputian existence at the feet of our new kings.","completion":"3. This issue looks at how scale shapes technology and the tech industry—and how their bigness and smallness are reshaping us. Our writers explore why technologists come under pressure to think big and think small—to scale and to compartmentalize. VCs demand massive growth on a short timetable. Because the vast majority of the startups they fund will fail, the few that succeed must succeed hugely. At the same time, software itself is modular. Engineers organize code into abstractions that help them manage, and conceal, complexity. The “black boxes” that result can be good for business, and bad for humans."}
{"prompt":"The tech industry typically speaks the language of engineering and finance. Increasingly, however, its leaders are coming to realize that they may need to become conversant in other idioms as well: the social and the political. And the social and the political, as our writers make clear, are the territories where tech’s particular configurations of bigness and smallness must ultimately be understood.","completion":"Social media is the site of much hatred and delusion. It is also the soil where social movements can take root. Hashtags enable individual incidents of injustice to go viral, revealing systemic patterns. Yet that virality is made possible by monopoly—it requires one Facebook, one YouTube, one Twitter. And these large concentrations of unaccountable private power endanger the basic premise of democracy—the idea, often invoked but rarely attempted, that the whole of the people should determine how society is run."}
{"prompt":"The leaders of the tech industry talk big. California’s very own Rocket Man wants to build a vacuum-tube railway across the state while financializing the stars. But new technologies also make it possible for ordinary people to experiment. Our children may be reduced to doing platform-driven piecework in a world ravaged by the energy demands of crypto mines. But “#nerdfarmers” are working to bring the outside indoors. In their smart bedrooms our children’s children may grow their own avocados.","completion":"4. Big Tech is an empire built on sand—literally. Sand is what silicon is made of. In the Bible, Jesus says that a wise man builds his house on rock; a foolish man, on sand. When the rain comes and the winds blow, the fool’s house falls down. The problem with sand is how quickly it can shift. It’s fluid. But this is also its advantage."}
{"prompt":"If we learn to see the world in a grain of sand, we may find the means to build the future we want. To live well at new scales, individually and collectively, will require imagining new shapes a society could take. Turn over an hourglass and time runs in a different direction—toward a new Year Zero.","completion":"Right now, many minds are tending toward the apocalypse. But if we can resist the temptations of fatalism—the bird’s-eye-view—we can start looking for specific places to hone in. The fact that global systems of networked power must pass through small nodes means that occupying those nodes can create enormous leverage."}
{"prompt":"If a tree falls on the power line leading to a Facebook data center, everybody hears it. “Give me a point on which to stand,” Archimedes said, “and I will move the earth.” What is the Wikimedia Foundation, and what do you do there? The Wikimedia Foundation is the nonprofit that powers Wikipedia. We run the servers. We make sure the site runs. We’re responsible for designing things, like the iOS app you have if you read Wikipedia on your phone.","completion":"The English-language Wikipedia is the one that people often think of as Wikipedia. But we also have over 200 Wikipedias in other languages. It’s the fifth most visited site in the world. I’m a design researcher on the anti-harassment team, which sits under our community technology team. The community technology team exists to help build tools requested by the community of Wikipedia editors. So if an editor says, “We want X that does Y,” it goes on a wish list, and it’s voted on by the community. If it gets enough votes, we’ll build it."}
{"prompt":"All of Wikimedia has to be radically transparent about what we do, and why we do what we do. But that’s particularly true of the anti-harassment team, because we’re engaging in participatory design with our editors. So if we want to solve something, we have to outline the different ways we think we could solve it, solicit feedback from our editors, and then take that feedback and fold it in. It’s a back-and-forth.","completion":"What are you working on right now? The anti-harassment team was funded by a grant from the Craig Newmark Foundation to study and mitigate online harassment inside the English-language Wikipedia, as part of a bigger initiative to address the gender gap inside of Wikipedia. And one of the things we realized we needed to do was to create tools that can mitigate different forms of harassment."}
{"prompt":"We just launched a tool to look at the interaction patterns of two editors to see if they’re potentially stalking each other or harassing each other. This kind of tool exists internally in other companies that run social networks—it’s just never externally talked about. I’m almost positive it exists at Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook.","completion":"How does the tool work? If you’re running a social network, then all of the interactions inside that network create data. When I like something on your Facebook page, that’s a data point. When I post something, that’s a data point. When I talk to you, that’s a data point. We’re building a dashboard that analyzes all of these patterns of interactions between users, to try to identify possible harassment."}
{"prompt":"I think people are aware of doxxing and harassment on Twitter. But what does harassment look like on Wikipedia, and how does it adversely affect the community? One of the reasons we made this tool is to study a form of online stalking called “wiki hounding.” Imagine that you’re a Wikipedia editor and you clean up an edit somewhere, or start an article page—and then someone goes and reverts all of your changes. And maybe they leave a comment—and what if that comment’s really aggressive? Is this wiki hounding, or is this just two people not agreeing in a debate about knowledge? Well, let’s say that person follows you to two other pages that are not in the domain expertise of the previous page. Let’s say you’re editing a page on spiders, and then you’re on City Lights Bookstore, then you’re going to automobiles. That’s not in the same realm of domain knowledge as the previous page. So they could be following you.","completion":"Wikipedia has historically has been an aggressive space because debates about knowledge can get really heated really fast. So harassment on Wikipedia is less like, “Hey, someone made a shitty Wikipedia page about me.” It’s more like someone you got into an argument with is now antagonizing you or following you around the encyclopedia."}
{"prompt":"This is something that we’re trying to figure out. We don’t actually know how often this scenario happens, versus other forms of harassment. For example, Wikipedia has had stringent rules against doxxing for a long time. A lot of people use pseudonyms. For us, doxxing is if you release someone’s real name, gender, or even their Twitter handle.","completion":"Listening to the scenarios you’re describing, it sounds like a very nuanced problem—trying to define what harassment looks like on Wikipedia, and what the community should be policing. One of the problems around mitigating harassment inside of Wikipedia—which I think is true of every other platform—is that there aren’t enough nuanced examples of what harassment is specifically."}
{"prompt":"It’s one thing to say no doxxing. But what’s doxxing? Let’s look at Twitter as an example. What is doxxing on Twitter? Is doxxing accidentally retweeting someone’s phone number, which led to Rose McGowan having her Twitter account suspended for twelve hours? Is doxxing the release of someone’s real name? Could you argue that doxxing is tweeting the email of one of your senators—or maybe only if it’s their personal email? You need to be able to say, “Doxxing is this event, but not this event.” You need to provide people with specific examples.","completion":"When you can provide those examples, you are providing a lot more clarity. The downside, however, is that you’ll sometimes have people arguing in a very pedantic way: “I didn’t do this exactly.” Well, no, but you did something within the scope of this. And people can always argue that something’s not harassment, that it’s more light-hearted trolling."}
{"prompt":"We shouldn’t think of trolling as one word. Trolling is an umbrella term. I made this taxonomy of trolling in the form of a matrix when I was studying Gamergate. I saw how often Gamergaters would use the argument that they were just trolling someone, especially when they were engaging in rape threats or death threats. “I hope you get raped to death” is not the same as sending someone goatse at work.","completion":"I grew up on the internet: I think trolling can be funny! Trolling can be a positive thing or a negative thing. But when you take something like a rape threat and put it into the umbrella of trolling, you lessen the severity and the specificity of what a rape threat is. So my matrix placed examples of trolling in a grid from most harmful to most absurd, and most casual to most serious. For example, sending someone goatse at work without warning is absurd and serious—it’s a shitty thing to do. What about sending pizza to the Church of Scientology? That’s more casual than serious, but potentially a little bit more harmful than absurd."}
{"prompt":"Thinking about where scenarios sit in this matrix is useful for trying to understand what harassment is. There’s conflict, harassment, and abuse—and harassment is the middle ground. Harassment can be really bad. But it’s important to acknowledge that certain events can be problematic—but that doesn’t make them a problem yet.","completion":"We’re people who live on the internet. So we’re going to be tenacious and angry and happy and upset and emotional. We should have the space to be those things online. We should also understand that sometimes getting into a fight with someone isn’t harassment—you’re just fighting. So how do you preserve space for that kind of conflict? And how do you then define what crosses the line? If you’re in a fight with someone, and they’re calling you a bitch, is that conflict or harassment? What if someone’s calling you a racial slur and a bitch—that should be harassment, right? And what if someone’s threatening to come to your house— well, that’s harassment that’s getting really close to abuse."}
{"prompt":"How do you think of these things as escalating events, while keeping in mind how you would litigate it? For example, someone saying “I want to kill you” is not necessarily considered a threat in a court of law. But someone saying “I’m going to kill you on this day, at this time, and in this location” is.","completion":"What are the differences you see in how Wikipedia handles harassment versus how another social network like Twitter does? It’s hard to say, because we don’t know how other social networks define harassment. You can go and read their terms of service, but that doesn’t necessarily help. Reddit gets pretty close to defining it, but only because they’re still very much a community-driven space. They have five rules that are kind of nebulous, and then they have the suggestion to follow “Reddiquette,” which consists of one to two hundred suggestions. But those are not firmly enforced."}
{"prompt":"With a platform like Facebook, we know a lot less. Until someone leaked the Facebook guide for moderators, we actually had no idea what was considered harassment or not. And this is the guide that says black children are not a protected class, but white men are. Until these materials are leaked, it’s really hard to know what the baseline is for what companies consider harassment. They often don’t even disclose why people are removed from a platform. People have to guess: “Oh, it’s probably because of this tweet.” I was just reading a story today in BuzzFeed by Katie Notopoulos about how her Twitter account was suspended for ten days for something she tweeted in 2011. It was a joke, with the words “kill all white people.” She wasn’t even notified, “Hey, it’s because of this tweet, and this is where you broke this rule.” I think that’s the problem here. There’s just no clarity for people.","completion":"That brings us to the subject of automated content moderation. Big platforms have a lot of users, and thus a lot of content to moderate. How much of the work of detecting harassment and abuse can be outsourced to algorithms? At Wikipedia, content moderation is very human and very grassroots. It’s being performed by a community of editors. That seems unscalable in today’s Big Tech. But I think it’s actually the most scalable, because you’re letting the community do a lot of small things."}
{"prompt":"That said, it depends on the platform. Content moderation doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution. Take Twitter. Rose McGowan was a good example of what automatic flagging looks like in terms of doxxing. They figured out what a phone number looks like: it’s a parenthesis, three numbers, end parenthesis, three numbers, dash, four numbers. That’s easy to detect.","completion":"At Twitter, they’re trying to fix things with code first, instead of hiring smarter people. And that can be really problematic. I don’t think Twitter knows enough about harassment. They’re trying to solve problems in a way that they think is smart and scalable. To them, that means relying on autonomous systems using algorithms and machine learning. It means fewer human-powered systems and more tech-powered systems. And I don’t think that’s the best way to go about solving a problem as contextual as harassment, especially if you don’t have good examples that explain how you’re even defining harassment."}
{"prompt":"What do you think is driving Twitter’s preference for automated approaches to content moderation? Techno-utopianism sold us the idea that technology can do things better than we can. It sold us the idea that the way to solve problems is through technology first. And in some cases, that approach made sense.","completion":"But the problem is that no one’s made a case for why ethnography matters, why anthropology matters, why qualitative researchers are so important. How many people at Twitter understand Twitter subcultures? How many people looked in-depth at the Green Revolution or the Arab Spring? How many people know what Sina Weibo looks like? How many people have read Gabriella Coleman’s book on Anonymous, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy? That’s the problem. Jack Dorsey doesn’t think about why his designers should know how people talk to each other on the internet."}
{"prompt":"I actually interviewed two years ago for a job with Twitter. Anil Dash recommended that the head of product talk to me. I had just wanted to consult with them about problems inside of Twitter. And they were like, “Well, we need a design researcher. You should interview.” And I was like, “I’m not going to make it through your interview process, because I’ve read on the internet about how you hire people, and it’s this really weird formulaic space where it’s clearly designed for people coming out of Stanford’s d.school.” [1] Those are not the skills that I have. And that’s not the way I conduct research. And I didn’t make it through the interview, because they asked me how I would study the effectiveness of their harassment reporting system if they’d made changes. It’s a standard question.","completion":"I was like, “What if you send out a survey?” And the guy said, “Only 2 percent of people respond to surveys.” So I proposed sending out a survey to people who have filed reports more than five or six times over the course of a month, and asking them to chat individually. I wanted to actually speak to victims of harassment."}
{"prompt":"That was not the answer that they wanted. I think they wanted something that was related to A/B testing—something that you could roll out really quickly and privately. And my idea was, “What if you just ask them?” That sounds like a huge clash in worldviews. And it says so much about how Twitter is fucked up. That whole d.school approach is like, “How do we design for this system that we have already imagined?” Totally. And a couple of months ago, I gave a lecture at the d.school. I was talking about all these different design interventions I would do on Twitter. And someone was like, “Aren’t you worried about changing the identity of Twitter?” If adding three more buttons changes the scope of your product, then maybe your product is made incorrectly. You should never put your product view over the safety of your user. What you’ve designed should never be incongruous with someone’s safety. If that’s happening, then you have made a flawed product. Maybe you don’t know how other people use this product. And maybe you aren’t experiencing the pain of it because you’re not that person.","completion":"What about Facebook? Harassment teams at places like Facebook are really siloed. They’ll be on a team devoted to a demographic, or devoted to a specific kind of product. So you could be on a team that’s focusing on the Facebook News Feed in Brazil, or that’s looking at how women in Brazil are using Facebook. But that doesn’t mean that you’re an expert on what Brazilian harassment looks like."}
{"prompt":"And I think that’s the problem. Did someone interview for that job in particular? Oftentimes when you interview at big companies, they just place you somewhere. But studying harassment is a form of expertise in the same way that studying misinformation or digital literacy or data visualization are. You wouldn’t hire an Android developer and put them in an iOS role, right? So why hire researchers and assume that the expertise is fluid? On a more optimistic note, do you have examples from your own work of successful interventions to stop online harassment? Not in my specific work with Wikipedia, because I just started, and it takes a long time when working with a community. I like to say that if regular tech is about moving fast and breaking things, civic tech is about moving slowly and being kind.","completion":"But I will say that I am generally optimistic about what’s happening with trying to mitigate online harassment. Because two years ago, no one really knew what the word doxxing meant—and now it’s in every major website’s terms of service. That’s a big change. I think we’re starting to see the standardization and the institutionalization of harassment research. Hopefully we’ll keep moving forward. It’ll just take time, because what we’re talking about is the establishment of a whole new area of expertise."}
{"prompt":"A few years ago, the mantra seemed to be, “Don’t read the comments, don’t read the retweets, just accept it for what it is.” But now it’s more like, “Okay, we should read the comments. We should treat that as a problem.” What do you think people should focus on with harassment online? Think about being on systems that listen to you, or creating your own systems and spaces. Come to a place where, if you request something to be built, it’s in their purview to build it for you. What does a social media co-op look like? And how do we band together and force companies to listen? People started to react really poorly to the spread of fake news on Facebook, to a point where even internally, Facebook employees were organizing and protesting. How do we continue that, but beyond fake news? How do we say that it behooves these platforms to have a community technology team? How do we demand the things we want built for us? I don’t think change will come from legislation—I don’t think those companies would listen anyway. But there needs to be some equity exchange.","completion":"[1] The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, commonly known as the d.school, has helped popularize “design thinking,” particularly in tech. Atossa Araxia Abrahamian (AAA) Luxembourg is very bullish on asteroid mining. They think it’s gonna be a huge business five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. And they’re a tiny country that needs to get ahead in this world. Historically, one of the ways they’ve done that has been to identify emerging businesses and lure them to Luxembourg. So that’s why they’re courting Planetary Resources, a startup based outside of Seattle that’s received funding from Richard Branson and various Google executives."}
{"prompt":"Meehan Crist (MC) How big is Luxembourg? AAA The size of Rhode Island. MC And how does a company like Planetary Resources describe what it wants to do? AAA Space is no longer a place where only big, nationally funded projects can go. It’s now open—it’s possible for commercial operators like Elon Musk’s SpaceX to send up rockets.","completion":"But bringing things back from space is still a long way off. There are significant financial and technical challenges. So right now, Planetary Resources says that their goal is to refuel existing space missions. Essentially, they want to build a gas station in space. That saves a lot of money, because it’s expensive to send fuel and water up with rocket launches. If you could just have a fueling station that’s already up there, you could extend the length of space missions."}
{"prompt":"So that’s the first step. And down the line, the idea is that there are natural resources that we’re going to run out of on earth—or that we don’t have very much of to begin with—that the company can procure in space by mining asteroids. MC What is actually in these asteroids that one could mine? Denton Ebel (DE) My understanding is that some companies are focused on mining iron asteroids for metals and others, like Deep Space Industries, are more focused on mining carbon and hydrogen and oxygen—water—for space civilization down the road.","completion":"We know there are bodies in the asteroid belt that are mostly iron. We have them in the form of iron meteorites—bits of them. In the American Museum of Natural History we have the crown jewel of meteoritics—or I’ll call it that—which is the Ahnighito fragment of the Cape York meteorite. It sits on six pillars going down to bedrock because it’s thirty-four tons of iron nickel metal. That has about eight grams of platinum per ton. By comparison, the richest ores that we mine in South Africa for platinum group elements have less than four grams per ton."}
{"prompt":"There’s also an asteroid called Kleopatra that reflects radar telling us that it’s mostly metal. It’s 220 kilometers long. You could sit it nicely down on New Jersey. It’s about 4.2 grams per cubic centimeter in density, where one gram is water. Iron nickel meteorites are 7.2 grams or more per cubic centimeter—so this is a porous, large object. It consists of big chunks of iron that are sort of welded together.","completion":"MC So how do you begin to solve the engineering problems involved in asteroid mining? Asteroids are shaped differently, they have different kinds of densities, they have different kinds of gravity. Building a robot that can actually go land on an asteroid and extract something and come back is not a single problem, right? DE No, it’s a bunch of problems."}
{"prompt":"On earth, a mining operation is a single, large, complicated thing—one failure and you’re down. In space, we can’t afford that. Instead, asteroid mining will involve a horde of ant-like robots, each of which will work semi-autonomously, linked through a hive mind. This is where people like E.O. Wilson, and other insect studiers, become important for asteroid mining because we will need to understand swarm behavior.","completion":"AAA You can definitely imagine conflicting swarms fighting over a piece of asteroid real estate. It’s something that seems pretty ripe for science fiction, but it could happen. DE Robots fighting each other in space—Roy Batty talks about it in the original Blade Runner. But yeah, that’s one scenario for space warfare. Another is throwing things. If you throw something from an asteroid in just the right direction, it will hit the earth and make a destructive impact, because it’s going really fast. It’s called conservation of angular momentum."}
{"prompt":"MC And how do you power all these tiny robots? AAA Well, you need water to do most things—up there, down here, everywhere, if you’re a robot or a rocket or a human. And if you can get it up there, it saves you a lot of time and trouble. That’s why Planetary Resources wants to build a fueling station in space.","completion":"But the main point here from Luxembourg’s perspective is that this is a massive business opportunity and it’s largely unregulated for now. MC Why Luxembourg? AAA That’s a good question. There’s nothing about Luxembourg, or where it is, or who lives there, that makes it particularly qualified to get into this game. They don’t have a space agency. They only just built a university. They only have about half a million people. They’re not a massive industrial power."}
{"prompt":"But what they do have—and this is really important—is the ability to make laws. You can only make laws if you’re a sovereign country. There are only so many sovereign countries. Luxembourg is one of them. And throughout its history, it has survived by making laws that businesses want. It’s as though lobbyists write their legislation. In fact, sometimes they do. Luxembourg is one of the biggest tax havens in the world, even though it’s one of the tiniest countries in the world. It’s the second biggest center for mutual funds. Trillions of dollars are funneled offshore through Luxembourg. It’s just astonishing the amount of wealth that passes through this tiny little country, and it does that because they have really favorable tax laws.","completion":"Fun fact: right before the Great Depression, Luxembourg passed a law exempting holding companies from any corporate taxes. So what happened? Companies from all around the world flocked to Luxembourg to open up shop. Within a few decades you had tens of thousands of companies there, to the point where you walk past a building in Luxembourg today and there are a hundred firms listed as resident there. There’s no way all of these people could fit in the building. But they’re registered."}
{"prompt":"MC By “open up shop,” you mean they have an address there. AAA Exactly. And simply by virtue of having an address and registration, they are able to claim they’re a Luxembourg company. There’s a lot of accounting acrobatics involved. But what does this have to do with space? Well, if you’re a company that thinks that one day you’re going to make a ton of money by digging platinum out of asteroids and bringing it back to earth, where do you want to incorporate? You want go to a place that’s going to have low taxes, where it’s easy to set up a company, where the politicians want to help you, and where the country is going to recognize your ownership of the stuff that’s in space. Which is not obvious or intuitive because there isn’t any binding international law that determines who can own stuff that’s in space.","completion":"MC The basis of space law is the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which says that sovereign nations can go out and explore space, but they can’t claim sovereignty over it. AAA Right. According to the Outer Space Treaty, space is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, use or occupation or any other means. So you can’t go up there and say, “This is part of my country.” The question is: can a private company not claiming sovereignty say “this asteroid is mine” or “this platinum is mine”? Property rights in space are not a given. If I take your bracelet, you can say, “That’s my bracelet.” Why is it your bracelet? Because you bought it in a shop. There was a transaction. That doesn’t happen in space. There are no transactions in space. There’s no market yet. The whole aim of this enterprise is to create markets up there in a (literal) vacuum."}
{"prompt":"MC They’re creating property law where there is no property, or law… DE There is some precedent for property in space, though. The moon rocks returned by the Apollo missions, and the moon rocks returned by the robotic lunar missions of Russia—those are the property of those sovereign nations. MC Why should this worry us? What are the potential dangers of space privatization? AAA Space is relatively untouched. It has not yet been exploited and pillaged—and when it is, I would hope that everybody could benefit from it. If space becomes entirely privatized, however, I worry that the profits will simply flow to the private sector—and thanks to countries like Luxembourg, those profits won’t be taxed.","completion":"It’s going to look like the extractive industries on earth. It’s going to be a repeat of what we’re seeing in Congo. Now, one big difference is that there aren’t any humans to suffer human rights abuses up in space, so that’s good. You won’t have blood minerals, because the miners will be robots. MC What does the Law of the Sea and the history of deep sea mining tell us about what might happen with asteroid mining? AAA Well, the asteroid mining companies like to compare mining asteroids to fishing in international waters. They say, “This doesn’t belong to anyone and it’s not sovereign territory, but we can fish and take the fish and eat the fish and sell the fish and do all the things with the fish. Why can’t we just do that with the stuff that’s on asteroids?” That’s a good question. Some legal scholars say, “Yeah, that’s legit.” Others say, “No, you can’t do that without having established who owns what beforehand.” I’m generalizing, but that’s the tenor of the discussion."}
{"prompt":"MC You can’t get very far down this road before you start talking about empire. Even if you love the basic science and believe in understanding more about the moon and how the universe started, this is functionally an extension of the colonialist project into space, to some degree. DE In 1960, the top federal tax rate on income in the United States was 91%. And if you look at constant dollar spending on space activities by the public sector, the Apollo program in the 1960s was huge compared to what we’re spending today. The shift to private enterprise taking some of the responsibility for space may reflect the fact that the resource balance between private entities and public entities has changed.","completion":"MC One could ask where all those resources came from. Or argue that if all of these companies that are funneling their money through Luxembourg were actually paying their taxes, we might have more money for things like NASA. What about the idea of space as a cosmic commons? That was part of the intention of the Outer Space Treaty. It states that whatever is done up there should be done for the good of all humankind, and that space belongs to everyone."}
{"prompt":"AAA I would love for a portion of all profits made in space to be redistributed. Maybe that’s crazy. Maybe I’m a crazy Marxist. Could you begin by telling us a little bit about People’s Policy Project? What is 3P, and why did you start it? People’s Policy Project is a crowdfunded think tank that focuses primarily on socialist and social-democratic policy ideas. The purpose of 3P right now is to try to provide policy support— analysis, construction, justification—for the gaps left by the liberal think tank establishment.","completion":"I started 3P because it is clear that there is a rather large swath of the American public who support ideas that are to the left of the mainstream Democratic Party. Prior to 3P, those people had no organ capable of polishing those ideas into practical policy. This is not because those ideas are inherently impractical, but rather because there are few if any institutions who put in the work on those ideas."}
{"prompt":"This gap between where the American public is and where the overwhelming weight of the DC think tank establishment is most clearly manifested itself in the last Democratic primary race, where Bernie Sanders was advocating ideas that are all completely doable—indeed they exist in other countries in the world right now—but which the major policy shops refused to do work in support of.","completion":"Some of this refusal was coldly careerist: people who work in these institutions crave administration jobs and so wanted to be on the team they thought would win the primary. But it was also ideological, meaning that the people who populate the DC liberal policy establishment just do have more conservative politics than Sanders, and financial, meaning that these institutions get money from people and organizations who are opposed to a Sanders-like agenda."}
{"prompt":"Why did you choose to fund 3P through Patreon? What kind of advantages or opportunities does that crowdfunding model provide? I am not sure if “choose” is the right term here. When I began 3P, there was no way for me to get money from any other source than crowdfunding. No big donor or foundation is going to give money to a twenty-eight-year-old who says he’s starting a new think tank. But I hoped that people who know my work from the internet would be willing to pitch in $5 a month for a while to see if I could actually make this happen. And it worked.","completion":"Even though I had no choice but crowdfunding, it nonetheless has a lot of advantages. I don’t have to spend money or time on fundraising or “development” as they say in the nonprofit world. It just comes in from Patreon on its own. Maybe I’ll need to promote the Patreon here and there with a social media share, but mostly it just grows organically as people see my stuff and as I get interviewed in outlets like this."}
{"prompt":"Additionally, crowdfunding means I am not heavily reliant on money from corporate donors, foundations, or very rich people. In fact, I am not heavily reliant on any one entity, as I have over 1,800 small donors. This gives me a lot of independence and completely liberates me to promote whatever policy I think is best, without wondering how this or that donor will feel about it. This can seem like an abstract “money in politics” type point, but all one has to do is look at what happened with New America and Google to see that funding sources exert very real influence over what a think tank produces.","completion":"The Patreon model clearly has a lot of benefits, but I wonder if you could speak to any challenges or limitations you’ve faced so far. Has it been tricky or time-consuming to “manage” your patrons—by supplying exclusive content, for instance, or providing input on certain decisions? The Patreon part has been really easy. I don’t supply any exclusive content or do any real patron relations management type stuff."}
{"prompt":"I have done some open threads on the Patreon platform to get input from patrons on things. For instance, the patrons named the think tank. That has been hugely helpful to me and not a burden at all. I’ve also gotten a lot of help from patrons on things I didn’t know how to do. So, for instance, I wanted to do videos as part of the think tank but had no prior experience doing them. I indicated as much on the Patreon platform, and from my patron pool, I got messages from voice actors who could do voiceovers. I got messages from audio engineers who could handle the voiceovers and mix in music and such. I also got some messages from animators who can put the videos together. In fact, 3P’s first video was produced with the labor of four different people. Three of those were patrons, all of whom I paid, and one is my wife. So, the patrons also serve as a kind of labor pool, which was unexpected, but creates a really neat community dynamic since it is their collective money that I then use to pay them to do things for the think tank.","completion":"Do you have plans to do more “offline” things with 3P, such as conferences or talks? Or is “online-only” a more efficient model for now? I do some offline things. I talk to people on Capitol Hill pretty regularly. I do podcasts and media interviews. There are some limits to the offline stuff only because I am one person, but I do more of that than people might realize."}
{"prompt":"The offline vs. online efficiency question is an interesting one that I am not sure I have an answer to. I’ve always found talks and conferences and such kind of odd because, when you go to them, you are speaking to a few dozen people and maybe a couple hundred at most. But if I deliver the same content online, I can easily reach tens of thousands (and often more) just through my own social media distribution. For instance, the first 3P video was shared by Robert Reich and Bernie Sanders and received over half a million views on Facebook alone. But nonetheless, people see doing offline stuff as the real, impactful work for some reason. I get that when it comes to organizing real people, but I don’t really get it when it comes to spreading ideas throughout the discourse.","completion":"The kind of offline work that I suspect is really valuable is paradoxically the stuff that is the most private: meeting with politicians’ staff, the editors of other publications, and that sort of thing. I do more of that than I do big public appearances. We’d love to hear your broader thoughts on the prospects of using the internet to build alternative political institutions that can challenge the prevailing common sense. Do you think the Right or the Left has been more successful so far in capitalizing on the new opportunities created by the internet? The value of the internet is primarily the fact that it has quasi-free distribution. I can reach millions of people for nothing. This means I can also fundraise from millions of people for nothing—or thousands, in my case. The social aspect of it means that people I reach can in turn share it with people they know, also for free. This allows for a level of coordination that wasn’t previously possible outside of huge institutions."}
{"prompt":"So in that sense, it does enable movements and people to try out new stuff and succeed without going through the usual institutional gatekeepers. As far as which political orientations have used the internet most successfully, it’s hard to say. The left movements behind Bernie and Corbyn, both fairly successful, were heavily assisted by the internet. Corbyn says as much.","completion":"I don’t think the Right has been successful in the same sense, but obviously they rack up huge audiences, especially in the InfoWars and InfoWars-adjacent part of the internet. So it’s obviously not a universally positive medium. Some people worry that the internet is bad for leftist politics: that it encourages insularity, “uncomradely” conversations, and so on. What’s your response to that? I don’t think the internet is bad as much as certain subcultures on the internet are bad. I’ve seen those same subcultures operate in real life, especially when I was a student in Boston. They are just as self-destructive and stupid there as they are online."}
{"prompt":"Supposing the internet was a woman—what then? This is not exactly how Friedrich Nietzsche began his book Beyond Good and Evil, when he first published that book in 1886. But it is one of the questions I have been thinking about ever since I first saw “#MeToo” in the Facebook status of a colleague one night last October.","completion":"I was at a bar with my husband, and a couple of men we had just met. I knew immediately what the hashtag meant, even though I had only ever met the colleague who posted it a few times. “#MeToo,” I typed with my thumbs, under the table. A minute later, I slipped my phone back out of my handbag and deleted the post."}
{"prompt":"I am not sure what I felt afraid of. When Nietzsche asked what if Truth were a woman he meant: Was there any such thing? Nietzsche believed there was not such a thing; or, rather, that the kind of Truth philosophers had been talking about all these centuries would never reveal itself to them. At the key moment, Truth would always draw back. Truth was a cocktease, teasing philosophy, which was a man. The philosophers should give up already.","completion":"(The love life of Friedrich Nietzsche seems to have been unhappy.) It might sound strange to say the internet is a woman, when you meet so many misogynist men online—so many of whom love Nietzsche! Or, at least, what they see about him on YouTube or read about him on Reddit. But when I ask if the internet is a woman I am not only thinking of all the women using the internet to talk to one another. I am also thinking of how much of what we do online corresponds to activities that have traditionally been seen as female."}
{"prompt":"Social media make “women” of us all. We preen and pose, hoping to draw eyes to us. When others do the same, we emote for and affirm them. We share events of everyday life that had never before been considered newsworthy. Here is my baby. Here is my breakfast. I should make clear that when I say “woman,” I do not mean a person whose body has this or that biology. I am not interested in chromosomes or hormones or genitals—not now. I mean a person who is expected to do certain kinds of work. Namely, the kind that is not seen as work, not really, but rather as expressing “natural” emotions. Childbearing and rearing and household chores are classic examples. But our culture considers care of all kinds feminine. And we treat female feeling as a natural resource that anyone can take for cheap, or free.","completion":"Smile, sweetheart! You have such good soft skills. On online platforms, we make money for other people, in return for the feeling that we are being seen and maybe even loved. In return for a digital place to live, we click. We let the men who own the platforms keep tabs on us 24/7. Good “digital housewives,” as the media theorist Kylie Jarrett has named us, we spend our days making “cookies” for them! Sexism at Scale One result of this arrangement is that the internet has become an engine for the accumulation of vast sums of capital. What a good business model, to get countless people to do things that make you money all the time, without paying them to do any of it! But another effect has been consciousness-raising. Social media shows just how political the personal is. If nothing else, social media platforms are vast machines for revealing structure. Facebook and Twitter encourage each of us to share the details of our lives all day—and then analyze these data points to discover patterns. People who like x also like y. People who look p and q ways are likely to have r happen to them."}
{"prompt":"Correlation may not be causation. But, as networks encourage us to discover our commonalities, to join a chorus of likes and retweets and hashtags, they show us the systems we live in. This may be why Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have made fitting homes for both conspiracy theories and new social movements. They remind us that even our most intimate experiences are not only our own; they prompt us to classify and tag our thoughts in ways that link them with those of others.","completion":"You may have spent years wondering: What if I had just said something else? Why did I have to have that last drink? Wear that dress to the interview? The internet will tell you: Maybe. But, look, the Thing that happened, happened to all these other people, too. Once you see structure, you cannot unsee it. The duck becomes a rabbit. The vase becomes two faces, staring each other down. The question is: What next? The morning after drinks with my husband and the other men, I arrived at my office and opened Facebook to kill time: A solid wall of #MeToos. I typed my post again. By then, it did not feel scary to do so. Or if it did, it was only because the statement felt too obvious to bother making. (My “#MeToo” got only fifty-six reactions.) Smart friends were already adding qualifiers. “#MeToo, duh.” “#MeToo, obviously, but also, I want to live in a world where women do not have to choose between identifying with men and seeing themselves as victims.” In the months since, the news has sped by like the third act of a horror movie. Like the mom who thought she was going crazy (cue: furious paging through old books and shuffling of Scrabble tiles), woman after woman is making her audience see what she is finally sure she sees. There really is a ghost! The clue was right there in the carpet where we had been standing! We are seeing sexism at scale, in other words. If there is fear in the elation of our anger, that fear, and not a little sadness, comes from the Bad Guys being our fathers, husbands, boyfriends, brothers, sons. You’ve always been the caretaker. In heterosexuality, the call is always coming from inside the house."}
{"prompt":"Good Neighbors The standard reading has been that the sad and ugly stories that appear under the hashtag #MeToo constitute a “revelation.” I am not entirely convinced. I know, we must leave room for the problem of other minds. “Assume good intentions,” as they say. It has been a long season of peering over the fence and feeling stunned by everything you do not see in the yard next door. And yet you want to stay good neighbors.","completion":"I meet a Good Man—or a friend I think is one, anyway—for lunch and he cannot believe the thing he read about our other friend—a story that all of the female friends we have in common knew. We are trying to decide what we should do about it. My husband and I meet a Good Man and his wife for dinner, and the Good Man starts telling a story about another Man who did x to his subordinate, years ago, and how the Man was talking about it the last time they got drinks together until I feel like I cannot not interrupt: “Did you not know that that subordinate was me?” My friend feels terrible for bringing it up. I feel relieved that he really had not known. It was not what I ever wanted to be known for. Still, as I smile it’s ok, I feel like my face is on too tight. My heart keeps beating all over my body."}
{"prompt":"“There are reasons you do not come to us with these things,” another Good Man reflects, about women, at a holiday party. He’s right. There are open secrets and then there are the secrets we keep even from ourselves. A senior colleague tells me, out of nowhere, about a dissertation advisor and how he threatened her, decades ago. The other night I went home and wrote it all down. I printed it out and folded it and put in an envelope. The advisor is long dead. I’m not going to send it anywhere. I just had to. A friend tells me about a powerful man asking her whether another powerful man they worked with was touching her, his college intern.","completion":"In a different context, a colleague says something I keep thinking about: “You have to allow people their shock.” She is talking about all the white people who, since Trump became president, or since they saw the Eric Garner video or the Philando Castile video, keep saying this is not us, meaning they do not recognize America. She wants to laugh. “Are you kidding?” But she believes it is better, in the long run, not to laugh in the faces of people who want to be allies. She believes this, even as she cannot help but marvel at the luxuries of their ignorance."}
{"prompt":"I know there are differences among these differences. But I think about it when I think about the shocked men. How hard do we work not to know what we know? When do we decide we have to? (“We” who?) Some of the specific details that have come out of #MeToo are shocking. The executive throwing the young reporter down the stairs. The button under the desk that locked the office door, locking you in. But the gist—that men in an unequal world use women to feel powerful, that they abuse their power over women, and often weaponize sex to do so… Who can remember the time before they knew that? The fact that we can be raped is the subtext of so many warnings we receive as girls. Do not wear this. Do not go there. Try your best not to exist, in public.","completion":"Clickbait Deathmatch To get to my provocation: I suspect that what #MeToo is revealing about the behavior of men within the media industry is less new than what it reveals about the industry itself. #MeToo is registering a change that has less to do with what we know than how. Whatever else it is, #MeToo is great digital content. Nobody does not have a stake. Nobody does not have an opinion. Stories of workplace abuse come with a titillating hint of pornography—particularly in the privileged, mostly white settings that have received the most media attention. We are supposed to be watching some kind of battle of the sexes, and we may be. But more often, these are battles between young women and older women, between Cool Girls and “cry-bully” victims, staged as a clickbait deathmatch."}
{"prompt":"The shape that #MeToo has taken reflects an ongoing contest between legacy media and digital media—and the way that these different forms of media get gendered. The Major Magazine, run by mostly white men, feels itself being eaten alive by a feminized (meaning: unpaid or underpaid) digital media ecosystem. There, women and queer people and people of color and working-class people have louder voices than they used to. But very few writers make a living.","completion":"The drama that unfolded in January 2018 regarding the so-called Shitty Media Men List and Harper’s Magazine reads like an allegory of the struggle between masculinized legacy media and their feminized digital rivals. A recap of the chain of events: An anonymous young woman creates a crowd-sourced Google Doc, shared and filled in by other anonymous women, and takes it down after less than twelve hours."}
{"prompt":"A legacy magazine run by an old man with inherited wealth, Harper’s, reveals that they plan to identify the creator of the Google Doc in an upcoming cover story by Katie Roiphe, a pundit who established her career by dismissing the existence of date rape in the New York Times, back in the 1990s. Dayna Tortorici, the young female editor who took over n+1, a literary magazine founded by four to five men, tweets that the “legacy magazine” responsible for the story should not out the Shitty Media Men list creator.","completion":"Nicole Cliffe, a writer and editor best known as the founder of the (now defunct) feminist website The Toast, retweets Tortorici, and offers to compensate any writer who pulls a piece from Harper’s. The campaign gathers momentum on Twitter. The creator of the spreadsheet, Moira Donegan, preempts Harper’s by publishing a long essay outing herself in New York magazine’s digital native “fashion and beauty” (women’s) vertical, The Cut."}
{"prompt":"The internet lights up. Donegan gains tens of thousand of Twitter followers overnight. Weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, Harper’s publishes its anti #MeToo story online. The subhead announces that “Twitter feminism is bad for women.” www.harpers.org gets more clicks than it has had in ages. Over the next few weeks, Harper’s sees a modest bump in subscriptions.","completion":"The process repeated itself the week after news of the Harper’s cover story leaked. On January 14, the online magazine Babe.net published an anonymized account of a bad date with the actor Aziz Ansari. Suddenly, a low-paid woman’s words (and screenshots of her text messages) went viral—and pundits at The Atlantic and The New York Times rushed to get a piece of the traffic by denouncing a feminist website that, until then, few of their readers had ever heard of."}
{"prompt":"Crazy Girlfriends and Straw Women The Media Men List showed what online platforms let women do: shareability means scalability, even if nobody is getting paid. Nobody but Google, that is. The internet made the whisper network clearly legible—and portable. But who was going to monetize it? Harper’s is the oldest general-interest magazine in the country. It is also one of the most notorious for failing to publish and promote women. And it is almost certainly the very worst at the internet. The website interface is risible. At the time of this writing, they have paywalled the Katie Roiphe article again.","completion":"Harper’s clearly craved online traffic. And they concluded that discussing a Google Doc written by anonymous women could be a great way to draw it. When their intention to reveal the name of Moira Donegan leaked, women on Twitter protested. On NPR, Katie Roiphe compared them to “a mob with torches outside the window.” There goes Twitter, like a girlfriend, being “crazy”! So Moira Donegan did the only thing she could do, which was to scoop Harper’s by telling her own story in a women’s vertical."}
{"prompt":"The Internet of Women: 1, Major Male Media: 0. When the Harper’s article finally came out, its six thousand rambling words said little that many others had not said already. Amid a lot of posturing falsely suggesting that others denied this, the piece advanced the following, indisputably true argument: Addressing the systemic, gendered inequality that pervades American workplaces—inequality that both expresses and maintains itself through the sexualized abuse of power—will be… complicated! The author, who teaches writing at New York University, seems to have missed the memo that says theories should be falsifiable. In order to create rhetorical drama, she had to suggest that there were people out there online saying that the situation was not complicated. Ironically, the main evidence that she cited of such refusal of nuance—indeed, the only named sources in her entire piece—came from blog posts and tweets.","completion":"One technique that Roiphe used in Harper’s is the signature of many anti-#MeToo op-eds that have appeared in other legacy publications. I call it The Straw Girl. This technique posits the existence of a hypothetical observer who is conflating things that should not be conflated. It discredits the testimony of real women by implying that other, imaginary, women are too stupid to know the difference between getting raped and having a guy be “creepy in the DMs.” Let us set aside the irony that the very pundits who accuse the Straw Girls of confounding things seem to think that having people in your office gossip about you is tantamount to getting fired and jailed. It does not seem unreasonable to ask whether these acts of sexualized aggression exist on a spectrum. I have never heard any woman say that the harms they cause are the same."}
{"prompt":"But Roiphe used another, newer, strategy in concert with the Straw Woman: feigned naivete. She quoted young women who were clearly making jokes online—tweets like “It’s not a revolution until we get the men to stop pitching LMAO” and “Small, practical step to limit sex harassment: have obamacare cover castration”—but refused to recognize these jokes as jokes, or personae as personae. Roiphe may have looked like a digital Rip van Winkle. But her incomprehension was a power move.","completion":"I don’t know how Twitter works, this move said, and I’m proud not to. I write for print! In contrast to the authors of the anonymous Google Doc she criticized, Roiphe probably got paid at least a few thousand dollars for her thoughts. Taken as a whole, the Harper’s cover story constituted an attempt to assert control over discourse in the digital public sphere—a sphere that merges the public and private to the point where those terms may no longer make sense. In much the same way, New York Times editorialists Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss rail against “Twitter mobs.” Despite the fact that, as one recent leak showed, they have plenty of critics among their coworkers in the New York Times office Slack. If these critics hesitate to reveal themselves, it’s because they fear getting dumped from their jobs—back on Twitter, among all the other Crazy Exes."}
{"prompt":"Season of the Witch Hunt One way that critics dismissed the “Twitter feminists” arrayed against Roiphe was that these women were leading a “witch hunt.” For some time, witch hunts have been in the air. Donald Trump regularly complains that the ongoing Russia investigations constitute a “witch hunt.” In the wake of a series of scandals during the summer of 2017, men in the tech industry were claiming that witch hunts were running wild on the West Coast, too. In early August, after the “gender diversity” memo that got James Damore fired from Google, the entrepreneur Jeff Giesea told The Guardian, “it’s a witch hunt.” In a widely shared story about pushback against the campaign for gender equality in tech, engineer James Altizer told the New York Times there was a cabal of feminist women looking to subjugate men in the industry—”It’s a witch hunt,” he concluded. In the wake of the revelations about Harvey Weinstein’s long history of harassing and assaulting women, Woody Allen warned against “a witch hunt atmosphere.” Most recently, the director Michael Haneke told the Austrian press that #MeToo had created “a witch hunt that should be left in the Middle Ages.” There is an obvious irony to this. When anti-feminists, serial harassers, and rapists say they are victims of “witch hunts,” they are claiming a status that has historically belonged to vulnerable women. And when Trump says that he and his (large adult) sons are the targets of a “witch hunt,” he is deploying a strategy that Republican leaders have used for years: appropriating the language of “identity politics” from historically marginalized and oppressed groups in order to claim victim status. (Cf. “reverse racism,” “white genocide.”) But the “witch hunt” has a special salience under a Twitter President. The ubiquity of witches demonstrates the slipperiness of political signifiers in the age of social media and memes.","completion":"As Jo Livingstone observed in The New Republic in summer 2017, witches were trending for a few years before Donald Trump started talking about them. Through clicks and other consumer choices, many women, queer and straight, adopted the “witch” as a transgressive identity. During the Hillary Clinton campaign accusations of her statecraft-witchcraft flew; Rush Limbaugh memorably called her a “witch with a capital B.” Following her defeat, supporters took up the witch label as a form of defiance. At the Women’s March and other protests in the aftermath of the election, variations on “we are the witches you couldn’t burn” became popular slogans. Lindy West delightfully flipped the paradigm in her New York Times op-ed, “Yes, This is a Witch Hunt. I’m a Witch and I’m Hunting You.” What we see in these repeated appropriations, reappropriations, and resignifications is that “witch” and “witch hunt” can mean almost anything. The context is no context. That is, the context is the internet."}
{"prompt":"Witches of the World, Unite! Revenants, by definition, return. In America, the language of witch hunts tends to reappear during moments of struggle over cultural authority: during the McCarthy era’s persecution of alleged Communists, and during the “culture wars” of the 1980s and 1990s. Now, the web is stoking new fears about how information spreads. Enabling content by even relatively marginalized people to scale rapidly and unpredictably, it makes all information potentially contagious. #MeToo gained momentum because billions of “digital housewives” are clustered on the few big platforms that now comprise our “global village.” Concentration makes the spread of information uncontainable.","completion":"But it is striking that, even as we recognize that sexism and sexual harassment permeate every layer of American life, the men that own the platforms where we are having these conversations have mostly avoided their consequences. Tech has faced relatively little #MeToo reckoning. Susan Fowler and others drew attention to systemic sexism at Uber, and a series of stories in the summer of 2017 brought scrutiny to a few venture capitalists. At least one or two wrote apologetic Medium posts pledging to “do better.” But mostly, the real seat of media power—Silicon Valley—has been spared. So too have the Wall Street firms that help provide the flood of capital lifting the private yachts of West Coast seasteaders."}
{"prompt":"As legacy media desperately try to snatch clicks with #MeToo content, they continue to hemorrhage eyeballs and money to Big Tech. As they throw young women to the internet as clickbait, the companies that own the internet—companies bigger and more male than any Major Male Magazine will ever be—circle them.","completion":"Historically, witch hunts took place at moments of economic transition. Feminist writers such as Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English, and Silvia Federici have shown that the killings of thousands of young women in the early modern period was not primarily motivated by medieval superstition. (If it had been, one imagines there would have been comparably vast and violent witch hunts throughout the Middle Ages; there were not.) Instead, the state persecuted women en masse during the transition from feudalism to capitalism and, again, when men in authority sought to drive women out of traditionally female healing professions."}
{"prompt":"Witch hunts were crackdowns on women workers, in other words. You can see it in the accusations that witch hunters made. Squint and “black sabbaths,” depicted as feasts and orgies held in the woods at night, come into focus as clandestine workers’ meetings. The acts of “stealing” or “eating” children becomes providing reproductive care. The roots and herbs that became part of the iconography of witchcraft were medicines, abortifacients, contraceptives. As women tried to gain power over the conditions of their labor and their lives, witch hunts aimed to destroy that power—keeping women dependent on patriarchal institutions.","completion":"Today, #MeToo marks the site of a struggle for the chance to work with dignity. Sexual harassment serves to keep women precarious, blocking access to capital—literal, social, cultural—and to the networks that distribute it. At the same time, it is the precarity of so much work that makes many women vulnerable to harassment in the first place. If the conversation has moved beyond the workplace to what we might once have called private life, in many industries the porous boundary between work and life is a sign of precarity, too. You never miss a chance to network if you never know how long a job will last."}
{"prompt":"Writers cannot afford to romanticize the internet we have. It has squeezed the economics of media, and thus the wages and working conditions of everyone in that industry. Yet the internet also provides tools that can be used to build alternatives. In this sense, the internet is ambivalent. Fortunately, inhabiting ambivalence is something that women are good at, having had to practice it for so long.","completion":"One thing is clear: When enough people whisper the truths about their lives together, they cast a powerful spell. For months now, we have been living under it. In that murmuration, a question like a heartbeat: What now? What now? Over a hundred years ago, the upheavals of industrialization gave rise to what Louis Brandeis famously called the “curse of bigness.” The modern industrial economy increasingly came to depend on new technologies and infrastructures: railroads, modern finance, oil, and the like. Yet these infrastructures remained largely in private hands."}
{"prompt":"For Brandeis and his fellow Progressive Era reformers, the result was a fundamental threat to liberty, opportunity, and democracy. By virtue of their control over these foundational goods and services, private firms could extract greater profits from the public. If the essence of arbitrary, authoritarian governance was the concentration of unchecked power, then these firms represented a profoundly oligarchical mode of social order, where the public good remained dependent on the will and whims of chairmans and chief executives.","completion":"A hundred years later, the fear of bigness is with us once again—from the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, which introduced “too big to fail” into the vernacular, to growing concerns about corporate concentration in healthcare, airlines, and innumerable other industries. But nowhere is this anxiety about modern-day bigness more alive—and more difficult to address—than in the domain of technology."}
{"prompt":"As in the Progressive Era, technological revolutions have radically transformed our social, economic, and political life. Technology platforms, big data, AI—these are the modern infrastructures for today’s economy. And yet the question of what to do about technology is fraught, for these technological systems paradoxically evoke both bigness and diffusion: firms like Amazon and Alphabet and Apple are dominant, yet the internet and big data and AI are technologies that are by their very nature diffuse.","completion":"The problem, however, is not bigness per se. Even for Brandeisians, the central concern was power: the ability to arbitrarily influence the decisions and opportunities available to others. Such unchecked power represented a threat to liberty. Therefore, just as the power of the state had to be tamed through institutional checks and balances, so too did this private power have to be contested—controlled, held to account."}
{"prompt":"This emphasis on power and contestation, rather than literal bigness, helps clarify the ways in which technology’s particular relationship to scale poses a challenge to ideals of democracy, liberty, equality—and what to do about it. Taming the Beast Starting in the late nineteenth century, scale became the central focus for Americans concerned about emerging forms of corporate power. But what’s notable about the intellectual ferment around scale is the degree to which these debates turned not on bigness, but rather on issues of power and contestability. How much and what kinds of power did these new corporate entities exercise? And how could these concentrations of power be minimized, contested, and held accountable? Power, crucially, could manifest in “good” and “bad” forms. Just because a firm acted benevolently did not change the fact that it possessed power. The key, then, was not outcomes but potential: so long as the good effects of corporate power relied on the personal decisions of corporate leaders, rather than on institutionalized forms of accountability, it remained a threat.","completion":"Perhaps the most famous front in this debate was the clash between Brandeis and other progressives like Herbert Croly and Teddy Roosevelt. For Croly and Roosevelt, corporate bigness was a problem, but one that could be addressed through government oversight. For Brandeis, by contrast, concentrations of corporate power had to be broken up through measures like antitrust laws."}
{"prompt":"While this is usually seen as a clash between bigness skeptics like Brandeis and bigness optimists like Roosevelt, much of this debate boiled down to a different set of disagreements: not about how big the government should let a company be, but about the best way to contest corporate power and hold it accountable. Roosevelt and Croly believed in the social and economic value of these corporate giants, and had faith in the capacities of public-minded, expert regulators to manage these concentrations, extracting the public goods and minimizing the public evils.","completion":"Brandeis shared many of these views. He was after all a classic progressive, who celebrated the importance of expertise and the emerging regulatory state. Nevertheless, he expressed skepticism towards concentrated corporate power, which in his view necessarily spilled over into political power as well. Economic influence could so easily be leveraged into political influence that the more prudent route would be to reduce concentration itself."}
{"prompt":"Furthermore, Brandeis, like many classical liberals, saw the marketplace itself as a machine for enforcing checks and balances. Once cut down to size, firms would face the checks and balances imposed by market competition—and through competition, firms would be driven to serve the public good, to innovate, and to operate efficiently. By making markets more competitive, Brandeisian regulation would thus reduce the risk of arbitrary power.","completion":"Around the same time, the architects of modern corporate law were trying to solve the same problem from another angle. In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means published The Modern Corporation and Private Property, a landmark work that laid the foundation for modern corporate governance. For many modern defenders of free markets, Berle and Means are seen as architects of the idea that shareholders and other market actors could hold corporate power accountable through the “discipline” of financial markets. This would defuse the problem of corporate power and assure the economically efficient allocation of capital."}
{"prompt":"But this is misleading, because Berle and Means shared the Brandeisian unease with corporate power. In fact, their analysis highlighted a serious obstacle to holding that power accountable: the structure of the modern firm. Since a public corporation was nominally “owned” by a diffuse and inchoate set of shareholders, they couldn’t effectively assert control over it.","completion":"The answer for some, like Berle, lay in the public-mindedness of corporate managers. Like the regulators of the early New Deal, they would approach their control of the firm in a spirit of public service and with a sense of social obligation. For others, this faith in managerial goodwill was misplaced, and the answer lay in more assertive forms of shareholder control."}
{"prompt":"Meanwhile, the rise of the labor movement and the consumer rights movement took a different approach altogether. Rather than trusting firm managers, shareholders, or even regulators to act on their own, contesting private power required building autonomous, grassroots groups like unions and consumer organizations that could exercise their own forms of countervailing power.","completion":"The problem of scale, then, has always been a problem of power and contestability. In both our political and our economic life, arbitrary power is a threat to liberty. The remedy is the institutionalization of checks and balances. But where political checks and balances take a common set of forms—elections, the separation of powers—checks and balances for private corporate power have proven trickier to implement."}
{"prompt":"These various mechanisms—regulatory oversight, antitrust laws, corporate governance, and the countervailing power of organized labor— together helped create a relatively tame, and economically dynamic, twentieth-century economy. But today, as technology creates new kinds of power and new kinds of scale, new variations on these strategies may be needed.","completion":"The Varieties of Corporate Power Corporate power isn’t a monolith. Rather, as the progressive crusaders of the past century recognized, it comes in several different forms. First, there is literal monopoly: the direct control over an entire good or industry by a single firm. But that’s only the most blatant kind of corporate power: there are other kinds of dominance that are far less obvious."}
{"prompt":"One of these is control over infrastructure. Infrastructure can mean many things. It can refer to physical infrastructure, like highways and bridges and railroads, or it can be social and economic: the credit that forms the lifeblood of business, for instance, or the housing stock and water supply that provide the foundational necessities for life.","completion":"These infrastructural goods and services combine scale with necessity. They are necessities that make possible a wide range of “downstream” uses. This social value in turn depends on the provision of these goods and services at scale to as many people as possible. Where a good or a service is essential and irreplaceable, the user depends on its provider—they are, by definition, in a vulnerable position. So if a firm controls infrastructure, it possesses arbitrary power over all those who rely on the infrastructure."}
{"prompt":"But infrastructural power can also operate in a more diffused way. Much of the early debate around corporate power revolved around norms of nondiscrimination in serving travelers. The classic example was the innkeeper. The innkeeper is not a monopolist in the sense of massive scale and concentration. And yet, for the traveler in isolation, without other competing providers present, the innkeeper possesses a kind of localized dominance, with the ability to deny or condition service, placing the traveler at the innkeeper’s mercy. Indeed, this understanding of localized power played a major role in the development of public accommodations laws, which aimed to prevent this kind of diffused exclusion through generally applicable requirements of nondiscrimination.","completion":"Transmission, Gatekeeping, Scoring A century after the debate between Brandeis and Croly, our technologically transformed economy poses new challenges. For much of the last few decades, these challenges were hidden from view: technology seemed to be at worst neutral and at best radically decentralizating, democratizing, and value-generating."}
{"prompt":"Recently, however, this optimism has begun to unravel. The problems of technology have come into sharper focus. But this has brought difficulties of its own: technological power today operates in distinctive ways that make it both more dangerous and potentially more difficult to contest. First, there is transmission power. This is the ability of a firm to control the flow of data or goods. Take Amazon: as a shipping and logistics infrastructure, it can be seen as directly analogous to the railroads of the nineteenth century, which enjoyed monopolized mastery over the circulation of people, information, and commodities. Amazon provides the literal conduits for commerce.","completion":"On the consumer side, this places Amazon in a unique position to target prices and influence search results in ways that maximize its returns, and also favor its preferred producers. On the producer side, Amazon can make or break businesses and whole sectors, just like the railroads of yesteryear. Book publishers have long voiced concern about Amazon’s dominance, but this infrastructural control now extends to other kinds of retail activity, as third-party producers and sellers depend on Amazon to carry their products and to fairly reflect them in consumer searches."}
{"prompt":"As some studies indicate, Amazon will often deploy its vast trove of consumer data to identify successful third-party products which it can then displace through its own branded versions, priced at predatorily low levels to drive out competition. This is also the kind of infrastructural power exercised by internet service providers (ISPs) in the net neutrality context, through their control of the channels of data transmission. Their dominance raises similar concerns: just as Amazon can use its power to prevent producers from reaching consumers, ISPs can block, throttle, or prioritize preferred types of information.","completion":"A second type of power arises from what we might think of as a gatekeeping power. Here, the issue is not necessarily that the firm controls the entire infrastructure of transmission, but rather that the firm controls the gateway to an otherwise decentralized and diffuse landscape. This is one way to understand the Facebook News Feed, or Google Search. Google Search does not literally own and control the entire internet. But it is increasingly true that for most users, access to the internet is mediated through the gateway of Google Search or YouTube’s suggested videos. By controlling the point of entry, Google exercises outsized influence on the kinds of information and commerce that users can ultimately access—a form of control without complete ownership."}
{"prompt":"Crucially, gatekeeping power subordinates two kinds of users on either end of the “gate.” Content producers fear hidden or arbitrary changes to the algorithms for Google Search or the Facebook News Feed, whose mechanics can make the difference between the survival and destruction of media content producers. Meanwhile, end users unwittingly face an informational environment that is increasingly the product of these algorithms—which are optimized not to provide accuracy but to maximize user attention spent on the site. The result is a built-in incentive for platforms like Facebook or YouTube to feed users more content that confirms preexisting biases and provide more sensational versions of those biases, exacerbating the fragmentation of the public sphere into different “filter bubbles.” These platforms’ gatekeeping decisions have huge social and political consequences. While the United States is only now grappling with concerns about online speech and the problems of polarization, radicalization, and misinformation, studies confirm that subtle changes—how Google ranks search results for candidates prior to an election, for instance, or the ways in which Facebook suggests to some users rather than others that they vote on Election Day—can produce significant changes in voting behavior, large enough to swing many elections.","completion":"A third kind of power is scoring power, exercised by ratings systems, indices, and ranking databases. Increasingly, many business and public policy decisions are based on big data-enabled scoring systems. Thus employers will screen potential applicants for the likelihood that they may quit, be a problematic employee, or participate in criminal activity. Or judges will use predictive risk assessments to inform sentencing and bail decisions."}
{"prompt":"These scoring systems may seem objective and neutral, but they are built on data and analytics that bake into them existing patterns of racial, gender, and economic bias. For example, employers might screen out women likely to become pregnant or people of color who already are disproportionately targeted by the criminal justice system. This allows firms to engage in a kind of employment discrimination that would normally be illegal if it took place in the workplace itself. But these scoring systems allow for screening even before the employer is involved in a face-to-face interaction with the candidate.","completion":"Scoring power is not a new phenomenon. Consider the way that financial firms gamed the credit ratings agencies to mark toxic mortgage backed assets as “AAA,” enabling them to extract immense profits while setting up the world economy for the 2008 financial crisis. But what big data and the proliferation of AI enable is the much wider use of similarly flawed scoring systems. As these systems become more widespread, their power—and risk—magnifies."}
{"prompt":"Each of these forms of power is infrastructural. Their impact grows as more and more goods and services are built atop a particular platform. They are also more subtle than explicit control: each of these types of power enable a firm to exercise tremendous influence over what might otherwise look like a decentralized and diffused system.","completion":"This is the paradox of technological power in a networked age. Where a decade or two ago, these technologies may have seemed intrinsically decentralizing, they have in fact enabled new forms of concentrated power and control through transmission, gateways, and scoring. These forms of power, furthermore, often operate in the background, opaque and hidden from view. This makes them harder to challenge and contest."}
{"prompt":"Inside Voices If the problem with scale is less literal size and more these forms of concentrated, unaccountable power, then what are the remedies? As technology creates new kinds of infrastructural power, we need to develop new tools for holding that power accountable. We can imagine a few different strategies. First, we might turn, like Berle and Means, to the internal politics of technological firms themselves. We might push for the creation of independent oversight and ombudsman bodies within Facebook, Google, or other tech platforms.","completion":"For these bodies to be effective and legitimate, however, they would need to have significant autonomy and independence. They would also need to be relatively participatory, engaging a wider range of disciplines and stakeholders in their operations. Precisely because of the infrastructural nature of their power, technology platforms affect a wide range of groups: workers within the firms, consumers more broadly, small businesses and producers, media companies, and the like. Any attempt to create internal checks and balances will have to find ways to engage these different constituencies and provide them with a channel through which to raise concerns and flag problems to be resolved."}
{"prompt":"A related idea might be the formation of more explicit professional and industry standards of conduct. It is not a coincidence that the professionalization of journalism emerged around the same time as print and broadcast media took a more concentrated form. Professionalization helped legitimate the industry’s growing dominance.","completion":"This mid-century custodial ethos is notably different from the Silicon Valley culture of “moving fast and breaking things.” Changing this culture will be difficult, but not impossible. Tech firms might prioritize a wider range of professional backgrounds outside of tech, engineering, and finance when developing internal leaders. The training of engineers could also incorporate a wider range of influences—ethics, sociology, history—whether through changes to the curriculum in leading university programs or through the formation of professional development practices within the industry."}
{"prompt":"These cultural and curricular shifts could be facilitated by third-party scoring systems. We need more independent nonprofit organizations with sufficient resources, technological sophistication, and public legitimacy to provide independent scoring of tech platforms’ data, privacy, and AI practices—similar to the LEED program that certifies green building practices.","completion":"A New Deal for Big Tech Another route would be to follow the example of Teddy Roosevelt and the New Deal itself. To the extent that we doubt the efficacy and independence of self-regulation, we might create new government institutions for oversight. These agencies would have to leverage interdisciplinary expertise in data, law, ethics, sociology, and other fields in order to monitor and manage the activities of technological infrastructure whether in their transmission, gatekeeping, or scoring forms."}
{"prompt":"Along these lines, several scholars have suggested the formation of regulatory bodies to assess algorithms, the use of big data, search engines, and the like, subjecting them to risk assessments, audits, and some form of public participation. Government oversight could attempt to ensure that firms respect values like nondiscrimination, neutrality, common carriage, due process, and privacy. These regulatory institutions would monitor compliance and continue to revise standards over time.","completion":"Yet both self-governance and regulatory oversight depend to some degree on the human capacities of the overseers, whether private or public. Call these managerial strategies for checking concentrated power. The problem with managerialism is that even if we built a powerful, independent, and accountable public (or private) oversight regime, it would face the difficulties endured by any regulator of a complex system: industry is likely to be several steps ahead of government, especially if it is incentivized to seek returns by bypassing regulatory constraints. Furthermore, the efficacy of regulation will turn entirely on the skill, commitment, creativity, and independence of regulators themselves."}
{"prompt":"A more radical response, then, would be to impose structural restraints: limits on the structure of technology firms, their powers, and their business models, to forestall the dynamics that lead to the most troubling forms of infrastructural power in the first place. One solution would be to convert some of these infrastructures into “public options”—publicly managed alternatives to private provision. Run by the state, these public versions could operate on equitable, inclusive, and nondiscriminatory principles. Public provision of these infrastructures would subject them to legal requirements for equal service and due process. Furthermore, supplying a public option would put competitive pressures on private providers.","completion":"The public option solution is not a new one. Our modern-day public utilities, from water to electricity, emerged out of this very concern that certain kinds of infrastructure are too important to be left in private hands. This infrastructure doesn’t have to be physical: during the reform debate after the financial crisis, for example, there was a proposal to provide a public alternative to for-profit credit ratings agencies, to break the oligopoly of those ratings companies and their rampant conflicts of interest."}
{"prompt":"What would public options look like in a technological context? Municipally owned broadband networks can provide a public alternative to private ISPs, ensuring equitable access and putting competitive pressure on corporate providers. We might even imagine publicly owned search engines and social media platforms—perhaps less likely, but theoretically possible.","completion":"We can also introduce structural limits on technologies with the goal of precluding dangerous concentrations of power. While much of the debate over big data and privacy has tended to emphasize the concerns of individuals, we might view a robust privacy regime as a kind of structural limit: if firms are precluded from collecting or using certain types of data, that limits the kinds of power they can exercise."}
{"prompt":"Usually privacy concerns are framed as a matter of individual rights: the user’s privacy is invaded by firms collecting data. But if we take seriously the types of technological power sketched above, then privacy acquires a larger significance. It becomes not just a personal issue but a structural one: a way to limit the kinds of data that firms can collect, in turn reducing the risk of arbitrary and biased technological power. Such privacy rules can be achieved by legal mandate and regulation, or through proposed technological tools to deliberately corrupt some of the data that platforms collect on users.","completion":"Tax policy could also play a role. Some commentators have proposed a “big data tax” as another structural inhibitor of some kinds of big data and algorithmic uses. Just as a financial transactions tax would cut down on short-term speculation in the stock market, a big data tax would reduce the volume of data collected. Forcing companies to collect less data would structurally limit the kinds of risky or irresponsible uses to which such data can be directed."}
{"prompt":"Finally, antitrust-style restrictions on firms might reduce problematic conflicts of interest. For example, we might limit practices of vertical integration: Amazon might be forbidden from being both a platform and a producer of its own goods and content sold on its own platform, as a way of preventing the incentive to self-deal. Indeed, in some cases we might take a conventional antitrust route, and break up big companies into smaller ones.","completion":"Civic Scale Creating public options or imposing structural limits would necessarily reduce tech industry profits. That is by design: the purpose of such measures is to prevent practices that, while they may bring some public benefits, are both risky and too difficult to manage effectively through public or private oversight."}
{"prompt":"Taming technological power will require changing how we think about technology. It will require moving beyond Panglossian views of technology as neutral, apolitical, or purely virtuous, and seeing it as a form of power. This focus on power highlights the often subtle ways that technology creates relationships of control and domination. It also raises a profound challenge to our modern ethic of technological innovation.","completion":"A key theme for Progressive Era critics of corporate power was the confrontation between the democratic capacities of the public and the powers of private firms. Today, as technology creates new forms of power, we must also create new forms of countervailing civic power. We must build a new civic infrastructure that imposes new kinds of checks and balances. But where new firms, however innovative, outstrip our ability to assure their accountability, then we have to ask hard questions about whether we want to pursue such innovation in the first place."}
{"prompt":"Moving fast and breaking things is inevitable in moments of change. The issue is which things we are willing to break—and how broken we are willing to let them become. Moving fast may not be worth it if it means breaking the things upon which democracy depends. Google knows you’re pregnant. Spotify knows your favorite throwback jams.","completion":"Is this convenient or creepy? It depends. Anxiety is a feeling that tends to come in waves—big data anxiety is no different. One minute, you’re grateful for the personalized precision of Netflix’s recommendations. The next, you’re nauseated by the personalized precision of a Facebook ad. Big data has been around for awhile, but our discomfort with it is relatively recent. We’ve always had dissenters sounding the alarm about Silicon Valley’s surveillance-based business model. It’s only since 2016, however, that their message has gone mainstream. The election of Donald Trump punctured many powerful fictions, among them the belief in the beneficence of the tech industry. The media, long captive to the tales that Silicon Valley tells about itself, has turned a sharper eye on tech. Among other things, this has meant greater public awareness of how a handful of large companies use technology to monitor and manipulate us."}
{"prompt":"This awareness is a wonderful thing. But if we want to harvest the political opportunity it presents, and channel the bad feelings swirling around tech into something more enduring and transformative, we need to radicalize the conversation. The techno-skeptical turn is fragile, incomplete—it needs to be consolidated, intensified. It’s good that more people see a problem where they didn’t before. The next step is showing them that the problem is much larger than they think.","completion":"The problem is not personal. Yes, our private lives are being pillaged on an unprecedented scale. Information as trivial or as intimate as our favorite sandwich or our weirdest sexual fantasy is being hoarded in data centers and strip-mined for profit. But big data is bigger than that. It is not merely the mechanism whereby Google learns you’re pregnant. It is not confined to the cluster of companies that we know, somewhat imprecisely, as the tech industry."}
{"prompt":"Rather, big data describes a particular way of acquiring and organizing information that is increasingly indispensable to the economy as a whole. When you think about big data, you shouldn’t just think about Google and Facebook; you should think about manufacturing and retail and logistics and healthcare. You should think about pretty much everything.","completion":"Understanding big data, then, is crucial for understanding what capitalism currently is and what it is becoming—and how we might transform it. What Makes Data Big? As long as capitalism has existed, data has helped it grow. The boss watches how workers work, and rearranges them to be more efficient—this is a good example of how surveillance generates information that’s used to improve productivity. In the early twentieth century, Frederick Winslow Taylor made systematic surveillance of the productive process a key part of “scientific management,” a set of widely influential ideas about how to increase industrial efficiency."}
{"prompt":"Data is useful for capitalism. That’s not new. What’s new is the scale and significance of data, thanks to breakthroughs in information technology. Take scale. Digitization makes data infinitely more abundant, because it becomes much easier to create, store, and transmit. You can slap a sensor on almost anything and stream data from it—an assembly line, a gas turbine, a shipping container. Our ability to extract information from the productive process in order to optimize it has reached a level of sophistication far beyond anything Taylor could’ve ever imagined.","completion":"But observing the productive process isn’t the only way we create data. More broadly, we create data whenever we do anything that is mediated or monitored by a computer—which, at this point, is almost everything. Information technology has been woven into the entire fabric of the economy. Just because you’re not directly using a computer doesn’t mean you’re not making information for someone somewhere. Your credit score, your healthcare history—simply by virtue of being alive in an advanced capitalist country, you are constantly hemorrhaging data."}
{"prompt":"No single technology contributes more powerfully to our perpetual data hemorrhage than the internet, of course. The internet both facilitates the flow of data and constantly creates more of it. It goes without saying that everything we do online leaves a trace. And companies are working hard to ensure that we leave more traces, by putting more of our life online.","completion":"This is broadly known as the “Internet of Things”: by placing connected devices everywhere, businesses hope to make corporate surveillance as deeply embedded in our physical environment as it is in our virtual one. Imagine a brick-and-mortar store that watches you as closely as Facebook, or a car that tracks you as thoroughly as Google. This kind of data capture will only grow in coming years, as the already porous boundary between online and off disappears."}
{"prompt":"Eating Reality At one level, then, big data is about literal bigness: the datasets are larger and more diverse because they are drawn from so many different sources. But big data also means that data can be made more meaningful—it can yield valuable lessons about how people or processes behave, and how they’re likely to behave in the future.","completion":"This is true for a few reasons. It’s partly because we have more data, partly because we have faster computers, and partly because developments in fields like machine learning have given us better tools for analysis. But the bottom line is that big data is driving the digitization of everything because any scrap of information, when combined with many other scraps and interpreted en masse, may reveal actionable knowledge about the world. It might teach a manufacturer how to make a factory more efficient, or an advertiser what kind of stuff you might buy, or a self-driving car how to drive."}
{"prompt":"If information can come from anywhere, then it can hold lucrative lessons for any industry. That’s why digitization is becoming as important to capitalism as financialization became during and after the 1970s. Digitization, as scholars like Shoshana Zuboff and Nick Srnicek have shown, offers a new engine of capital accumulation. It gives capitalism a new way to grow.","completion":"Rosa Luxemburg once observed that capitalism grows by consuming anything that isn’t capitalist. It eats the world, to adapt Marc Andreessen’s famous phrase. Historically, this has often involved literal imperialism: a developed country uses force against an undeveloped one in order to extract raw materials, exploit cheap labor, and create markets. With digitization, however, capitalism starts to eat reality itself. It becomes an imperialism of everyday life—it begins to consume moments."}
{"prompt":"Because any moment may be valuable, every moment must be made into data. This is the logical conclusion of our current trajectory: the total enclosure of reality by capital. In the classic science-fiction film The Blob, a meteorite lands in a small town carrying an alien amoeba. The amoeba starts expanding, swallowing up people and structures, threatening to envelop the whole town, until the Air Force swoops in and air-lifts it to the Arctic.","completion":"Big data will eventually become so big that it devours everything. One way to respond is to try to kill it—to rip out the Blob and dump it in the Arctic. That seems to be what a certain school of technology critics want. Writers like Franklin Foer denounce digitization as a threat to our essential humanity, while tech industry “refuseniks” warn us about the damaging psychological effects of the technologies they helped create."}
{"prompt":"This is the path of retreat from the digital, towards the “authentically human”—an idea that’s constantly invoked by the new techno-moralists but rarely defined, although it’s generally associated with reading more books and having more face-to-face conversations. The other route is to build a better Blob.","completion":"Building a Better Blob Data is the new oil, says everyone. The analogy has become something of a cliche, widely deployed in media coverage of the digital economy. But there’s a reason it keeps coming back. It’s a useful comparison—more useful, in fact, than many of the people using it realize. Thinking of data as a resource like oil helps illuminate not only how it functions, but how we might organize it differently."}
{"prompt":"Big data is extractive. It involves extracting data from various “mines”—Facebook, say, or a connected piece of industrial equipment. This raw material must then be “refined” into potentially valuable knowledge by combining it with other data and analyzing it. Extractive industries need to be closely regulated because they generate all sorts of externalities—costs that aren’t borne by the company, but are instead passed on to society as a whole. There are certain kinds of resources that we shouldn’t be extracting at all, because those costs are far too high, like fossil fuels. There are others that we should only be extracting under very specific conditions, with adequate protections for workers, the environment, and the broader public. And democratic participation is crucial: you shouldn’t build a mine in a community that doesn’t want it.","completion":"These principles offer a framework for governing big data. There are certain kinds of data we shouldn’t be extracting. There are certain places where we shouldn’t build data mines. And the incredibly complex and opaque process whereby raw data is refined into knowledge needs to be cracked wide open, so we can figure out what further rules are required."}
{"prompt":"Like any extractive endeavor, big data produces externalities. The extractors reap profits, while the rest of us are left with the personal, social, and environmental consequences. These range from the annihilation of privacy to algorithmic racism to a rapidly warming climate—the world’s data centers, for instance, put about as much carbon into the atmosphere as air travel.","completion":"Society, not industry, should decide how and where resources are extracted and refined. Big data is no different. Giving People Stuff Regulating big data is a good start, but it’s far from revolutionary. In fact, it’s already begun: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that takes effect in the European Union in 2018 embodies aspects of this approach, imposing new obligations on companies that collect personal data. Congress isn’t anywhere close to passing something similar, but it’s not impossible to imagine some basic protections around data privacy and algorithmic transparency emerging within the next decade."}
{"prompt":"More public oversight is welcome, but insufficient. Regulating how data is extracted and refined is necessary. To democratize big data, however, we need to change who benefits from its use. Under the current model, data is owned largely by big companies and used for profit. Under a more democratic model, what would it look like instead? Again, the oil metaphor is useful. Developing countries have often embraced “resource nationalism”: the idea that a state should control the resources found within its borders, not foreign corporations. A famous example is Mexico: in 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the country’s oil reserves and expropriated the equipment of foreign-owned oil companies. “The oil is ours!” Mexicans cheered.","completion":"Resource nationalism isn’t necessarily democratic. Revenues from nationalized resources can flow to dictators, cronies, and militaries. But they can also fund social welfare initiatives that empower working people to lead freer, more self-directed lives. The left-wing governments of Latin America’s “pink tide,” for instance, plowed resource revenues into education, healthcare, and a raft of anti-poverty programs."}
{"prompt":"In a democracy, everyone should have the power to participate in the decisions that affect their lives. But that’s impossible if they don’t have access to the things they need to survive—and, further, to fulfill their full potential. Human potential is infinite. “You can be anything when you grow up,” parents tell their kids, a phrase we’ve heard so often it’s become a cliche—but which, when taken literally, is a genuinely radical thing to say. It’s a statement that would’ve been considered laughable for most of human history, and remains quite obviously untrue for the vast majority of the human race today.","completion":"How could we make it true? In part, by giving people stuff. And this stuff can be financed out of the wealth that society holds and creates in common, including the natural wealth that Thomas Paine once called “the common property of the human race.” Nationalize It Data isn’t natural, but it’s no less a form of common property than oil or soil or copper. Resources that come from a planet we all happened to be born onto belong to everyone—they’re our “natural inheritance,” said Paine. Data is similar. Data is made collectively, and made valuable collectively."}
{"prompt":"We all make data: as users, workers, consumers, borrowers, drivers. More broadly, we all make the reality that is recorded as data—we supply the something or someone to be recorded. Perhaps most importantly, we all make data meaningful together, because the whole point of big data is that interesting patterns emerge from collecting and analyzing large quantities of information.","completion":"This is where the excessive emphasis on personal data is misleading. Personal data represents only one portion of the overall data pool. And even our personal data isn’t especially personal to the companies that acquire it: our information may have enormous significance for us, but it’s not particularly significant until it’s combined with lots of other people’s information."}
{"prompt":"There’s a contradiction here, the most fundamental contradiction in capitalism: wealth is made collectively, but owned privately. We make data together, and make it meaningful together, but its value is captured by the companies that own it, and the investors who own those companies. We find ourselves in the position of a colonized country, our resources extracted to fill faraway pockets. Wealth that belongs to the many—wealth that could help feed, educate, house, and heal people—is used to enrich the few.","completion":"The solution is to take up the template of resource nationalism, and nationalize our data reserves. This isn’t as abstract as it sounds. It would begin with the recognition, enshrined in law, that all of the data extracted within a country is the common property of everyone who lives in that country."}
{"prompt":"Such a move wouldn’t necessarily require seizing the extractive apparatus itself. You don’t have to nationalize the data centers to nationalize the data. Companies could continue to extract and refine data—under democratically determined rules—but with the crucial distinction that they are doing so on our behalf, and for our benefit.","completion":"In the oil industry, companies often sign “production sharing agreements” (PSAs) with governments. The government hires the company as a contractor to explore, develop, and produce the oil, but retains ownership of the oil itself. The company bears the cost and risk of the venture, and in exchange receives a portion of the revenue. The rest goes to the government."}
{"prompt":"Production sharing agreements are particularly useful for governments that don’t have the machinery or expertise to exploit a resource themselves. This is certainly true in the case of big data: there is no government in the world that can match the capacity of the private sector. But governments have something the private sector doesn’t: the power to make and enforce laws. And they can use that power to ensure that data extractors pay for the privilege of making a profit from common property.","completion":"The Data Dividend Bringing data revenues into public coffers is only the first step. To avoid the bad forms of resource nationalism, we would also need to distribute those revenues as widely as possible. In 1976, Alaska established a sovereign wealth fund with a share of the rents and royalties collected from oil companies drilling on state lands. Since 1982, the fund has paid out an annual dividend to every Alaskan citizen. The exact amount fluctuates with the fund’s performance, but in the last few years, it’s generally ranged from $1000 to $2000."}
{"prompt":"We could do the same with data. In exchange for permission to extract and refine our data, companies would be required to pay a certain percentage of their data revenue into a sovereign wealth fund, either in cash or stock. The fund could use that capital to acquire other income-producing assets, as the Alaskan fund has, and pay out an annual dividend to all citizens. If it were generous enough, this dividend could even function as a universal basic income, along the lines of what Matt Bruenig has proposed.","completion":"A data fund that distributes a data dividend would help democratize big data. It would enable us to collectively benefit from a resource we collectively create. It would transform data from a private asset stockpiled by corporations to make a small number of people rich into a form of social property held in common by everyone who helps create it."}
{"prompt":"If we’re going to require companies to pay a chunk of their data revenue into a fund, however, we first have to measure that revenue. This isn’t always easy. A company like Facebook, by virtue of its business model, is wholly dependent on data extraction—all its revenue is data revenue. But most companies don’t fall into that category.","completion":"Boeing, for instance, uses big data to help manufacture and maintain its planes. A 787 can produce more than half a terabyte of data per flight, thanks to sensors attached to various components like the engines and the landing gear. This information is then analyzed for insights into how to better preserve existing planes and build new ones. So, how much of Boeing’s total revenue is derived from data? Further, how much of a company’s data revenue can be attributed to one country? Big data is global, after all. If an interaction between an American and a Brazilian generates data for Facebook, where was that data extracted? And if Facebook then refines that data by combining it with information sourced from dozens of other countries, how much of the value that’s subsequently created should be considered taxable for our data fund? Measuring data’s value can be tricky. Fortunately, scholars are developing tools for it. And politics can help: in the past, political necessity has motivated the creation of new economic measurements. In the 1930s, the economist Simon Kuznets laid the basis for modern GDP because FDR needed to measure how badly the Great Depression had hurt the economy in order to justify the New Deal."}
{"prompt":"Economic measurement doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Political power helps determine which parts of the economy are worth measuring, and how those measurements are understood. If we can build enough power to make our data ours, we can build enough power to measure what it’s worth. It’s Complicated Every analogy breaks down eventually. Thinking about data as the new oil takes us a fair distance towards understanding how it works, how to regulate it, and how to socialize it.","completion":"But data is also very different than oil, or any other resource. That’s because it has genuinely radical potential. It’s not just a source of profit—it’s also, possibly, a mechanism for moving beyond profit as the organizing principle of our economic life. Maybe the most intriguing idea from the Marxist tradition is that capitalism creates the conditions for its overcoming—that the building blocks for making a better world are already present in our own. Information technology is almost certainly one of those building blocks. Data gives capitalism a new way to grow, yes, but it also might give us a way to turn capitalism into something else."}
{"prompt":"One of capitalism’s sustaining myths is that it’s unplanned. Markets impartially, impersonally allocate wealth; Detroit goes bankrupt, Jeff Bezos makes another billion dollars, all because of something called the market. In truth, however, capitalism is planned. The planners are banks and other large financial institutions, as the economist J.W. Mason has pointed out—they make the decisions about how to allocate wealth, and their decisions are anything but impartial or impersonal.","completion":"What if those decisions were democratic? What if everyone had the power to help make them? Such an economy would still be planned, of course. But planning would have to become more explicit and more participatory. This would also presumably change what an economy is for: if everyone had a say over how society organizes its wealth, the economy would no longer be run solely for the purpose of profit-making. It would become a machine for fulfilling human needs."}
{"prompt":"Fulfilling human needs is a daunting task. After all, people’s needs vary. We all share some big ones, like the need for food, shelter, healthcare, and a habitable planet. But beyond the basics, needs can get pretty varied. For that reason, democratic planning is likely to be more complex than the capitalist variety. Drug addicts often talk about the clarity of addiction, how it simplifies one’s life by structuring it around a single goal: scoring the next dose. The clarity of capitalism is similar: it structures the economy around profit-making. In a society without this compulsion, the economy becomes less simple. Planning no longer serves a single goal, but many.","completion":"This is where data comes in. Information technology has the potential to be planning’s killer app. It offers tools for meeting the complexity of the task, by enlarging our capacities for economic coordination. Better Laid Plans The idea of using computers to plan an economy isn’t new. The Soviets briefly experimented with it in the 1960s, Salvador Allende’s Chile explored it in the 1970s, and Western leftists have been particularly interested in it since the 1990s. In 1993, W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell published Towards a New Socialism, which proposed that advances in computing made a more efficient, flexible, and liberating form of planning possible—a theme picked up by more recent “accelerationist” works like Inventing the Future by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams."}
{"prompt":"The dream of a digitally run economy is an old one, then. But it’s rapidly becoming more workable, as vast new quantities of information become available. The problem of planning is primarily a problem of information. Friedrich Hayek famously said that planning couldn’t work because markets have more information than the planners. Markets give us prices, and prices determine what to produce, how to allocate assets, and so on. Without markets, you don’t have the price mechanism, and thus you lose a critical source of information. In Hayek’s view, this explained the inefficiencies of Soviet-style command economies, and their failure to meet people’s material demands.","completion":"As more of our economy is encoded as data, however, Hayek’s critique no longer holds. The Soviet planner couldn’t possibly see the entire economy. But the planner of the near future might. Data is like the dye that doctors inject into a patient’s veins for an MRI—it illuminates the entire organism. The information delivered by prices looks crude by comparison. Who needs prices when you know everything? Greater transparency enables greater coordination. Imagine a continuous stream of data that describes all economic activity in granular detail. This data could be analyzed to obtain a clearer picture of people’s needs, and to figure out how to fulfill those needs in the most efficient and sustainable way."}
{"prompt":"Even better, much of this process could be automated. Economic democracy has the potential to be terribly time-consuming. Everyone should have the opportunity to participate in the decisions that most affect them, but nobody wants to make every decision. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams offer one possible solution: rather than subject every last detail of the economy to democratic deliberation, we could come up with our preferred outcomes—“energy input, carbon output, level of inequality, level of research investment and so on”—and let the algorithms worry about how to get there.","completion":"This is an excellent future, and an entirely feasible one. But it’s far from guaranteed. Transparency, coordination, automation—if these have democratic possibilities, they have authoritarian ones as well. China is likely to be the innovator in this respect. The government is developing a “Social Credit System” that uses big data to rate citizens’ “trustworthiness.” China also happens to be investing heavily in big data and artificial intelligence, which suggests that more sophisticated forms of surveillance and control will soon emerge."}
{"prompt":"Technology helps set the parameters of possibility. It frames our range of potential futures, but it doesn’t select one for us. The potential futures framed by big data have a particularly wide range: they run from the somewhat annoying to the very miserable, from the reasonably humane to the delightfully utopian. Where we land in this grid will come down to who owns the machines, and how they’re used—a matter for power, and politics, to decide.","completion":"Where does innovation come from? Startups. Where do startups come from? Venture capital. For nearly half a century, this has been the conventional wisdom of Silicon Valley. Venture capital is the lifeblood of the Bay Area tech industry, ebbing and flowing with every business cycle. More broadly, venture has provided the initial form of financing for most of the world’s fifty most valuable publicly traded global corporations that were founded after the late 1960s. And it has become a standard part of how institutional investors allocate capital, from public employee pension funds to university endowments to wealthy families."}
{"prompt":"At present, venture capital deploys roughly $84 billion per year in the United States. And venture capital is no longer solely an American phenomenon. The model has been replicated all over the world, especially in burgeoning Asian tech ecosystems from Beijing to Bangalore. Yet relatively few people understand how venture works or where it comes from.","completion":"Scaling to Survive Venture capital needs scale to survive. It needs to fund companies that have the potential to become very big in order to compensate for losses or break-even returns elsewhere in a portfolio. This need for scale is a key part of what distinguishes venture from other kinds of capital. Venture specializes in funding the development of unproven applications of technology—an endeavor that poses large risks with the potential for large rewards. Banks, commercial lenders, and traditional sources of capital for small businesses are highly restricted in the types of borrowers that they can afford to take risk on. Venture comes in to finance companies that traditional lenders can’t. And they do so through equity investments, rather than debt."}
{"prompt":"In exchange for assuming greater risk, venture firms expect higher returns. Its model tolerates losses—sometimes obscene ones—for a chance at grabbing an entire market or customer “mindshare” first. Since some of the companies a VC fund invests in will fail, the ones that succeed must succeed big time. The venture model requires large, disproportionate returns from a handful of investments. About 6 percent of investments generate about 60 percent of venture capital’s total returns, according to a data set covering thirty years of returns from Horsley Bridge Partners, a firm that has invested in many well-known venture funds. Indeed, the larger the fund size or amount of capital under management, the larger the expectation of a big “exit”—an IPO or acquisition by another company.","completion":"A fund that has $100 million may only be able to justify investing in companies that seem likely to result in an exit that pays out $1 billion or more. And since most VC funds are structured as ten-year partnerships, they’re not only looking for big exits—they’re looking for big exits on schedule. The VC model isn’t right for everyone. Many companies will never match the “return profile”—the rate of growth—required by venture capital. Moreover, for a startup, a venture check is only the beginning. Even though venture capital rounds are often celebrated as major milestones, they are really just entry tickets. When a company accepts venture funding, it commits itself to steep expectations for future growth. 2X a year is considered good, 3X is great, and 4X or more a year is amazing. These are challenging targets to meet, and the expectation to grow quickly can scale—but also contort—a founder’s original vision."}
{"prompt":"Taking venture funding can also involve surrendering a certain amount of control, although the way that venture firms exert influence varies widely. At an early-stage firm like the one where I work, we engage in so-called “soft advising.” By contrast, venture firms that invest at a later stage usually hold seats on the company’s board, and can therefore exercise “hard control.” Sometimes this control is especially stark. In an earlier era, as many as 50 percent of original founders were thrown out in favor of professional management, according to an interview with Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine. For the past decade, however, there has been a trend toward letting founders keep more power. The Facebook IPO set a new precedent by enabling Mark Zuckerberg to own most of the voting shares. Afterwards, venture firms marketed themselves as founder-friendly so as not to miss out on deals. But more recently, in the wake of the Uber crisis around Travis Kalanick, there is now some discussion that the industry has overcorrected toward too much founder control.","completion":"The Masters of the Masters of the Universe To a startup founder seeking financing, venture capitalists might look like masters of the universe. But they answer to higher masters in the form of “limited partners.” These are the masters of the masters of the universe—venture capital’s customers, who supply most of the capital for a firm’s different funds."}
{"prompt":"Venture capitalists don’t just provide capital, in other words. They also have to raise it. A firm’s managers—called “general partners”—are responsible for finding limited partners to finance investments. They also often have to invest a meaningful amount of their personal wealth in the fund they work for, so that limited partners are assured they have skin in the game.","completion":"Historically, limited partners have included major pension funds, endowments, and other large institutions. The city of San Francisco, for example, has $1 billion out of its $20 billion under management allocated to venture capital to fund the retirements of city workers. Even if these investment officers are leading mission-driven or civic institutions like philanthropic foundations or state retiree funds, they are legally bound to do what is in their client’s best financial interest—regardless of whether the side effects of generating those returns may conflict with the ostensible values of the institution’s beneficiaries. As global wealth inequality has deepened, venture firms are also increasingly raising funds from “family offices,” which manage the private wealth of the world’s richest families."}
{"prompt":"Every two to four years, venture capital firms embark on a fundraising roadshow. General partners pitch chief investment officers on their ability to secure exclusive access to a high-quality “deal flow” while being responsible stewards of capital for stakeholders like retirees or charitable foundations.","completion":"The dynamic isn’t all that different from that of a hopeful entrepreneur seeking seed investment from a few dozen venture firms. Venture firms raise money from institutions, so that founders can raise money from them. The pressure to scale moves up the chain: a startup has to make it big in order to deliver large returns for its venture investor, so that its venture investor can deliver large returns to its limited partners."}
{"prompt":"In order to succeed, venture firms pursue all kinds of strategies. They can make concentrated bets with high ownership stakes in a small number of companies. They can use their reputation to do highly selective momentum-based bets on growth-stage companies. They can “spray and pray”—go for smaller participation in a wider net of hundreds of companies. They can orient their entire fund around a specific theme like AI or robotics, or a geographic area like the Midwest.","completion":"Depending on the strategy, the payoff may arrive sooner or later in the fund’s lifetime. Because returns aren’t realized for years, it can be hard to know whether a fund is high-performing at first. The privately held companies that a venture fund invests in don’t have the same reporting requirements as public companies, so it’s not simple to judge how a portfolio is doing overall."}
{"prompt":"However it’s achieved, the highest return comes from perceiving value in ideas and people that the rest of the world doesn’t see yet. While venture investors say no a lot more than they say yes, one can never totally rule anything out. After all, businesses that were unworkable in the first dot-com boom (Webvan) became workable in the second one (Instacart) because of mobile phones and greater familiarity with e-commerce. There is always a chance that a bad idea in one business cycle becomes a brilliant idea in the next.","completion":"These brilliant ideas aren’t evenly distributed across the industry, however. A small number of venture firms have disproportionately high returns compared to the rest. Across the entire industry, annual venture capital returns over the past ten years have been 9.1 percent compared to 7.9 percent for the S&P 500, which doesn’t look impressive. But the top quartile of funds might return something north of 20 percent as once-a-decade companies like Google or Facebook blow returns from other companies and funds out of the water."}
{"prompt":"Traitors In order to understand venture capital, you have to understand not only how it works, but where it comes from. Venture capital emerged from a particular moment in American history, when military funding for technological development was waning, and investors were pioneering new ways of managing risk.","completion":"The story of venture capital began at a semiconductor company called Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Mountain View, California. In the late 1950s, a group of eight physicists and electrical engineers who had been working at the company got fed up with their tyrannical boss, Nobel Prize winner William Shockley, and quit. But after they left Shockley, they faced a problem: there were few competing employers that could hire them. If they wanted to stay in the Bay Area instead of going back to the East Coast, they would have to start a company themselves."}
{"prompt":"A young securities analyst named Arthur Rock tried to find funding for them. He pitched thirty large aerospace and electronics companies. All refused. The only place they could secure financing from was a failing aerial camera manufacturer named Fairchild. Its founder, Sherman Fairchild, was an eccentric bachelor who happened to be a prolific inventor, heir to the IBM fortune, and sympathetic to their cause.","completion":"They eventually closed the deal. Those eight engineers—the “Traitorous Eight”—would go on to form Fairchild Semiconductor through a $1.38 million loan from Fairchild Camera for their first eighteen months of operation. And Rock would in turn become one of Silicon Valley’s very first venture capitalists. He would later move to the Bay Area in 1961 and realize $90 million of proceeds from an initial $3 million investment in companies like Teledyne and Scientific Data Systems. Meanwhile, the alumni of Fairchild Semiconductor—or  “Fairchildren,” as they were called—would go on to include Intel cofounders Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, Sequoia Capital founder Don Valentine, and Kleiner Perkins cofounder Eugene Kleiner."}
{"prompt":"The birth of venture capital came at an opportune time. Military funding for technology companies began receding in the late 1950s and early 1960s, creating a crisis for a young Silicon Valley still heavily dependent on military money. Just a few years after the historic Fairchild deal, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara began reducing weapons systems orders under the Kennedy Administration. This triggered a severe slowdown in the semiconductor industry known as the “McNamara Depression.” The loss of revenue from large-scale military contracts reordered the entire industry. It forced Silicon Valley companies like Fairchild to shift toward selling transistors and diodes in the civilian market. It also compelled them to cut labor costs by looking abroad—particularly to East Asia. In 1963, Fairchild opened an assembly plant in Hong Kong, where the hourly rate was 25 cents an hour, compared to $2.80 in the Bay Area.","completion":"Fairchild eventually turned around, reaching $100 million in sales in 1964. But its success created a whole new set of problems, fueling friction between the company’s West Coast engineers and its East Coast management. These tensions eventually led to the exit of two of the original Traitorous Eight, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore. Noyce and Moore turned to Arthur Rock to raise capital for their next company. That would be Intel—the $220 billion giant whose chips still run 80 percent of the world’s PCs."}
{"prompt":"A few years later, two of the longest-standing venture firms came into existence. A young manager at HP Labs, Tom Perkins, teamed up with another of the Traitorous Eight, Eugene Kleiner, to create Kleiner Perkins—the storied firm that would back Amazon, Google, and Genentech, and then be pulled into a public trial during the Ellen Pao case four decades later. Yet another of the “Fairchildren,” Don Valentine, would go on to create Sequoia Capital, an eventual investor in Apple, Google, Oracle, and PayPal.","completion":"Rethinking Risk By the early 1970s, venture capital had established itself in Silicon Valley. But it remained small: when Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital closed their first funds, there was maybe $50 million devoted to venture in the whole of the United States. A limiting factor, enshrined in law, effectively capped the size of the venture industry. For venture capital to fill the void left by the decrease in defense contracts, and nourish a new tech industry, the law would have to be changed."}
{"prompt":"In 1830, Harvard College sued a man named Francis Amory. Amory was accused of mismanaging funds that were intended to be donated to the university once a donor and his wife had passed away. Amory put the money into riskier investments like insurance, manufacturing, and banking stocks—and then lost half the money. Harvard sued and the judge sided with the college against Amory, establishing the “prudent man rule.” The prudent man rule required that investment managers exercise caution and care, avoid speculation, and behave as if the money they are investing were their own. In the 1960s and early 1970s, as the first venture capital firms were getting established, the prudent man rule was interpreted as a restriction on the kinds of risks that early-stage investors could take. This norm effectively prevented venture firms from raising capital from large institutional investors, which capped the possible size of the industry.","completion":"If venture capital was going to grow, it would need a different interpretation of prudent investing. It would need to change how investors managed risk. In the late 1970s, venture capital scored a major victory. Congress was crafting a comprehensive set of rules governing private pension management to ensure that workers could feel secure that their retirement savings were being managed responsibly. They applied the prudent man rule to pension investments, which the investment management industry interpreted as a ban on riskier investments such as venture capital."}
{"prompt":"But a Ford Foundation vice president named Roger Kennedy took it upon himself to convince policymakers that it was “prudent” to invest not only in low-risk bonds, but in higher-risk equities. He wanted to create a standard of prudence that took into account the whole composition of the portfolio rather than individual investments. A Nobel Prize-winning economist and student of Milton Friedman named Harry Markowitz had developed a similar idea as part of “modern portfolio theory.” This would be a fundamental shift from a principle of risk avoidance to one of risk management.","completion":"So Kennedy and his allies lobbied to make the prudent man rule more flexible. The political climate helped: the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, along with rising anxiety about emerging competitors like Japan, stoked fears among policymakers that the country would fall behind if it didn’t stimulate new business development."}
{"prompt":"In 1979, they succeeded. The Department of Labor ruled that diversification across an entire portfolio could be a factor in weighing the prudence of an individual investment. Risky investments were allowed, so long as they were balanced out with safer ones. This was also the year after the capital gains tax rate was nearly slashed in half, from 49 percent to 28 percent, under the Carter Administration. As a result, the venture capital industry exploded in the 1980s, growing from between $100 to $200 million raised a year to $4 billion by the end of the decade.","completion":"“And all of a sudden University of California was willing to give us money, Yale University was willing to give us money, Alcoa was willing,” recalled Sequoia’s Don Valentine. “So a whole bunch of people who had been sitting on the edge of their seats to make more aggressive investments with a very small part of their funds finally got a small go ahead, and people like us were able to start in business.” The floodgates had opened. The influx of money into venture capital in the coming decades would help propel Silicon Valley’s growth, and transform a handful of startups into some of the world’s biggest companies."}
{"prompt":"Rocket Fuel, With Strings Attached What’s next for venture capital? In the past decade, Silicon Valley’s venture model has scaled globally. Venture has been exported all over the world, with China committing $50 billion to the U.S.’s $84 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, India, which had just over 100 million internet users five years ago, is now a bonafide market with roughly a half-billion people online and between $5 to $7 billion committed each year to venture-backed companies.","completion":"Several factors are fueling venture’s global growth. As internet penetration has deepened, an increasingly unified market of more than 3 billion online consumers has made it easier for nascent businesses to quickly grow and acquire millions, if not hundreds of millions, of customers. And in the post-2008 world of low interest rates and cheaper access to capital, there is a lot of money out there looking for higher returns, leading many investors to venture on top of many other kinds of investment products. Moreover, new capital sources from Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund to Japanese corporation SoftBank’s Vision Fund have offered an influx of additional funding at the very late stage."}
{"prompt":"But there are challenges ahead. This includes a record level of capital entering the industry and chasing a small number of venture-backable companies, which exerts downward pressure on returns as initial valuations increase. Moreover, plentiful capital lets companies stay private for longer, which pushes out exits for venture capital firms and their limited partners. Finally, the American venture industry remains highly geographically concentrated, with about half of all dollars invested going into the Bay Area.","completion":"Venture also faces an interesting conundrum with the emergence of cryptocurrency-based initial coin offerings (ICOs). ICOs offer a relatively unregulated way for a project to crowdfund capital by selling “tokens,” which will appreciate if the value of the project is perceived to grow. The growth of ICOs has been explosive. In total, ICOs raised north of $4 billion in 2017, but their pace has been slowing down recently as lower-quality offerings and anticipation of SEC enforcement has made it harder for projects to reach their funding targets."}
{"prompt":"That said, founders in the crypto space still aim to raise orders of magnitude more in capital for projects that haven’t even launched yet, compared to venture-backed founders that have spent years building a profitable business. Last year, a project named Block.one raised at least $700 million for its tokens—even though all it had produced was a fourteen-page white paper. The shopping startup Stitch Fix, by contrast, raised less than one-fifth as much during its recent IPO, even though the business pulled in nearly $1 billion in revenue this fiscal year.","completion":"Whether ICOs will cannibalize part of the venture industry—or implode out of existence—is uncertain. What’s clear is that venture capital, or something conceptually like it, will continue to exist for the foreseeable future. Institutional investors that are managing billions of dollars of assets don’t have the time or bandwidth to evaluate tens of thousands of nascent projects to try to determine which ones might grow big enough to deliver large returns."}
{"prompt":"That’s where venture comes in. It’s the intermediary that sifts through a glut of new and untested ideas to identify those that have the potential for massive scale—and then makes them fulfill that potential. For founders, it’s rocket fuel, with strings attached. It can help them reach entirely new markets, but it also sets up daunting expectations for scale that can alter their original vision—and have unintended consequences for society at large.","completion":"Given the scale that Twitter is at, a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day. It’s the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale. For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms. Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone. There’s no threat involved… After you take out that 99.999 percent, that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. The sheer scale of what we’re dealing with makes for a challenge."}
{"prompt":"— Del Harvey, Vice President of Trust and Safety at Twitter, from “Protecting Twitter Users (Sometimes from Themselves),” March 2014. Scale and size, though, are not the same thing at all. If we think about simple massification, we might talk about the difference between a single cell and ten million cells, but that’s not the same as talking about a human arm. Scale is a dimension along which different objects arise; the arm exists as an object at one scale, the cell at another.","completion":"—Paul Dourish, The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information (2017) Social media platforms must moderate, in some form or another. They must moderate to protect one user from another, or one group from its antagonists. They must moderate to remove offensive, vile, or illegal content. Finally, they must moderate to present their best face to new users, to their advertisers and partners, and to the public at large."}
{"prompt":"Whether they want to or not, then, platforms must serve as setters of norms, interpreters of laws, arbiters of taste, adjudicators of disputes, and enforcers of whatever rules they choose to establish. Having in many ways taken custody of the web, they now find themselves its custodians. But the problem of moderation is not new. Broadcasters, booksellers, publishers, and music labels all grappled with the problem of being in the middle: not just between producer and audience, but between providing and restricting, between audience preference and public propriety. They have all had to set and enforce rules about what they will and will not make available.","completion":"Moderation is not new to the web either. From the earliest days, users disagreed about what online spaces were for. Someone always wanted to circulate porn; someone always looked for ways to harass others. So parameters of proper content and behavior were always necessary. What is different about today’s social media platforms is that they host and oversee an unprecedented amount of content and an unprecedented number of people. As a result, they must moderate on a qualitatively different scale."}
{"prompt":"From Workshop to Factory The most obvious difference is the sheer number of users, the sheer amount of content, and the relentless pace at which they circulate. It was once difficult to imagine how traditional media could review, rate, and police all of the US television programming running twenty-four hours a day across multiple channels. But that was a small challenge compared to what social media platforms must now do. As one policy manager at Flickr put it to me recently, “the scale is just unfathomable.” At this size, certain approaches to content moderation are practically impossible. For instance, there is simply too much content and activity to conduct “proactive review,” in which a moderator would examine each contribution before it appeared. Instead, nearly all platforms have embraced a “publish-then-filter” approach: user posts are immediately public, without review, and platforms can remove questionable content only after the fact.","completion":"This means that everything, no matter how reprehensible or illegal, can be posted to these platforms and will be available until it is noticed and removed. Vile or criminal behavior may occur, and have its intended impact, before anything is done in response. There is always something on a social media platform that violates the rules—and typically lots of it. Someone is being harassed right now. Plenty of porn, graphic violence, animal cruelty, and hate speech are available as you read this. They will remain there for hours, days, or years, because of the challenges of policing platforms as immense as these. Because social media platforms operate at this scale, we as a society are being asked to tolerate the fact that even content as universally abhorred and clearly illegal as child pornography can be and is available on our favorite platforms, if only briefly."}
{"prompt":"But the question of scale is more than just the sheer number of users. Social media platforms are not just big; at this scale, they become fundamentally different than they once were. They are qualitatively more complex. While these platforms may speak of their online “community,” singular, at a billion active users there can be no such thing. Platforms must manage multiple and shifting communities, across multiple nations and cultures and religions, each participating for different reasons, often with incommensurable values and aims. And communities do not independently coexist on a platform. Rather, they overlap and intermingle—by proximity, and by design.","completion":"At this scale, moderation techniques that might have fit smaller venues simply will not translate. For instance, the techniques of online community management are ill-suited to the scale of major social media platforms. Managing early online communities depended in part on community members knowing the webmaster, regulars knowing one another, and users sharing an accumulated history of interactions that provided the familiarity and trust necessary for a moderator to arbitrate when members disagreed. Tough cases could be debated collectively; policies could be weighed and changed by the community. The scale of the forum made self- government possible. But as these platforms have grown, traditional community management has become increasingly untenable."}
{"prompt":"This means that the approaches social media platforms take, toward not just content moderation but all types of information management, are tied to this immense scale. Content is policed at scale, and most complaints are fielded at scale. More important, the ways that moderators understand problems have been shaped by working at scale. As a content policy manager from Facebook noted: The huge scale of the platforms has robbed anyone who is at all acquainted with the torrent of reports coming in of the illusion that there was any such thing as a unique case… On any sufficiently large social network everything you could possibly imagine happens every week, right? So there are no hypothetical situations, and there are no cases that are different or really edgy. There’s no such thing as a true edge case. There’s just more and less frequent cases, all of which happen all the time.","completion":"What to do with a questionable photo or a bad actor changes when you’re facing not one violation but hundreds exactly like it, and thousands much like it. This is not just a difference of size—it is fundamentally a different problem. For large-scale platforms, moderation is industrial, not artisanal."}
{"prompt":"Industrial Moderation Industrial moderation requires industrial-scale human resources. These include community managers who work at the platform, crowdworkers who perform tasks farmed out to them, and users who avail themselves of complaint mechanisms. The labor that platforms put toward moderation, and the labor that we as users are conscripted to perform, are not just part of how platforms function—they constitute it. Platforms are made by the work that goes into content moderation. They are not platforms without it. But because this work is distributed among different labor forces, because it is unavailable to public or regulatory scrutiny, and because it is performed under high-pressure conditions, there is a great deal of room for slippage, distortion, and failure.","completion":"In their earliest days, many platforms did not anticipate that content moderation would be a significant problem. Some began with relatively homogenous user populations who shared values and norms with one another and with the developers—like back when “TheFacebook” was only open to Ivy League university students. Many of the social norms that first emerged were familiar from college life, and the diversity of opinions, values, and intentions would be attenuated by the narrow band of people who were even there in the first place. Facebook, when it began, relied on Harvard students as volunteers, until the backlog of user complaints reached the tens of thousands. The company made its first permanent hire for content moderation in late 2005, almost eighteen months after launching."}
{"prompt":"As these sites grew, so did the volume and variety of concerns coming from users. Platforms experienced these in waves, especially as they grew in cultural prominence, changed dramatically in their demographics, or expanded to an international audience. Some tried to address these concerns the same way that online discussion groups had: through collective deliberation and public rule-making. But this proved increasingly difficult.","completion":"So the major social media platforms found that they had to expand their internal content policy groups. Today, most platforms have a team charged with overseeing moderation. The team sets the rules of the platform, supervises their enforcement, adjudicates the particularly hard cases, and crafts new policies in response."}
{"prompt":"At the scale at which most platforms now operate, however, these internal teams would be insufficient by themselves. Back in 2009, 150 of Facebook’s then 850 employees—based in California and in Dublin, Ireland—handled moderation, one click at a time. But as Facebook expanded, such an artisanal approach became infeasible. So platforms turned to outsourcing much of the front-line work of content moderation to crowdworkers.","completion":"As recently as 2014, Twitter was still claiming, “Every report by a user is reviewed by a member of Twitter’s Trust and Safety team.” Even for Twitter, which has leaner rules than similar-sized platforms, this statement is hard to believe—if what it meant was its handful of permanent employees devoted to content moderation."}
{"prompt":"But Twitter, like many social media platforms, now employs a substantially larger group of people to provide a first wave of review, beneath the internal moderation team. These workers might be employed by the platform itself, either at its headquarters or in satellite offices located around the world in places like Dublin and Hyderabad.","completion":"But more commonly they are hired on a contract basis: as independent contractors through third-party temp companies, or as on-demand labor employed through crowdwork services such as Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, Upwork, Accenture, or TaskUs—or both, in a two-tiered system. Crowdworkers are now used as a first-response team, looking at flagged posts and images from users and making quick decisions about how to respond."}
{"prompt":"Human review must be handled fast. “Fast” can mean mere seconds per complaint—approve, reject, approve—and moderators are often evaluated on their speed as well as their accuracy, so they must keep up the pace. Each complaint is thus getting just a sliver of human attention, and the moderator is under enormous pressure to be responsive not just to the current complaint, but to the queue of complaints behind it. To speed things along, and to protect users’ privacy, the images and posts are also usually detached from their original material.","completion":"Users expect the judgments of moderators to weigh competing values, show cultural sensitivity, and appear fair and consistent. This is hard to achieve when the content is distilled from its context, and the labor is performed under the intense pressure of an endless queue of complaints. But crowdworkers aren’t the only labor pool that platforms can draw on to perform moderation work. Platforms have another resource close at hand: the users themselves."}
{"prompt":"Most platforms invite users to “flag” problematic content and behavior, generating a queue of complaints that can be fed to its army of crowdworkers to adjudicate. Flagging puts the work of review right at the point of offense, in front of those most motivated to complain. Even if moderators can’t be everywhere, users can. If internal content policy teams cannot anticipate emerging problems, users can serve as their nerve endings.","completion":"Flaggers may also help an internal team better understand the norms of the community. Content that is not flagged will remain, even if members of the team might have worried about it had they encountered it. Similarly, they may look twice at materials they think are acceptable but that users keep flagging. This becomes especially useful as a site expands into different countries: the population of possible flaggers automatically includes people with the necessary linguistic and cultural expertise."}
{"prompt":"Logistics and Translations Each of these three labor forces—the internal team, the crowdworkers, and the flaggers—is an answer to the problem of moderation at scale. Each provides a way for either a few people to do a great deal with limited resources, or for a lot of people to each do a little, together.","completion":"The challenge of content moderation, then, is as much about the coordination of work as it is about making judgments. What the press or disgruntled users might see as mistaken or hypocritical might be the result of slippage between these divisions of labor—between what is allowed and what is flagged; between how a policy is set and how it is conveyed to a fluctuating population of crowdworkers; between how a violation is understood in one cultural climate and how it is understood in another; between what does trigger a complaint and what should."}
{"prompt":"The challenges of coordinating the distributed and decentralized work of moderation are probably most acute at the points of contact. Between flaggers and crowdworkers, and between crowdworkers and policy teams, are membranes across which must flow expressions of principle in one direction and expressions of concern in the other. At these points of contact, expressions get rewritten, translated into a new form that is meant to both retain the meaning and fit it to the work that will respond to it. These translations can introduce distortions, ambiguities, and even new meanings.","completion":"For example, enlisting the crowd to police itself can only work if the concerns of users can be transformed into manageable bits of data. When a user flags some problematic content, the character of his concern must be reduced to fit the data entry format provided: the flag itself, its particular submenus, time codes, and so on. This takes an affective, socially loaded, and meaningful expression of a user, scrubs it of emotion and detail, and restates it."}
{"prompt":"What may have been “Ugh! That’s terrible!” becomes “flag :: hateful or abusive content :: promotes hatred and violence :: 5:40.” The data comes to stand in for the users and their objections. Something is lost, and something is added. Similarly, when policy teams craft specific guidance for crowdworkers, they must translate the platform’s community guidelines into instructions that will suit the modular, rapid work of the reviewers. But these two documents are not congruent in their spirit, emphasis, or detail. Again, much is lost and much is added.","completion":"The Robots Aren’t Coming In May 2016, TechCrunch reported a significant milestone in how Facebook handles moderation: “Facebook’s artificial intelligence systems now report more offensive photos than humans do.” This does not mean that Facebook is using automatic techniques to remove photos, as some of the press coverage that followed incorrectly assumed. The platform’s automatic detection software is designed to detect nudity, hate speech, and the like—to identify it and flag it for human review. Still, the fact that the majority of what is reviewed is flagged by software speaks to how important automated techniques for moderation are becoming."}
{"prompt":"Is AI the answer? Software-based detection techniques promise, first, to solve the problem of scale. Particularly for sites that are too vast, like YouTube, or that emphasize real-time communication, like Twitter, platforms would like to have moderation techniques that do not depend on direct and real-time human oversight, and that can immediately and automatically identify unacceptable content. Ideally, these automated methods could be paired with automated interventions: algorithmically identified porn or hate speech would be instantly removed or withheld from some users.","completion":"Automated detection isn’t easy, however. Arguably, it’s impossible, given that what constitutes an offense depends so critically on both interpretation and context. State-of-the-art detection algorithms have a difficult time discerning offensive content or behavior even when they know precisely what they are looking for. There are fundamental limitations that may be impossible to overcome: the lack of context, the evasive tactics of users, and the fluid nature of offense."}
{"prompt":"Machine-learning recognition tools typically measure their success in terms of their detection rate. The best nudity detection algorithm claims to detect nudity with 94 percent accuracy and a false positive rate of 5 percent—that is, it spots nearly all the nude images while misidentifying as nude only one of every twenty non-nude images. In 2015 Twitter purchased Madbits, which promised an algorithm that could identify NSFW (not safe for work) images, including porn, violence, and gore, with 99 percent accuracy and a 7 percent false positive rate.","completion":"Is 94 percent good? What about 99 percent? It depends on what the platforms hope to do with these tools. These are, from one vantage point, phenomenal achievements. But when it comes to culture and expression, even a few false positives can be a cause for real concern, depending on whether those errors are idiosyncratic or systemic."}
{"prompt":"The stakes for false positives and false negatives differ, depending on the context and audience. While marking the occasional baby photo as pornography is one kind of problem for the users involved, incorrectly identifying black skin in ways systemically different from white skin is a different kind of problem—a public problem about representation and equity, rather than a consumer problem about efficiency and inconvenience.","completion":"These platforms now function at a scale and under a set of expectations that increasingly demand automation. Yet the kinds of decisions that platforms must make, especially in content moderation, are precisely the kinds of decisions that should not be automated, and perhaps cannot be. They are judgments of value, meaning, importance, and offense. They depend both on a human revulsion to the horrific and a human sensitivity to contested cultural values."}
{"prompt":"There is, in many cases, no right answer for what to allow or disallow, except in relation to specific individuals, communities, or nations that have debated and regulated standards of propriety and legality. And even then, the edges of what is considered appropriate are constantly recontested, and the values they represent are always shifting.","completion":"Feeling Like a Data Point No matter how they handle content moderation, what their politics and premises are, or what tactics they choose, platforms must work at an impersonal scale: the scale of data. Platforms must treat users as data points, subpopulations, and statistics, and their interventions must be semi-automated so as to keep up with the relentless pace of both violations and complaints. This is not customer service or community management but logistics—where concerns must be addressed not individually, but procedurally."}
{"prompt":"However, the user experiences moderation very differently. Even if a user knows, intellectually, that moderation is an industrial-sized effort, it feels like it happens on an intimate scale. “This is happening to me; I am under attack; I feel unsafe. Why won’t someone do something about this?” Or, “That’s my post you deleted; my account you suspended. What did I do that was so wrong?” The press also tends to cover moderation at this intimate scale. Journalists challenge the actions of a behemoth company by pointing out a single violation, and telling the story of the people who were harmed by it. Compelling, human-sized stories fit the journalistic frame well, but they say little about the scale at which social media platforms operate.","completion":"It may be that this gulf can be bridged. Users may become more aware of this sociotechnical apparatus and their place in it; social media platforms might better recognize that impersonal interventions make users feel personally judged or silenced. On the other hand, it may be that these scales are simply irreconcilable. Interventions made at a data scale may always run up against the lived experience of those interventions, felt intimately by individuals."}
{"prompt":"Trawling a hotel minibar one night while on a work trip to Amsterdam, I found a piece of chocolate with an unusual name: Tony’s Chocolonely. I giggled at how apt the name was—who eats minibar chocolate unless they are, indeed, a little lonely?—and, on a whim, plugged it into Google. The results were more sobering than I’d expected. The founder of Chocolonely, Teun (Tony) van de Keuken, founded the company with the goal of making the first (the “lonely only”) chocolate bar produced without labor exploitation. According to the company, this goal actually landed them in legal trouble: Bellissimo, a Swiss chocolatier, sued Chocolonely in 2007, allegedly claiming that “slave-free chocolate is impossible to produce.” I had heard similar claims about other industries. There was the Fairphone, which aimed at its launch in 2013 to be the first ethically produced smartphone, but admitted that no one could guarantee a supply chain completely free from unfair labor practices. And of course one often hears about exploitative labor practices cropping up in the supply chains of companies like Apple and Samsung: companies that say they make every effort to monitor labor conditions in their factories.","completion":"Putting aside my cynicism for the moment, I wondered: What if we take these companies at their word? What if it is truly impossible to get a handle on the entirety of a supply chain? The thing that still confused me is how reliable supply chains are, or seem to be. The world is unpredictable—you’ve got earthquakes, labor strikes, mudslides, every conceivable tragedy—and yet as a consumer I can pretty much count on getting what I want whenever I want it. How can it be possible to predict a package’s arrival down to the hour, yet know almost nothing about the conditions of its manufacture? In the past twenty years, popular and academic audiences have taken a growing interest in the physical infrastructure of global supply chains. The journalist Alexis Madrigal’s Containers podcast took on the question of how goods travel so far, so quickly. The writer Rose George traveled the world on a container ship for her book Ninety Percent of Everything. And Marc Levinson’s The Box startled Princeton University Press by becoming a national bestseller. Most recently, Deborah Cowen’s The Deadly Life of Logistics offered a surprisingly engrossing history of that all-important industry."}
{"prompt":"These books help us visualize the physical infrastructure that makes global capitalism possible. But the data infrastructure has yet to be explored. How does information travel through the supply chain in such a peculiar way, so that I know to wait impatiently at my door at the exact moment my new iPhone will arrive—but no one really seems to know how it has gotten to me? I set out to find the answer, and what I found surprised me. We consumers are not the only ones afflicted with this selective blindness. The corporations that make use of supply chains experience it too. And this partial sight, erected on a massive scale, is what makes global capitalism possible.","completion":"A Network of Waterways The industry of supply-chain management (or SCM, to its initiates) is both vast and secretive. It’s one of the most rapidly growing corporate fields, and the subject of reams of books, journal articles, and blog posts. You can even get a degree in it. But most companies are leery about revealing too much about their own logistics operations. It’s not only because they are afraid of exposing what dark secrets might lurk there. It’s also because a reliable, efficient supply chain can give a company an invaluable edge over its competitors."}
{"prompt":"Take Amazon: it’s not so much a retailer as a supply chain incarnate. Its advantage lies in the high speed and the low price with which it can get a set of bath towels to your door. No wonder the retailer is famously tight-lipped about its supply-chain infrastructure. Few people outside of Amazon know much about the software that Amazon uses to manage its logistics operations.","completion":"In the supply-chain universe, there are large, tech-forward companies like Amazon and Apple, which write and maintain their own supply-chain software, and there’s everyone else. And most everyone else uses SAP. SAP—the name stands for Systems, Applications, and Products—is a behemoth, less a single piece of software than a large, interlocking suite of applications, joined together through a shared database. Companies purchase SAP in “modules,” and the supply-chain module interlocks with the rest of the suite. Among people who’ve used SAP, the reaction to hearing its name is often a pronounced sigh—like all large-scale enterprise software, SAP has a reputation for being frustrating."}
{"prompt":"Nevertheless, SAP is ubiquitous, with modules for finance, procurement, HR, and supply-chain management. “A very high percentage of companies run SAP for things like finance,” says Ethan Jewett, an SAP consultant and software developer who helps companies implement SAP modules. “And so, if you’re running it for one part of your business, you’ll default to running it for another part of your business.” Leonardo Bonanni is the founder and CEO of a company called Sourcemap, which aims to help companies map their own supply chains. Bonanni suspects that companies’ inability to visualize their own supply chain is partly a function of SAP’s architecture itself. “It’s funny, because the DNA of software really speaks through,” said Bonanni. “If you look at SAP, the database is still actually written in German. The relations in it are all one-link. They never intended for supply chains to involve so many people, and to be interesting to so many parts of the company.” This software, however imperfect, is crucial because supply chains are phenomenally complex, even for low-tech goods. A company may have a handle on the factories that manufacture finished products, but what about their suppliers? What about the suppliers’ suppliers? And what about the raw materials? “It’s a staggering kind of undertaking,” said Bonnani. “If you’re a small apparel company, then you still might have 50,000 suppliers in your supply chain. You’ll have a personal relationship with about 200 to 500 agents or intermediaries. If you had to be in touch with everybody who made everything, you would either have a very small selection of products you could sell or an incredible margin that would give you the extra staff to do that.” We call them “supply chains,” but that image is misleading. They really look more like a network of waterways, with thousands of tiny tributaries made up of sub-suppliers trickling into larger rivers of assembly, production, and distribution.","completion":"Bonanni explained that while workplace abuses get a lot of attention when they take place in the supply chains of large, prestigious companies like Apple and Samsung, working conditions are actually most opaque and labor abuse is most rampant in other industries, like apparel and agriculture. “Apparel, every quarter they have 100 percent turnover in the clothing that they make, so it’s a whole new supply chain every season. And with food, there’s millions of farmers involved. So in these places, where there’s way too many nodes for anyone to see without a computer, and where the chain changes by the time you’ve monitored it—those are the places where we see a lot of problems and instability.” The picture that many of us have of supply chains involve state-of-the-art factories like those owned by Foxconn. In reality, the nodes of most modern supply chains look much less impressive: small, workshop-like outfits run out of garages and outbuildings. The proliferation and decentralization of these improvisational workshops help explain both why it’s hard for companies to understand their own supply chains, and why the supply chains themselves are so resilient. If a fire or a labor strike disables one node in a supply network, another outfit can just as easily slot in, without the company that commissioned the goods ever becoming aware of it."}
{"prompt":"It’s not like there’s a control tower overseeing supply networks. Instead, each node has to talk only to its neighboring node, passing goods through a system that, considered in its entirety, is staggeringly complex. Supply chains are robust precisely because they’re decentralized and self-healing. In this way, these physical infrastructures distributed all over the world are very much like the invisible network that makes them possible: the internet.","completion":"Gold Must Be Gold By the time goods surface as commodities to be handed through the chain, purchasing at scale demands that information about their origin and manufacture be stripped away. Ethan Jewett explained the problem to me in terms of a theoretical purchase of gold: In some sense all gold is the same, so you just buy the cheapest gold you can get. But if you look at it in another way, it matters how it was mined and transported. And then all of the sudden, every piece of gold is a little bit different. And so it becomes very difficult to compare these things that, in terms of your actual manufacturing process, are almost exactly the same."}
{"prompt":"To be traded as a commodity, in other words, gold must be gold. As Jewett described this state of affairs, I felt a jolt of recognition. The system he was outlining was, in a word, modular: a method of partitioning information that’s familiar to every computer programmer and systems architect. Modular systems manage complexity by “black-boxing” information; that is, they separate code or information into discrete units. A programmer need only know about the module with which she is working, because managing the complexity of the entire system would be too much to ask of any single individual. Modularity is the method we’ve devised to manage complexity at a time when we’re drowning in information.","completion":"The computing historian Andrew Russell told me that “black-boxing reduces all kinds of cognitive and informational overhead, because you just know what the box spits out; you don’t need to know anything about what’s going on in there.” Modularity, as Russell has documented, emerged as a term in architecture, and then spread to the military, where it was picked up to describe Project Tinkertoy, a post-World War II program to design interchangeable, self-contained parts for electronics. From there, the notion of modularity proliferated wildly, as a way of thinking about and structuring everything from organizations to economics to knitting. “It’s kind of a characteristic of modernity,” Russell said."}
{"prompt":"Supply chains are highly modular by design. Think of the shipping container. It wasn’t revolutionary because it was a box; it was revolutionary because it was a standardized, interchangeable box that could be locked in and transported. It makes globalization possible—it makes global scale possible—because of what it obscures. One doesn’t need to know what’s in the box, just where it needs to go.","completion":"How do you manage the complexity of a system that procures goods from a huge variety of locations? You make it modular: when you black-box each component, you don’t need to know anything about it except that it meets your specifications. Information about provenance, labor conditions, and environmental impact is unwieldy when the goal of your system is simply to procure and assemble goods quickly. “You could imagine a different way of doing things, so that you do know all of that,” said Russell, “so that your gaze is more immersive and continuous. But what that does is inhibit scale.” And scale, of course, is key to a globalized economy."}
{"prompt":"On the one hand, this all seems very logical and straightforward: to manage complexity, we’ve learned to break objects and processes into interchangeable parts. But the consequences of this decision are wide-ranging and profound. It helps explain, for one thing, why it’s so hard to “see” down the branches of a supply network. It also helps explain why transnational labor organizing has been so difficult: to fit market demands, workshops have learned to make themselves interchangeable. It sometimes seems as though there’s a psychological way in which we’ve absorbed the lessons of modularity—although the world is more connected than ever, we seem to have trouble imagining and articulating how we’re linked to the other denizens of global manufacturing networks.","completion":"Put It On the Blockchain If technology enables a selective blindness that makes the scale of global supply chains possible, can technology also cure the problem of disavowal? Can software, having created the black box, help crack it open? Recently, there’s been a lot of buzz about blockchain and the Internet of Things (IoT) among SCM practitioners. IoT technology would attach transmitters to components, so that their locations could be traced and monitored. With blockchain technology, each component that passes through a supply chain could have a unique, traceable ID number, and a log that registers every time it changes hands. Their proponents say that these technologies could bring radical transparency and unprecedented safety to global supply chains."}
{"prompt":"Blockchain is the technology that underlies bitcoins. The idea is that at each “stop” along a chain of users, a database associated with a particular coin (or component) updates to register the change of hands. The identity of each user could be cryptographically concealed, or it could be recorded transparently. Either way, the record of transactions is available to everyone along the chain, and it’s near-impossible to forge.","completion":"Blockchain is security for the age of decentralization, and it could, in theory, make it possible for companies to verify the safety, composition, and provenance of manufactured goods. Supply Chain 24/7, an industry newsletter, calls blockchain a “game-changer” that “has the potential to transform the supply chain.” IoT is a different technology that addresses a similar problem. A company somewhere along a supply chain embeds a small transmitter, like an active RFID tag, in a component, allowing a monitor to see its location and status in real time. With sensors, a company could also keep track of the component’s environment, checking on things like temperature and humidity. It sounds like a solution custom-fitted for the problem at hand: with these tiny trackers, companies could finally get the visibility they say they’re after."}
{"prompt":"But the supply-chain specialists I talked to were skeptical. To make blockchain meaningful, Bonnani told me, you’d need to get every vendor to agree to disclose information about its practices; otherwise you’ll just see a string in a database. “If you get suppliers to agree to be transparent, then blockchain is a way to verify that the thing you receive actually came from the person who sent it to you, and it’s extremely valuable in that respect,” said Bonnani. “But if you don’t get them to opt in, then all you know is, you got what you asked for. They’re not going to tell you who they got it from, or who that person got it from.” IoT lends itself to the same problems. Without genuine buy-in from suppliers, IoT “becomes one more technology to counterfeit,” said Bonnani. “You’re basically not improving the current problem, which is a lack of visibility.” Given the pressure on suppliers to move quickly and flexibly, it’s hard to imagine anyone volunteering more information than necessary.","completion":"One could imagine a system in which IoT and blockchain enable detailed information on labor conditions and safety, but the reality of global capitalism suggests that IoT is more likely to bring us smart toasters than socially responsible supply chains. Making Better Bets SCM innovation continues to thrive, but it’s not trending toward the kind of visibility that Tony’s Chocolonely is looking for. The newest technology that logistics professionals find exciting is machine learning, which involves creating algorithms that are capable of making predictions or decisions by “learning” from a set of data."}
{"prompt":"Machine learning is already in heavy use on the consumer side, where companies like Target use it to wager that a shopper who purchases unscented lotion, vitamins, hand sanitizer, and soft furniture might be getting ready to have a baby. But in the SCM world, machine learning could make it much easier to discover which suppliers and routes will deliver goods most quickly and reliably. A company could “predict the performance of each supplier, carrier, forwarder, port, lane, road, manufacturing facility, warehouse, etc. within the extended supply chain, under varying conditions,” according to the SCM analytics company Transvoyant.","completion":"In a machine-learning scenario, companies could use historical data about manufacturers and goods to assign suppliers risk scores. Weather, changes in a supplier’s political climate, or economic factors could all reassign risk scores, causing the supply network to automatically reconfigure itself to favor less risky suppliers. It’s a stunning idea: supply-chain networks dynamically rerouting themselves in response to global risk factors, just the way Google Maps sends you down surface streets when the freeway is clogged."}
{"prompt":"This would increase efficiency, but at the cost of making it even more impossible to identify the supplier of your smartphone’s LCD screen. It would aggravate, not alleviate, the problem of selective blindness that’s already so deeply embedded in global supply chains. In reality, the prospect of using machine learning on the manufacturing end of supply chains remains mostly speculative. When a company doesn’t even know the most basic facts about its suppliers, it’s hard to imagine how it would assemble the data necessary to develop efficient machine-learning models.","completion":"But its attraction for SCM specialists is notable, because it points to the kind of visibility that companies are talking about when they call for supply-chain transparency: not the kind of information that would help a consumer see where her candy comes from, but the kind of information that would get it into her hands faster and cheaper."}
{"prompt":"Visibility, in the SCM context, is itself highly selective. Learning To See The challenges are political as well as technical, in other words. And the political challenges are immense. In the absence of real efforts to create democratic oversight of supply chains, we’ve come to see them as operating autonomously—more like natural forces than forces that we’ve created ourselves.","completion":"In 2014, the Guardian reported that Burmese migrants were being forced into slavery to work aboard shrimp boats off the coast of Thailand. According to Logan Kock of Santa Monica Seafood, a large seafood importer, “the supply chain is quite cloudy, especially when it comes from offshore.” I was struck by Kock’s characterization of slavery as somehow climatological: something that can happen to supply chains, not just something that they themselves cause."}
{"prompt":"But Kock was right, supply chains are murky—just in very specific ways. We’ve chosen scale, and the conceptual apparatus to manage it, at the expense of finer-grained knowledge that could make a more just and equitable arrangement possible. When a company like Santa Monica Seafood pleads ignorance of the labor and environmental abuses that plague its supply chains, I find myself inclined to believe it. It’s entirely possible to have an astoundingly effective supply chain while also knowing very little about it. Not only is it possible: it may be the enabling condition of capitalism at a global scale.","completion":"It’s not as though these decentralized networks are inalterable facts of life. They look the way they do because we built them that way. It reminded me of something the anthropologist Anna Tsing has observed about Walmart. Tsing points out that Walmart demands perfect control over certain aspects of its supply chain, like price and delivery times, while at the same time refusing knowledge about other aspects, like labor practices and networks of subcontractors. Tsing wasn’t writing about data, but her point seems to apply just as well to the architecture of SAP’s supply-chain module: shaped as it is by business priorities, the software simply cannot absorb information about labor practices too far down the chain."}
{"prompt":"This peculiar state of knowing-while-not-knowing is not the explicit choice of any individual company but a system that’s grown up to accommodate the variety of goods that we demand, and the speed with which we want them. It’s embedded in software, as well as in the container ships that are globalization’s most visible emblem.","completion":"We know so much about the kinds of things we can get and when we can get them. But aside from the vague notion that our stuff comes from “overseas,” few of us can really pin down the stations of its manufacture. Is a more transparent—and more just—supply chain possible? Maybe. But, as the Chocolonely lawsuit demonstrates, it could mean assimilating a lot of information that companies have become very good at disavowing—a term that, in its Freudian sense, means refusing to see something that might traumatize us."}
{"prompt":"In the future that was imagined during the Obama years, the technology industry was one of the most valiant heroes. As the confetti settled in 2008, Obama was celebrated as the “first internet president.” He was as natural in the medium as Kennedy had been in television. Four years later it was the campaign’s unprecedented data analytics strategy—one which mined personal information on tens of millions of Americans to target its messaging—that was framed as the secret of the president’s re-election.","completion":"Obama was hailed as a modern, progressive figure. He was bringing Silicon Valley innovation into the heart of government. With that smile and those smarts, what could go wrong? Of course, in 2016, everything did go wrong. Hillary Clinton’s precision-guided electioneering efforts came up short. Donald Trump was elected president—thanks to many of the same targeting techniques pioneered by Obama, and a Russian-fed misinformation campaign across Facebook and Twitter. Ever since, Big Tech’s political fortunes have dimmed. It is now at risk of joining the ranks of Big Tobacco, Big Pharma, and Big Oil as a bona fide corporate pariah."}
{"prompt":"Today, a growing number of people are thinking about how to regulate Big Tech. Think tanks are studying the complex interactions between social and technical systems, and proposing ways to make them fairer and more accountable. Journalists are investigating how platforms and algorithms actually function, and what’s at stake for people’s lives.","completion":"But while all of this has been crucial in refocusing the public conversation, it needs to go further. We won’t fix Big Tech with better public policy alone. We also need better language. We need new metaphors, a new discourse, a new set of symbols that illuminate how these companies work, how they are rewiring our world, and how we as a democracy can respond."}
{"prompt":"Imaginary Friends Tech companies themselves are very aware of the importance of language. For years, they have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in Washington and on public relations to preserve control of the narrative around their products. This clearly paid off: media coverage of the industry was largely favorable, until the 2016 election forced journalists to ask much more critical questions. The shift in sentiment has put the industry on the offensive and propelled lobbying spending to new heights, with Google paying out more than any other company in 2017.","completion":"In its public messaging, Facebook describes itself as a “global community,” dedicated to deepening relationships and bringing loved ones closer together. Twitter is “the free speech wing of the free speech party,” where voices from all the world can engage with each other in a free flow of ideas. Google “organizes the world’s information,” serving it up with the benevolence of a librarian."}
{"prompt":"However, in light of the last election and combined market valuations that stretch well into the trillions of dollars, this techno-utopian rhetoric strikes a disingenuous chord. What would a better language look like? Most of the regulatory conversations about platforms try to draw analogies to other forms of media. They compare political advertising on Facebook to political advertising on television, or argue that platforms should be treated like publishers, and bear liability for what they publish. However, there’s something qualitatively different about the scale and the reach of platforms that opens up a genuinely new set of concerns.","completion":"At last count, Facebook had over 200 million users in the United States, meaning that its “community” overlaps to a profound degree with the national community at large. It is on platforms like Facebook where much of our public and private life now takes place. And, as the election makes clear, there is a substantial public interest in how these technologies are used. Their dominance means that a few big companies can determine what free speech and free association look like in these new, privately owned public spheres."}
{"prompt":"The ground upon which politics happens has changed—yet our political language has not kept up. We know that we look at our phones too much and that we’re probably addicted to them. We know that basically every aspect of our life—from our passing curiosities to our most ingrained habits—are recorded in private databases and made valuable through the obscure alchemy of data science.","completion":"But we don’t know how to talk about all of this as a whole or what it really adds up to. We lack a common public vocabulary to express our anxieties and to clearly name what has changed about how we communicate, how we relate to other people, and how we come to have any idea what’s going on in the world in the first place."}
{"prompt":"The work being done by experts, insiders, and policymakers—whether in the form of the EU’s new regulatory regime to govern personal data, the General Data Protection Regulation, or various conversations within the tech community—is necessary but not sufficient. For a durable and democratic response to the power of platforms, we need a shared set of concepts that are rich enough to describe the new realities and imaginative enough to point towards a meaningfully better future.","completion":"The Octopus The biggest insight in George Orwell’s 1984 was not about the role of surveillance in totalitarian regimes, but rather the primacy of language in shaping our sense of reality and our ability to act within it. In the book’s dystopian world, the Party continuously revises the dictionary, removing words as they try to extinguish the expressive potential of language. Their goal is to make it impossible for vague senses of dread and dissatisfaction to find linguistic form and evolve into politically actionable concepts."}
{"prompt":"If you can’t name and describe an injustice, then you will have an extremely difficult time fighting it. Making the world thinkable to a democratic public—and thus empowering them to transform it—is a revolutionary act. In the late nineteenth century, the United States was in a situation similar to today. The rapid rise of industrialization changed the social fabric of the country and concentrated immense power over nearly every facet of the economy in the hands of a few individuals. The first laws to regulate industrial monopolies came on the books in the 1860s to protect farmers from railroad price-gouging, but it wasn’t until 1911 that the federal government used the Sherman Antitrust Act to break up one of the country’s biggest monopolies: Standard Oil.","completion":"In the intervening fifty years, a tremendous amount of political work had to happen. Among other things, this involved broad-based consciousness building: it was essential to get the public to understand how these historically unprecedented industrial monopolies were bad for ordinary people and how to reassert control over them."}
{"prompt":"Political cartoons offered an indispensable tool in this imaginative struggle by providing a rich set of symbols for thinking about the problems with unaccountable and overly centralized corporate power. Frequently pictured in these cartoons were the era’s big industrialists—John Rockefeller, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie—generally pictured as plump in their frock coats, resting comfortably on the backs of the working class while Washington politicians snuggled in their pockets. And the most popular symbol of monopoly was the octopus, its tentacles pulling small-town industry, savings banks, railroads, and Congress itself into its clutches.","completion":"The octopus was a brilliant metaphor. It provided a capacious but simple way to understand the deep interconnection between complex political and economic forces— while viscerally expressing why everyone was feeling so squeezed. It worked at both an analytical and an emotional level: it helped people visualize the hidden relationships that sustained monopoly power, and it cast that power in the form of a fearsome monster. Conveyed as a lively cartoon, its critique immediately connected."}
{"prompt":"Think Different What would today’s octopus look like? In recent years, the alt-right has been particularly effective at minting new symbols that capture big ideas that are difficult to articulate. Chief among them, perhaps, is the “red pill,” which dragged the perception-shifting plot device from The Matrix through the fetid and paranoid misogyny of “men’s rights activist” forums into a politically actionable concept.","completion":"The red pill is a toxic idea, but it is also a powerful one. It provides a new way to talk about how ideology shapes the world and extends an invitation to consider how the world could be radically different. The left, unfortunately, has been lacking in concepts of similar reach. To develop them, we will need a way of talking about Big Tech that is viscerally affecting, that intuitively communicates what these technologies do, and that wrenches open a way to imagine a better future."}
{"prompt":"A hint of where we may find this new political language recently appeared in the form of the White Collar Crime Risk Zones app from The New Inquiry. The app applies the same techniques used in predictive-policing algorithms—profoundly flawed technologies which tend to criminalize being a poor person of color—to white-collar crime.","completion":"Seeing the business districts of Manhattan and San Francisco blaze red, with mugshots of suspects generated from LinkedIn profile photos of largely white professionals, makes its point in short order. It seems absurd—until you realize that it is exactly what happens in poor communities of color, with crushing consequences. What if police started frisking white guys in suits downtown? Much like the political cartoons of the nineteenth century, the White Collar Crime Risk Zones app is effective because it uses the vernacular language of software. It functions as a piece of rhetorical software: it’s not designed to collect data or to sell advertising, but to make an argument. And while software will never be the solution to our political and social problems, it may, to hijack a slogan of Big Tech, at least provide a way to “think different.” A single E. coli placed in a sugary broth will divide into two genetically identical cells in twenty minutes. Another twenty minutes later, those two will grow and divide into four. Give those cells enough broth and room to grow and after about twenty-three hours there will be enough E. coli cells to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool. Wait another twenty hours and the mass of bacteria would equal the volume of the earth. Round it out to forty-eight hours and you’d have a ball of E. coli twenty-two times the size of Jupiter."}
{"prompt":"The scales possible with exponential growth are as incomprehensible as they are impossible. E. coli’s potential for exponential doubling is realized only in the highly controlled environment of a researcher’s test tube, where food is abundant and no other species are in the way. Even then, the time that bacteria can be expected to grow exponentially is inevitably limited—growth slows once nutrients start running low or the cells are too crowded to keep dividing further.","completion":"Biological growth scales to fit its context. There are no gas giants full of identical E. coli. More than one hundred years ago, D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson published On Growth and Form, a treatise on the mathematics of biological growth. In it, he summarizes this central maxim for biological scaling: “The effect of scale depends not on a thing in itself but in relation to its whole environment or milieu; it is in conformity with the thing’s ‘place in Nature,’ its field of action and reaction in the Universe.” Biology’s ability to grow in relation to its environment—to grow ecologically rather than exponentially—is at the heart of what inspires biologists, engineers, and designers to work with organisms to build a new kind of technology. What if our technologies could grow and heal like living things? What if concrete could be set by the metabolism of microbes, any cracks repaired in situ? What if factories were replaced with farms, growing new things that could be recycled back into the soil? What if, as MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito has proposed and further developed in a recent manifesto, “the role of science and technology [in the next hundred years] will be about becoming part of nature rather than trying to control it”? People don’t multiply like E. coli, but put a few people together and you’ll quickly end up with more. Over the scale of millennia we’ve ended up with 7,589,052,176—the mind-boggling number of people on earth today, whose ability to satisfy basic needs for shelter, food, and warmth are always dependent on the availability and distribution of resources."}
{"prompt":"How we’ve grown to this number is a story about the industrial revolution, where the convergence of steam power, chemical development, mechanized production and the ideas revolution of the Age of Enlightenment led to great leaps and bounds in our capacity to create life-giving stuff—and therefore the conditions for populations to multiply. We are currently riding that exponential growth curve, and the UN expects this to peak at 11 billion by the end of the century. Within our current economic framework, that’s 11 billion consumers of life-giving resources, taking from living ecosystems without regard to the environmental milieu. Industrialization has put manufacturing on exponential curves that can be as incomprehensible as the growth of E. coli—and as devastating on a global scale.","completion":"The Re-industrial Revolution Each of the 7,589,052,176 people currently on the planet uses an average of 1700 litres of water every day. This is partly for drinking and washing, but it’s mostly accounted for in the “embedded” water that’s needed to produce everyday products—the food we eat and what it took to grow or rear it, the clothes we wear, or the energy we use."}
{"prompt":"Industry is heavily reliant on water, and demand is expected to increase 400 percent by 2050. The textile industry in particular is a huge consumer and polluter of water: it takes 1083 gallons of water to produce one cotton t-shirt, twenty-six of which are needed for dyeing alone. Overall, textile dyeing uses enough water to fill 2 million Olympic swimming pools every year—a number that will continue to grow as more people buy more clothes and wear them for less time.","completion":"We live on one planet with finite resources and yet our mode of industrial production has managed to mimic the nightmare scenario of a devastating E.coli megaplanet. How might we transform the scale of industry to conform to its place in nature? How can we make technology grow ecologically rather than exponentially? As a biologist (CA) and designer (NAC), we’ve approached the challenge posed by the need to scale technology within the bounds of nature by designing biology itself as the technology. Natsai’s recent work, for example, tries to minimize the amount of water used in textile dyeing, as well as the amount of pollution it produces. By growing a bacteria called Streptomyces coelicolor—a soil microbe that naturally produces pigmented molecules—directly on a textile, a colorfast pink, purple, or blue finish can be achieved without the use of toxic chemical additives. To dye a t-shirt using this method requires just 200 milliliters of water, 500 times less than current industrial techniques."}
{"prompt":"In this way, the bacteria becomes the coauthor in the creation of a new textile design. The designer no longer specifies all the details of the final product, but rather brings together the conditions in which the living process can thrive and create. Adjust the pH, and the color changes from pink to blue. Alter the amount of oxygen or moisture, and the intensity changes. Alter the genetic pathways of the cell, and new colors and conditional patterns can emerge. This notion of co-authorship marks a fundamental paradigm shift for the designer: a new kind of learning to live within one’s means. Rather than the traditional model of specify, procure, and transform, the designer learns to develop outcomes with a living system and within finite biological limits.","completion":"Processes like these point towards the possibility for a new era of biologically derived materiality. Rather than an old industrial model based on extracting resources from nature, they allow us to think about how to re-industrialize according to biology’s ability to grow and scale—to extract nature’s logic, harnessing biological processes for human production."}
{"prompt":"Such a re-industrialization might enable new aesthetic and technical opportunities, from microbially defined patterns to liquid leather. We might imagine microbially enhanced homes, e-readers made from specially engineered leaves, or laptops grown from sawdust and programmable fungus. While these offer inspiring visions for a biological future, achieving this future requires more than just biology. New technology is not enough; the surrounding system has to change as well. Dyeing textiles using bacteria may use much less water and do away with toxic effluent, but the economic imperatives that structure the fashion industry threaten to limit this innovation’s impact. The reality that underpins the fashion industry is a “race to the bottom line” business model, calibrated to sell more units no matter the cost—human or environmental.","completion":"Moreover, when industry does make use of biological methods, the impact is often destructive. Biological manufacturing forced into a culture of industrialization has led to dire ecological consequences (clearcut forests, feedlots) and will only continue to do so if we adopt biological processes without adopting biological constraints. Scaling biology to meet the needs of 7,589,052,176 people therefore requires us to reconsider and redesign more than just what can be encoded in DNA."}
{"prompt":"From Petri Dish to Planet A single E. coli has a volume of about 0.7 cubic micrometers. More than seven trillion densely packed cells can fit into a teaspoon. Accessing the incomprehensible smallness of the molecular scale requires training, techniques, and tricks to bring the microscopic into focus.","completion":"At this laboratory scale, biologists and engineers have designed organisms that can produce medicines, fuels, materials, and chemicals—living, biological sources for all kinds of stuff that today is more likely to come from petrochemical sources. But scaling these processes from the lab into products that people can use has proven challenging. Despite microorganisms’ penchant for exponential growth in the right conditions, adapting these techniques to systems of industrial manufacturing takes much more than placing a cell in a vat and waiting for it to grow."}
{"prompt":"There are the technical challenges posed by the microbes themselves, unwilling to produce what we ask of them. But there are also challenges posed by scaling within the limits of overlapping contexts of ecosystem, economy, society, and planet. Biofuels, for example, are produced from renewable biological sources via bio-industrial processes, but the reality of how land use, government subsidies, fermentation, and the price of oil are entangled in its production mean that the jury is still out on whether biofuels are any better than gasoline when it comes to contributing to climate change.","completion":"Technology, as Ursula M. Franklin notes in The Real World of Technology, “entails far more than its individual material components. Technology involves organization, procedures, symbols, new words, equations, and most of all, a mindset.” A deep understanding of DNA, enzymes, and microbes—the individual material components—is necessary to scaling biological technologies. But so too is an understanding of chemical engineering and process development, environmental science and life cycle analysis, sourcing and supply chain management, economics and market dynamics, politics and regulatory governance, sociocultural forces, consumer needs and perception, product design, and marketing."}
{"prompt":"No one person can see across all these scales, from the molecular to the global. We need organizations and language to bridge scales and disciplines, to work together to achieve the necessary mindset of ecologically bounded technology. For us, that has meant learning how to learn from each other: for a designer to learn to see the microscopic scale and grow bacteria in the lab, and for a biologist to learn to see at the scale of social context. Without the tools to collaborate from petri dish to product to system we run the risk of creating a “disruptive” technology that doesn’t disrupt anything.","completion":"As biological technologies emerge and scale, we must nurture not only the cells in our petri dishes and fermentation vats, but also the people, organizations, and systems that are necessary to grow a new kind of industry, scaled to our planetary context. A truly radical bio-industrial revolution will see the line between pastoral farmlands, biological foundries, and industrial factories completely blurred. In this new revolution, biology becomes both the creator and constrainer of scale, empowering everyone on the planet to live well—within limits."}
{"prompt":"The act of gerrymandering acquired its name in 1812, when Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry approved a state redistricting plan that favored his own party. The partisanship of the map was manifest in the contorted shapes of its districts—one in particular, the story goes, reminded the editor of the Boston Gazette of a salamander, giving rise to a portmanteau that stuck: the gerry-mander.","completion":"The name was new, but the practice was not. By the time the case was making news, gerrymandering had long been an established fact of American politics. Even so, redistricting was a tedious process done entirely by hand. It involved a considerable amount of work: maps had to be drawn and redrawn, demographics had to be tallied and retallied, all within a short timeframe. It also required intricate knowledge of the electorate across the entire state."}
{"prompt":"Digital technology has revolutionized this process. As mathematician Jordan Ellenberg explained in a New York Times op-ed, “Gerrymandering used to be an art, but advanced computation has made it a science.” While drawing districts for partisan gain is an ancient custom in American politics, computers have greatly improved its effectiveness.","completion":"Digital technology has advanced to the point where carrying out a legal, effective, and durable gerrymander may hardly be more difficult that editing a picture in Photoshop. The consequences are troubling. Left unchecked, digital gerrymandering threatens to make competitive elections a thing of the past."}
{"prompt":"Packing and Cracking To understand how gerrymandering works, consider a pile of stones, some blue and some red. You have to group the stones into as many piles of three as possible. But you want to arrange the piles so that blue wins—in other words, you want the maximum number of piles to have a majority of blue stones.","completion":"Suppose the pile has fifteen stones: nine red and six blue. Even though there are more red stones—red has a three-to-two advantage over blue—this is a combination that can nonetheless be grouped into piles of three so that blue has the overall majority. Forming groups of three blue stones must be avoided, for only two stones are required for blue to “win” a pile. Similarly, it is ill-advised to place a blue stone with two red ones: blue does not win that pile, so again a blue stone gets wasted. The optimal solution for a blue victory is to form three piles of two blue stones and one red stone, and two piles of three red stones."}
{"prompt":"This example captures the essence of gerrymandering. The strategies employed even have specific names: “packing” and “cracking.” “Packing” is when you concentrate the other party’s voters in certain districts—putting the red stones into two all-red piles. “Cracking” is when you dilute the other party’s electoral strength by distributing its voters across many districts—scattering the red stones into three blue-majority piles.","completion":"Block Party Whenever you rearrange the stones, you have an opportunity to gerrymander. That happens every ten years, when states draw new Congressional and legislative districts. Redistricting immediately follows each national census, and it is designed to accommodate changing trends in population. A district map is supposed to satisfy several—often conflicting—criteria, such as equal population, stipulations of the Voting Rights Act, respect for city boundaries, and fair representation for “communities of interest”—broadly defined as groups of individuals who have similar legislative concerns."}
{"prompt":"Meeting all of these requirements is highly challenging. As a result, redistricting is ultimately a matter of trial and error. Officials often have to test many different iterations of a district map until they find one with an acceptable approximation of the desired outcome. To conceptualize the redistricting process, imagine that you have a paper map that shows the boundaries of various numerically-labeled “census blocks.” (A census block is the finest level at which census data is reported; in urban areas, it often corresponds to a city block.) You also have at hand the corresponding tabular demographic data—for instance, the race and gender breakdown, or the number of voting-age residents of voting age—referenced by block number.","completion":"Now imagine laying a sheet of tracing paper on top of the base map. On this layer, you are free to trace lines around groups of census blocks to form your own “districts.” You can use the census data tables, and some basic arithmetic, to find the demographic information specific to any given district—say, the number of voting-aged Latina women living there. This is the process of aggregating census data to the district level."}
{"prompt":"Visualizing census data by district is invaluable for drawing legal districts. But a gerrymanderer needs more than just census data—they also need to predict election results by census block. They need to know the color of the stones, in other words. Election results, however, are not reported by census block, and methods of collecting and tabulating election data vary greatly by state.","completion":"The Voting Tabulation District (VTD) is the Census Bureau’s general term for the “unit” at which election data is reported. A VTD might be a voting district, a ward, or a county, depending on the state. Fortunately, these VTDs are themselves built from census blocks, so that the process of integrating this data involves disaggregating the VTD election data into its constituent blocks."}
{"prompt":"Suppose that in a recent election, a VTD has a voting population of 1000. Of those voters, 600 voted for the Red Party, and 400 for Blue. If one census block within the VTD has ten residents of voting age, that block is projected to be worth six red votes and four blue—the same red-to-blue ratio as the entire VTD. If another census block from the same VTD has fifty voting-age residents, it is projected to be worth thirty red votes and twenty blue.","completion":"Repeating this process for every VTD gives each census block in the state its own weights of red and blue votes. This provides an approximation of historical election results at the census block level, which in turn predicts the block’s vote for future elections. The blue-biased gerrymanderer can then group census blocks into districts to maximize the number of projected blue wins, based on the election results that are disaggregated from VTD data."}
{"prompt":"Point and Click Redistricting can be done by hand, but it’s time-consuming and difficult. Fortunately, it’s the sort of task that technology excels at—which is why officials now use standard commercial redistricting software when drawing districts. But the same features that make these applications useful for creating compliant districts are also what make them useful for gerrymandering.","completion":"Since the 2001 redistricting cycle, most states have used a GIS software package called Maptitude to draw their district maps. Maptitude has attracted the attention of state officials with its innovative capacity to handle the Census Bureau’s own digital geographic feature files. It also comes prepackaged with demographic census data, which it easily merges with any other data the user chooses to load into the program. The user then works with a layered map, where each layer corresponds to a different type of feature, such as a road or a political boundary—much like a digital version of the tracing paper scheme used to aggregate census data by hand."}
{"prompt":"Using Maptitude is comparable to using Photoshop. The user chooses a map layer—say, the counties layer. With a few clicks of the cursor over the map, the user selects a particular cluster of counties. The program automatically adds the boundary of the group to the working map layer as a new “district.” Statistics about the new district are instantly calculated from the available data and displayed in a table on the screen.","completion":"With this instant feedback, the user can then make small modifications to the boundary as needed. For instance, if the population of the district is slightly too small, the user can switch to the VTD layer and attach a single VTD to bump up the district size. With software like Maptitude, redistricting becomes significantly easier—and so does gerrymandering."}
{"prompt":"Big Data Gerrymandering Maptitude doesn’t just make it easier to work with census data, however. It also enables users to incorporate data from other sources that might be useful for gerrymandering. After all, in the age of big data, there is a broad spectrum of information available for purchase, some of which is overtly predictive of the voting behavior.","completion":"Credit card purchases can reveal membership in the NRA, regular donations to Planned Parenthood, or subscriptions to the National Review. Geopositioning software on personal devices is becoming more widespread, and often goes unnoticed by users. A geotagged photo taken at a white-supremacist rally, for instance, might reveal important data about that user’s political preferences."}
{"prompt":"All of this information could easily be loaded into Maptitude and used to draw gerrymandered districts. It should be emphasized that the use of this type of commercially available data for the purposes of gerrymandering is, to date, strictly hypothetical. However, so-called “data brokers” are already in the business of packaging vast bundles of data for the purposes of selling it to political parties for campaigns and fundraising. Using it for gerrymandering seems like a natural next step.","completion":"Algorithms used by tech companies to sell advertising already do an excellent job predicting consumer preferences. These same algorithms may be just as effective in predicting political preferences. The abundance of data—and the sophistication of the machine learning models that train on that data—make it possible to detect patterns in human behavior that would otherwise be invisible."}
{"prompt":"It’s not simply that algorithms are getting better at predicting behavior, however. It’s also that voting patterns are getting easier to predict, as the US electorate becomes increasingly polarized. An astonishing 66% of states are currently governed by a “trifecta,” in which both legislative chambers and the governorship are held by the same party—the vast majority by Republicans.","completion":"Trifectas tend to encourage gerrymandering. When a legislature knows the governor is unlikely to veto a district map—as when the map’s bias works in the governor’s favor—public officials are far more likely to attempt a bold gerrymander. This is precisely what happened in Wisconsin in its last redistricting process in 2011, which provoked a legal challenge now before the Supreme Court, Gill v. Whitford."}
{"prompt":"Drawing Better Shapes Wisconsin’s gerrymandered map all but guarantees a permanent Republican majority, even though the state as a whole is evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. As part of their evidence in Gill v. Whitford, the plaintiffs have presented computer simulations that conclude that the map is an unmistakable statistical outlier, strongly suggesting that partisan interests were at play in its design.","completion":"In our current political environment, however, it was not entirely surprising that two Supreme Court justices, including Chief Justice Roberts, dismissed much of the work as “sociological gobbledygook” during oral arguments in October 2017. Stanford professor Jonathan Rodden, contributor to an amicus brief for the case, expressed his frustration to me in an interview: “There are so many things that we can do that are really rigorous and correct. But then you talk to a federal judge and they just look at you like you’re from Mars.” The Supreme Court is expected to issue its ruling in June 2018, and the decision is likely to have significant impact on the future of gerrymandering. But Rodden suspects that the outcome of the Wisconsin case is not as earthshaking as some observers would like to believe. The courts aren’t a silver bullet when it comes to cracking down on gerrymandering—rather, different political approaches are needed."}
{"prompt":"For states that hold referenda, it may be possible to put measures on the ballot that hand the task of drawing districts to an independent commission. This was the path that California ultimately took to address its gerrymandering problem, a move widely acknowledged to have been successful. The state of Florida passed an amendment making gerrymandering explicitly unconstitutional, and it has been used to disqualify a biased district map.","completion":"But any enduring solution will require sustained civic engagement. You can’t force politicians to stop drawing maps that help them get elected without building popular pressure from below. Maimuna Majumder, a graduate student at MIT and computational epidemiology research fellow at HealthMap, has observed a negative correlation between gerrymandering awareness and the presence of gerrymandering across the United States. The more people know about gerrymandering, in other words, the less it happens."}
{"prompt":"That creates a sense of urgency when it comes to raising awareness—particularly as gerrymandering becomes more effective with ever more granular data and ever more predictive algorithms. Our democracy depends on it. Everyone knows what gentrification looks like. Community gathering places are replaced by boutiques and bank branches. Corner stores are made obsolete by VC-funded vending machine startups. Blocks that spent decades in a state of disrepair sprout Michelin-starred bistros and cocktail bars—some even trading on the allure of formerly stigmatized neighborhoods with Instagram-ready touches like fake bullet holes and 40-ounce bottles of rosé wine.","completion":"These new businesses don’t just reflect gentrification, of course. They actively drive it. Take New York City’s SoHo neighborhood: sociologist Sharon Zukin has described how art galleries and live-work spaces displaced industry from Lower Manhattan and paved the way for luxury residences for non-artists. Or Dumbo: in the late 1970s, real estate developer David Walentas came up for the idea of redeveloping a quiet corner of the Brooklyn waterfront while eating in the area’s lone gourmet restaurant."}
{"prompt":"In recent years, however, technology has accelerated this dynamic. Upscale consumption spaces have always been engines of gentrification. What’s new is how these spaces increasingly attract customers beyond their immediate surroundings: through “location-based services” (LBS), a genre of smartphone and web applications that filter digital information about the world through a user’s spatial coordinates.","completion":"Apps like Yelp and Foursquare are not just tools for finding cafes and restaurants in gentrifying neighborhoods, in other words. By making new establishments more visible to upper-income patrons in other parts of the city, LBS are transforming those neighborhoods in very direct ways. Everyone’s a Critic Cities have evolved in tandem with text and image-based information systems designed to help overwhelmed residents choose among competing options for consumption. To take one example, annual publications of business information like the Yellow Pages have existed since the 1880s. But digital technology adds unprecedented speed and precision to this process. Today, companies like Foursquare, Yelp, and TripAdvisor offer continuously updated lists of businesses and attractions with extraordinary specificity."}
{"prompt":"You can find Polish restaurants that take American Express, dog-friendly hotels near Lake Tahoe, and bilingual Mandarin-English notaries. By speeding up the flow of information, LBS turn cities into what mainstream economists consider more “efficient” markets, tightening the connections between critical evaluation and real estate value in a process that can help accelerate gentrification.","completion":"Imagine moving to New York City or London in 1970 and deciding where to spend your free time. Most of your knowledge of the urban scene would come from personal experience, conversations with friends, family, and coworkers, or via articles, reviews, and ads in newspapers or magazines like New York or Time Out. If a new restaurant or art gallery opened elsewhere in the city, your likelihood of finding out about it would be limited by the publication schedule and capacity of the local media; many smaller establishments would never be “newsworthy.” This is precisely the problem that Manhattan lawyers Tim and Nina Zagat wanted to solve in the late 1970s, when they asked their friends and colleagues in New York’s rapidly expanding professional services sector to rate various restaurants in the city. After being passed around among thousands of Citibank employees like samizdat literature for yuppies, the Zagats turned their survey into a wildly popular retail guidebook, ultimately expanding to over seventy cities. Rather than using professional dining critics, the Zagat Survey drew its judgments from hundreds of thousands of individual diners. This amateur contributor pool fed data into the company, which synthesized it into statistical averages that they sold in pocket-sized books by the millions."}
{"prompt":"Zagat’s crowdsourcing model represented a major innovation for urban information systems—but it would take digital technology to realize its full potential. The Location Layer In 2009, serial entrepreneur Dennis Crowley founded one of the most popular contemporary LBS: Foursquare. Early in his career, Crowley had worked as a software developer for a company that licensed Zagat’s reviews for PalmPilot mobile devices in the first dot-com boom, and he sold his first company, an early LBS prototype based on text messages called Dodgeball, to Google in 2005.","completion":"Working with data from Zagat and other publishers gave Crowley an idea. He saw the potential for dynamically updated reviews from mobile devices, contributed by users distributed throughout the city. While Zagat crowdsourced data from diners once a year, Crowley would let them weigh in on their phones in real time."}
{"prompt":"With smartphones, a new level of scale became possible. The number of users contributing data could be far greater than anything imagined by Tim and Nina Zagat—and the sheer volume of that data could be greater as well. Mobile devices also added a spatial element: users could constantly broadcast their location, enabling more geographically specific interactions.","completion":"The current culmination of Crowley’s efforts is Foursquare City Guide, a mobile app that provides personalized recommendations based on a user’s location and past interests. These recommendations are themselves sourced from other users, in the form of venue ratings and reviews. The company touts its use of machine learning to sort through all this information and match users with venues. Foursquare might recommend a particular coffee shop to you not just because it’s nearby and highly rated, in other words, but because the algorithm believes you will like it—based on your demographic profile, your clickstream of past likes, the time of day, and so on."}
{"prompt":"The scale is impressive. Formerly, Foursquare enabled users to “check in” to a particular location—essentially telling the app, “I am here.” Since Foursquare’s launch in 2009, users have performed 12 billion of these check-ins across over 8 million unique locations. But the company no longer needs users to announce their location—Foursquare has the technology to track users through GPS coordinates, cell towers, and Wi-Fi signals. Simply by walking around with a smartphone, the Foursquare user makes the company’s multidimensional map of urban space incrementally more useful.","completion":"The ultimate goal, Crowley says, is to create the “location layer of the internet.” He wants to “crawl the world with people in the same way that Google crawls web pages with machines.” Just as Google crawls the web in order to organize it for use, Foursquare crawls the city in order to organize it for consumption."}
{"prompt":"Serfs Up But there’s a crucial distinction: whereas Google’s crawling is automated, Foursquare’s is performed by actual humans—a fact that LBS companies tend to downplay. A lot of the hype around urban information systems centers on “artificial intelligence”: the ability for companies like Foursquare to seamlessly guide you to relevant places and products. But as danah boyd and Kate Crawford, among others, have pointed out regarding “big data” more broadly, these apps actually derive their value from a vast stockpile of human labor.","completion":"And, as with any labor pool, some workers are more valuable than others. Certain Foursquare users are more passive in their interactions with the app; others actively contribute ratings and reviews, and check in to new businesses using Foursquare’s “lifelogging” app Swarm to keep the company’s data current. According to Foursquare’s own promotional material, this population of “superusers” is only 43,000. But this relatively small cohort, performing what Tiziana Terranova calls the “free labor” undergirding the online economy, produces a large portion of the company’s value."}
{"prompt":"The aggregate product of all this labor is extremely valuable for Foursquare’s advertisers and investors, at least in theory. The company is reportedly on track to hit $100 million in annual revenue in 2018, and its 2016 fundraising round gave it a valuation of $325 million. By industry standards, this isn’t even particularly high: its rival Yelp, which is publicly traded, has a market capitalization of over $3.5 billion. Google purchased Zagat in 2011 for $151 million, after infamously failing to acquire Yelp, and both Apple and Facebook have their own proprietary ratings of real-world businesses.","completion":"Schrödinger’s Latte Power users and reviewers don’t just create value for companies like Foursquare, however. Their labor also enriches the developers, brokers, landlords, and small business owners that profit from the gentrification of urban space. That’s because LBS don’t just measure and map the city—they transform it."}
{"prompt":"By making it easier for urbanites to search for gluten-free pasta or private room karaoke, businesses can draw an audience from farther afield, especially in conjunction with the rise of ridesharing services like Lyft and Uber that efficiently ferry well-heeled patrons around the city. And by opening up a “long tail” of establishments for review, LBS enable even the humblest coffee shops to have thousands of reviews.","completion":"If one of these coffee shops becomes popular, it can have significant consequences for surrounding real estate values. In a capitalist real estate system in which property values reflect both scarcity and desirability, changes in a neighborhood’s amenities are quickly reflected in rising housing prices. Real estate brokers understand this dynamic, and actively cultivate it. In places like Harlem, they have even opened their own cafes in order to expand the gentrification frontier to areas where they have listings."}
{"prompt":"Brokers often enlist LBS directly to sell particular neighborhoods. Online real estate listings include “Walk Score” ratings calculating nearby amenities using LBS data. Real estate platforms like Trulia directly incorporate Yelp data into their listings pages. These digital urban information systems, then, don’t just gentrify neighborhoods by funneling customers to upscale establishments. They also provide a valuable source of data to the brokers who hope to convert those customers into residents.","completion":"Brunching While Rome Burns Crawling the city is lucrative for technology companies, the real estate industry, and other beneficiaries of gentrification. But what happens when the users who crawl the city can no longer afford to live there? What happens when services like Foursquare and Yelp lose their labor supply? The long-term profitability of these companies is threatened by the growing impoverishment of their key user base: urban millennials. Squeezed by stagnant wage growth and sky-high housing prices, both lambasted for their thrift and shamed for small indulgences like avocado toast, this cohort’s ability to generate new data and justify advertising campaigns is crucial to the location data economy. And while LBS founders and investors skew predictably straight, white, and male, prolific Yelp users in cities like New York and San Francisco are more likely to identify as female and Asian-American, facing a double bind of discrimination despite educational credentials well above average."}
{"prompt":"By willingly serving up ratings, reviews, and brunch photos to brutally efficient urban housing markets, millennials are turning prestige into price, collaborating in making their cities uninhabitable. A recent Twitter ad for Foursquare Swarm aims to appeal to users who are “constantly traveling.” To a user who responded, “I wish I could afford to travel,” the company replied, “exploring can be as close to home as walking a new way to work or checking out a neighborhood nearby!” But even this attenuated form of travel may no longer be feasible in the near future. This is the final irony of LBS: the users who sustain these platforms are working hard to evict themselves from the cities they’re mapping for free. Just as their labor helped fuel the market dynamics that pushed people out of gentrifying neighborhoods, they will themselves be pushed out as values climb higher. The volunteer crawlers may eventually crawl themselves right out of town.","completion":"Technology alone isn’t silencing our languages. But it won’t single-handedly save them either. At first it seemed like the internet would reinforce the dominance of “killer languages” like English, Spanish, and Chinese. Then came the hope, in the last few years, that the internet might make room for a multitude of smaller languages. Maybe the virtual world, as it grew ever more oral and bottom-up, would become as deeply, humanly diverse as the physical one."}
{"prompt":"Now a more muddled, sobering picture is coming into view. As a handful of platforms come to dominate the internet, consolidation and commercialization are putting limits on linguistic variety. Google’s claim to “organize the world’s information” and Facebook’s bluster about “bringing the world closer together” ring hollow when these things only happen in around 5 percent of the world’s languages.","completion":"At the edges, or in the interstices, of the official, searchable internet—that’s where the languages are. Click away from the shiny, texty, corporate pages where at most just a few hundred languages flourish, the biggest handful way out in front, and you can chase traces of the world’s actual, vanishing linguistic diversity, some 7,000 languages deep."}
{"prompt":"How that diversity holds up in the face of new and evolving technologies will depend on their design (how they handle orality, for instance), their architecture (e.g. how open they are), and on the efforts of individuals and communities. Smaller languages and cultures stand a chance if they can organize, muster a critical mass of users, reproduce, and meet and mingle with other cultures on an equal footing.","completion":"Not just online, but offline too—where urbanization, analogous to the ingathering of the internet, is challenging the assumption that smaller cultures need isolation to survive. Today’s internet, likewise, is a clamorous site of last-minute linguistic life and death: a “Babel in reverse.” Groups don’t need to wall themselves off—hardly possible now anyway—in order to preserve and develop their heritage. But they do need rights, resources, and respect to manage the transition from traditional territories to diasporic possibilities."}
{"prompt":"Tearing Down the Tower of Babel, Again At the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA), physical and digital diasporas are our point of departure. Our home base of New York City, with up to 800 languages spoken in the metropolitan area, is the most linguistically diverse place in the history of the world—precisely and paradoxically at the moment when more and more languages are disappearing.","completion":"To take one example, as many as one-fifth of the world’s languages originate in the greater Himalayan region that stretches from northern Pakistan across to Vietnam. Within two generations, fueled by the occupation of Tibet, climate change, and diminishing economic opportunities, a new Himalayan diaspora has taken shape. This diaspora is increasingly digital and urban, rooted in cities like Kathmandu, Dharamsala, Delhi, and New York."}
{"prompt":"Speakers of Himalayan languages—who also use the English, Nepali, Tibetan, Hindi, or Chinese internets—are forming their own WeChat and Viber groups, hundreds of members strong, making room for local, oral vernaculars like Amdo Tibetan, Sherpa, and Mustangi. They are creating projects like ELA’s Voices of the Himalayas, a series of oral history videos watched across the diaspora, featuring a dozen Himalayan languages rarely seen or heard online before.","completion":"Crucial, along with the spread of smartphones and social media, is the new ease of recording and sending audio messages, sometimes video too, within group text streams. Most of the world’s languages were traditionally oral and unwritten. Many still have no script, but the newly widespread literacy in larger languages and the ease of texting are prompting more and more speakers of endangered languages to experiment with writing their languages. Some have started battling with ICANN, Unicode, Microsoft, and the like—the gatekeeping language academies of the digital age—to support non-Latin scripts."}
{"prompt":"Remixing, reusing, and readapting dominant-culture content is another major strategy for smaller languages, accelerated by the web. A whole universe of diasporic digital media now exists online: Tom and Jerry cartoons dubbed into otherwise invisible Chinese languages; Seinfeld in Yiddish; online television in Inuktitut, a major Inuit language; scenes from Troy, Titanic, and other Hollywood blockbusters, mischievously and hilariously voiced-over in southern Italian “dialects” very different from the Tuscan-based standard. (“Troy in Altamurano” has over 430,000 views; the town of Altamura has just over 70,000 inhabitants.) YouTube alone, if you know what to look for, contains the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand languages. But it remains a long road from those phone-captured fragments and remixed movies to what sociolinguists call a whole new language “domain”—especially at a time when smaller languages are ceaselessly ceding traditional domains like work, education, and religion to larger languages.","completion":"Maybe the Apps Will Save Us While threatened but still vital languages, concentrated in the Global South, wage a grassroots digital struggle to be heard, languages on the brink or already silent—concentrated in North America, Europe, and Australia—are counting on a tech-led resurrection from above. “Can an App Save an Ancient Language?” “Can a Podcast Revitalize an Endangered Language?” “Video Game Offers New Life to Ancient Indigenous Language”—these are constant headlines now: positive but counterintuitive, dramatic but non-threatening. Linguists, teachers, and activists, many now employed by tribes and communities, share tools in forums like the Indigenous Languages and Technology (ILAT) listserv run by Phil Cash Cash, a scholar and speaker of Nez Perce from northeastern Oregon. Tribes like the Chickasaw Nation, headquartered in Ada, Oklahoma, are creating sophisticated iPhone and Android apps that aim to preserve the Chickasaw language by teaching the alphabet, along with basic words and phrases, and providing recordings of the remaining native speakers."}
{"prompt":"In parallel, beginning in the 1990s, many academic linguists—awakening to the disappearance of the very basis of their field—began a substantial push to document smaller languages. One driving force was the availability, for the first time, of relatively cheap, portable, and easy-to use video and audio equipment capable of producing archive-quality recordings. Gathered primarily for academic purposes in digital repositories like the Endangered Languages Archive and Documentation of Endangered Languages (DOBES) collection, these represent a significant but largely frozen legacy, aimed as much at tomorrow as today.","completion":"They may be online, but most of the corpora gathered by linguists in the field, like the peoples whose voices they represent, are still too small, poor, and particular to interest the likes of Google and Facebook. Smaller languages may only have whatever material one linguist, often a graduate student, can muster on a short-term grant. How accessible such recordings can or should be on the wider internet remains an open question, where communities differ."}
{"prompt":"By contrast, big languages have big corpora: annotated text collections gathered by governments, companies, or researchers that allow for all sorts of data analysis. Google Ngram Viewer, for instance, lets users search printed sources over time in a dozen larger languages, like English, Chinese, and Spanish. New technologies and platforms, dependent on capital under the current system, are inevitably developed with big markets, communities, and languages in mind, leaving language activists to push their way up through the digital cracks.","completion":"Do Androids Dream of Small Languages? Dreams of a magic bullet for languages persist, from Douglas Adams’ “Babel fish” to the real-time translation promised by Google’s new Pixel Buds. Online language teaching, universal machine translation, enhanced voice recognition—these are just a handful of possible cyborgian fantasies. Nor is it unthinkable that new techniques of capture and simulation through technologies like virtual reality could make the past effectively eternally present, in some kind of linguistic parallel to the push for indefinite life extension, cloning, and the de-extinction of biological species. The annihilation of space by time may be followed by the annihilation of time altogether—and the past, as we’ve traditionally known it."}
{"prompt":"In the meantime, there is the risk that futurist fantasies will distract us from developing strategies grounded in the everyday lives of communities of speakers, especially the smallest and most threatened. Any tool not integrated with daily, oral use in families and communities is likely to remain a symbolic gesture—a morale boost, rather than a true linguistic revival. No technology developed so far can rival the intensive, unsung process of language transmission that takes place between adults and young children, almost always at home.","completion":"More dangerously, a magic-bullet mindset might make us misconstrue what language is all about. It has always fallen to people—through extensive and unending efforts of understanding and translation—to sustain the age-old ecology of difference that lies behind the real richness of the world’s information and the world’s relationships. If language is prototypically lived through densely contextualized meanings unfolding spontaneously and dialogically in real time, it is hard to see how any device, however fantastical, could be more than “merely one element in a transient flux of compulsory and disposable products”, as Jonathan Crary puts it. Meaning would be flattened, and what would remain is just metabolism: “how the rhythms, speeds, and formats of accelerated and intensified consumption are reshaping experience and perception,” as Crary writes."}
{"prompt":"Subcultures, speaking chosen dialects, will still flourish online, as they do in cities. But the future of cultures—rooted in history and mostly passed down in families, anchored in distinctive value systems and long-term lifeways—is still up in the air. More deeply different, they are also much more of a threat to any kind of hegemony. This is why we need them, now more than ever. Coding languages are not human languages, which are still an intricate index, after all, of the time that people spend with other people.","completion":"Climate is anything but democratic. Agriculture is tied to place. Grapes thrive in the hot winds of Napa Valley while coffee requires the consistent humidity of the equatorial zone. Olive trees are abundant in Spain; cloudberries thrive across the Arctic zone, and nowhere else. Climate change is making climate even less democratic. It amplifies the polarity and raises the stakes. Farmers in Jordan suffer from increasingly saline soils while Alsatian vintners fret over what warmer temperatures mean for their vines. California, subject to alternating periods of drought and flooding, produces over a third of the vegetables and more than half of the fruits and nuts that Americans eat."}
{"prompt":"The need to overcome these environmental challenges has only bolstered our existing, highly globalized food system. States import and export goods in attempt to feed populations and stabilize their own economies. The “food miles” add up; the emissions accumulate. Corporations reap incredible profits in the process.","completion":"And nevertheless, global hunger is rising. People are moving into cities at unprecedented rates. Farmers are aging out of the business worldwide. The corporations that control much of the food supply continue to consolidate. Given these pressures, a set of entrepreneurs want to build a climate-agnostic form of agriculture. What if you could grow avocados in Jordan and olives in the Arctic? Deploying the latest developments in automation, machine learning, and computer vision, these high-tech food startups grow indoors, nourishing plants through hydroponic or aeroponic systems and rhythmic exposure to LED light."}
{"prompt":"As is standard in the commercial technology and agricultural industries, the companies don’t disclose their methods. From hardware to plant research to data standards, proprietary and defensible intellectual property forms the backbone of their businesses. But over the past few years, an initiative based at the MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts has started sowing the seeds of a different sort of indoor agricultural revolution—one built on open-source hardware and software.","completion":"Agriculture Wants To Be Free The Open Agriculture—or “OpenAg”—ecosystem consists of three parts. The Open Agriculture Foundation protects licenses and manages a community of “#nerdfarmers,” as OpenAg practitioners are called. The Open Agriculture Initiative conducts research and partners with universities—currently Chiba University in Japan and Can Tho University in Vietnam. And Fenome, a startup, is attempting to commercialize OpenAg’s signature product: an open-source “personal food computer.” The project started in earnest in 2015 when Caleb Harper hacked together the first personal food computer with a team of researchers. An architect by training who grew up tinkering with computers, Harper turned to indoor farming following a trip to Japan. There, he saw a plant factory: an immense facility growing tons and tons of greens. Something clicked: the prospect of growing large volumes of produce in a country that imports a significant percentage of its food supply looked like a way to democratize climate."}
{"prompt":"Back home in the United States, several companies were already at work on commercial indoor farms similar to what Harper had seen in Japan. But his proposition was different: he wanted to create a network of semi-automated indoor farms that ran on an open-source platform. The farms would range in scale from small units the size of a mini-fridge to warehouses outfitted with plant towers.","completion":"Over the next two years, Harper scaled his experiment into a global community of horticulturalists, mechanical engineers, plant scientists, teachers, and hackers committed to the idea of open agriculture. Like any open-source community, OpenAg enthusiasts swap hardware specs and software code on GitHub, and trade troubleshooting tips on an online forum."}
{"prompt":"But they’re not just hobbyists— they’re crusaders. Instead of highly centralized industrial farms run by Big Ag, they envision a radically decentralized network of customizable farms. They want to give everyone the power to grow anything anywhere. Personal Food Computing The most basic unit of food computing is the personal food computer, now in its 2.1 edition. It consists of a plastic container affixed to a metal frame outfitted with sensors, microcomputers, lights, and electrical wiring. The machine grows plants in a tub similar to what cafes use to collect dirty dishes. A floating styrofoam tray fits snugly inside and has evenly spaced holes where the plants grow.","completion":"The tub itself holds water treated with the nutrients and fertilizers best suited to the crop. Some #nerdfarmers outfit their food computers with aeroponics—a system that uses nutrient-dense mist rather than water. An outer shell made of clear acrylic encases the entire box, creating a controlled environment. An array of LEDs affixed to the top of the box delivers light to the plants."}
{"prompt":"Two printed circuit boards form “the brain.” A Raspberry Pi microcomputer hosts the software that allows a farmer/user to control the system from a computer, while an Arduino microcontroller links to the temperature, humidity, pH, and CO2 sensors that collect data about the environment. Let’s say you want to grow arugula from seedlings. You load a “climate recipe” onto the Raspberry Pi that consists of many lines of code. The personal food computer interprets this code, and adjusts the lighting, humidity, temperature, pH, nutrient levels, and CO2 to the appropriate levels: \"air_temperature\": [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 17, \"value\": 21.1}, {\"start_time\": 17, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 15.6}], “water_potential_hydrogen”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 6}], “air_flush”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 3}], “nutrient_flora_duo_a”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 10}], “nutrient_flora_duo_b”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 10}], “light_intensity_red”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 17, \"value\": 1}, {\"start_time\": 17, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 0}], “light_intensity_white”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 17, \"value\": 1}, {\"start_time\": 17, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 0}], “light_intensity_blue”: [ {\"start_time\": 0, \"end_time\": 17, \"value\": 1}, {\"start_time\": 17, \"end_time\": 24, \"value\": 0}] Arugula is only one example. The machine could grow anything, although like the rest of the indoor farming community #nerdfarmers tend to focus on crops with short growth cycles and high value propositions. The less plant you have to grow to get the end product, the more efficient the system. And efficiency is important because the machine isn’t cheap: in all, a personal food computer costs between $3000 and $5000 to build.","completion":"The #nerdfarmers I spoke to see personal food computers as a way to bring crop cultivation back to where people live and reduce the distance between farm and table. Everyone I spoke to lives in a city, and by and large, they recognize the current limitations of OpenAg. We aren’t going to see amber fields of grain enclosed in a warehouse-sized “food data center” anytime soon."}
{"prompt":"That’s because the technology is still fairly primitive. Dan Nelson was among the first people to build a personal food computer from the published plans. He works out of AgTech X, a coworking space in Brooklyn for entrepreneurs in agricultural technology. He described the GitHub instructions as “terrible.” And he isn’t much more optimistic about the machine’s latest version: “I think it’s totally inaccessible and totally unaffordable for the overwhelming majority of people who aren’t doing it in a research context,” he said.","completion":"It’s inefficient to grow anything except leafy greens. The economics are wildly bad. Still, #nerdfarmers see the personal food computer as an important first step: not a wholesale solution to a broken food system, but a useful teaching tool, and a modest opening salvo in the battle to wrest control of agriculture from Big Ag."}
{"prompt":"Through the forum, Nelson met Peter Webb, who lives in St. Louis. Webb almost discovered the OpenAg community too late. He wanted to build a machine that grew food. So he scoured the internet for guidelines, parts, and advice. His research took him into the depths of the hydroponic cannabis industry: most of the material he found online focused on equipment for growing weed. The parts were priced accordingly—up to $1000 for LED lights, several hundred dollars for grow tents, $100 for reservoirs.","completion":"Spending thousands of dollars to grow weed might be worth it. But spending that amount of money to grow a tomato plant, as Webb put it, is simply not sustainable. Working from his bedroom, without institutional support or corporate research dollars, he put months into creating a prototype for an open-source build-your-own-hydroponic-farm kit without any knowledge of the MIT project. He listed ten of them for sale on eBay, but none sold."}
{"prompt":"Not long after, Webb found out about OpenAg, and he burst into tears. “Within two months I went from being totally alone, a crazy kid in a closet to having 1000 people on the forum, to having a community of people.” Webb connected with Harper, and he now leads a team that is developing designs for a cheaper, leaner food computer. The current prototype costs only about $300 to build, and uses lower-cost materials: mylar and PVC piping instead of metal frames and sheets of acrylic. Moreover, it’s simpler. The personal food computer has 152 unique parts; Webb’s version has thirty-one. This also means fewer aspects of the machine are automated, which means more work for the user.","completion":"Big Data Farming You need efficient hardware to grow food indoors, but both #nerdfarmers and agtech entrepreneurs recognize that the true value lies in the software and the data. “No company is going to get millions of dollars for anything other than proprietary algorithms and data,” Webb said. But the indoor farming industry is still young—by and large, it lacks standards, said Allison Kopf, the founder of Agrilyst, a software company for indoor growers. The pressure that venture capital investors put on startups to protect their intellectual property is counterproductive, she thinks. “It would be hugely beneficial to the industry as a whole if everyone could sit down and say how do we develop these standards from climate devices to software.” From hardware to software, the industry needs a playbook, and OpenAg could help build that. The open-source community could develop a common set of standards, practices, and source code that startups might use to build their businesses."}
{"prompt":"One example is climate recipes, the source code of OpenAg. In the past year, the MIT team has honed in on how to write these recipes, but the community hasn’t seen much of that research yet. Harper has posted about partnerships with AI firms and doubled down on phenotypic research—which involves learning how to put environmental stress on basil plants in order to produce particular traits. But the dream of the Open Phenome project—a public database full of climate recipes that anyone can download onto their personal food computer—is some ways off.","completion":"Data is another weak point. The data that personal food computers collect, Webb said, doesn’t easily translate into meaningful plant science metrics. It’s fine to measure CO2 levels, temperature, and humidity, but without a clear understanding of how those influence the biomass of plants, the information isn’t all that valuable. A climate recipe should ultimately clarify the details of output and yield. “There is this disconnect between open field plant science and this controlled environment agriculture,” Webb said."}
{"prompt":"He often thinks about Monsanto, where his dad worked: although anything but open-source, the company has mastered the art of data collection. Its extensive laboratory research on corn and soy has given it an enormous competitive advantage. For digitized agriculture to fulfill its potential, it has to follow Monsanto’s lead on data. It must standardize how it gathers information, and develop a process for converting that information into knowledge that improves the growing process. If and when OpenAg hacks its way to a platform where users can post and exchange climate recipes, the open-source model could prove a valuable tool for commercial ventures—much as Linux, Apache, and countless other projects have for the tech industry.","completion":"Open-Source Capitalism For all its idealism about disrupting Big Ag, OpenAg may ultimately help strengthen it—or reproduce it in a different form. Just because open-source projects give their source code away for free doesn’t mean they aren’t immensely useful for commercial enterprises. Today’s tech giants rely heavily on open-source projects."}
{"prompt":"The question, then, isn’t whether OpenAg will benefit business, but which businesses will benefit. Will traditional Big Ag companies like Monsanto embrace OpenAg research and development? Or is it more likely that we’ll see tech companies move into the space? It’s too soon to know, but the signs seem to point towards tech. Already, the indoor farming industry has modeled itself more after tech companies than after agricultural ones. SoftBank’s Vision Fund—the world’s largest corporate venture fund—made the single biggest investment in agtech on record in Plenty, a vertical farming company based in South San Francisco. Jeff Bezos’s personal venture fund also invested in Plenty—a significant gesture, perhaps, given Amazon’s recent acquisition of Whole Foods.","completion":"It’s possible to picture OpenAg becoming big business in the near future. Imagine an Amazon warehouse that not only stocked toilet paper and televisions, but grew broccoli and lettuce—and sent you any of the above in the mail. “A suite of production technologies can simultaneously embody radical ideals of cooperation, freedom, and social change and be an ever more widely embraced model of capitalist software production,” write Samir Chopra and Scott Dexter in their paper, “The Political Economy of Open Source Software.” The same is true of OpenAg: developing shared networks of agricultural knowledge can embody utopian ideals even if it serves to retrench industry."}
{"prompt":"When farmers, like software developers, have the right to modify and alter their code, everyone benefits. The #nerdfarmers vision of a radically decentralized digital food system isn’t likely to prevail over the deeper pockets of the closed-source community, but the work still matters. Linux is better than Windows, and farmers have long fought to preserve their rights to “open-source” methods from sharing seeds to cultivating common lands. As we race towards a digital future of food, the ability to freely adopt and adapt technology amounts to a small yet fertile plot for resistance.","completion":"1. Ever tried. Ever failed. Fail again. Fail better. Growing old in Paris, the Irish writer Samuel Beckett could never have expected this fragment to become a tech industry mantra. But it has, and with good reason: The success of Silicon Valley is built on failure. This may be its greatest innovation. The region broke ahead of its rivals because it encouraged people to take big risks and did not punish them when those risks did not pay off."}
{"prompt":"At one level, this forgiving attitude reflected the influence of Bay Area hippies who shaped tech culture from the beginning. At another, it reflected the rise of new funding models. Early venture capitalists embraced risk rather than avoiding it; they expected most of the companies they invested in to fail. The failures did not matter, so long as the few that did succeed succeeded big.","completion":"The rise of software and, later, the web, made it possible to succeed at a whole new scale. This in turn enabled investors to tolerate more and bigger losses, because when the moonshot landed, the returns were astronomical. When you found the right product-market fit, you could eat the world, fast. In the meantime, with companies appearing and disappearing so quickly, people had an interest in staying friends, in sharing expertise, in going to Burning Man together."}
{"prompt":"Not everyone gets invited to the caravan, of course. To get funded, it still helps to be white, to be cis, to be male, to have been admitted to Stanford, and even completed a course or two, before dropping out to raise your Series A. While some people can only fail up, others fail out, and many never get a chance to try at all. It also helps to be young—or, as the saying goes, to “have a lot of runway.” Don’t trust anyone over thirty used to be a political slogan. Now it’s a business strategy.","completion":"Above all, to fail well, you must undertake a certain type of endeavor: A startup that could scale massively. A sandwich shop that fails was a bad idea. A sandwich delivery app that fails was a valuable learning experience for its founders; the market timing just wasn’t quite right. Struggling taxi companies are in terminal decline, but a ride-hailing app that loses two billion dollars per year is one of the most successful companies in the world."}
{"prompt":"This model of success may seem strange, when seen from Mars. But for the people to whom it is available, tolerance for failure is one of the best qualities of Silicon Valley. Letting people try things that might not work really does stimulate creativity. It fosters a respect for hard problems, and collaborating on those problems creates a sense of community. The course of true innovation never did run smooth.","completion":"2. If Silicon Valley is built on failure, it is also built on stories about failure. Once upon a time, a Reed College dropout got fired from the company he founded, then came back more than a decade later to invent the iPod and iPhone. A UCLA dropout started a company that declared bankruptcy to avoid lawsuits, started another company where he committed tax fraud, moved in with his parents to save money, moved to Thailand to save money, then came back and cofounded Uber."}
{"prompt":"Travis Kalanick told this story at FailCon, a one-day conference started in 2009 in San Francisco to teach startup founders to “learn from and prepare for failure, so they can iterate and grow fast.” Since then, it has become so common for entrepreneurs to talk about their failures in public and in long Medium posts that FailCon itself started failing to attract the audience it once did. So the founder has licensed the brand in “over a dozen cities on six continents.” You can attend FailCon in Ulaanbaatar. You can attend FailCon in Porto Alegre.","completion":"You go to learn the conventions of a genre. There are many ways to fail: go bankrupt, get acquired, get acqui-hired. To fail well, however, you have to get your story straight. A good founder story always describes failure without bitterness. It has been an incredible journey. I learned a ton. It presents every failure as temporary—a waystation to success."}
{"prompt":"Storytelling is not only for founders. It is a skill that everyone at a startup should cultivate, because the vast majority of startups will fail. And when you suddenly learn that you are out of work and all that equity you pulled all those all-nighters to earn is worthless, no job interviewer will want to hear that you got screwed over. They want to hear how you grew.","completion":"Even if you do get hired at one of the biggest tech companies, the risk of failure does not go away. On the contrary, a funny thing happens: the more successful the company becomes, the higher the bar for any internal project to be considered successful. If you build a startup that gets ten thousand users, you could sell that startup for seven figures. But once you work at a platform with billions of users, if you design a feature that only a few million use, your bosses will shake their heads and shut it down."}
{"prompt":"If something you spent years working on fails, you do not just need a story to tell your current or future employers; you need a story to tell yourself. You want to be able see those years as part of an incredible journey, too. 3. Silicon Valley tells itself one set of stories about failure. It has another story that it tells everyone else. Namely, that the old world has failed. The old world was analog: government bureaucrats, boring businesses, factory jobs, gray flannel suits. The new world is flexible, Technicolor, gymnastic, young. It has no dress code. It is neither white-collar nor blue-collar: it wears no collars at all.","completion":"In the new world, everyone will live a better life. This was the promise sold for decades by tech industry leaders and politicians alike: tech would drive American growth, creating widespread prosperity. This sounded good in an era of deindustrialization and spiraling inequality. It sounded even better after the 2008 financial crisis wiped out middle-class savings. As wages continued to flatline, the smartphone-driven gig economy would pick up the slack. Asia might be rising, but Silicon Valley still provided a bulwark of essentially American creativity; just look at all those Chinese nouveaux riches standing in line to buy the latest iPhone."}
{"prompt":"A set of political assumptions followed from these claims. The most important of these was that it was all right for a handful of former failures to accumulate vast amounts of money and power, so long as what was good for Silicon Valley was good for humanity. If tech was the future, why would anyone, or any regulation, want to stand in its way? The government bought this; the media bought it; almost everyone seemed to like two-day delivery and the ability to chat and share pictures for free. It was not just in America. The Silicon Valley model was replicated all over their world. Yet, in the past year, the narrative has started to change.","completion":"Anyone paying attention knew that there were problems in the tech industry, and with its products. We knew about the systemic racism and sexism, the exploited gig workers and Silicon Valley service staff, the bots and the trolls and the fake news, the swarms of Pepes and incels. Now, since revelations about the role of disinformation on Facebook, Google, and Twitter during the 2016 election, criticism of Big Tech has reached a new and unprecedented level."}
{"prompt":"The Silicon Valley story has come down to earth. Maybe these companies are just companies after all. Maybe they are pursuing their self-interest as any capitalist firm would. Maybe, even if their IPOs occasionally toss some money to California state coffers shortchanged by Prop 13 (o hai, Snap!) the interests of tech companies do not perfectly align with the interests of humanity.","completion":"There are signs that the interests of tech leaders aren’t even perfectly aligned with those of most tech workers. After the 2016 election, many good people who entered the industry because they wanted to change the world were appalled to see their supposedly liberal bosses warming up to Trump. More recently, a wave of worker organizing within Google, Microsoft, and Amazon against collaboration with the Pentagon and ICE shows how big the rift could grow."}
{"prompt":"Burning Man could get awkward. 4. As scandal after scandal surfaces, Big Tech CEOs apologize for their mistakes. We will do better. Our AI will fix it. For many onlookers watching Mark Zuckerberg before Congress, (“We sell ads, Senator”) a troubling question began to emerge: What if the mechanisms that enabled advertisers to reach “Jew haters,” white supremacists to harass BLM activists, or far-right conspiracists to flood users’ feeds with disinformation were not, in fact, mistakes? What if Facebook is doing what it was designed to do? The system may be working exactly as it is supposed to. If so, is the definition of success we have been using wrong? What if the success of Silicon Valley is failing most of us? This issue ventures a few possible answers to these questions. It explores what happens when technology blows up and breaks down. It looks at failures of code, institutions, narratives, and imagination. In so doing, it tries to imagine a better way to live with our machines—and to build new ones.","completion":"There is no shame in failing, until there is. Having been exempt from scrutiny for so long, many tech leaders seem genuinely stung by their first taste of criticism. Don’t they see? We’re working so hard. Taking a cue from Trump, some of them have take to Twitter to denounce their critics as liars, and to challenge the legitimacy of the media as a whole."}
{"prompt":"There has long been the sense in Silicon Valley that anyone who criticizes is simply a hater. We take the opposite view. Engaging with failure is, as FailCon could have taught us, the first step to growth. Only, that growth may have to happen in a different direction than Silicon Valley has been imagining. We may not need to iterate to grow faster but act boldly to create a more expansive and equitable world.","completion":"The only failure that should frighten us is not taking advantage of the opportunity that this moment presents. Complacency is no way to honor the disruptive potential of technology. To paraphrase one interview in the following pages: Criticism can be the highest form of love. I am on the phone with the one-time owner of Kozmo.com. Back in 2001, Kozmo.com was going to deliver your Starbucks coffee in less than an hour. Its former owner is… not what you’d expect."}
{"prompt":"Martin Pichinson is about seventy, a former music manager who came to Silicon Valley in the mid-1980s. His business partner is Michael Maidy, another septuagenarian who, judging from a Google search, favors dark suits that look about a half-size too big for him. Maidy was recently the CEO of another failed tech company: Pebble Tech, LLC, maker of smartwatches. Pichinson and Maidy look about as far from our image of the Silicon Valley CEO as you can imagine. But they are nevertheless an important, if rarely glimpsed, part of its ecosystem.","completion":"Their actual company is Sherwood Partners, and unlike Kozmo.com, Pebble, and about a thousand other companies they have wound down over the years, it (a) still exists and (b) its business is always booming. The company is Silicon Valley’s premier specialist in “assignment for the benefit of creditors” (ABC)—a process by which insolvent companies assign their assets, titles, and property to a trustee."}
{"prompt":"ABC was how Pebble Tech, LLC came into existence: it was, for its brief life, simply a collection of Pebble’s remaining assets, to be distributed among various creditors, employees, and shareholders.  This was also how Maidy briefly became the figurehead of a zombie version of the once-hip startup. When you’re dealing with Sherwood, things are going badly. “People don’t like to talk to us, because they think, ‘If I’m talking to Sherwood, it’s a sign I’m in trouble,’” Pichinson says. Maidy’s and Pichinson’s names are all over public filings. While many of the lawyers and VCs I spoke to for this story try to stay out of the headlines, Sherwood doesn’t have that option. TechCrunch once called Pichinson “the Terminator of startups,” and many journalists on the Silicon Valley beat seem to check in with him periodically to see how business is going—if he’s upbeat, it’s time for another culling of a herd.","completion":"They’re not undertakers, Pichinson insists, though he too can refer to ABCs as “a private funeral.” Silicon Valley’s failure industry runs on discretion and convenient amnesia. Sherwood Partners is a place of memory and a place of failure. “I am the guy who closed down a lot of the high-flying dot-coms,” Pichinson notes, not without a note of pride. Receiverships, bankruptcy, ABC—Sherwood is like a one-stop-shop for whatever the opposite of the image Silicon Valley likes to project is. And it has been for almost thirty years."}
{"prompt":"Fail Better Silicon Valley thinks it has failure figured out. Even beyond the clichéd embrace of “failing better,” a tolerance for things not going quite right is baked into the tech industry. People take jobs and lose them, and go on to a new job. People create products that no one likes, and go on to create another product. People back companies that get investigated by the SEC, and go on to back other companies. They can even lie on behalf of a company like Theranos without any taint whatsoever. In Silicon Valley, it seems, there is no such thing as negative experience.","completion":"The attorneys and consultants who have grown old with the industry’s failures, from Pets.com to Pebble, are anything but harsh in assessing their “clients.” “They are not bad,” one old hand insists. Instead, “the question really becomes: how many new ideas can society handle?” Even Sherwood Partners doesn’t see themselves as a repository of Silicon Valley’s fuck-ups. To them it’s about luck, bad timing, the wrong blend of personalities. “They didn’t fail, they just didn’t come in first.” That can be deeply charming: rather than make failure, messiness, and growth something to hide, the ethos of the tech industry puts fallibility and vulnerability at the center of life. The guys at Sherwood have some of that relaxed California vibe, plus a dose of paternalism—they wind down companies started by people less than half their age. They try to make it a teachable moment and move on."}
{"prompt":"At the same time, Silicon Valley’s tolerance for failure has long sustained an obsession with youth. If a founder fails, tech discourse interprets it as a sign of young vigor. In a country in which twenty-five-year-old white rapists are “still boys” and black twelve year-olds on the playground “look like adults,” the question of who gets to be a kid and who counts as a grown-up is clearly charged with privilege.","completion":"In 2017, a chastened Travis Kalanick admitted, “I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up.” Even in a place as choc-a-bloc with balding skateboarders and middle-aged trick-or-treaters as San Francisco, a forty-year-old CEO of a $15-billion company casting himself as an overenthusiastic kid who just needs to get his shit together is a bit much."}
{"prompt":"Failing in Silicon Valley is often a prerogative of the young—or, in Kalanick’s case, the adolescent-acting. And people don’t talk about how much less sustainable it has become to be young in the Valley. One VC who back in the early aughts grew a tiny startup into an $80 million company with more than 250 employees reminisced to me about the early days when “we just lived with our parents in Toronto.” “Our labor force was ourselves and we paid for the servers by credit card,” he continued. Then he reflected a moment. “That’s no longer possible, which I guess is what makes us necessary.” Another change he has noticed: a lot of big funds have moved towards investing earlier in the life of a company. Where once a founder may have come to them looking for a Series A round, now they are coming for angel funding. This means that any falling out of favor with investors will be extremely public—“If Sequoia offered you funding and suddenly isn’t around for the next round, I ask myself: what do they know that I don’t?” Silicon Valley’s tolerance for failure is partly predicated on a privacy that is starting to dissipate.","completion":"But the thing about failing is that it seems to carry opposite meanings depending on who does it. If a traditional brick-and-mortar business hemorrhages money as unregulated digital competition moves in, then that’s just a sign that brick-and-mortar deserves to die. By contrast, if a disruptive New Economy startup loses money by the billions, it’s a sign of how revolutionary and bold they are."}
{"prompt":"There is an entire cottage industry in Silicon Valley devoted to making this distinction. The fawning court press, the hype machine, the angel investors are always ready to explain why a venture that has all the hallmarks of a total failure is actually a genius idea. And those aren’t the only businesses built on the reality behind “fail better.” There’s also the handyman at an incubator who lets all the denizens pick over the carcass of any startup in the building that has gone belly-up: swivel chairs, ping-pong tables, swag and lots of Soylent. There are lawyers busy disentangling the Gordian knot tied by youthful idealism. And there are companies like Sherwood, which step in and take over your company when all hope of success has faded.","completion":"Daddy’s Home The clean-up crew stays deliberately out of sight. “It’s in bad times that they hear about us,” Pichinson says, and he sounds regretful about it. The careers being made in Silicon Valley have something magical about them, and perhaps for that reason all of the professionals working behind the scenes get the sense that their clients think consulting them will constitute a capitulation. An admission that what they’re running is a business, that their career is in the end just a career, that gravity has some kind of purchase on their meteoric trajectories."}
{"prompt":"A lot of the younger VCs are themselves highly successful founders, and the contingency of their own success hasn’t yet sunk in. I’ve generally found it to be the case that people who strike it rich in Silicon Valley are in a way dumbstruck by their own success. It comes so early, so unpredictably, so noiselessly—a bolt of lightning out of a blue sky. But people have to make sense of what happens to them. Some withdraw almost shyly from their own good fortune. But those who don’t have to tell themselves stories about it. Why do they deserve their good fortune? What does it mean? This matters because only those who have encountered the most stupefying, most inexplicable success will end up funding the next generation of startups. If you wind down, get acqui-hired, or make some other type of “graceful exit,” you usually don’t have the cash to do venture capital investing. Among those who do have that kind of cash, their sense of reality can be deeply warped—perhaps it almost has to be a little bit, shell-shocked as they all can be by their extraordinary luck.","completion":"That might be why a nimbus of unreality envelops the early stages of funding. At the center of this colossal churn of money is a kind of stunned muteness. The investors all tell me: I wish founders spoke to me sooner. “We’re not smarter, but we’ve seen more pain in the industry than anyone,” Pichinson says. It makes sense why kids who have glided almost without resistance into Stanford, alumni meet-ups, and VC offices may not want to be reminded of pain. Many of them, Pichinson points out, have never experienced a tech recession—they were in kindergarten, if that, when the dot-com bubble burst. As one lawyer I spoke to explains, “Often enough, the only authorities they run into outside of their age cohort are venture capitalists, who are either very young themselves” or are busy speed-dating a bunch of startups, without providing much mentorship in the process."}
{"prompt":"But reality may not be worth much. In the league in which these startups play, one founder tells me, reality may seem like a poor guide to business. The crucial moment in the life cycle of your business arrives at a moment when you’re “expecting to get millions of dollars for a PowerPoint deck.” You have to convince a room of investors that your company could make hundreds of millions of dollars—“otherwise why not just get a business loan?” The term “lifestyle business,” he points out—meaning a business that is designed to keep its owners fed and happy rather than making them brain-meltingly wealthy—is “kind of a pejorative in this world.” Because to be reminded of why people normally work is an unwelcome dose of real life, of gravity, of adulthood.","completion":"This is where the anonymous lawyer I spoke to sees his niche: hard truths, a little bit of adult sensibility. He runs his business as a tiny two-man firm with a boutiquey reputation. He doesn’t advertise his services, and people come to him only by referral. A Bay Area local—Berkeley-bred, Berkeley-educated, Bohemian Club—he has seen tech come in waves. He’s gotten older, while tech has gotten younger. Many of his clients are straight out of college, if that. They’ve imbibed an ethos of egalitarianism and a vocabulary of aspiration. This forces him to function as reality principle, as mentor, and, often enough, as a Cassandra."}
{"prompt":"He also functions as an avatar of a centuries-old corporate structure inimical to their visions—hierarchical, vertical, based on more than just personal relationships. He’s only at the end of his thirties himself, but surrounded by so much immaturity he’s started to sound middle- aged by comparison. “It’s weird for me to think of myself as the adult in the room,” he says.","completion":"By the time they come to him, many startups have some legal framework in place. Which can be a good thing or a bad thing. He sees terms between a young company and its VC investors, where both sides are represented by the same law firm—the investors’. That’s not technically a conflict of interest but, he says, it’s a massively bad idea."}
{"prompt":"He usually just tells his clients to simply do the right thing. He tries to counsel twenty-five-year-old disruptors to be caretakers of a legacy. Beyond your contractual obligations, how do you make sure not to fuck over employees or investors? How do you make sure your company’s final chapter lives up to the vision you had for it? Failure, he points out, puts Silicon Valley’s high-flying language to the test much faster than unbridled success.","completion":"Another thing he tells his clients: the IP is gone. You can’t sell it or take it with you—but you can make it open-source and help others out, or yourself down the line. If you don’t, it may end up once again at Sherwood Partners. Because Sherwood isn’t just a repository of a kind of wisdom that Silicon Valley doesn’t have time for. It’s also a literal repository of IP that arrived too late, too early, or too close on the heels of a similar idea."}
{"prompt":"Although most of Sherwood’s work is with investors, employees, and vendors, they also hold a massive database of patents amassed from their assignees. “We probably monetize more patents than anyone else in the world,” Pichinson says. And he’s not wrong: Agency IP, Sherwood’s sister company, is nominally a consultancy, but in fact spends most of its time actively exploring the applicability of patents left behind by the companies Sherwood has buried. Like what William Morris agency does for screenplays, says Pichinson, who now operates from LA’s “Silicon Beach.” He makes it sound glamorous.","completion":"You Can’t Get Rid of Wealth The guardian angels of better failure in Silicon Valley are the investors. When men like Pichinson are pretty Zen about failure, it makes sense—after all, it’s their business. When lawyers who charge by the hour seem okay with failure, then sure, why not, they get paid one way or the other. But what about the investors who sink money in ventures and either get some of it back or none of it back? It’s easy to assume that the shrug with which they treat every flop is a facade. It’s unnerving to realize that it’s absolutely not—and for good reason."}
{"prompt":"The reason is what one VC calls “the repeat business effect.” Sure, a twenty-four-year-old can run his company into the ground—but he’s still a twenty-four-year-old, with time and energy for another startup, and then another. And any one of those could pan out and make everybody fantastically rich. It is, as one founder told me, “the luxury of having a lot of runway left.” Why would you upset a person like that and potentially miss out on a future payday? There is a lot of money sloshing around Silicon Valley in search of that payday. It laps up Sand Hill Road, all the way to the famous Rosewood Hotel with its Tesla-filled parking lot and tech divorcees on the prowl. There’s the old Chris Rock joke about the distinction between being rich and being wealthy: “You can’t get rid of wealth,” Rock says. Watching the well-preserved faces at the Rosewood bar, you believe it. The money that pours in—from pension funds, hedge funds, private investors—has to go somewhere. It is agnostic about individual failure or success; its mantra is the law of averages. By the time one venture crashes and burns, everyone is already on to their next one.","completion":"But failure comes encased in bubble wrap—at least among those who have a reasonable expectation of running into each other again. What about those who don’t? Many of the employees who have foregone sleep, pay, healthcare, and a social life for the benefit of now-worthless shares will not be instrumental in making the next spin of the wheel the winning one."}
{"prompt":"There are many ways to close up shop in Silicon Valley: get acquired or acqui-hired, wind the company down, buy out your investors and start anew as a small business. Depending on how a company dies, however, most or all of the employees will not be part of these transactions. Google won’t acqui-hire the receptionist, or even the publicity person. They won’t take on those who were only contractors, or those who mysteriously got the boot right before a desperate final funding round.","completion":"And even among those with titles, salary, and equity, the acqui-hiring party gets to pick and choose: in an acqui-hire truly deserving of the name, the company’s product and assets matter little. It’s really a way of hiring a very small group of people—and it falls to that group to stand up for those members of the company that the hiring party is not interested in. “They know what they’re prepared to spend,” one person whose company got absorbed into Google told me. “How equitably that gets spread around is basically one big prisoner’s dilemma.” Given the gender dynamics of Silicon Valley, that means that men usually fail better. Given that many of the founders meet in college, it means that having gone to university with the top team is a plus. Those excluded are people who are treated as contractors and received only equity, people who vested and then left, people who have been thrown out before they reach a vesting cliff after a mysterious performance review."}
{"prompt":"And for them, the law of repeat business reveals its ugly side. “None of this litigation happens in this industry, because nobody wants to be blackballed,” my anonymous lawyer says. Or, as an angel investor puts it, it’s important that even a failed venture “facilitates the founder’s story.” Something similar seems to be true for employees: “I learned a lot” is a story that whoever is hiring, seeding, funding, or advising you on your next undertaking is going to want to hear. “The bastards screwed me out of a bunch of money” isn’t.","completion":"That’s the funny part of the tech industry’s narrative about itself. For tech, failure is always assumed to be temporary; for everyone else, it’s terminal. Taxicab companies are going out of business because they’re losing money? Creative destruction, my friend—sink or swim. Uber hemorrhages cash? Well, that’s just a sign of how visionary the company is. This double standard justifies the exploitation of workers outside of the tech industry—and, in certain cases, the exploitation of workers within it."}
{"prompt":"If the incredible rise of computing is one of the biggest stories of the twentieth century, then the failure of the nation that invented the electronic computer to capitalize on it is undoubtedly one of history’s most important cautionary tales. In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. The top-secret codebreaking computers that the British deployed at Bletchley Park worked round the clock to ensure the success of D-Day, and the Allies’ win in Europe. At a time when the best electronic computing technology in the United States was still only in the testing phase, British computers literally changed the world.","completion":"After the war, British computing breakthroughs continued, and British computers seemed poised to succeed across the board, competing with US technology on a global scale. But by the 1970s, a mere thirty years later, the country’s computing industry was all but dead. What happened? The traditional history of computing would have you understand this change through the biographies of great men, and the machines they designed. It would gesture towards corporations’ grand global strategies, and the marketing that those companies pushed to try to define what computers were for an entire generation of workers. It would not, however, focus on the workers themselves. And by ignoring them, it would miss the reasons for this catastrophic failure—a failure that remains a cautionary tale for many other countries today, particularly the United States."}
{"prompt":"Early Retirement In 1965, a young computer worker named Anne celebrated her retirement. Decked out in a punched paper tape train that was made to resemble a bride’s veil, Anne celebrated the end of her career with her fellow twenty-something women colleagues at the computer company. To modern eyes, a retirement party thrown for a woman in her twenties might seem incongruous—all the more so because Anne’s technical skills were much in demand. British businesses and government agencies were scrambling to hire people who had computer skills, and yet here was a computer worker retiring from the workforce at the beginning of her career.","completion":"A few years earlier, a novel called Anne in Electronics—Anne was a popular name in Britain in the mid-twentieth century—had been published. Young women might read a light, pulpy novel like this as they rode to work each day on the London Tube, or younger women might read it to see what they had to look forward to. The book reflected the experience of many working women, but made it more glamorous and exciting."}
{"prompt":"The real-life Anne shared many of the same talents and characteristics as the fictional one. She was also young, white, and had technical skills. The fictional Anne enjoys an exciting career in a growing field, as she proves her knack for technical work, laboring with quiet diligence each day on a secret, high-tech airplane project. She eventually shows up her male superiors by figuring out a critical engineering error that was holding up the project. While they flounder, trying desperately to figure out the flaw in their design, she hesitantly points it out, afraid of embarrassing them. In the process, she not only saves the project but she wins the heart of the male coworker she had her eye on—and allows him to take credit for her breakthrough.","completion":"As women, neither the real Anne nor the imaginary one was making an unusual decision to put their career behind their other life goals. In fact, each was making the socially expected, and strongly encouraged, choice. In the book, Anne stays in the workforce after marriage, but only after being admonished that she must put her husband’s career first. Even in fantasies, women weren’t allowed to think that their careers could come first—the best Anne might do was to try to juggle her work, her family, and her husband’s needs, knowing that if a ball needed to drop, it would be her career."}
{"prompt":"A young woman named Anne Davis wears a punch tape dress at her “retirement party” as she leaves her job to get married. In the real world, this juggling act was difficult, and often impossible. Middle-class women who had the mettle and the privilege to try it encountered major obstacles. And the fact that it was still seen as completely inappropriate for women to hold authority over men in the workplace meant that women who struggled to stay in their jobs rarely got very far. So the real-life Anne celebrated her retirement with half a dozen other young women computer workers—most of whom would go down the same path in the next few years.","completion":"Collective Failures When we talk about computing history, we rarely talk about failure. Narratives of technological progress are so deeply ingrained into our ways of seeing, understanding, and describing high tech that to focus on failure seems to miss the point. If technology is about progress, then what is the point of focusing on failure? Up until recently, we also rarely talked about women in relation to computing."}
{"prompt":"The first silence is related to the second. Women, after all, were seen as having largely failed in computing until recent historians’ attempts to correct that assumption. But as it turns out, technological failure and womens’ erasure are intimately related in more than one way. When we put these facts together—our avoidance of failure, our ignoring of women in computing, and our tendency to see women’s contributions as less important—curious patterns start to emerge.","completion":"The failure of one unnamed and ignored postwar computer worker is a good place to start. In 1959, this particular computer programmer faced a very hectic year. She needed to program, operate, and test all of the computers in a major government computing center that was doing critical work. These computers didn’t just crunch numbers or automate low-level office work—they allowed the government to fulfill its duties to British citizens. Computers were beginning to control public utilities like electricity, and the massive and growing welfare state, which included the National Health Service, required complex, calculation-dense taxation systems. Though the welfare state was created by policy, it was technology that allowed it to function."}
{"prompt":"In addition to doing all of her normal work, our programmer also had to train two new hires. These new hires didn’t have any of the required technical skills. But once she trained them, which took about a year, they stepped up into management roles. Their trainer, meanwhile, was demoted into an assistantship below them. She succeeded at her job, only to fail in her career.","completion":"That the trainer was a woman, and that her trainees were both young men, was no coincidence. Nor was it coincidental that, as a woman, she had the technical skills for a job like this while they did not. That’s because before computing became electronic, women were seen as ideal for what was considered mundane calculation work. Though this work often required advanced mathematics knowledge, it was perceived as unintellectual. Before a computer was a machine, it was a job classification—these women workers were literally called “computers.” Even when electromechanical and then electronic computers came in, women continued to do computing work. They programmed, operated, troubleshooted, tested, and even assembled these new machines. In fact, IBM UK measured the manufacturing of computers in “girl hours” (which were less expensive than “man hours”) because the people who built the machines were nearly all women. Meanwhile, the British government, the largest computer user in the nation, called their computer workers the “machine grades” and later, the “excluded grades”—excluded from equal pay measures brought into the Civil Service in the 1950s. Because their work was so feminized, the government declined to give them equal pay and raise their pay to the men’s rate on the basis that the men’s wage was almost never used. Therefore, the lower, women’s wage became the default market rate for the work. So concentrated in machine work were women that the majority of women working in government did not gain equal pay."}
{"prompt":"By the mid-to-late 1960s, however, the low value assigned to computing work was starting to change. Not because the work itself was changing, but because the perception of the work was. Instead of being seen as intimidating behemoths that were only good for highly technical tasks, computers were now becoming widely integrated into government and industry. Their great power and potential was growing more apparent. Suddenly, low-status women workers were no longer seen as appropriate for this type of work—even though they had the technical skills to do the jobs.","completion":"So the UK faced a major problem: all of the workers who could do this work were no longer the type of workers that management wanted doing the work. Instead, managers wanted people who would eventually become managers themselves to control these newly important machines and all of the decision-making that was being programmed into them. That excluded women. In this era, women were not supposed to be in positions of power over men. Both implicit and explicit prohibitions prevented women from managing men or mixed-gender workforces."}
{"prompt":"Moving Out, Moving Up Around the same time that the woman programmer trained two men to replace her, a young woman named Stephanie Shirley embarked on a technical career at the prestigious Dollis Hill research station—the same government agency where the Colossus codebreaking computers had been created during World War II. Shirley had been a child during the war, born in Germany, and she was Jewish. She was evacuated out of Nazi-occupied Europe with 10,000 other children on the Kindertransport, a humanitarian refugee program designed to take Jewish children to England. By comparison, the United States allowed in little more than 1,000 children through a similar program.","completion":"Grateful for the chances afforded by her adoptive country, Shirley set out to make the most of them. Yet early in her career she began to chafe at the confines of British culture. With a degree in math, a good work record, and a master’s degree on the way, Shirley was the perfect candidate for promotion—or so she thought. As she was denied promotion after promotion, she started to understand that her role was being defined by things other than her technical skill and education—that the much-vaunted “meritocracy” of the government service was anything but. “What shocked me was the discovery that, the more I became recognized as a serious young woman who was aiming high—whose long-term aspirations went beyond a merely subservient role—the more violently I was resented and the more implacably I was kept in my place,” she wrote in her memoir."}
{"prompt":"After being denied another promotion, one that she’d earned several times over, she eventually learned that the men evaluating her were resigning from the promotions board rather than making a decision on her case. “They disapproved on principle of women holding managerial posts,” she found out, so they would rather resign than consider her for a promotion. “I was devastated by this: it felt like a very personal rejection,” she recalled.","completion":"After hitting the glass ceiling first in government and then in industry, Shirley did what women were supposed to do—what the two Annes and so many other women had been encouraged to do—she got married and resigned from her position. But, unlike the Annes, she wasn’t happy about it. She still had the skills, the intelligence, and the drive to work in computing, and she knew many other women who were in the same situation—being stymied in their careers not because they weren’t good enough, but because they were women."}
{"prompt":"Because she saw the need for computers growing, she knew that people who could program would be essential. Only they could figure out how to unlock the potential of the new mainframes that so few managers understood, even as those managers earmarked hundreds of thousands of pounds to buy them. So although Shirley got married and started a family, she continued to work. In 1962, she started her own software company, Freelance Programmers, out of her home. When she had stationary made for her new company she half-jokingly put the name all in lowercase, because “we had no capital at all.” Nevertheless, she began to recruit women who had similarly been forced into “early retirement” by having children or getting married. Once her business began to grow, she published an ad seeking people for full-time programmer positions, in the classified section of the Times of London. It read: “Wonderful chance, but hopeless for anti-feminists.” In other words, the company had a woman boss. The ad also announced that there were “opportunities for retired programmers (female) to work from home.” In 1964, this was revolutionary.","completion":"Shirley’s freelance programmers worked from home in an era when computer time was so expensive that most programming was done on paper before being punched onto cards and then tested on an actual machine. Programming from home was therefore not a problem, as long as you had a telephone to collaborate with your co-workers. Indeed, one of her programmers was once chastised by a company for using too much computer time to debug a program. Programming without a computer was cheaper—and preferred."}
{"prompt":"Programming from home also allowed women to simultaneously take care of their young children and fulfill their domestic responsibilities. To make things seem more professional, Shirley played a tape recording of typewriter sounds in the background when she answered the phone at her house, in order to drown out the sounds her young son might make. And when she was unable to get contracts early on, she took her husband’s suggestion that she start signing her letters with her nickname instead: “Steve.” With Steve Shirley as the public face of the company, business began to take off.","completion":"The Real Ann(e) in Electronics Like many startup founders, Shirley was meeting a consumer need that was still barely understood. In the early 1960s, most software came packaged with the computer itself or was written in-house after a company purchased a mainframe. Software was not considered a product in its own right—and few people expected that customers would actually pay for it separately after spending so much money on a computer."}
{"prompt":"Shirley realized that they would. She had seen the need in both government and industry for programmers who could unleash the potential of expensive hardware with good software. Without software, after all, computers didn’t do anything, and with poor software they couldn’t fulfill their potential or justify their cost. Shirley also knew that British industry and government were getting rid of most of the people who had programming skills and training because they were women, thereby starving the entire country of the critical labor that it needed to modernize effectively.","completion":"Shirley scooped up this talent pool by giving women a chance to fulfill their potential. Offering flexible, family-friendly working hours and the ability to work from home, her business tapped into a deep well of discarded expertise. Because people who could do this work were an absolute necessity, the government and major British companies hired her and her growing team of women programmers to do mission-critical computer programming for projects ranging from payroll and accounting to cutting-edge projects like programming the “black box” flight recorder for the first commercial supersonic jet in the world: the Concorde."}
{"prompt":"A woman named Ann Moffatt led the Concorde programming team. And unlike the fictional Anne from Anne in Electronics, she kept the credit for her work. Working from home, Moffatt managed a team of women who also worked from their homes. In fact, this was the first time that Freelance Programmers had undertaken a project managed and staffed exclusively by remote workers—rather than being overseen by one of the four full-time managers who operated out of the small office space Shirley had rented a few years after starting the company out of her house. The arrangement of using remote workers to manage projects worked so well that Ann would go on to become technical director at the company, in charge of more than 300 home-based programmers.","completion":"Moffatt sits at her kitchen table in 1966, writing the code for the Concorde, while her baby looks on. Much like Stephanie Shirley, Ann had begun working in technical roles in the 1950s, but had encountered a roadblock once she had children. The feminist business practices of Freelance Programmers let Ann continue her career and take care of her home and children, all the while contributing to Britain’s high-tech economy. In addition to being a major project for the company, the Concorde was a symbol of British high-technology pride and prestige—it flew successfully for decades, the only supersonic passenger airplane to date. And Ann’s concurrent project functioned for even longer: the baby in the photograph is now fifty-three years old."}
{"prompt":"Losing The Lead While Shirley, Moffatt, and hundreds of other women programmers created software that helped Britain advance further into the accelerating digital age, British industry and government struggled to hire, train, and retain their computer workers. Women had the technical skills, but were not supposed to be managers. Even the fact that women were wielding more power by controlling computers was viewed as dangerously out-of-bounds.","completion":"As computing became increasingly interwoven with all of the functions of the state—from the Bank of England to the Atomic Energy Authority—computer workers grew indispensable. By the late 1960s, the government began to fear losing control of the machines that allowed the state to function because they did not have a well-trained, permanent, reliable core of technical experts. The women who had the technical skills were judged unreliable because they were not aligned with management. They were seen as liminally working-class, temporary workers who should not rise above their current station. To elevate women further would upend the hierarchies of both government and industry, pushing low-status workers into high-status positions."}
{"prompt":"So determined were ministers within government that they needed a cadre of male, management-oriented technocrats that they began, counterintuitively and in desperation, to lower the standards of technical skill needed for the jobs. Lowering standards of technical proficiency to create an elite class of male computer workers didn’t work, however. In fact, it made the problem worse, by producing a devastating labor shortage.","completion":"Well-heeled young men tapped for the positions often had no interest in derailing their management-bound careers by getting stuck in the “backwater” of computer work, which had still not fully shaken its association with low-level, feminized labor. Machine work in general was viewed as unintellectual and working-class, ensuring that men of the desired background had little interest in being swept up in the “industrialization of the office.” Most men who were trained for these positions, at great employer expense, left to take better, non-computing jobs within a year. As a result, the programming, systems analysis, and computer operating needs of government and industry went largely unmet. Although there were plenty of women who had the required skills, the government all but refused to hire them, and private industry largely refused to promote them."}
{"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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.","completion":"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."}
{"prompt":"My point in The Future of the Internet was that power and stability and goodness can come from a loosely governed space that welcomes contributions from anywhere and yet is still remarkably trustworthy. But if we're not careful, the very popularity of that space will attract people who are up to no good. Those bad apples will in turn have the authorities in their wake chasing them—and Burning Man won't ever be the same. That was my worry. And I think, to a huge extent, I was right.  A big part of the audience for my book were people who were skeptical of authority. They thought, “We can take care of ourselves. Leave us alone.” I wanted to make the point that trying to have all of the caretaking be self-care wouldn’t be great once we started to welcome people into the environment who were not particularly nerdy. For them, the internet wouldn’t be a whimsical place. It'd be a place that's like their bank account—it would have all of their private correspondence, and so on. There would be much more at stake should something go wrong.  That has been borne out, sadly. And there have not been huge strides in self-governance to forestall the kind of corporate enclosure that I was worried about.","completion":"What I didn't quite take into account, however—although I hinted at it—was that states would eventually wise up. And I don’t just mean generic regulators eager to get data that would help them solve crimes or whatever, but states up to no good—states looking to make trouble in other states. I didn’t foresee how valuable it could be to a country like Russia—which, after all, only has a GDP the size of Italy—to have a building full of people out to make trouble on the internet.  At that point, do you still not want to let the authorities in? Who else is going to get other states to stand down?  State actors certainly matter, but they do seem like small fry alongside big platforms like Facebook and Google. Corporate enclosure of the internet means that corporations, rather than governments, now have the most power to shape and suppress opinion online. How do we respond to that? Government is the usual entity we look to when it comes to concentrations of power, because it makes laws and has a monopoly on the use of force. That's why the Bill of Rights protects individual rights as against the government. But even the civil liberties organizations most known for hewing to that line, like the ACLU, are starting to get nervous about accretions of private power, and how they might affect our lives.  If I have a message for my fellow citizens that's perfectly legal and that they might like to see, it’s no solace to me if it’s a private company rather than the government that prevents me from distributing that message."}
{"prompt":"This gets back to the difference between now and ten years ago. It’s no longer a straightforward battle between the proponents and opponents of free speech. That doesn’t fully account for what’s going on right now, with private concentrations of power determining who gets to speak and how they speak.","completion":"But breaking up those concentrations of power doesn’t always solve the problem. The Nazis may move to Gab if Gab is there to welcome them. Decentralization lets people with a common set of interests come together and create their own communities. But that’s going to carry its own costs. If breaking up the concentrations of power doesn’t always solve the problem, what are the better solutions? What do you see as the most promising path forward? Antitrust has been watered down in the past twenty years. But I think the antitrust toolkit has a lot of remedies that can make sense if you're willing to acknowledge a problem.  I've encouraged Facebook to make it possible for anybody to produce their own personalized News Feed. Then I can have my recipe and share it with you. Then not everything is resting on Facebook’s shoulders to produce the perfect News Feed for everyone. Why would we ever think they could do that?  That kind of decentralization solves a lot of the problems I worry about. It doesn't solve the filter bubble problem—in fact, it may make it worse, because I can share a recipe with you that only shows us the world we want. And it doesn't solve the problem of enabling groups to conspire to do bad things off in a corner.  But I think it's important for us to be clear about not only what the problems are but what the tradeoffs are. Often when you solve one problem, you make another one worse.  Think of the twentieth-century media architecture. There wasn't a whole lot to recommend it, but there were some benefits. If you were a lazy news consumer, you would tend to only be subjected to stuff that, for better or worse, was already mainstream. There wouldn't be a John Bircher bellowing at you at 7 PM on CBS. Of course, there was the problem of “manufactured consent”—to shape mass opinion, all you had to do was co-opt those networks. But there’s something to be said for an era where you had to go to some extremes to find extremism. Now, in a Google search, a press release from some astroturf organization is on par with a deeply researched piece from the New York Times. There’s something deeply wrong about that."}
{"prompt":"How can government help solve some of these problems while navigating the tradeoffs? How are other countries dealing with this? Certainly the Europeans have less compunction when it comes to government decision-making about content. And that includes laws against hate speech that would flunk First Amendment tests here. If you set your location on Twitter to Germany, there's fewer Nazis, because the display of Nazi artifacts and sentiments is illegal in Germany. And there it is—problem solved! If we want fewer Nazis on Twitter, let's all just move to Germany without having to move!  That’s an interesting example of government forcing a technical fix. What are some other technical fixes that platforms are trying, or should try? Above all, companies don’t want to be in the content-judging business. So they will try to use telltales that aren’t content. They'll say, “It looks like the same content is appearing in multiple places at once, and it’s coming from a range of IP addresses that we have previously identified as bots running an orchestrated campaign.” And they’ll crack down on it. This isn't judging content, but it will have the impact of restricting content.  I think that’s a promising avenue. But it's worth realizing that it involves a tradeoff with privacy. Companies are going to have to retain more data about the linkages between content and source so that they can make those judgments over the period of weeks and months that might be needed to go after increasingly sophisticated bots.","completion":"How do the engineers working for these companies fit into this? How do you see their role? There’s an old concept of a “learned profession.” It means that people who inhabit certain roles require a lot of training because they can have significant social impact. They have special responsibilities—not only to those they might be working with directly, but to society at large.  Software engineering should be considered one of those professions. It’s a little weird that cosmetologists have to get licensed before they can brush somebody’s hair for money, but nothing equivalent exists for engineers."}
{"prompt":"I’m not suggesting that we should make people get a license before they can start coding. But if you're coding some feature of Facebook, you are potentially affecting a lot of lives and a lot of speech. Getting engineers to recognize that ethical moment seems really important—as does building structures that enable them to send up a flare if they see something weird that gives their spidey-sense a tingle.  Lawyers have been around long enough that legal ethics are a bit more cut-and-dried. Law has a classic ethical framework around compliance where we know where the boundaries are, and the point is to train people in those boundaries. Your client hands you a smoking gun and asks you to put it in a drawer—can you do that? No, you can’t do that.  Software engineering isn’t like that. Engineers might feel their spidey-sense tingling, but we won’t always know what the right answer is. That’s why the crucial thing is to create layers of safe publicity, so that daring to surface a problem as a company or as an engineer does not subject them to corporate or professional suicide. We need to build systems that let us be honest about our problems.","completion":"It reminds me of airline pilots, who are permitted to disclose mistakes they made on a flight without being penalized for them. That system exists because the value of disclosure outweighs the value of accountability. Figuring out the right titration between disclosure and accountability will be important for helping engineers think about what they’re building and how it might be used."}
{"prompt":"There’s clearly a whole lot of thinking and writing that will have to be done to map out these problems, and to develop potential solutions. And it’s reasonable to expect that a lot of that thinking and writing will be done by people working at universities and think tanks. But that raises a question: many of the scholars and the institutes exploring these issues have close links to, and in some cases receive substantial funding from, the tech industry. In mid-2017 we saw a stark reminder of this when the think tank New America expelled its Open Markets group for being overly critical of Google, one of its main funders.","completion":"How do you manage these concerns at Berkman, and how do you think others should manage them? I think you have to depend on the professional tenets of people at think tanks and universities. There are astroturf organizations that are designed to present and launder industry views. There are other organizations that purport to want to get it right, create a culture of wanting to get it right, and hire serious people with relevant training.  Still, will they bite the hand that feeds them? It’s a good incentives question. But I see it as a real puzzle rather than as a cause for castigation."}
{"prompt":"Ten years ago, most of what we were interested in was on the open web. It was at the other end of a URL. Even if it was on a private website, you could scrape it—and you could worry later about whether you were violating the terms of service.  That's not the world we live in now. Stuff is inside apps—it's not scrapable. The interesting behaviors happen on Facebook and Twitter. So establishing a firm and long-term relationship between those who want to dispassionately study those behaviors and the private entities that have all the data is a huge imperative for me.  It requires walking through a minefield. On the one hand, if all you're doing is calling out the companies—well, it's their data, and they're not going to want to share it with you. On the other hand, if you get too close to them then you get the data but you don't always go where it follows.  You've got to get up every morning and figure out how to navigate that. It’s not pure, but that's the reality we're in. And I like having a diverse ecosystem that includes people who say, “I would never walk in the doors of Facebook. Forget it, NDA or no NDA, I'm not going to talk to them.” Great. Fine. You should be weighing in with what you see.  It's just, also, somebody ought to get the data! “Is there a volunteer among us who's ready to get sullied in order to do that?” How did you start writing code? I went to a perfectly fine public school in Texas. We had a computer science course, but the teacher didn’t know anything about programming. We had a textbook, though, and if you were sufficiently self-motivated, you could work through the exercises and then take the AP exam. Fortunately there were a few of us who really liked to code. So we got together and taught the course ourselves. We all passed the exam, and it helped me get into an elite institution for college.","completion":"What did arriving at that elite institution look like? It was weird. There was a big cultural gap. I resented my family for not having prepared me for the experience. There were all these kids who went to private schools who were years ahead of me in math. I was angry that I didn’t get those opportunities, and that came out as resentment towards my parents for awhile."}
{"prompt":"I remember going to my college girlfriend’s parents’ house and feeling intimidated by the food they ate and the way they talked. But I also knew I wanted to emulate it. Throughout college, I put a lot of pressure on myself to make sure that nobody could say I wasn’t supposed to be there. That was the particular form that impostor syndrome took for me: it wasn’t about the fear of not being a good programmer, but the fear of not belonging.","completion":"The path that college put me on created some distance between me and my parents, though. They have never been anything but proud of me, but they stopped understanding me sometime in college. And in the years since, the gaps between our worlds continue to grow wider. To this day, when I call my mom on the weekend, she still asks me if I’m off that day, because she doesn’t know that people only work Monday through Friday in offices. That’s just not context that she has—and I didn’t have it either before I left for college. My stepdad says if I ever wanted to move back home I could find work because there’s a local guy who fixes computers."}
{"prompt":"Apart from the culture shock, what was college like? The school where I went wasn’t friendly to failure. It was a meat grinder. When you walked through campus around finals week you saw kids sitting on the ground crying. Still, it’s the kind of place where you make connections that end up mattering a lot later. You meet people who will go on to start companies in Silicon Valley, or who will become higher-ups at bigger firms. It’s also the kind of place where recruiters track you from freshman year, have dinner with you at department-sponsored events—that sort of thing.","completion":"That industry interest made me feel special. And when I became a teaching assistant for a computer science course, that interest intensified. I had to do a work-study as part of my financial aid, and it was either serving food in the cafeteria or teaching computer science. But teaching paid well—$15 an hour, which blew my mind, since my high school job had paid $4 an hour plus tips."}
{"prompt":"Plus the job was super fun, and the industry attention felt great. Big firms would come in and lavish the teaching assistants with gifts—embarrassing gifts. Sometimes we would go buy cheap tricycles and ride them down a steep hill and play a sort of human Mario Kart. Microsoft found out about it and bought us the highest-quality tricycles available. I think it’s actually gotten worse since I’ve left. These days companies send stretch Hummer limos to pick kids up for fancy dinners.","completion":"So you must’ve been pretty well set up for a job in tech by the time you graduated. After I graduated I had a few options of places to work. I chose an older, more established company. That ended up being one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made in my life. I spent two years there while my friends were jumping on rocket ships. Then I decided to start a startup with somebody I knew from school."}
{"prompt":"My cofounder and I had been talking for several months about doing our own thing. In college, everybody was expected to go start a startup—that expectation had been drilled pretty deep into us. We lived in a big house with a bunch of friends, and we turned an extra room into an office. We had a really nice routine. We worked there every day, and tried to prototype things very quickly.","completion":"This was around 2009, when mobile apps were taking off. It was the era of “SoLoMo”—“social local mobile.” The iPhone had changed everything: there had been programming platforms for phones before, but they were garbage. Everyone wanted to build something for the App Store. The tech giants were way behind the curve, however—the Facebook mobile app was horrible, for example. It seemed possible that the bigger players just weren’t going to make it on mobile, and that created opportunities for startups like us."}
{"prompt":"So we tried to build a bunch of different apps. None of them found a huge amount of success. But the last one we tried, a social app for making plans with friends, did well enough to get some attention from TechCrunch and other places in the tech press. It was fun, but scary. Because we always knew that if one of the tech giants got their shit together, they could eat our lunch if they wanted to. I remember waking up one day and seeing a new product announcement from Facebook that I was convinced would put us out of business. I ran to my cofounder’s room, freaking out. It turned out we were fine. Still, I had that feeling of “Holy shit, we’re fucked” a lot. We lived in constant fear of getting scooped.","completion":"But you didn’t. Not exactly. But after a year, we were still living off our savings. It was clear that we either needed to get funding, get a job, or get acquired. Around this time, we went to an up-and-coming company to ask them whether they would give us access to their private API. They said, essentially, “No way. You’re a tiny company that doesn’t matter.” But they also said they’d be interested in acquiring us. We were very surprised to hear that. We didn’t even really know what it meant. But we decided to pursue it."}
{"prompt":"What they were offering is what Silicon Valley calls a “talent acquisition.” They wanted to buy the company, but they weren’t going to take our technology. They weren’t going to take our code. They just wanted to get the two of us working for them. They put me and my cofounder through an interview process, and it was the same standard interview process I’d already been through before. But at the end of it, they made an offer with a slightly different format. It was clear that we were talking to people who worked in their mergers and acquisitions (M&A) department rather than in recruiting. Those people have the authority to write bigger checks, and they’re supposed to be thinking about what the company is going to need a little further down the line.","completion":"We were very green, so we didn’t know what a good offer looked like. But we did know that we should go get at least one competing offer, to see what our options were. So, using our network of contacts from college, we reached out to somebody who had the ear of a few VPs at a bigger company that made similar acquisition offers. We said, “Hey, we have this offer from one of your competitors. They’re moving fast. Can we start a conversation with you?” Recruiters famously don’t make the process very fast for people. You can do an interview and not hear back for a month, for instance. It’s frustrating for most people coming in the front door. But it’s very different if you have an offer from a competitor. An offer from a competitor is always the best way to get their attention, even if they have ignored you in the past. And doubly so through the M&A route."}
{"prompt":"How old were you at the time? Twenty-three. This was all very new to me. Even with some experience in the industry, I had no idea how corporations worked. No one in my family worked for a corporation. So we went into the bigger company and did a presentation for several directors. They found it interesting, because we were thinking about the same problems that they needed to be thinking about. Because the big companies missed the boat on mobile, they were willing to write checks to make up for that gap. That’s probably the biggest phase of talent acquisition that I’ve seen in my career. Although maybe today acquisitions around AI could rival it now.","completion":"They liked our product enough to make an offer. But their offer was many multiples larger than the first one we’d received. They were a larger company, with more money to spend. They were also more frightened of smaller competitors outmaneuvering them, so they were willing to spend more. They wanted to acquire all of the assets of our company for a particular price and then wind the company down. The price they proposed was pretty high. And being a young kid with lots of student loan debt, I was blown away by the seriousness of that number. That’s the main thing I remember."}
{"prompt":"How did they decide how much the assets were worth? It was a charade. Our assets weren’t actually worth anything. We had a rounding error number of users. Our service was not wildly popular by any means. So they valued the assets pretty arbitrarily—this chunk of code is worth this many millions of dollars.","completion":"You said the smaller company wanted to acquire you as a way to hire you and your cofounder, but wasn’t interested in your technology or your code. What about the bigger company? They were planning to throw away every line of code. There was nothing that they were actually acquiring besides us. Then why buy your code if they’re just going to throw it away? Wouldn’t it have been easier to just hire you, instead of hiring you and buying your code? Sometimes the big tech companies acquire startups to acquire their technology, and sometimes they do it just to prevent those startups from becoming competitors. In our case, it was the latter."}
{"prompt":"Even if a big company is not directly threatened by a startup as a competitor currently, the thinking is that if they need to buy them later, they’re going to pay a lot more for it. So they might as well buy the startup as early as possible to nip it in the bud. Our startup was pre-funding, so they could get away with paying us much less. We didn’t have any investors they had to satisfy.","completion":"But acquiring our assets was also a way to justify paying us a lot. If they’re only going to pay you 2x the normal salary, then that can take the form of a very nice job offer. But if they’re going to pay you more like 8x or 10x, it breaks the whole idea of salary bands, which is how big companies organize compensation by experience level. So buying your assets is the backdoor—it’s a way to get away with paying certain people much more."}
{"prompt":"As far as what they’re buying—yes, they’re avoiding paying more for a potential competitor later. But the inherent value in a talent acquisition comes from acknowledging that most projects in software fail. Finding a team that can actually ship something that gets out the door is rare. Even at big companies, most projects will not see the light of day. So to find a group of people that have managed to build something—even if it’s small, even if it’s humble—means they’re probably a team that works well together. So they’re worth a premium. That’s the theory behind it, at least.","completion":"Also, they could make us sign a contract that locked us in for a long time. The deal to acquire our startup was a lump of cash and a job offer. We had to take both together. About half of the payment came up front, in the form of the cash. And the rest would come to us through salary and stock-based compensation on a vesting schedule over the course of four years."}
{"prompt":"Sure, I could’ve showed up on day one and quit. And they would’ve been angry at me, but I still would’ve been able to pay off my student loans. However, I would’ve been leaving a lot of money on the table. Were you excited? Paying off your student loans must’ve felt pretty good. I was very excited and very terrified. I didn’t want to screw it up. The deal was complicated. There were hundreds of pages of legal documents that I felt very overwhelmed by. We had to pay a lawyer fifty thousand dollars to make sure everything was airtight. My parents didn’t understand it, and to this day don’t understand it. My friends in tech were happy—some of them had been through this experience before.","completion":"But it changed my life. I went from being basically broke—my next rent payment would have emptied out my savings account, not to mention my student loans—to not having to worry about money anymore. So that was great. How did it feel to go from running a startup to working for a big company? It was intimidating, but there were some really positive aspects. As an engineer, I learned a lot. I felt like I was finally learning how to actually write software. I would go home and read the company’s internal wikis for hours. I was so excited about working there that I read documentation every weekend for a year, actually."}
{"prompt":"But coming in as a talent acquisition, you’re also expected to be a thought leader. You’re expected to inject the company with new ideas. It’s an informal role—it’s not reflected in your title. But that’s why management has paid a premium for you. So my cofounder and I started to materialize what we thought this company needed, and assembled a team of people to work on it. The fact that we could come in and substantially change product direction—that we could create and staff and launch a project—was due to the fact that the company had paid extra for us. Leadership assumed we knew something.","completion":"Failing Up, Down, and Sideways You said that most projects in software fail. Why is that? Because you never know what’s going to work. Market timing is everything: something that makes perfect sense two years from now, or made sense two years ago, might fail today for no good reason. Everything changes so fast: the technology stack, consumer demand, even the fundamental capabilities of these devices."}
{"prompt":"I mean, everything I’ve ever worked on has failed. I’ve worked on some ambitious projects at several of these big companies, and none of them have succeeded. But I’ve still been rewarded and promoted. And I think that’s a good thing about Silicon Valley. Failure isn’t looked down upon, which is a positive aspect of tech culture.","completion":"When you fail inside a big company, does it still feel like failure? The average time spent on a team is well under two years at most of these big companies. So when a company wants to change direction and abandon a product, people usually don’t take it that hard because they weren’t planning on being there for very long anyway."}
{"prompt":"On some teams, however, that’s not the case. I’m currently on a team that has been working on something for several years. And it’s failing. We have been launching small representative parts of our product but users aren’t using them. This is partly a problem with what constitutes success within a big company: if you launch a product with a million users, it’ll get killed because a million users is nothing. That’s one of the reasons that big companies have trouble innovating, because achieving a 1 percent gain in users of your main product will win every time over launching a new product with a much smaller user base. I mean, a million users would be a rocketship success for an early startup. For a big company, it’s a drop in the bucket. That’s why big companies tend to get stagnant, because they’ll always prioritize growing the main product over funding experimental ventures.","completion":"Anyway, on my team, failure has really depleted our energy. We’re demoralized because we’ve been grinding for a long time on something that just isn’t taking off. It used to be one of the best teams I’ve ever been on—but within a period of six months, we’ve become very unproductive. We have no direction."}
{"prompt":"That sounds like burnout. People get burned out not because they’re working too hard but because they’re not feeling rewarded by the work they’re doing. They get burned out because they believe their work has no impact. On my team, since we know it’s only a matter of time before leadership kills our product, people are burning out left and right.","completion":"At work, there are certain things you have to do. But what the company is really paying you for is to come up with new things to do. They’re paying for your creativity. When I’m burned out, I’m still doing the things I have to do—I’m filing the TPS reports—but I’m not coming up with new things to do. Burnout is when the creative part of your work is dead. There’s a muscle I go to flex and it’s just not there."}
{"prompt":"What about in the startup world? Failure must look different inside a startup. If you launch a startup that goes out of business, no one thinks you wasted your time. People still revere a founder whose company has failed, even to a fault. Plus, because there’s always more money being pumped into tech, it’s a soft landing for almost anyone whose startup fails.","completion":"That changes depending on what you’re working on and the time period, of course. For instance, I don’t think if your social app failed today you would have a nice acquisition offer waiting for you, unless you knew the potential acquirers on a personal level. And that ends up being the major way that the opportunities for “failing upwards” are not distributed equally."}
{"prompt":"Who is allowed to fail, and who gets to fail upwards? Your startup wasn’t failing exactly, but it sounds like the social network that you acquired in college was the determining factor in your ability to land acquisition offers. Definitely. In our case, that was the main thing. We didn’t have an impressive piece of technology or an impressive user base. But we did have social capital.","completion":"There are other ways to acquire social capital. If your startup gets press attention, that raises its acquisition price. If you have a really stellar team, that’s another way to fail upwards. You could assemble a dozen excellent engineers to work on a very hard problem and then fail at that problem. But you found a dozen engineers that can work together without killing each other and maybe even manage to ship something. That’s worth a lot."}
{"prompt":"On the one hand, Silicon Valley seems to revere entrepreneurialism. On the other hand, the industry is increasingly dominated by a handful of big companies—companies that, as you’ve explained, frequently acquire startups and burn down all their assets to ensure they don’t become competitors. How do you make sense of that contradiction between the cult of the founder and the increasingly monopolistic structure of tech? The funding model for startups is venture capital. And venture capital is a hits-driven business: you expect the vast majority of your investments to fail, so the ones that succeed have to succeed on a massive scale. Venture capital is risky, and it requires a lot of money.","completion":"Until relatively recently, tech companies didn’t have enough money to compete with venture capitalists. But now they do. Today, you have four or five tech giants with cash piles big enough to really push people around. And this has only happened in the last decade or so—it wasn’t like that in the early 2000s after the first dot-com crash."}
{"prompt":"But the incentives of a VC firm are different from those of a tech giant, right? The former is giving you capital to help you grow into a bigger company, whereas the latter is buying you to make sure you don’t grow into a bigger company. Right. But again, the tech giant is also buying you because you’re a founder who has had some amount of success. The reverence for the founder might sound silly, but it’s based on something real, which is that it’s really hard to measure why a company is successful.","completion":"There are too many factors at play: market timing, staffing decisions, choices about the technology stack. It’s impossible to know why a particular startup succeeds. So you find something to control for, and that’s the people. That’s why big tech companies like to bet on founders. This is something I’ve noticed in my career: there are people who are just very effective, and the things they touch seem to work. And most people aren’t like that."}
{"prompt":"How have your views of the acquisition experience, and of the tech industry more broadly, changed over time? I felt I was succeeding while the acquisition was happening. I had worked hard and I was being rewarded for it. The system was working. But today I look back and think of it as a failure. Why didn’t I work on something more challenging? Why didn’t I take a bigger swing? At the time, I thought I was working on something groundbreaking. Now, with some hindsight and maturity, I think I just got lucky doing something small.","completion":"I definitely feel like this was a silly chapter in my life. I’m very glad I got to pay off my student loans. But I don’t feel good about the work. In fact I feel pretty embarrassed about it. It’s not that I consider myself a failure for not having built a successful business. The failure I feel is more personal: it’s that I spent my time on building a small social app instead of something that would have been more meaningful."}
{"prompt":"What would’ve been more meaningful? I could have worked on something that actually had a positive impact on society. Or I could’ve set out to solve a problem that had more interesting technology behind it. Making the World A Better Place What do you think changed your mind? Because you didn’t feel that way at first.","completion":"I think it was seeing more of the industry, spending time at these big companies, and observing certain things. One of those had to do with bias. Silicon Valley has been under attack for the past several years for having a lot of bias in its compensation practices around gender and race. As a result, the big companies have tried to standardize the way they pay people. They’ll break compensation into salary bands that are supposed to match an employee’s level. So if you’re at a certain level, your pay falls somewhere within the corresponding salary band. Which means that if a man and a woman are in the same band, they’re going to be paid roughly the same."}
{"prompt":"That’s supposed to help correct gendered pay discrepancies. But it doesn’t really work, because there are all sorts of escape hatches built in. Salary bands only cover your salary. There’s lots of other ways that people get paid. As we discussed, talent acquisition is one of them. Talent acquisition gives companies a way to pay a premium to people who have more social capital. But that’s not the only way that people are rewarded unequally. There’s also the sign-on bonus. The sign-on bonus in Silicon Valley today can easily be a hundred thousand dollars. Even for somebody coming off their first job, or maybe even right out of school, it can be upwards of fifty thousand dollars. And the recruiters have a lot of leeway in setting that number. Then there’s your annual bonus, which is a percentage of your salary at most companies. Finally, there’s your stock-based compensation.","completion":"When you take an offer at a company, you’re given either stock options or grants of shares in the company. Those options or grants vest over a four-year schedule. And there’s really no restriction on how high that can go. So for a lot of people, a majority of total compensation comes from stock. Salary typically tops out at around $200,000 or $250,000 at a big company. But it wouldn’t be surprising to be given another $100,000 in stock grants. If you’re joining a company early on, that stock, by the time you’re done vesting it, could be more like a million dollars."}
{"prompt":"What about ageism in the industry? Silicon Valley tends to be very young. Does that worry you as you get older? I don’t know where all the old programmers go. They must go somewhere. It is a little worrisome. I’m in my thirties, and I feel like I have less energy. I’m an iOS developer and I haven’t learned Swift. Five years ago, definitely ten years ago, the day Swift was announced I would have become an expert on it. And I just don’t have that energy now.","completion":"So it sounds like issues around equity and bias played a determining role in changing how you think about the industry. Well, come to think of it, those are issues I’ve only come to understand in the past few years. I think what really shifted my thinking about my success was observing that most of the startups that are getting crazy amounts of venture capital aren’t solving interesting problems. There is a lot of money going into squeezing more ad dollars out of users, and getting more attention and eyeballs. Yo is a good example. My app wasn’t much dumber than Yo. And they got millions of dollars of funding."}
{"prompt":"I also felt like people were becoming founders and investors not because they wanted to solve problems that would help humanity but because they wanted to be in the Silicon Valley scene. They wanted the cultural cachet. They wanted to go to the parties. That was disillusioning to me, because I had really bought into the ideology that building a business was the best way to make the world a better place. That was something that was drilled into my head at my elite college. I had completely bought into it.","completion":"But over the years, as I saw what products were being funded and built, I felt disappointed. It changed how I thought about my own success. I wasn’t actually solving problems—I was just riding a wave of ridiculous overinvestment in social apps. So your own success started to feel more like a failure—not a personal failure, perhaps, but the failure of the industry more broadly."}
{"prompt":"Recently, you’ve actually had a number of high-level people in Silicon Valley express some degree of disillusionment as well. Early Facebook investor Sean Parker, among others, seems to regret his role in building a platform he now considers psychologically damaging. How do you see this disillusionment playing out more broadly in the industry? Get wealthy and solve the world’s problems—this was the message that I absorbed early on. You couldn’t do one without the other, the argument went, so don’t feel bad about becoming rich. The profit motive is the only way that we can possibly solve problems at scale.","completion":"I truly believed that. And it remains a widespread belief in the industry, and in the engineering departments of elite institutions. But to move forward, I think we are going to have to challenge that belief very directly. That’s why I’m skeptical of some of these newfound regrets expressed by Sean Parker and others. I don’t think they’re actually attacking the core notion that the profit motive is the best way to make the world a better place. They still believe they can centralize large amounts of capital in these massive corporations and pay themselves well and solve the world’s problems. I think there are some inherent tradeoffs that they’re not yet acknowledging."}
{"prompt":"Sean Parker is also a billionaire. Do you see rank-and-file tech workers expressing  doubts about what they’re building as well? When you’re an engineer, you’re constantly being told to do things that are clearly not good for the user. If you’re building any kind of app or platform that makes its money from advertising, you are trying to maximize “time spent”—how long a user spends with your product. Time spent is considered a proxy for value delivered to the user, because if your product wasn’t useful, the user wouldn’t be using it.","completion":"Here’s how it typically works. An order comes down from on high: the board says to increase revenue. What’s the best way the management team knows to increase revenue? To increase time spent. So they issue the order, which gets percolated down the tree, and now everyone is working on increasing time spent. This means making the product more addictive, more absorbing, more obtrusive. And it works: the user starts spending more time with the product."}
{"prompt":"But every worker knows this is bad. Every engineer and designer knows this is awful. They’re not happy making these features. But they can’t argue with the data. The engineer and the designer who care about the user don’t want to put these features out in the world. But the data says those features are increasing time spent—which means they’re good. Because more time spent means selling more advertising, which means making more money.","completion":"And so long as you’re working for an advertising company, what other metric besides time spent could there be? So long as you’re working for a company, what other metric besides profit could there be? That’s a similar question. You can make small surface-level improvements here and there. But you’re not going to tackle the core problem until you tackle the profit motive."}
{"prompt":"The directives to increase metrics like time spent come from above, but the actual work is being done by tech workers on the ground. And they’re doing this work because their performance is measured by whether or not they moved that metric and whether or not they implemented those features—even if they know they’re bad for users.","completion":"But there’s no way they can push back on it. They can talk about it—in their company Slack, in their public forums, at their all-hands meetings. They can express a lot of malaise about it. But they can’t argue against the experiment succeeding, because you can’t argue against increased profits. You could imagine different structures of the company that might not have this problem. You could imagine a world where these companies empower rank-and-file workers to make certain decisions themselves, and give users a voice in those decisions. Workers and users could together decide what metrics to optimize for, and what kind of technology they want to build."}
{"prompt":"One of the first things I learned after learning how to write software was how to write tests for that software. First you wrote code to perform a certain task—say, find the square root of a number. Then you wrote more code to test whether the first piece of code did what you wanted. Does the function return the correct value? Is two the square root of four? I thought this type of testing was ridiculous. If you wrote buggy software, why would the software you wrote to check that software be any less buggy? That happened to me a lot: I’d spend twenty minutes trying to figure out why my tests said my programs were broken only to realize that the tests themselves were broken.","completion":"Yet what I found even more troubling was that in order to write effective tests, a programmer had to know all of the ways that a piece of software could fail in order to write tests for those cases. If she forgot the square root of -1 was undefined, she’d never write a test for it. But, obviously, if you knew where your bugs were, you’d just fix them. Errors typically hide in the places we forget to look."}
{"prompt":"My first employer, the online dating site OkCupid, didn’t harp on testing either. In part, this was because our company was so small. Only seven fellow engineers and I maintained all the code running on our servers—and making tests work was time-consuming and error-prone. “We can’t sacrifice forward momentum for technical debt,” then-CEO Mike Maxim told me, referring to the cost of engineers building behind-the-scenes tech instead of user-facing features. “Users don’t care.” He thought of testing frameworks as somewhat academic, more lofty than practical.","completion":"Instead, the way we kept from breaking the site was to push updates to small subsets of users and watch what happened. Did anything crash? Did lag increase? Were users reporting new problems? The idea was that the best way to discover errors was to expose software to real site traffic and respond quickly with a patch or rollback if necessary."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps this was a sensible methodology for a small engineering team. But when I first started at OkCupid, I found it terrifying. About four months in, I was assigned to build a feature that would highlight the interests that members listed on their profiles—things like “Infinite Jest,” “meditation,” “The Dirty Projectors”—for OkCupid staff to see. Because this was an internal feature that users wouldn’t be able to access, the stakes were low.","completion":"Still, I was paranoid about breaking the site, and procrastinated. My boss, then-Director of Engineering David Koh, started to notice. “I know it’s intimidating,” he told me at the end of work one day, “but you just have to pull the trigger and launch the code. Soon you’ll do it without even thinking.” He told me to push my update the next day, when he’d be out of the office."}
{"prompt":"I was nervous to make a change without David there to save me if anything went wrong. But, admittedly, my update was pretty dinky. The next morning, just to cover my tail, I asked Mike the CEO, who was also OkCupid’s best engineer, to take a look at my code. “You only added a few functions,” he said, reading through my lines on his monitor. “Looks fine.” I felt silly taking up his time for something so insignificant.","completion":"So I launched my new code for a fraction of our users and watched the statistics. All seemed well. I pushed my changes out to the rest of the site and went for a snack. When I came back, everything was most definitely not fine. The site had slowed to a crawl, and then became completely non-responsive. From the back corner of our single-floor office, the head of operations yelled, “The servers are on fire. What the hell’s going on?” “It must’ve been me,” Mike shouted back. Mike and I had both deployed code at almost exactly the same time, a development no-no since when something broke (like now), you didn’t know who to blame. But when Mike reversed his change to no effect, he was stuck. It wouldn’t be long before the OkCupid servers became so unresponsive we wouldn’t even be able to connect to them to push our fixes."}
{"prompt":"#Panic #Freakout By lunch, we still hadn’t saved the site. OkCupid users were starting to notice on Twitter: “@okcupid how am I supposed to get my daily dose of crushing rejection and emotional humiliation if your site is down????” “Okcupid stops working over lunch hour, NYC wonders if we’re committed to the people in our phones from now on, panic in the streets” “@okcupid How can I continue to be ignored by the females of the world if they don’t know where I am to ignore me?! #panic #freakout” The more time that passed, the more confident I became, by process of elimination, that I’d taken down the site. I read through every file I’d changed—the lines of code I’d written and even the ones I hadn’t. Then, finally, I found the error. It looked something like this: If (the database throws an error) { do nothing } This was a bug, and I hadn’t even written it. I had just triggered it. But it was a bad bug, one that, under the right circumstances—circumstances that I’d unfortunately created—would not only crash the OkCupid servers but also spew radioactive garbage into our caches and database, making recovery especially difficult. I was horrified.","completion":"How could such a tiny change have such an outsized impact on the site? “That same story happened so many different times,” my old boss David told me. “Someone launched a small, relatively innocuous change that did one of the millions of unexpected things it could have done, which then happened to break some part of the site, and then bring it all down—sometimes bring it down to the point where we couldn’t recover it for hours.” When I saw him in the office the morning after I’d broken the site, totally mortified, he consoled me by saying that site outages were just the cost of relying on such a small engineering team."}
{"prompt":"But even large companies are susceptible to meltdowns caused by seemingly innocuous actions. In February 2017, Amazon accidently brought down swaths of the internet when one of its employees, trying to debug the company’s S3 service, entered a command incorrectly. Because hundreds of thousands of companies use S3 to store data, the error took down tons of sites, including Quora, Giphy, and Slack. Ironically, Amazon’s own S3 status indicator relied on S3, which is why it incorrectly reported that the service was working just fine during the outage.","completion":"Tangled Webs For most businesses, however, a software crash is not a death knell. If you’re not building self-driving cars, storing sensitive information, or supporting the data backbone of the internet, it may not matter if an error interrupts your service. It’s okay, for example, if a free online dating site goes down for an hour or half a day. In fact, it might even be better for business to trade off bugginess for forward momentum—the ethos behind Facebook’s old mantra “move fast and break things.” When you allow yourself to build imperfect systems, you start to work differently—faster, more ambitiously. You know that sometimes your system will go down and you’ll have to repair it, but that’s okay. “The fact that it’s easy to fix things means you end up with this methodology where you think, ‘Let’s get a broken thing out there as fast as possible that does sort of what we want, and then we’ll just fix it up,’” says David. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since preventing errors is inherently difficult. “Even if you spend a whole bunch of time trying to make something that’s perfect, you won’t necessarily succeed,” he explains."}
{"prompt":"OkCupid was a complex site. Had we tried to make it perfect, it might not have come to exist in the first place. But software is built on top of other software. You’re working not just with your own code but with code from your coworkers and from third-party software libraries. If these dependencies are buggy or complicated or behave in non-intuitive ways, errors may seep into the software that relies on them.","completion":"Take the Equifax data breach, which leaked some 147.9 million Americans’ private information in September 2017. Equifax was vulnerable to attack not because of a bug introduced by one of its own engineers, but rather because of a bug in the code that Equifax’s software was built on top of—a popular open-source framework called Apache Struts."}
{"prompt":"That bug had existed in Struts since 2008 but had gone unnoticed until 2017, when Apache finally released a patch. Until they installed the patch, the tens of thousands of companies that used Struts—including banks and government agencies—were hackable. Yet Equifax didn’t install the patch until two months after Apache released it. Why the delay? According to testimony by Equifax executives before the House Energy and Commerce committee, the problem was twofold: first, the employee whose job it was to report that a patch was necessary didn’t. Second, an error in a software script meant to flag known vulnerabilities in Equifax’s software stack failed.","completion":"Yet even if Equifax had tried to install the patch, it wouldn’t have been an easy update. As Ars Technica reported, the patch was difficult to install and could break existing systems, possibly introducing new bugs. That helps explain why, according to the software vendor Sonotype, some 46,557 companies downloaded vulnerable versions of Struts even after the patch came out."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps Equifax’s security procedures were sloppy and its breach completely preventable. Yet it’s easy for me to imagine a future bug with similarly catastrophic consequences that’s not so easy to blame on incompetence. Most complex software today is composite, consisting of interwoven modules written by many different programmers and maybe even many different organizations. The higher these code towers grow, the more difficult it becomes to understand how their various components interact.","completion":"Pessimism of the Intellect It’s for this reason that my own bug at OkCupid was so bad. I had written a function that asked the database to give me data that didn’t exist. It should’ve returned an error, stopping the program. But because of a bug in one of my dependencies—the bug I found reading through the code on the day of the crash—my program didn’t error out, but instead kept chugging along as if nothing were wrong. It kept consuming more and more memory, which eventually ate into almost every program running on our servers. That’s why the OkCupid site slowed down to the point of becoming unusable."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps the worst part of figuring out how I’d crashed OkCupid was that I was still too green to know how to fix it. All I could do was sit at my desk twiddling my thumbs in solidarity while my coworkers rebuilt what I’d destroyed. We stayed in the office until 9 PM. From then on, I came to appreciate how unexpectedly far fractures in a system can travel.","completion":"“I heard you had an exciting day yesterday,” my boss David said the next morning. Mortified, I was sure I’d be fired. But I wasn’t, and instead I spent the next three months anxiously trying to prove to my coworkers that I wasn’t totally incompetent. I never brought the site down again, perhaps because my code-launching senses were heightened by a PTSD-induced adrenaline rush."}
{"prompt":"Maybe I’m still scarred or just generally pessimistic, but on the whole, I tend to think that all sufficiently large, complex software is prone to this kind of meltdown. It’s almost certainly impossible to prevent all bugs, and since code is composite, it’s even harder to reason about the consequences of those bugs. A successful developer today needs to be as good at writing code as she is at extinguishing that code when it explodes.","completion":"The failure of the open-source movement is ultimately a failure of imagination. Let’s back up a bit. When I talk about the “failure” of the open-source movement, I don’t simply mean that systemic underfunding of crucial open-source projects has led to incidents like the Heartbleed saga, whereby a vulnerability in an important software library called OpenSSL undermined the integrity of a large part of the internet. Nor am I referring to the low adoption of open-source software on the consumer side. Those are certainly failures, but they are minor in comparison to the one that looms over the entire movement. Open source’s biggest failure is philosophical. And it is rooted in what we normally think of as open source’s greatest success."}
{"prompt":"In recent decades, open source has proliferated on the production side—how software is developed, deployed, and maintained. Much of the technological infrastructure that underpins our digital world now relies on open-source tooling. We’ve even reached a point where corporations are frequently choosing open-source software over proprietary alternatives. What’s more, they’re publicly extolling its virtues: they’re sponsoring conferences and allowing their developers to work on popular projects. Indeed, many employers now consider past contributions to open-source projects a de facto requirement for getting hired.","completion":"So hasn’t the movement succeeded, then? If startups that have built their businesses on open-source software can raise hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital? If a company like Microsoft, which once positioned itself as the enemy of open source, is now funding key projects? That depends on what you think open source is fundamentally for. For some, open source is about making software less buggy and more robust by widening the pool of possible contributors. For others, it’s about giving users—at least the more technically skilled ones—more control over the software they use. For the most cynical, it’s a way to dupe people into working for free."}
{"prompt":"But I always thought there was something more to open source—something more radical, something worth fighting for. Free as in Freedom For me, the best parts of the open-source movement were always the remnants of the “free software movement” from which it evolved. During the early days of the movement in the 1980s, best captured by Richard Stallman’s book Free Software, Free Society, there were no corporate conferences featuring branded lanyards and sponsored lunches. Instead, it was all about challenging the property rights that had granted software companies so much power in the first place. Stallman himself was possibly the movement’s best-known evangelist, traveling around the world to preach about software freedom and the evils of applying patent law to code.","completion":"Stallman lent the movement an unorthodox, anti-establishment tone. He framed the argument for free software in moral terms, positioning it as not only technically but ethically superior to proprietary software, which he saw as a “social problem.” And he practiced what he preached: in his personal life, Stallman went to great lengths to avoid using proprietary software, even to the point of not owning a cell phone."}
{"prompt":"But it wasn’t until the free software movement shed its rebellious roots and rebranded as the more business-friendly “open-source movement” that it really took off. One of the most crucial figures in this effort was Tim O’Reilly, founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, who built his business empire by identifying the pieces of the free software movement that could be commodified. Suddenly, corporations that had previously considered open source to be dangerously redolent of “communism” were starting to see its value, both as a way of building software and as a recruitment tactic. From there, an entire ecosystem of virtue-signaling opportunities sprang up around the marriage of convenience between the corporate world and open source: conference and hackathon sponsorships, “summers of code,” libraries released under open licenses but funded by for-profit corporations.","completion":"If that counts as a victory, however, it was a pyrrhic one. In the process of gaining mainstream popularity, the social movement of “free software”—which rejected the very idea of treating software as intellectual property—morphed into the more palatable notion of “open source” as a development methodology, in which free and proprietary software could happily co-exist. The corporations that latched onto the movement discovered a useful technique for developing software, but jettisoned the critique of property rights that formed its ideological foundation."}
{"prompt":"Yet it was precisely the weakness of that foundation that made the free software movement vulnerable to co-optation in the first place. The movement’s greatest limitation was its political naivete. Even as it attacked the idea of software as property, it failed to connect its message to a wider analysis that acknowledged the role of property rights within a capitalist framework. Free software pioneers like Stallman tended to approach the issue from an individualized perspective, drawn from the 1970s-1980s hacker culture that many of them came from: if you could change how enough hackers wrote and used software, you could change the world. This highly personalized model of social change proposed an individual solution to a structural problem, which necessarily neglected the wider social context.","completion":"Still, it’s not entirely fair to blame the founders of free software for having their movement hijacked. They were facing difficult odds: the neoliberal consensus of the last few decades has meant that the benefits of technological development have largely flowed to corporations, under the aegis of a strong intellectual property regime. As the free software movement came up against these prevailing economic forces, its more contentious aspects were watered down or discarded. The result was “open source”: a more collaborative method of writing software that bore few traces of its subversive origins."}
{"prompt":"Which is a shame, because the movement had the potential to be so much more. Free software arose out of the desire to decommodify data, to contest the idea of treating information as property. Of course, the movement’s ability to fulfill this desire was hampered by a lack of political analysis and historical context. Crucially, free software advocates neglected to recognize information as simply the latest battlefield in a centuries-old story of capital accumulation, as capital discovers new engines of profit-making and new areas of our common life to enclose. Still, there was something there: glimmers of a recognition that property is the enemy of freedom.","completion":"How to Set Software Free Recently, it feels like we’ve reached a turning point when it comes to public sentiment about tech.  More and more people are questioning the power that technology companies have over our lives, our economies, and our democracies. Pundits and politicians are casting about frantically for solutions: better regulation; a code of ethics for engineers, more diverse workforces. Unfortunately, these are mostly window-dressing solutions that don’t address the imbalance of power at the root of the problem. But maybe a more radical approach was there all along, hiding in plain sight, within the history of tech itself."}
{"prompt":"In his 2004 book The Hacker Manifesto, media theorist McKenzie Wark coins the term “vectoralist class” to refer to those who profit from commodifying information. This process is enforced by intellectual property restrictions to prevent sharing, resulting in an artificial scarcity of a non-scarce good. Given that property rights originally developed under conditions of scarcity, it feels somewhat odd, from a consumer perspective, to apply those same rights to non-scarce goods which can be replicated at zero marginal cost. As a result, initiatives for “digital rights management” are typically unpopular among the public, straining consumer expectations of ownership by imposing restrictions on what you can do with the songs, movies, or e-books you have paid for.","completion":"There is a tension, then, between what makes sense to consumers and what is required by capital, as strong intellectual property regimes are needed to secure profits for the vectoralist class despite their unpopularity among users. The standard justification for this state of affairs is that it’s the only way to ensure that content creators can make a living. But this merely deploys content creators as a human shield to distract from the sheer unnaturalness of this extremely lucrative system, one in which the bulk of the profits are accruing to corporations, not content creators."}
{"prompt":"Fortunately, there is an alternative. You can see the beginnings of it in commons-based movements like open access journals, Creative Commons licensing, and open-source software, which Wark calls the “gift economy.” These movements have flourished partly because they correlate with the common-sense idea that “information wants to be free,” and despite their limitations, they still hint at a deeper revelation. As Wark writes: …the vectoralist class quite rightly sees in the gift a challenge not just to its profits but to its very existence. The gift economy is the virtual proof for the parasitic and superfluous nature of vectoralists as a class.","completion":"Seen in that vein, the radical undertones of open source didn’t just come out of nowhere, and they’re not unique to software. Instead, open source is simply a response to the very real contradictions that abound when property rights are applied to information. Where it fails is by offering an easy way out—by creating a microcosm, itself commodified, that suspends intellectual property conventions on a small scale, without ever presenting a viable alternative to the wider intellectual property regime required under capitalism."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps it’s time to move beyond the corporate-friendly veneer of the open-source movement and resurrect its free software roots, paired with an understanding of the broader economic context. The gift economy, of which the open source movement is a crucial part, shows us that property rights are not necessary for driving innovation, and so there is no need for the vectoralist class—no need for the pantheon of technology corporations that attempt to commodify every aspect of our lives in order to enrich a select few. We should try to imagine a world without them, in which the technologies that shape our common life belong to us in common, and are harnessed for the purpose of benefiting society and not hoarding wealth.","completion":"The biggest obstacle to building such a world is the question of how contributors will get paid, and it’s one that frequently comes up in the open-source software world today. If contributors are unable to sell their code, how can they make a living? The solution isn’t to sweep this under the rug by assuming contributors will have other sources of income—that’ll only produce a contributor ecosystem that amplifies the demographic biases of the wider economy. A more compelling vision, grounded in a materialist analysis of the conditions of production, would be a world where no one needs to get paid for these contributions because their material needs are taken care of through other means."}
{"prompt":"Now, this isn’t exactly a small project—it would require a complete reimagining of the relations of production. The only way to set information “free” is to restructure the economy such that information production can be free, with contributors no longer needing to get paid for their work because crucial goods like housing, transport and food are available as free public services. In other words, truly decommodifying information will require decommodifying the things we need to survive in order to produce that information. To make markets less dominant in software, we must make them less dominant everywhere else.","completion":"Luxurious Code This is why the struggle to set information free is not just a technical matter—it has to involve a broader political struggle. The challenges faced by the original free software movement are merely the tip of the iceberg. If you take the core tenets of free software to their logical conclusion, you end up with a desire to reverse all kinds of commodification by transforming property rights in their entirety. As a result, today’s open source communities have the potential to serve as gateways to a more radical politics, one that pushes for the decommodification of not just information but also the material resources needed to sustain the production of information."}
{"prompt":"What’s needed, then, is a leap of faith: from feeling gratitude towards corporations for funding open-source projects to questioning why we allow these corporations to amass the wealth that enables them to do so in the first place. What’s needed is a movement to resist the commodification of information in all its forms—whether that’s software, content, or using personal data to increase product sales through targeted advertising—and diminishing the power of these corporate giants in the process.","completion":"The open-source movement could—and should—be more than just another way to develop code. Fulfilling its radical potential will involve expanding the scope of the movement by linking it with a broader struggle for decommodification. This will require a massive political battle, challenging not just individual corporations and institutions but the neoliberal state itself."}
{"prompt":"Ultimately, there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between the idea of free information and the existence of corporations that profit from its commodification. The battle to make information free is the battle for an entirely different world, one characterized by public luxury—an abundance of commons, and a corresponding dearth of parasitic corporations extracting rent by enclosing ones and zeroes. The open-source movement opens a crack in the economic edifice, but only a small one; if it wants to be anything more, it’ll need to embrace a bolder vision for reclaiming the commons. Only then can it reclaim its long-buried emancipatory soul.","completion":"Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic located in Central Asia, does not have a long history of nationhood. It does not have a long history of the peaceful transfer of power either. After gaining its independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan saw its first two presidents ousted from power by riots in 2005 and 2010. That’s why the 2017 presidential election was historic: for the first time, power was peacefully transferred from one popularly elected president to another. This was not only a first for Kyrgyzstan, but for the entire ex-Soviet region of Central Asia."}
{"prompt":"Even so, the elections were fraught with controversy. While their outcome wasn’t predetermined, they weren’t free from foul play either. The Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe issued a report that described voter intimidation, vote-buying, and government pressure on local journalists. Human Rights Watch pointed to defamation cases brought against independent media outlets, as well as restrictions on public gatherings at central locations.","completion":"These incidents are representative of a broader culture of corruption in Kyrgyzstan. While Kyrgyzstan is a poor country, with gross national income per capita of $1,100 in 2016, vast sums of money are being laundered on their way to offshore accounts. In one period, from January to July 2005, these transactions totaled a staggering $6 billion. The shady businesses involved in these deals thrive on the blurring of lines between organized crime, industry, and government. Corruption is so endemic in Kyrgyzstan, in fact, that it isn’t merely an issue but a whole mode of governance. The scholar Johan Engvall calls the Kyrgyz state an investment market, where people run for public office because it is profitable."}
{"prompt":"The profitability of political power in Kyrgyzstan is why those who possess it will deploy any number of dirty tricks to hold onto it. One of these is the use of so-called “administrative resources” to promote the government’s preferred candidate. These include a range of tactics, from putting pressure on civil servants to hiring groups of men to intimidate voters at polling stations. Buying votes with cash is also common. While vote-buying is available to every candidate, the government has access to greater funds and greater manpower, and enjoys a layer of protection from the judiciary.","completion":"In the 2017 election, however, corruption also came in a newly digital form. Former prime minister Sooronbay Jeenbekov, the ruling elite’s chosen candidate, won the race in part through an unfair advantage he gained by accessing voters’ private data. The scandal became popularly known as “Samaragate,” after the name of the site that hosted Jeenbekov’s system for tracking and influencing voters."}
{"prompt":"In a country where corruption is deeply embedded in government structures, Jeenbekov’s move came as no surprise. Still, his use of data to swing the election adds an interesting twist to a familiar theme. The story of Samaragate is a cautionary tale of how data can be manipulated for anti-democratic ends—a story that resonates far beyond Kyrgyzstan.","completion":"Data for Votes The story of Samaragate begins in September 2017, a month prior to the election, when an obscure website called samara.kg began managing the private data of Kyrgyz citizens. Formerly owned by a real estate agency, the site migrated to a government-owned server that month, a fact which was confirmed by the famous computer scientist Paul Vixie. And this server contained detailed information on about two million Kyrgyz citizens, including biometrical data, passport numbers, and personal tax reference numbers—out of a total population of only six million."}
{"prompt":"A day before the election, an anonymous hacktivist who goes by the handle “suppermario12” hacked into the samara.kg server. Suppermario12 moved the domain to their own server, so that anyone who tried to access the site for the next ten hours saw a video that explained the mechanics of how Jeenbekov was using samara.kg to influence the outcome of the election. They also leaked information gathered from the server to journalists at several local news outlets, including the site Kloop.kg, which ran an extensive investigative report.","completion":"How did the samara.kg system work? Previously, so-called “campaigners” had to go door-to-door to buy votes. Often, jaded Kyrgyz citizens would take the cash regardless of whether they were actually registered to vote. Samara.kg helped campaigners eliminate this problem by making it easier to check someone’s eligibility to vote. Since 2015 only citizens who have submitted their biometrical data can vote in Kyrgyzstan. Samara.kg had a copy of all this data, which campaigners used to ensure that the votes they were buying were genuine. Samara.kg also tracked which voters had already voted, preventing citizens from selling their vote multiple times."}
{"prompt":"The ruling elite built samara.kg to get Jeenbekov elected, and he remains in power. Still, the fallout from the scandal may come back to haunt the government. Rinat Tuhvatshin, executive director of Kloop Media, who was summoned and questioned by Kyrgyz security services for three hours for his team’s investigation into Samaragate, is convinced of it. If the country’s current leadership is pushed out, a new round of leaders may use Samaragate “as some sort of leverage against people who were formerly in power… [S]ome new president will say: ‘Ok, what do we have on Samara? Let’s use it against our predecessors.’” Medet Tiulegenov, a professor of international and comparative politics at the American University of Central Asia in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan’s capital, says the scandal’s implications are even broader. The samara.kg story “has wide ramifications for democratic development in Kyrgyzstan,” he says. Biometrics were supposed to strengthen the integrity of elections. Instead, they have been used to undermine it: The country has developed electoral procedures that minimize electoral fraud mostly due to the introduction of biometric identification of voters and voting with electronic scanners. Samaragate, however, puts in question this achievement. Moreover, a new challenge to civil society might be the difficulty of tracking and monitoring possible manipulations of electoral data in the future.","completion":"Digital Distortion Samaragate is just one example of how technology can warp elections, especially in fragile democracies. There are many more cases—most of which will not make it into local news, much less receive global attention—of governments in poor countries using technology to distort the democratic process—not only in Central Asia but in countries like the Philippines, Myanmar, and Cambodia. And these cases are unlikely to be addressed in any meaningful way."}
{"prompt":"In the Philippines, for example, Rodrigo Duterte was elected in 2016 in large part due to his groundbreaking Facebook campaign. Since becoming president, he has used the same platform to manipulate public opinion with “fake news” and crack down on critics, including journalist Maria Ressa. Ressa has urged Mark Zuckerberg to address the issue. Instead, in November 2017, Facebook announced a partnership with the Duterte government to build underwater cables for high-speed internet.","completion":"Biometric data raises additional concerns. Several countries, including the Philippines, Venezuela, and Iraq, already connect bank accounts and voter registration to biometrics. It is impossible to guarantee that states will not misuse this data as the Kyrgyz government did. And electoral interference is likely to be the least of it—biometrics have the potential to greatly increase a government’s ability to surveil and repress its citizens. To take one example, China is currently collecting biometric data on everyone aged twelve to sixty-five in the region of Xinjiang."}
{"prompt":"In the United States, revelations about surveillance, fake news, and Russian influence are finally starting a public conversation about the dark side of technology. The European Union is implementing a comprehensive privacy law to protect the personal data of its citizens. Yet, while these initiatives are important and should be pursued, citizens in lesser developed nations are often overlooked and excluded from the global discussion about digital rights. If technology is to be democratic, it should work in everyone’s interests, not only those who happen to live in rich countries.","completion":"Did you just work a particularly shitty shift at Walmart? Visit walmart-blows.com to vent about your boss. Had an especially crappy experience flying United? Go to Untied.com to blow off some steam. This was the promise of the “gripe site,” a fixture of an earlier era of the web. Often using the format CompanyName-sucks.com, gripe sites allowed people to anonymously complain about companies. Nowadays, gripe sites are digital refuse. Their old URLs lead to 404s or ancient HTML pages. Indeed, the very idea of having a website dedicated to griping about a single company feels antiquated in an age where we have websites like Yelp, Glassdoor, Twitter, and Facebook to meet our griping needs."}
{"prompt":"But the rise and fall of gripe sites are an important chapter in the history of the internet. Gripe sites were far more than a place to complain. Rather, they offered a lively, anonymous outlet for consumers and workers to criticize corporate power, and even to organize against it. As a result, they faced an onslaught of attacks from companies. Gripe sites were the flashpoint for intense legal and regulatory battles—battles that boiled down to a confrontation between two conflicting visions of the internet’s purpose. Who owns the internet, and what is it for? This was the core question in the war over gripe sites, and one that remains no less urgent today.","completion":"Talking Shit In 2004 there were around 7,800 .com websites that included company names and derisive slang verbs like “sucks” or “blows.” They were so popular in the early 2000s that Forbes even published several annual “Top Corporate Hate Websites” articles, ranking gripe sites on criteria like “ease of use, frequency of updates, number of posts, hostility level, relevance, and entertainment value.” Where did all these sites come from? Gripe site founders were often motivated by specific grievances. The creator of WalMart-Blows.com said he created it because he was “pissed off at Wal-Mart… for their crappy customer service and for treating their employees like s–t.” Bradley Jones ran a Radio Shack for seven years and launched his gripe site, RadioShackSucks.com, after suing the company for refusing to renew his contract and opening up a competing franchise down the street from his location."}
{"prompt":"These gripers felt that the existing institutional routes for redress weren’t effective. By making their complaints public, they hoped to shame the company into making improvements or, at the very least, find solace in sharing their irritation with others. And it turned out that many people did share their irritation—especially workers. The single most active group of gripers were the company’s employees themselves. They gathered on gripe sites to commiserate about how much their job sucked—anonymously and out of earshot of the boss. This was especially useful for workers who worked different shifts or at different franchise locations. Gripe sites brought these atomized workers together. It functioned as an online water cooler that facilitated candid conversations about their workplace conditions.","completion":"Moreover, these conversations often touched on the need for collective action to improve their situation. Talk of labor rights dominated gripe sites, especially those of major retail and food service companies like McDonald’s, Lowes, and Walmart. On Walmart-Blows.com, the most frequented forum was the “Employee Department,” where popular threads bore titles like “Unionization,” “Piss Poor Wages?,” and “1-800 Sick Call.” As gripe sites became places for worker empowerment, however, bosses came to see them as a threat and discouraged their employees from using them. As one user on RadioShackSucks.com claimed, “My boss threatened to fire me if I ever went on this site. He said the DO [District Office] would do it, no questions asked.” Sticks and Stones Management was right to fear gripe sites. They could hurt companies in very concrete ways."}
{"prompt":"In 2004, a group of store managers brought a class action lawsuit against RadioShack for failing to pay them overtime. Both RadioShack and the law firm representing the underpaid employees recognized the role that RadioShackSucks.com played in quickly encouraging 3,300 current or former employees to join. RadioShackSucks.com even linked to the site of the law firm, encouraging visitors to see if they were eligible for the suit.","completion":"Labor unions latched onto the gripe site model as well. UNITE HERE and the Teamsters targeted the anti-union company Cintas with a website called CintasExposed.org. Recognizing gripe sites’ ability to bring workers and consumers together, the unions encouraged Cintas clients to vent about their bad experiences—“Tell your Cintas story”—and read through experiences posted by others. The site also described how clients could file complaints against Cintas and cancel their contracts with the company."}
{"prompt":"But gripe sites didn’t need to help mobilize lawsuits and consumer campaigns in order to hurt companies. They could also make corporations sweat merely by existing. From a branding perspective, gripe sites were a nightmare. Much of a company’s value is based on their brand’s reputation. On the web, however, almost anyone could register a domain name and build a website that damaged that reputation. Every post by gripers served to chip away at a company’s brand—and by extension its profits.","completion":"The Empire Strikes Back As companies recognized the danger of gripe sites, they developed an arsenal of tactics to fight back. The first step was usually to hire a cyber-monitoring firm. These companies would trawl through websites to look for threats to a client’s reputation. Once they found a damaging website, the client’s law firm would send the site’s owner a cease-and-desist letter."}
{"prompt":"The letters typically claimed several serious violations and demanded that the site be taken down to avoid a lawsuit. It is unknown how many sites folded at this point. Most gripe site owners had neither the time nor the money to conduct an intense legal fight. But many of them were up for a battle, and even posted the cease-and-desist letters to their site for fellow gripers to laugh about.","completion":"If the company took the gripe site owner to court, they would usually bring hundreds of pages of “evidence” claiming several legal violations in the hopes that one would stick. The three most common claims were libel, trademark violation, and cybersquatting. This technique of aggressive litigating deployed by companies is a textbook example of a SLAPP. A SLAPP is a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation and, as the name suggests, SLAPPs are designed to silence critics by forcing them to focus their time and money on legal defense."}
{"prompt":"A few states have tried to pass laws to curb SLAPPs, but it is difficult to demonstrate that a lawsuit is a SLAPP since companies rarely explicitly state that their intentions are to intimidate. This difficulty is compounded in the case of anti-gripe site SLAPPs, since courts take trademark laws very seriously and are unlikely to see suits as frivolous. Equipped with trademark laws, companies were able to—at least temporarily—rein in criticism through long and expensive lawsuits.","completion":"Yet despite the significant legal firepower that corporations assembled, courts would often end up siding with the owner of the gripe site. Sometimes these suits could even backfire, as a company’s attempt to silence criticism led to increased attention for the gripe site. This was the case with ihateryanair.co.uk, a gripe site devoted to RyanAir. After a British court ruled that it had to be taken down, its owner transferred its contents to ihateryanair.org, a “generic top-level domain” (gTLD) not under British jurisdiction."}
{"prompt":"To forgo this game of cat-and-mouse, as well as the legal fees associated with filing all those lawsuits, companies eventually turned to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), a US-based nonprofit that oversees the Domain Name System (DNS). In fact, ICANN’s controversial Trademark Clearinghouse has given corporations their most powerful weapon in their war against gripe sites.","completion":"Companies can submit their trademarks to the Clearinghouse, which will then deter the registration of domain names that come too close to those trademarks. If someone tries to register a domain name with a gTLD like .com, .org, or .net that contains words linked to someone’s entry in the Trademark Clearinghouse—GoogleSucks.com, for example—then they will receive a warning that discourages them from continuing. The trademark holder will also be notified. ICANN doesn’t currently block such registrations entirely, but establishing a mechanism for doing so remains a high-priority item for industry."}
{"prompt":"In 2015, ICANN released the new .sucks gTLD, creating an exciting opportunity to reinvigorate gripe sites. However, this potential was quickly squelched by ICANN’s Trademark Clearinghouse, which broadly prevented anyone but the companies themselves from registering domain names under the .sucks gTLD that contained their trademarks. Many companies took advantage of the opportunity to buy up their .sucks domain: for example, Apple.sucks redirects to their feedback page.","completion":"ICANN has proven a very effective ally for corporations seeking to silence critical speech. With ICANN’s help, corporations can neutralize gripe sites by preventing them from ever being registered in the first place. Commodify Your Gripe Today, many are rightfully pessimistic about the internet’s ability to serve emancipatory politics. But the story of gripe sites reveals a forgotten kernel of emancipatory potential. By enlisting ICANN to protect their brands, however, companies eroded that potential—and an opportunity for democratic dissent, not to mention labor and consumer organizing, was lost."}
{"prompt":"In her book No Logo, Naomi Klein reflected on early instances of anti-gripe site lawsuits along with other forms of what she called “copyright and trademark harassment.” She wrote that the underlying message behind these suits was “that culture is something that happens to you… It is not something in which you participate, or to which you have the right to respond.” Gripe sites present us with a lost moment in the history of the internet when people had the power to critically respond to companies on platforms they managed themselves—and companies told them to shut up.","completion":"We now have many more opportunities to gripe on social media. But platforms like Yelp and Facebook and Twitter are owned and managed by corporations, not by users. When we criticize United Airlines on Facebook, we are making money for Facebook. Online griping has been monetized and defanged. We can complain more freely than ever before—but only because our complaints generate value for a handful of big companies. It’s never been easier to talk shit, because it’s never been more lucrative to let us do so."}
{"prompt":"The metaphors we use to describe the internet matter. In the 1990s, as the internet gained steam in the United States, one metaphor reigned supreme: “the information superhighway.” Bill Gates, for one, wasn’t a fan. “The highway metaphor isn’t quite right,” he wrote in 1995. It put too much emphasis on infrastructure—the material stuff and institutions that make the internet work. It evoked governments and implied that they should have a hand in maintaining it.","completion":"“A metaphor I prefer,” Gates continued, “is the market.” The internet wasn’t a highway at all, he argued, but more like the New York Stock Exchange—a supposedly self-organizing system generated by individuals pursuing their own interests. It would facilitate “friction-free capitalism” and realize the dream of Adam Smith’s “ideal market.” Since 1995, this laissez-faire vision of the internet has helped produce our digital world. Generations of digital capitalists embraced the internet and found innumerable ways to monetize its growth: selling access, leveraging its reach to move goods, marketing gadgets to tap into it more easily. Recently, however, digital capitalism has coalesced around one business model in particular: data extraction. Social media, search engines, and email accounts come for free in exchange for personal data that the platforms monetize."}
{"prompt":"This data has been called “the new oil.” It’s an apt metaphor for the tech industry, in the sense that data is a lucrative and highly speculative commodity. It’s even more appropriate when you consider the many crises produced by oil. What tradeable thing is more politically fraught, has launched more wars, or inflicts greater ecological damage? The oil metaphor, much like Gates’s vision of the internet as a free market, restricts our imagination about what the internet could be. We need metaphors that center the internet’s role as a commons, and emphasize not merely its technical organization but its political and economic underpinnings.","completion":"One possibility is the utility. What if we saw platforms, internet service providers, and other critical components of the network as utilities? What if we treated them as critical infrastructures—similar to the systems that provide our electricity, our water, and our public transit? What if we organized them as institutions outside of the market, subject to democratic rule and public accountability? This idea has been gaining traction recently, but it’s not new. In fact, the “information utility” has a long history, one that predates not just Gates’s laissez-faire internet, but the internet itself. That history offers valuable lessons for today, as a rising tide of public anger towards the tech industry creates new opportunities for imagining a radically different digital future."}
{"prompt":"When the Utility Was the Future In 1964, the MIT business school professor Martin Greenberger wrote an article for The Atlantic called “The Computers of Tomorrow.” Greenberger was part of a generation of management thinkers writing in the early 1960s who foresaw the importance of the computer to the American economy. He believed that computing power could soon become as ubiquitous as electrical power, driven by a new technology he had seen firsthand at MIT called “time-sharing.” In the 1960s, computers came in the form of “mainframes”: enormous room-size machines. The innovation of time-sharing was that it divided the computing resources of a single mainframe among multiple terminals, which could be located in a single lab, or linked up miles away. This enabled multiple users to use the same computer simultaneously. We tend to associate “personal” computing with microprocessors: smaller chips that made desk-scale, individually owned and operated computers possible. But throughout the 1960s, the spread of interactive and user-oriented computing was associated with a utility model made possible through time-sharing.","completion":"Utility computing exploded in the second half of the decade. Some companies sold dial-in access to data storage and programming environments. Others, including large providers like General Electric, offered on-demand services like ready-made programs for accounting, financial planning, and project management. Meanwhile, railroads, airlines, and financial institutions that had bought expensive mainframes for their own purposes sold “spare” time in regional secondary markets."}
{"prompt":"This utility model made computing far more accessible to businesses. Because buying or renting a mainframe was so costly, few firms could afford them. With time-sharing, companies could suddenly buy computing time by the hour rather than rent a $300,000 per year machine from IBM. By the end of the 1960s, the utility model as an idea was pervasive. Some predicted it wouldn’t be long until even households would subscribe to these on-demand computer services. Dialing in from a small desktop terminal, users would store data, word process, and communicate without owning any of the actual hardware to do it.","completion":"So when Greenberger wrote about the information utility, he wasn’t imagining some wholly new technology of the future—he was proposing a change to the technology of the present. The computer utilities of his day remained private and largely regional. Greenberger wanted a different kind of utility, one that was both public and national."}
{"prompt":"Greenberger was no radical: his information utility was to serve “free enterprise,” the banking sector, and the financial markets. Computers were to function as infrastructure for the flow of capital. Once computers were ubiquitous, he envisioned, the work of determining credit-worthiness, setting the Federal Reserve interest rate, and supervising stock markets would become the domain of computer systems.","completion":"The computer infrastructure Greenberger imagined embodied the politics of mid-century liberalism. He wanted to build a digital system that could modernize industry, and fulfill the fantasy of a harmonized, technocratically managed national economy. Still, he envisioned computing as a commons under public control. Such a utility couldn’t be left in the hands of an unregulated monopoly. It demanded robust oversight for the same reasons that any capital-intensive utility did: because only regulation could guarantee universal access, keep costs fair, and ensure the infrastructure was maintained."}
{"prompt":"Community Infrastructure Elsewhere, the possibilities of the utility sparked a more revolutionary aspiration: to create information services that supported communities and social movements, rather than businesses and markets. This was the dream at ONE, an experimental urban community founded in 1970 in San Francisco. Its members were artists and technical workers; largely college-educated, white, and in their late twenties. As an early prospectus for the community noted, their generation had come of age at a time when the demand for skilled labor seemed infinite. They emphasized the “utilization of industrial surplus,” a surplus that Cold War America was producing a lot of: armies of technical workers and warehouses full of computing machines.","completion":"ONE happily gathered both in support of their fledgling community. Among the haul: a surplus XDS-940 mainframe from the San Francisco-based insurance conglomerate Trans-America. The XDS was tailor-made for utility computing—for being shared among users through time-sharing. Soon, the communalists of ONE put the machine to work on a number of projects, including a system called Community Memory. Coming online in August 1973, Community Memory functioned as a digital bulletin board for the Bay Area. It consisted of a teletype terminal on the third floor of Leopold’s Records in Berkeley that anyone could come in and use. The machine used a modem to connect to the XDS over a phone line, and users could enter commands to add or retrieve listings: “ADD” to contribute text, or “FIND” to search for it. Responses would then come back over the phone line and get printed out on the teletype printer."}
{"prompt":"Community Memory anticipated many of the uses of the contemporary internet. People organized carpools, bands advertised gigs, and poets “published” their verse. In this respect, it resembled an early form of social media. But it was also a tool for community organizing. Like other radical computing groups in Chicago and Boston, ONE wanted to tap computing power for social ends: to build databases to support community activism and to research the arrangements of corporate and political power.","completion":"Indeed, Community Memory was “inescapably political,” declared ONE member Michael Rossman at a 1975 conference. “Its politics,” he continued, “are concerned with people’s power—their power with respect to the information useful to them, their power with respect to the technology of information (hardware and software both).” What was revolutionary about the ONE experiment was what Rossman called its “operational politics”: that it provided computing as a public service. The democratizing possibilities of computing were inseparable from its political economy. It didn’t extract economic rent from the information utility but rather treated it as a social good—as a people’s utility."}
{"prompt":"Collective Memory During the mid-1970s, computing underwent a rapid change. The availability of inexpensive microprocessors like the Intel 8080 helped spur a hobbyist hacking community interested in building smaller, more “personal” computers. The mainframe and the time-sharing system didn’t die with the rise of personal computing, but its centrality to the imagined future of computing—along with the politics of the information utility—faded away.","completion":"In popular histories of computing, personal computers often seem like an inevitable conclusion. The model of a single-user, privately owned device became so dominant that utility computing of the time-sharing era came to seem like an aberration—a strange detour that never amounted to much. Yet more recent scholarship reveals the importance of that detour to our digital present. The historian Joy Lisi Rankin has shown how people organized around time-shared devices in schools and universities inspired the first conceptions of computing as a socially minded and community-oriented activity. The scholar Tung-Hui Hu sees the return of the old utility model in modern cloud computing."}
{"prompt":"Still, something was lost with the rise of personal computing. One clue comes from a 1978 article by the leftist tech activist group Boston Computer Collective. Writing in the radical science magazine Science for the People, they took aim at the hollowness of the personal computing revolution, reviewing Ted Nelson’s Computer Lib/Dream Machines, a widely circulated book celebrating that revolution.","completion":"Making computers more widespread would not “pave the way towards a just society,” they argued. Smaller machines would not mean more personal power and less corporate control. “We cannot accept Nelson’s implication that a small computer must come from a relatively small manufacturer,” they wrote, “or that this supposedly small corporation will therefore hold public interest over profits.” Nor could they accept the idea that “hypermedia” and “individualized” instruction would improve the conditions of education; rather, it would likely lead to more “individualized control and standardization.” In subsequent decades, their critiques seem to have proven correct. Decentralization and personalization—watchwords of the personal computing and internet era—did not automatically serve as forces for liberation. Rather they were something of a Trojan horse: a way of making computer technology so intimate that it brought profit-making and corporate power into every aspect of our lives."}
{"prompt":"But the history of the information utility shows that there are alternatives. It reminds us that there is nothing natural about computing’s current form. It suggests that the problems of digital capitalism are inseparable from the problems of capitalism itself. Technologies can’t make social choices for us. The hope that computers could fix the market, make a just society, and democratize politics or information are nearly as old as the machines themselves. To define the technology we want means first defining the society we want. It means asking old questions: How can democracy coexist with capitalism? Are certain things too valuable to be bought and sold? Who will own the machines? There’s a distinctive rhetoric around technology for disabled bodies, one that emphasizes the power of technology to make people whole. To become disabled is to be exposed to a barrage of techno-optimistic rhetoric about “overcoming” the state of your body. Recovery means not only reaching a certain level of “old” abilities but becoming even better than you once were by consuming the latest technologies. From TED talks to news articles to commercials that feature paralympians, the technologized disabled body is offered as a site of redemption for “broken” people.","completion":"These “techno-ableist” ideas dominate how we imagine disabled bodies—and how we design for them. Techno-ableism suggests that using technologies to restore physical abilities is the key to addressing disability—and that disabled bodies are inferior when they are not properly equipped with those technologies."}
{"prompt":"But this rhetoric reflects a severely limited imagination about disabled bodies. And the consequences of these limitations couldn’t be more concrete for disabled people. Context Matters One failure of imagination is structural. The technologies that are imagined for disabled people often neglect the larger structures that shape how disabled people access those technologies. These include health insurance systems, prescriptions for devices, vocational rehabilitation programs, warranties, systems of maintenance, and service contracts. All of these factors determine who gets which technologies when—and if they get them in the first place.","completion":"The iBOT power wheelchair clearly illustrates this failure of imagination. In the early 2000s, Dean Kamen, the creator of the Segway, invented the iBOT. The wheelchair magazine New Mobility praised it as “a revolutionary four-wheel-drive wheelchair that can climb up and down stairs and curbs, roll across terrain, and raise a seated user to eye-level-standing height by rising up and balancing on two wheels.” Many disabled folks liked this invention. But the iBOT was expensive—it cost around $25,000, and was never covered by insurance. The FDA classified the chair as a Class III medical device—a higher-risk category that includes pacemakers—instead of as a Class II device, which is the rating for most power wheelchairs. The difference is significant: Medicare and Medicaid might be willing to cover the cost of the iBOT as a Class II device—and most insurance programs take the lead of Medicare and Medicaid when it comes to their coverage."}
{"prompt":"Technology has to be understood in context. And in the context of disability, problems are rarely just technological: designers also need to consider the structures in which disabled people have to operate. Otherwise they are just creating fancy one-off machines that only a few people will ever be able to try out.","completion":"Fortunately, more people may soon be able to use the iBOT. Discontinued in 2009 due to slow sales, it’s now being rolled out again—this time with a Class II rating and the backing of Toyota. Bodies Together If one failure of technological imagination ignores how disabled people actually access technology, another only sees that technology in purely personal terms. Often, we imagine technologies as individual solutions for individual disabled people. Literally, this device will help you—we can rebuild you. This is the impetus for building more impressive wheelchairs, exoskeletons, and prostheses. But the technological world doesn’t just consist of individual tools or devices; rather, it’s a social world shaped by common infrastructure."}
{"prompt":"Yesterday, I had to meet with another faculty member. That wouldn’t usually be a problem. I have a fancy leg as an amputee, and the coffee shop where we were meeting on campus was not terribly far from parking. However, it was raining. Here’s a thing about disability parking: it fills up when it rains. Many of us don’t use the disabled parking except when we need it. And, for people with mobility disabilities, we are much more likely to need it in adverse weather conditions that make traversing longer distances slippery, icy, or otherwise challenging. I was lucky to find parking, but it was further away than planned, and I had to make a dicey choice: either to take a ramp with no handrail in the pouring rain or to climb some stairs with a slippery handrail.","completion":"I took the stairs, and made it to the building. Then I walked inside, and I stood on the small, already soaked, floor mat. I was stuck. Moving off the mat would mean slipping and probably falling, which has happened too many times before for me to be bold about it. The person I was meeting for the first time recognized me from my faculty picture and came over, perhaps confused as to why I was just standing in a double-doored hallway. I explained that I was going to have to wait until my shoes were a little drier to move."}
{"prompt":"Was I stuck standing on a mat due to my disability, or was I stuck due to a slippery surface? I was lucky that my colleague was very chill about the whole thing, so the social weirdness of the situation wasn’t a concern. But I could also provide a long list of places in my community that I dare not go when it rains.","completion":"Disability inclusion and empowerment can’t be achieved with individual fixes alone. Rather, it has to involve designing physical environments where disabled people are not stigmatized. Some environments literally keep people out: steps, out-of-order elevators, ill-conceived bathroom spaces, disability access around the back of buildings or in other inconvenient and hard-to-find locations, slippery or bumpy surfaces, poor acoustics, flashing lights for no good reason, lack of ramps, lack of handrails or grab bars. People are forced away, or put into discomfort, pain, or danger in order to enter or exist in a given place."}
{"prompt":"To see technology for disability as merely about solving individual problems for individual people is to fail to see that bodies are never bodies alone. Every body has a context in which it sits—and our technological imagination must take that context into account. Room to Play My friend Mallory Kay Nelson has an idea that she calls “transmobility.” Transmobility says that many disabled bodies actually have more ways of being and moving in the world than nondisabled ones do. For instance, Nelson herself has spent time with a prosthetic leg, but now chooses between a wheelchair and a set of forearm crutches for navigating her daily life. She has at least three modes of mobility—unlike the nondisabled, most of whom have probably never been forced to think creatively about the movement of their bodies.","completion":"Transmobility insists that there aren’t bad ways of moving through the world. Dominant ideas about disabled bodies point toward two-legged non-limping ambulation as the ideal. This ideal plays out in exoskeletons and prosthetic legs and orthotics, as well as in physical therapy environments and most medical contexts. We imagine solutions as correcting a person’s body, or restoring them to “normal” functioning. By contrast, transmobility gives us a space to think about disabled bodies as adaptable and adapting."}
{"prompt":"To think about disabled bodies as good, whole, and valuable as they are is to reject many of the medicalized notions that dominate the technological design spaces that concern disabled bodies. This doesn’t mean we can’t also have fun with technology. Rather, it means we shouldn’t have to conform or perform as normal. There should be room to play.","completion":"In fact, successful design for disability comes not from a place of stigma and loathing, but from playing with the material world and our contextualized embodiments within it. This takes us back to the individual, but opens up space for community as well. The notion that technology has the power to make people whole is seductive. But it also reinforces ableist tropes that work strongly against disability inclusion and flourishing. The stakes are real: this rhetoric informs the design of the world all around us, and the self-perceptions of disabled people themselves, who live with bodies that become stigmatized through our failures of technological imagination."}
{"prompt":"Disabled bodies are often used as ammunition for techno-optimist arguments: that we should want to fix them is a goal for many technological thinkers. But this view of human progress forecloses new possibilities for all sorts of bodies. It kills creativity, caps adaptability, and prevents disabled people from being seen as already complete as they are.","completion":"1. Life must be lived as play, Plato wrote, but don’t take his word for it. Just go to the park and look for an animal. Better yet: at least two animals. A dog runs for a ball. Two dogs chase and tumble with each other. The way they bite looks different from a real bite. The difference reflects a power of abstraction. The difference is the style that communicates: This “bite” is a game."}
{"prompt":"As long as it lasts, playfulness extends an invitation to another reality. We are here, but there is also somewhere else we can go. Come with me? As soon as play ends you can tell. When two dogs stop “biting” and start biting, you separate them, fast. They might not know why they switched. Then again, a philosopher might not know whether he is playing with his cat, or whether his cat is playing with a philosopher. The instinct to play may be a deeper instinct for abstraction than language—an older way to make new realities. Making new realities may be the first way that humans, and other animals, sort ourselves into teams.","completion":"In 1938, a few years before the Nazis locked him up, the Dutch scholar Johan Huizinga wrote a book about this. He called it Homo Ludens, “the playing man,” a joke that is also an argument. Huizinga argued that all of culture comes from the human instinct to make up rules and follow them, together, and against one another. Enter: athletes, music, courtship, war."}
{"prompt":"We tend to think of play as frivolous. In fact, nothing could be more serious. It is no accident that so many traditions depict the gods as playing to make the universe. No accident, the dead seriousness with which small children take on imaginary tasks. We hate the spoilsport more than the cheat, Huizinga said. The cheat at least honors the rules that sort us into our lives, while the spoilsport destroys the order that holds our team together.","completion":"In other words, In the beginning was the game. 2. Games aren’t just at the origins of our social order. They also lie at the origins of our digital order. Modern computing is largely a creation of the US military. And one of the things that the US military has always liked to do with computers is play games. During the Cold War, the Pentagon’s favorite game was simulating war with the Soviet Union—something that computers were good at."}
{"prompt":"This is memorably illustrated in the 1983 cult classic WarGames. A teenager played by Matthew Broderick hacks into a NORAD supercomputer and sets off a simulation that almost triggers World War III. The problem is that the computer can’t tell the difference between playing a thermonuclear war and actually fighting one, between a “bite” and a bite.","completion":"But nuclear annihilation wasn’t the only game that computers could play. In 1962, a programmer at MIT came up with Spacewar!, a multiplayer space combat game that became a huge hit in computing centers around the country. Spacewar! turned the unwieldy, intimidating machines of mid-century computing into instruments of play and pleasure. It made computers fun."}
{"prompt":"It also helped inspire the personal computing revolution. In 1972, the famed cultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand watched a group of people play Spacewar! at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. What he saw was a revelation—“good news,” he called it, “maybe the best since psychedelics.” In Spacewar!, he saw the possibility for a new kind of computing—one that “bonded human and machine through a responsive broadband interface of live graphics display” and “served primarily as a communication device between humans.” Spacewar! offered a vision of the digital age as interactive, social, personal. In the coming years and decades, engineers and entrepreneurs would implement this vision, and create the building blocks of our digital age.","completion":"3. Kids these days still fall in love with computers by playing with them. The writers in this issue describe finding their way into computers through games. Some gamers are just in it for fun, while others get into managing gamer communities, and even go pro. Some gamers discover that the game isn’t what they expected—or that play is something different than what the game’s designers intended."}
{"prompt":"Sometimes, though, gaming gets serious. Games can embody a set of assumptions, even an ideology. Playing a game about cities, for example, you can absorb assumptions about how cities are supposed to be run. A model for gaming an auction can become the basis for an entire platform economy. New rules can restructure global financial markets. Does it work? Sometimes it seems that the game where humans are self-transparent rational actors, working with complete information, is the biggest make-believe of all.","completion":"Managers have promoted “teamwork” at work for decades. More recently, gamification has become a buzzword. In every job that must be done there is an element of fun, the song goes. You find the fun and—snap!—the job’s a game. But in reality, gamification may serve less as a technology to speed chores than to destroy solidarity, coaching people to compete constantly against their natural allies—and themselves."}
{"prompt":"In the attention economy, successful platforms find a way to turn more and more of our fun into an opportunity to extract profit. Ironically, the people who make computer games have themselves become highly exploited. Platforms that claim to be public squares or even playing fields can in fact encourage actors to game them in bad faith. Trolls attacking the serious bite bite, then back off saying it was “just a joke.” Transgression repeated, in feedback loops, can transform into boredom. As data-driven porn converges on predictable categories, we search for our safety word: What do you say when your kink isn’t naughty anymore? 4.","completion":"If the end game of gamification is playing yourself, what would it take to reclaim play? Writers in this issue explore how homo ludens has put and might still put our instinct to better ends. How to build a better “bite”? As we gain new computational powers, we can use them to build and explore virtual alternatives to vanishing public space. We can tinker and jigger, attempting to build networks on entirely new principles."}
{"prompt":"A defining feature of play—a form of creativity that depends on restrictions, or rules—may be that it teaches us to adapt what we have to make what we want. This it shares with code, which encodes but can also be decoded, recoded. It is an education for an era of democratic deficits and dwindling resources.","completion":"Ours are times of anger and grief—but no time for despair. After the game is before the game, as legendary soccer player and coach Sepp Herberger once said. The task, now, may be to approach the limitations of the present with the intense seriousness of a child whom nothing makes happier than to start the same game—Again! “The game represents a need that is strictly the product of a society whose dominant interests demand repression.”    — Michael Burawoy, Manufacturing Consent In May 2016, after months of failing to find a traditional job, I began driving for the ride-hailing company Lyft. I was enticed by an online advertisement that promised new drivers in the Los Angeles area a $500 “sign-up bonus” after completing their first 75 rides. The calculation was simple: I had a car and I needed the money. So, I clicked the link, filled out the application, and, when prompted, drove to the nearest Pep Boys for a vehicle inspection. I received my flamingo-pink Lyft emblems almost immediately and, within a few days, I was on the road.  Initially, I told myself that this sort of gig work was preferable to the nine-to-five grind. It would be temporary, I thought. Plus, I needed to enroll in a statistics class and finish my graduate school applications—tasks that felt impossible while working a full-time desk job with an hour-long commute. But within months of taking on this readily-available yet strangely precarious form of work, I was weirdly drawn in."}
{"prompt":"Every week, Lyft sends its drivers a personalized “Weekly Feedback Summary.” The summary includes passenger comments from the previous week’s rides and a freshly calculated driver rating. It also contains a bar graph showing how a driver’s current rating “stacks up” against previous weeks, and tells them whether they’ve been “flagged” for cleanliness, friendliness, navigation, or safety. At first, I looked forward to my summaries; for the most part, they were a welcome boost to my self-esteem. My rating consistently fluctuated between 4.89 stars and 4.96 stars, and the comments said things like,“Good driver, positive attitude,” and “Thanks for getting me to the airport on time!!” There was the occasional critique, like: “She weird” or just “Attitude,” but overall, the comments served as a kind of positive reinforcement mechanism. I felt good knowing that I was helping people and that people liked me.","completion":"But one week, after completing what felt like a million rides, I opened my feedback summary to discover that my rating had plummeted from a 4.91 (“Awesome”) to a 4.79 (“Okay”), without comment. Stunned, I combed through my ride history trying to recall any unusual interactions or disgruntled passengers. Nothing. What happened? What did I do? I felt sick to my stomach.  Because driver ratings are calculated using your last one hundred passenger reviews, one logical solution is to crowd out the old, bad ratings with new, presumably better ratings, as fast as humanly possible. And that’s exactly what I did."}
{"prompt":"For the next several weeks, I deliberately avoided opening my feedback summaries. I stocked my vehicle with water bottles, breakfast bars and miscellaneous mini candies to inspire riders to smash that fifth star. I developed a borderline-obsessive vacuuming habit and upped my car-wash game from twice a week to every other day. I experimented with different air-fresheners and radio stations. I drove, and I drove, and I drove.","completion":"Aggressively Managing Freedom The language of choice, freedom, and autonomy saturate discussions of ride hailing. “On-demand companies are pointing the way to a more promising future, where people have more freedom to choose when and where they work,” Travis Kalanick, the founder and former CEO of Uber, wrote in October 2015. “Put simply,” he continued, “the future of work is about independence and flexibility.”  In a certain sense, Kalanick is right. Unlike employees in a spatially-fixed worksite (the factory, the office, the distribution center), ride-hailing drivers are technically free to choose when they work, where they work, and for how long. They are liberated from the constraining rhythms of 9-to-5 employment or shift work. But that apparent freedom poses a unique challenge to the platforms’ need to provide reliable, “on-demand” service to its riders—and so a driver’s freedom has to be aggressively, if subtly, managed. One of the main ways  these companies have sought to do this is through the use of gamification.  Gamification is “the Silicon Valley buzzword du jour,” the tech researcher PJ Rey recently observed. Simply defined, it is the use of game elements—point scoring, levels, competition with others, measurable evidence of accomplishment, ratings, and rules of play— in non-game contexts. Games deliver an instantaneous, visceral experience of success and reward, and they are increasingly used in the workplace to promote emotional engagement with the work process, increase workers’ psychological investment in completing otherwise uninspiring tasks, and to influence, or “nudge,” workers’ behavior.  This is what my weekly feedback summary, my starred ratings, and other gamified features of the Lyft app did. Gamification also serves the useful function of redirecting conflict away from capital, as workers become consumed with the more urgent task of beating the game."}
{"prompt":"There is a growing body of evidence to suggest that gamifying business operations has real, quantifiable effects. Target, the U.S.- based retail giant, reports that gamifying its in-store checkout process has resulted in lower customer wait times and shorter lines. During checkout, a cashier’s screen flashes green if items are scanned at an “optimum rate.” If the cashier goes too slowly, the screen flashes red. Scores are logged and cashiers are expected to maintain an 88% green rating. In online communities for Target employees, cashiers compare scores, share techniques, and bemoan the game’s most challenging obstacles.","completion":"But color-coding checkout screens is like an early-gen Nintendo of gamification. In the digitally mediated world of ride-hailing work, where almost the entirety of one’s work is prompted and guided by screen—and where everything can be measured, logged, and analyzed—there are few limitations on what can be gamified."}
{"prompt":"Making Out In 1974, Michael Burawoy, a doctoral student in Sociology at the University of Chicago and self-described Marxist, began working as a miscellaneous machine operator in the engine division of Allied Corporation, a large manufacturer of agricultural equipment. He was attempting to answer the following question: why do workers work as hard as they do? In Marx’s time, the answer to this question was simple: coercion. Workers had no protections and could be fired at will for failing to fulfill their quotas. One’s ability to obtain a subsistence wage was directly tied to the amount of effort one applied to the work process. However, in the early 20th century, with the emergence of federal and state labor protections, the elimination of the piece-rate pay system, the rise of strong industrial unions, and a more robust social safety net, the coercive power of employers waned.  Yet workers continued to work hard, Burawoy observed. They cooperated with speed-ups and exceeded production targets. They took on extra tasks and sought out productive ways to use their down time. They worked overtime and off the clock. They kissed ass. After ten months at Allied, Burawoy concluded that workers were willingly and even enthusiastically consenting to their own exploitation. What could explain this? One answer, Burawoy suggested, was “the game.” The history of gamification is unclear. Microsoft’s Ross Smith traces it back to ancient Egypt, when pyramid builders organized workers into gangs who would compete over beer and bread by seeing who could carve and haul the most stone. In the mid twentieth century, the industrial sociologist Donald Roy observed that factory workers played a series of games on the job as a way to “keep from going nuts” in the face of monotony. Some workers would generate their own incentive systems: when they assembled one thousand steel dies they could take a drink of water; if they assembled two thousand, they rewarded themselves with a bathroom break.","completion":"For Burawoy, “the game” described the way in which workers manipulated the production process in order to reap various material and immaterial rewards. When workers were successful at this manipulation, they were said to be “making out.” Like the levels of a video game, operators needed to overcome a series of consecutive challenges in order to make out and beat the game."}
{"prompt":"At the beginning of every shift, operators encountered their first challenge: securing the most lucrative assignment from the “scheduling man,” the person responsible for doling out workers’ daily tasks. Their next challenge was a trip to “the crib” to find the blueprint and tooling needed to perform the operation. If the crib attendant was slow to dispense the necessary blueprints, tools, towels, and fixtures, operators could lose a considerable amount of time that would otherwise go towards making or beating their quota. (Burawoy won the cooperation of the crib attendant by gifting him a Christmas ham.) After facing off against the truckers, who were responsible for bringing stock to the machine, and the inspectors, who were responsible for enforcing the specifications of the blueprint, the operator was finally left alone to battle it out against the clock with his machine.","completion":"According to Burawoy, production at Allied was deliberately organized by management to encourage workers to play the game and thus “make out.” Quotas were established and incentive-pay was given to those who exceeded production targets. But workers also tried to game the game, making sure not to consistently exceed the targets set by management, lest management then raise the targets."}
{"prompt":"When work took the form of a game, Burawoy observed, something interesting happened: workers’ primary source of conflict was no longer with the boss. Instead, tensions were dispersed laterally between workers (the scheduling man, the truckers, the inspectors), between operators and their machines, and between operators and their own physical limitations (their stamina, precision of movement, and focus).","completion":"The battle to beat the quota also transformed a monotonous, soul-crushing job into an exciting outlet for workers to exercise their creativity, speed, and skill. Workers attached notions of status and prestige to their output, and the game presented them with a series of choices throughout the day, affording them a sense of relative autonomy and control. It tapped into workers’ desire for self-determination and self-expression. Then, it directed that desire towards the production of surplus value."}
{"prompt":"As Marx remarked in his Grundrisse, “It is not the individuals who are set free by free competition; it is, rather, capital which is set free.” Challenge Accepted Every Sunday morning, I receive an algorithmically generated “challenge” from Lyft that goes something like this: “Complete 34 rides between the hours of 5 AM on Monday and 5 AM on Sunday to receive a $63 bonus.” I scroll down, concerned about the declining value of my bonuses which once hovered around $100-$220 per week, but have now dropped to less than half that. “Click here to accept this challenge.” I tap the screen to accept.  Now, whenever I log into driver mode, a stat meter will appear showing my progress: only 21 more rides before I hit my first bonus. Lyft does not disclose how its weekly ride challenges are generated, but the value seems to vary according to anticipated demand and driver behavior. The higher the anticipated demand, the higher the value of my bonus. The more I hit my bonus targets, or ride quotas, the higher subsequent targets will be. Sometimes, if it’s been awhile since I’ve logged on, I’ll be offered an uncharacteristically lucrative bonus, north of $100, though it’s been happening less and less of late.  Behavioral scientists and video game designers are well aware that tasks are likely to be completed faster and with greater enthusiasm if one can visualize them as part of a progression towards a larger, pre-established goal. Like the HUD, or head-up display in a first-person shooter game, the Lyft stat meter is always present, always showing you what your acceptance rating is, how many rides you’ve completed, how far you have to go to reach your goal.","completion":"In addition to enticing drivers to show up when and where demand hits, one of the main goals of this gamification is worker retention. According to Uber, 50 percent of drivers stop using the application within their first two months, and a recent report from the University of California Davis’ Institute of Transportation Studies suggests that just 4 percent of ride-hailing drivers make it past their first year."}
{"prompt":"Retention is a problem in large part because the economics of driving are so bad. Researchers have struggled to establish exactly how much money drivers make, but with the release of two recent reports, one from the Economic and Policy Institute and one from MIT, a consensus on driver-pay seems to be emerging: drivers make, on average, between $9.21 and $10.87 per hour. What these findings confirm is what many of us in the game already know: in most major U.S cities, drivers are pulling in wages that fall below local minimum wage requirements. According to an internal slide deck obtained by the New York Times, Uber actually identifies McDonalds as its biggest competition in attracting new drivers. When I began driving for Lyft, I made the same calculation most drivers make: it’s better to make $9.00 per hour than to make nothing.  Before Lyft rolled out weekly ride challenges, there was the “Power Driver Bonus,” a weekly challenge that required drivers to complete a set number of regular rides. I sometimes worked more than 50 hours per week trying to secure my PDB, which often meant driving in unsafe conditions, at irregular hours, and accepting nearly every ride request including those that felt potentially dangerous (I’m thinking specifically of an extremely drunk and visibly agitated late-night passenger).  Of course, this was largely motivated by a real need for a boost in my weekly earnings. But, in addition to a hope that I would somehow transcend Lyft’s shitty economics, the intensity with which I pursued my PDBs was also the result of what Burawoy observed four decades ago: a bizarre desire to beat the game.  Slot Machines on Wheels Like the wages at Allied Steel, drivers’ per-mile earnings are supplemented by a number of rewards, both material and immaterial. Uber drivers can earn “Achievement Badges” for completing a certain number of five-star rides and “Excellent Service Badges” for leaving customers satisfied. Lyft’s “Accelerate Rewards” program encourages drivers to “level up” by completing a certain number of rides per month in order to unlock special rewards like fuel discounts from Shell (Gold Level) and free roadside assistance (Platinum Level).","completion":"In addition to offering meaningless badges and meager savings at the pump, ride-hailing companies have also adopted some of the same design elements used by gambling firms to promote addictive behavior among slot machine users. One of things the anthropologist and NYU Media Studies professor Natasha Dow Schüll found during a decade-long study of machine gamblers in Las Vegas is that casinos use networked slot machines that allow them to surveille, track, and analyze the behavior of individual gamblers in real time—just as ride-hailing apps do. This means that casinos can “triangulate any given gambler’s player data with her demographic data, piecing together a profile that can be used to customize game offerings and marketing appeals specifically for her.” Like these customized game offerings, Lyft tells me that my weekly ride challenge has been “personalized just for you!”   Former Google “design ethicist” Tristan Harris has also described how the “pull-to-refresh” mechanism used in most social media feeds mimics the clever architecture of a slot machine: users never know when they are going to experience gratification—a dozen new likes or retweets— but they know that gratification will eventually come. This unpredictability is addictive: behavioral psychologists have long understood that gambling uses variable reinforcement schedules—unpredictable intervals of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback—to condition players into playing just one more round.  We are only beginning to uncover the extent to which these reinforcement schedules are hardwired into ride-hailing apps. But one example is primetime or surge pricing. The phrase “chasing the pink” is used in online forums by Lyft drivers to refer to the tendency to drive towards “primetime” areas, denoted by pink-tinted heat maps in the app that signify increased fares at precise locations. This is irrational because the likelihood of catching a good primetime fare is slim, and primetime is extremely unpredictable. The pink appears and disappears, moving from one location to the next, sometimes in a matter of minutes. Lyft and Uber have to dole out just enough of these higher-paid periods to keep people driving to the areas where they predict drivers will be needed. And occasionally—cherry, cherry, cherry—it works: after  the Rose Bowl Parade last year, I made in 40 minutes over half of what I usually make in a day of nonstop shuttling."}
{"prompt":"It is not uncommon to hear ride-hailing drivers compare even the mundane act of operating their vehicles to the immersive and addictive experience of playing a video game or a slot machine. In an article published by the Financial Times, longtime driver Herb Croakley put it perfectly: “It gets to a point where the app sort of takes over your motor functions in a way. It becomes almost like a hypnotic experience. You can talk to drivers and you’ll hear them say things like, I just drove a bunch of Uber pools for two hours, I probably picked up 30-40 people and I have no idea where I went. In that state, they are literally just listening to the sounds [of the driver’s apps]. Stopping when they said stop, pick up when they say pick up, turn when they say turn. You get into a rhythm of that, and you begin to feel almost like an android.” A Good Old-Fashioned Work Stoppage So who sets the rules for all these games?  “Ok so let’s organize this. At 1:50 everyone that wants to join in, turn off your app so that primetime goes up…”  It’s half past midnight on a Friday night and the Lyft Drivers Lounge, a closed Facebook group for active drivers, is divided. The debate began, as many do, with an assertion about the algorithm. “The algorithm” refers to the opaque and often unpredictable system of automated, “data-driven” management employed by ride-hailing companies to dispatch drivers, match riders into Pools (Uber) or Lines (Lyft), and generate “surge” or “primetime” fares, also known as “dynamic pricing”.\t  The algorithm is at the heart of the ride-hailing game, and of the coercion that the game conceals. In their foundational text Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers, Alex Rosenblat and Luke Stark write, “Uber’s self-proclaimed role as a connective intermediary belies the important employment structures and hierarchies that emerge through its software and interface design.” “Algorithmic management” is the term Rosenblat and Stark use to describe the mechanisms through which Uber and Lyft drivers are directed. To be clear, there is no singular algorithm. Rather, there are a number of algorithms operating and interacting with one another at any given moment. Taken together, they produce a seamless system of automatic decision making that requires very little human intervention.","completion":"For many on-demand platforms, algorithmic management has completely replaced the decision-making roles previously occupied by shift supervisors, foremen, and middle to upper-level management. Uber actually refers to its algorithms as “decision engines.” These “decision engines” track, log, and crunch millions of metrics each day, from ride frequency to the harshness with which individual drivers break. It then uses these analytics to deliver gamified prompts perfectly matched to drivers’ data profiles.  Because the logic of the algorithm is largely unknown and constantly changing, drivers are left to speculate about what it is doing and why. Such speculation is a regular topic of conversation in online forums, where drivers post screen grabs of nonsensical ride requests and compare increasingly lackluster, algorithmically generated bonus opportunities. It is not uncommon for drivers to accuse ride-hailing companies of programming their algorithms to favor the interests of the corporation. To resolve this alleged favoritism, drivers routinely hypothesize and experiment with ways to manipulate or “game” the system back."}
{"prompt":"When the bars let out after last call at 2 AM, demand spikes. Drivers have a greater likelihood of scoring “surge” or “primetime” fares. There are no guarantees, but it’s why we’re all out there. To increase the prospect of surge pricing, drivers in online forums regularly propose deliberate, coordinated, mass “log-offs” with the expectation that a sudden drop in available drivers will “trick” the algorithm into generating higher surges. I’ve never seen one work, but the authors of a recently published paper say that mass log-offs are occasionally successful.  Viewed from another angle, though, mass log-offs can be understood as good, old-fashioned work stoppages. The temporary and purposeful cessation of work as a form of protest is the core of strike action and remains the sharpest weapon workers have to fight exploitation. But the ability to log-off enmasse has not assumed a particularly emancipatory function. Burawoy’s insights might tell us why.","completion":"Gaming the game, Burawoy observed, allowed workers to assert some limited control over the labor process and to “make out” as a result. In turn, that win had the effect of reproducing the players’ commitment to playing and their consent to the rules of the game. When players were unsuccessful, their dissatisfaction was directed at the game’s obstacles, not at the capitalist class, which sets the rules. The inbuilt antagonism between the player and the game replaces, in the mind of the worker, the deeper antagonism between  boss and worker. Learning how to operate cleverly within the game’s parameters becomes the only imaginable option. And now there is another layer interposed between labor and capital: the algorithm."}
{"prompt":"Rules of the Game After weeks of driving like a maniac in order to restore my higher-than-average driver rating, I managed to raise it back up to a 4.93. Though it felt great, it’s almost shameful and astonishing to admit that one’s rating, so long as it stays above 4.6, has no actual bearing on anything other than your sense of self-worth. You do not receive a weekly bonus for being a highly-rated driver. Your rate of pay does not increase for being a highly-rated driver. (In fact, I was losing money trying to flatter customers with candy and keep my car scrupulously clean. ). And yet, I wanted to be a highly-rated driver.  And this is the thing that is so brilliant and awful about Lyft and Uber’s gamification: it preys on our desire to be of service, to be liked, to be good. On weeks that I am rated highly, I am more motivated to drive. On weeks that I am rated poorly, I am more motivated to drive. It works on me, even though I know better.  “It is by constituting our lives as a series of games, a set of limited choices,” Burawoy writes, “that capitalist relations not only become objects of consent but are taken as given and immutable. We do not collectively decide what the rules of making out will be; rather, we are compelled to play the game, and we proceed to defend the rules.” To date, I have completed more than 2,200 rides.","completion":"I was in a rented home being used as a set somewhere in the hills north of Los Angeles. “You have to say ‘stepmom’ three times before we get to the sex, then you can just call her ‘mom,’” the director told the younger of the two actresses. “Also, remember to say, ‘This is wrong!’ or ‘This is fucked up!’ once or twice, but never the word ‘No!’ because that messes up the consent.” The director then told the other actor there, who was playing the stepson, to refer explicitly to “being home from college” in order to establish that his character was over eighteen."}
{"prompt":"For three years, I covered the adult industry for LA Weekly as a writer and photographer. As porn professionals became comfortable with my presence on sets, photoshoots, and at award shows, I was allowed a rare level of access into a production process that, for obvious reasons, tends to be secretive. Producers, directors, and performers would often tell me things, share gossip, and answer questions—both on- and off-the-record—about the many aspects of the business that often baffle outsiders.","completion":"Over the course of these experiences, I learned about a major new force reshaping the industry: data. That day on set, the director’s instructions came directly from the production company, which decided on the topic and vetted the script. And the company based its creative direction on specific fantasies proposed by paying customers on an online forum that it owned. (“The stepsister should catch her stepbrother masturbating and she should humiliate him for being a dork,” one commenter suggested. And that was cut, pasted, and embellished into the script emailed to the director.) In the pre-internet days, a producer might notice that a particular kind of porn movie sold well, and then try to make more like it. Today, a corporate porn conglomerate can analyze a continuous stream of information from online viewers, who supply feedback in the form of comments, and leave behind a data trail as they travel around porn sites."}
{"prompt":"The internet isn’t just revolutionizing how porn is distributed and consumed. It’s also revolutionizing how porn is made, by enabling companies to cater more closely to the perceived tastes of their audience. Rise of the Tube Sites The epicenter of porn production in the US—and, due to the size of the US porn industry, the world—is the San Fernando Valley north of the city of Los Angeles. Before 2006, the Valley was also the heart of the business side of porn. Trade publication AVN’s headquarters is still in Chatsworth and the sign for Vivid Entertainment, a key brand during the DVD years, can still be seen across the street from Universal Studios, in Studio City.","completion":"But between 2006 and 2007, the adult video business changed dramatically. Internet porn swallowed up the entire industry through the “tube sites”—porn-specific YouTube knockoffs like YouPorn, RedTube, and the unquestioned winner of the competition among them, Pornhub. These sites are owned by larger entities that are typically not based in the Valley."}
{"prompt":"The aggregator sites, much like YouTube, were first pitched as a way for people to upload content that they owned. But they quickly grew, Pornhub in particular, by not particularly enforcing the removal of copyrighted material that was being uploaded. Initially porn producers decried the practice as outright theft, but a few years back they were forced to make peace with the unstoppable hegemonic forces of what everyone in the industry calls “the tube era.” MindGeek is a Montreal-based juggernaut that owns most of the top-ten tube sites, including Pornhub. It also owns key LA-based studios like Brazzers, Reality Kings, Digital Playground, Mofos, and the gay-focused Sean Cody. Its major competitors include Gamma Entertainment, another Montreal company that provides affiliate services (the standard marketing monetization scheme that allows people to collect money for online customer referrals) and owns several popular studios; and WGCZ Holdings, which owns XVideos.com, Porn.com, the BangBros studio, and recently acquired the Penthouse brand.","completion":"Big Porn’s new business model is online advertising. MindGeek boasts that it employs over 1,000 tech workers worldwide, with its main center of operations in Montreal. Many of these employees are tasked with compiling, analyzing, and interpreting the data generated by users, which is then used to sell targeted ads."}
{"prompt":"In other words, the tube sites make money the same way that Facebook does. And the fact that the same companies also own many of the big studios means that they can use the data they collect not only to sell targeted ads but to make their videos even more engaging so that users spend even more time watching them, thus generating even more data. They are creating a vertically integrated data porn empire.","completion":"Don’t Fight the Data While a lot of people (most likely you and everyone you know) are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned by MindGeek), and entering their credit card information."}
{"prompt":"This “consumer” vs. “customer” division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. “We started partitioning this idea of consumers and customers a few years ago,” Adam Grayson, CFO of the legacy studio Evil Angel, told AVN. “It used to be a perfect one-to-one in our business, right? If somebody consumed your stuff, they paid for it. But now it’s probably 10,000 to one, or something.” There’s an analogy to be made with US politics: political analysts refer to “what the people want,” when in fact a fraction of “the people” are registered voters, and of those, only a percentage show up and vote. Candidates often try to cater to that subset of “likely voters”— regardless of what the majority of the people want. In porn, it’s similar. You have the people (the consumers), the registered voters (the customers), and the actual people who vote (the customers who result in a conversion—a specific payment for a website subscription, a movie, or a scene). Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It’s their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole.","completion":"By 2018, we are now over a decade into the tube era. That means that most LA-area studios are getting their marching orders from out-of-town business people armed with up-to-the-minute customer data. Porn performers tend to roll their eyes at  some of these orders, but they don’t have much choice. I have been on sets where performers crack up at some of the messages that are coming “from above,” particularly concerning a repetitive obsession with scenes of “family roleplay” (incest-themed material that uses words like “stepmother,” “stepfather,” and “stepdaughter”) or what the industry calls “IR” (which stands for “interracial” and invariably means a larger, dark-skinned black man and a smaller light-skinned white woman, playing up supposed taboos via dialogue and scenarios)."}
{"prompt":"These particular “taboo” genres have existed since the early days of commercial American porn. For instance, see the stellar performance by black actor Johnnie Keyes as Marilyn Chambers’ orgy partner in 1972’s cinematic Behind the Green Door, or the VHS-era incest-focused sensation Taboo from 1980. But backed by online data of paid customers seemingly obsessed with these topics, the twenty-first-century porn industry—which this year, to much fanfare, was for the first time legally allowed to film performers born in this millennium—has seen a spike in titles devoted to these (frankly old-fashioned) fantasies.","completion":"Most performers take any jobs their agents send them out for. The competition is fierce—the ever-replenishing supply of wannabe performers far outweighs the demand for roles—and they don’t want to be seen as “difficult” (particularly the women). Most of the time, the actors don’t see the scripts or know any specific details until they get to set. To the actors rolling their eyes at yet another prompt to declaim, “But you’re my stepdad!” or, “Show me your big black dick,” the directors shrug, point at the emailed instructions and say, “That’s what they want…” We Know What You Like The data collected by porn companies doesn’t just shape what happens on set, however. It is also starting to shape how the media understands the state of sexuality today."}
{"prompt":"In mid-2013, Pornhub launched a sister website called Pornhub Insights. Unlike their main product, the high-traffic aggregator of sex videos, Pornhub Insights is designed to be safe for work. Its mission is to provide “research and analysis directly from the Pornhub team… to explore the intricacies of online porn viewership.” Pornhub Insights posts regularly, but its greatest hit is its “Year in Review” article, which offers crunched numbers and spiffy graphics about its viewers’ habits over the previous twelve months. “Welcome to Pornhub’s 5th annual Year in Review,” Insights posted in January 2018, “the best place to discover and reflect on what we’ve collectively been searching for and how we’ve been viewing porn in 2017.” These discoveries and reflections included self-reported traffic numbers (“28.5 billion visitors, which turns out to be an average of 81 million people per day!”), a ranking of “the searches that defined 2017” (#1 Porn for Women, #2 Rick and Morty, #3 Fidget Spinner), most searched terms (lesbian, hentai, MILF, stepmom), most searched porn stars (female and male), countries by traffic (#1 US, #2 UK, #3 India), top searches by country (e.g., Netherland’s #1 search is for “dutch”), and many other easily shareable graphics and numbers. The Year in Review also offers in-house analysis: “2017 seems to have been the year where women have come forward to express their desires more openly,” wrote Dr. Laurie Betito, who is credited as “sex therapist and director of the Pornhub Sexual Wellness Center.” Noticeably absent in the Pornhub Insights reports are links to any of the actual data about porn consumption gathered by the company, however. This is unsurprising: the actual user, traffic, and search data is one of the company’s most valuable assets. MindGeek’s dominance over the industry is based on its ability to monetize content via targeted advertising and an algorithm that delivers certain videos to certain customers, not to mention its treasure trove of unique consumer data.","completion":"But the Year in Review’s lack of substantiating information doesn’t stop reporters from repeating its claims as facts. Nor does it stop them from extrapolating those claims to stand in for all of online porn, or to speak definitively about “our” sexual predilections. Over the past few years, a new genre of story about sex has become widespread in the mainstream press. These stories purport to tell the general public about what “people,” “women,” “gay men,” “people in Southern states,” “Russians,” “Mormons,” “millennials,” “Americans,” or any other broad category of humans—including sometimes an absurdly universal “we”—are really into sexually. The italics on really are important, because the assumption of most of these articles is that “people” have a public self that is either asexual, ashamed of discussing sexuality, or vanilla—but that there is another self, a more “true” or “real” self, that comes out at 2 a.m. when these same people search for porn on the internet."}
{"prompt":"This Victorian Jekyll-and-Hyde model of desire and sexuality informs the recent bestseller Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. Stephens-Davidowitz, who holds a PhD in economics and worked briefly at Google as a data scientist, claims that for his sections on pornography he was given access to “the Pornhub data,” though his method and data sets are unclear from the endnotes or accompanying website. His argument is simple: people’s public personas are deceptions that conceal a secret, more “truthful” self obsessed with taboos, kinks, and unconventional sexual desires.","completion":"The many pieces of clickbait that claim to illuminate these desires by drawing on Pornhub Insights are often ridiculous. “While interest may be hot and heavy,” Mashable wrote in 2017 about the supposed rise in searches for fidget spinner porn, “what you’ll actually find on Pornhub is pretty hilarious. It’s just a lot of video of fidget spinners…spinning. […] For instance, a video called ‘1000MPH Fidget Spinner Bisexual Threesome’ literally features three spinners ramming into each other with excellent narration.” More often than not, Pornhub Insights press releases get spun into stories about broad trends in human sexuality. On August 2017, for example, Insights published a post called “Boobs: Sizing Up the Searches” looking at data about “the most popular breast related searches.” The post revealed that “Pornhub visitors between the ages of 18 to 24 are 19% less likely to search for breasts when compared to all other age groups.” A Maxim writer then turned that single line in the report into the headline “Millennials Aren’t All That Interested in Breasts, According to Pretty Depressing New Study.” Playboy’s popular Twitter account received almost 10K likes, 2.8K retweets, and 2.4K comments for an 100% on-brand tweet that read “Millennials aren’t as interested in breasts as older generations. Why?” In fact, if you search “millennial” and “breasts,” Google will return countless hits about this supposedly data-based “fact,” all clustered around August 2017 and all sourced from a couple of quotes from that one Pornhub Insights report."}
{"prompt":"Ever since Pornhub Insights launched, a large number of articles in the mainstream press about sexual proclivities in the US and around the world have drawn their sourcing from it, or from press releases sent to journalists by Pornhub. This is the other side of data-driven porn. Not only is it changing how the industry makes porn—it’s also increasingly changing the popular narrative about sexuality, by supplying the fodder for sensational stories about people’s “true” kinks.","completion":"The resulting dynamic benefits both Pornhub and the media. Pornhub strategically releases “reports” they know will make good clickbait, based on proprietary data that is not independently verifiable. The clickbait, amplified by Twitter and other social media (because sex always sells), then drives traffic both to the news sites that produce it and back to Pornhub itself. In the era of the attention economy, media and porn are in the same business, and have forged a symbiotic relationship to their mutual benefit."}
{"prompt":"After the Fall It would be easy to see the rise of data-driven porn as a familiar internet narrative: the corporate betrayal of a digital utopia. Online porn was supposed to give everyone unfettered access to their own particular kinks, with tech-hippies sharing a new world of hyper-specific fetishes with a like-minded crowd of early Burning Man adopters and subscribers to Mondo2000 magazine via newsgroups with names like alt.sex.aluminum.baseball.bat (an actual newsgroup).","completion":"In this account, the prelapsarian idyll of internet porn seems to have suffered the same fate as the internet as a whole: corporate consolidation and the monetization of our attention. A few massive companies control the online porn industry, and use sophisticated techniques to grab more of our attention and sell it to advertisers, or to coax us into becoming paying customers."}
{"prompt":"The story, of course, is more complicated. Internet porn has become a big business, but amateur communities are thriving. Just as millions of little-known SoundCloud musicians didn’t prevent the rise of a megastar like Taylor Swift, the ready availability of free amateur erotic content on spawn-of-newsgroups megasites like Reddit coexists with the unstoppable rise of Pornhub. The spirit of the older internet endures there, albeit in a different form.","completion":"As for the performers, many are torn between endorsing the “success” narrative being pushed by Big Porn outfits like Pornhub and voicing very real grievances—some of them brought about, in their opinion, by the rise of the tube sites. In September 2018, Pornhub produced their first award show at a historic theater in Downtown Los Angeles, enlisting a large number of actresses and actors with the promise that the winners would be “decided by the viewing patterns of the site’s millions of visitors and loyal members.” Shortly before that, Kanye West had mentioned the site on Jimmy Kimmel’s late night talk show. West referred to “Pornhub” as a generic term for online porn, much like older people in the 1990s would call the internet “AOL.” Pornhub promptly scrapped their original plans for their event, and made West “artistic director” of the evening."}
{"prompt":"The Pornhub Awards afterparty, a swanky affair held on the rooftop of affluent hipster mecca the Ace Hotel, was organized by Greg Lansky. The 2018 porn industry includes larger-than-life characters like Lansky—creator of big international brands like Vixen, Tushy, and the biggest interracial brand of all time, Blacked—who are attempting to be to today’s digital porn content what Playboy was to an earlier era of paper-based erotica.","completion":"Obviously inspired by Hugh Hefner in terms of exposure, projected lifestyle, and the desire to be embraced by mainstream publications, the French-born Lansky is known to pay top rate to his performers and spends lavishly on promotional stunts and PR. By crowning girls “Vixen Angel” of the month or the year, Lansky deliberately fosters an old-fashioned, glossy star system of sorts within the industry. His graphic design and aesthetics owe a lot to early 2000s French Vogue and American Apparel billboards."}
{"prompt":"The partnership between Big Porn outfits like Pornhub and ambitious entrepreneurs like Lansky is lucrative. As of September 2018, Lansky’s Pornhub channels Blacked (mentioned by Kanye West as his favorite “category” of Pornhub), Vixen, and Tushy, which drive content to his sites, are ranked #4, #6 and #9 on the tube site. The videos on the Blacked channel, founded four years ago, have 892,613,843 views.","completion":"These are rarified success stories in an industry that, at the production level, has a habit of complaining about its perceived “collapse” from the halcyon days before the internet changed the game—especially when talent or crew wants better pay or better working conditions. By all accounts, the rates usually paid to performers (even those featured on the trendy sweatshirts that Kanye West designed for the Pornhub awards) have been stagnant for a decade. If the new tech overlords in Montreal are doing as well as their PR blitzes imply, it might be about time to spread the wealth."}
{"prompt":"Steve Jobs wanted customers to understand the Apple Store “with one sweep of the eye,” as if they were gods standing on Mount Olympus. Indeed, the iconic outlets seem to speak for themselves. Bright, uncluttered, and clad in glass, they couldn’t contrast more sharply with the big-box labyrinths they were designed to replace.  Neither could their profit margins. Since launching in 2001, the instantly recognizable Stores have raked in more profits—in total and per square foot—than any other retailer on the planet, transforming Apple into the world’s richest company in the process. Yet the very transparency of the Apple Store, paradoxically, conceals how those profits are made.","completion":"When we think of “tech,” we rarely think of retail stores, and when we think of “tech workers” we rarely think of the low-waged “geniuses” who staff them. Almost all media coverage of tech companies encourages us to forget that the vast majority of their employees are not in fact coders in Silicon Valley: they’re the suicidal assemblers of your phone, the call-center support staff, the delivery drivers, and the smiling shop floor staff who make up the majority of Apple’s workforce.  The first open secret of the Apple Store, in other words, is people. The place is far less focused on fancy gadgets than might be assumed. In fact, the Apple Store was explicitly designed as a brand embassy rather than a dedicated source of technical knowledge. As Ron Johnson, the former Target executive who came up with the concept, told the Harvard Business Review, “People come to the Apple Store for the experience—and they’re willing to pay a premium for that . . . Apple is in the relationship business as much as the computer business.”  Johnson and Jobs wanted ambassadors whose ostensible role was not to sell products—uniquely, Apple Store employees do not receive a commission—but to create positive customer sentiment and repair trust in the brand when it broke. That was hard to do if your stuff was lumped in with everyone else’s in a big electronics store, overseen by third-party staff lacking any special expertise or interest in what you wanted to sell.  The goal was to take full control of the brand image while humanizing it. The problem, however, was that humans can be rather unruly.  No Sticks, No Carrots Fortunately for Apple, someone had been hard at work fixing that bug. In 1984 a group of professors at Harvard Business School published a book, Managing Human Assets, aimed at updating workplace organization for a new era. Previously, the book argued, labor discipline could be achieved in a relatively straightforward top-down manner, but now it required something else. “The limitations of hierarchy have forced a search for other mechanisms of social control,” the authors said. The mechanisms they proposed consisted, at root, of treating employees as nominal stakeholders in business success, within narrow limits that would increase rather than challenge shareholder profitability."}
{"prompt":"Managing Human Assets was based on the first new compulsory course at the Harvard Business School in a generation, launched in 1981. Johnson started his MBA at Harvard the next year, graduating as the book itself was released. Reading Johnson’s Apple Store as the mechanical translation of Managing Human Assets would of course be reductive—yet key features of the Apple Store’s practice bear an unmistakable similarity to it.  Johnson found the first cohort of Apple Store employees by personally interviewing every manager and offering jobs to upbeat staff working for competitors. Then he developed a training program for the in-house production of “geniuses.” (Jobs reportedly hated the term at first, finding it ridiculous. True to form, he asked his lawyers to apply for a patent the following day). How do you create an engaged, happy, knowledgeable workforce that can pass, however implausibly, as an entire battalion of geniuses in towns across the country? More importantly, how do you do all of that without the stick of the authoritarian boss or the carrot of a juicy commission? Apple’s solution was to foster a sense of commitment to a higher calling while flattering employees that they were the chosen few to represent it. The Genius Training Student Workbook is the vaguely comical title of the manual from which Apple Store employees learn their art. Prospective geniuses are taught to use empathetic communication to control customer experience and defuse tension, aiming to make them happy and relax their purse strings. It might be expected that Apple Store employees are, as their name implies, tech gurus with incredible intellects. But their true role has always been to use emotional guile to sell products. Before they get to do that, though, Apple uses similar techniques to foster their own relationship with the brand.","completion":"By counterintuitively raising the bar of admission, crafting a long series of interviews to weed out the mercenary or misanthropic, Johnson soon attracted more applicants than there were posts. Those keen enough to go through the onerous hiring process were almost by definition a better “fit” for the devotional ethos of the brand, far more receptive to the fiction that they weren’t selling things but, in an oft-repeated phrase, “enriching people’s lives,” as if they’d landed a job at a charity. “When people are hired,” Johnson explained, “they feel honored to be on the team, and the team respects them from day one because they’ve made it through the gauntlet. That’s very different from trying to find somebody at the lowest cost who’s available on Saturdays from 8 to 12.”  While not the lowest, the cost of these eager staff was still low—both relative to industry averages, to the amount they made for the company, and to the $400 million that Johnson earned in his seven years at Apple. Lower wages also had another, less obvious effect. As Apple Store managers explained to the New York Times, the lack of commissions meant that the job didn’t pay well enough to support those with dependents: older workers were functionally excluded from representing the brand without the need for a formal policy—or the attendant specter of discrimination lawsuits that it would raise. Deploying psychology, not the maximizing calculus of economic rationality (money), allowed Apple to turn hiring and wages into managerial props."}
{"prompt":"The sense of higher calling and flattery doesn’t stop with the hiring process, of course. Make it through the gauntlet and you are “clapped in” by existing employees: given a standing ovation as if receiving a prize. The clapping, according to employees, continues until new hires, perhaps after a confused delay, begin clapping too, graduating from outside spectator to part of the performance—part of the team. Leave the company and you’re “clapped out.”  Products are clapped, customers waiting overnight to buy them are clapped, their purchases are clapped, claps are clapped. Clap, clap, clap. “My hands would sting from all the clapping,” said one manager. Claps, cheers, performances of rapturous engagement provided, by design, a ready-mixed social glue to bind teams together, reaffirming both the character of the brand and employees’ cultish devotion to it.  Playing Smart The Genius Training Student Workbook schools prospective geniuses in a similar set of methods to manage customers. In effect, the Workbook trains employees to train customers to love Apple. It teaches emotionally savvy, algorithmic solutions to customer gripes, such as the “three Fs”: Feel, Felt, Found—then offers a series of role-playing scenarios to rehearse them.  Here’s an example from the book, meant to be role-played by trainees: Customer: This Mac is just too expensive.Genius: I can see how you’d feel this way. I felt the price was a little high, but I found it’s a real value because of all the built-in software and capabilities.  When customers run into trouble with their products, geniuses are encouraged to sympathize, but only by apologizing that customers feel bad, lest they implicate Apple’s products as the source of the trouble. In this gas-lit performance of a “problem free” brand philosophy, the very language with which to articulate discord is erased: many words are actually verboten for staff.  Do not use words like crash, hang, bug, or problem, employees are told. Instead say does not respond, stops responding, condition, issue, or situation. Avoid saying incompatible; instead use does not work with. Staff have reported the absurdist dialogues that can result, like when they are not allowed to tell customers that they cannot help even in the most hopeless cases, leading customers into circular conversations with employees able neither to help nor to refuse to do so.","completion":"Staging the Genius All these performances—genius, surreal, or tragicomic as they may be—take place on a platform managed just as carefully as the staff. This stage, the second key ingredient to Apple’s lucrative relationship business, is so obvious that it’s easy to overlook. Jobs and Johnson wanted to control every detail, like the specific color of the bathroom signs, or ensuring that every store had just one entrance, to manage the customer experience. Apple has trademarked almost every aspect of its stores, from stairs to display tables to storage racks. Even the supposedly “intuitive” layout, so obvious that it can be understood by all, is considered unique enough to warrant a suite of intellectual property protections."}
{"prompt":"Like a true artist, the company has also turned faults into features through its control of space, as demonstrated when Apple decided to launch their first store in New York City. The only available location on Fifth Avenue was a spot near Central Park owned by mogul Harry Macklowe, empty for seven years. No other retailer had wanted to rent it for a rather basic reason: the space was a dark concrete cave. Undeterred, Apple built a hardened glass staircase and a cube to let sunlight (and customers) stream down through it. The store has become the third most popular tourist attraction in the city and the most profitable store in the world, a monument to Apple’s apparent power to defy retail gravity. The glass cherry on top is, predictably, trademarked.  Yet even as this austere cube has levitated into history, the Apple Store itself has recently started to evolve. In part to counter the falling sales volume of a saturated market, Apple has spent the past two years overhauling its stores to work even harder. Potted trees have been added to give a green splash to the signature gray and, in a move so ridiculous it’s almost certain to be a hit, the Genius Bar has been rebranded the “Genius Grove.” Windows are opened to blur the distinction between inside and outside, and the stores are promoted as quasi-public spaces. As the new head of retail at Apple, former Burberry executive Angela Ahrendts (2017 salary: $24,216,072), told the press, “We actually don’t call them stores anymore. We call them town squares.” The town square. It’s an almost quaint symbol of participatory civic life—a world away from the big-box sprawl that characterized the retail imaginary of the late 20th century, or even the digital isolation of the 21st. Apple’s goal has been to create spaces for people to just hang out in, extending the original insight that focusing on everything other than cold hard cash will paradoxically be the best way to rake it in. Apple has continued to buy former public buildings or prominent places within them—think of the Apple Stores in Grand Central or the former Prince Street Post Office in New York, or the Carnegie Library in Washington, D.C.—while also repurposing actual town squares like Piazza Liberty in Milan, all to give a sense of grandeur, permanence, and public provision.","completion":"In Ahrendts’s vision, \"the store becomes one with the community.\" But the real hope seems to be closer to the opposite, that the community will become one with the store. Like the gentrification pushing the poor out of their neighborhoods, Apple’s role-playing of civic virtue redefines the public, and does so by excluding most people from it. Yet Apple’s ability to creatively reinterpret the line between public and private runs far deeper than this, into Apple’s products themselves."}
{"prompt":"Ex Nihilo The word “genius” in Latin originally meant “deity of generation and birth,” gaining the idea of intellectual ability in the 16th century. Like “genesis,” it suggests a theological account of novelty: divine creative power. To be a genius, in this sense, is to be someone who in-spires, who breathes life into a void. Witness the hagiographies of Saint Steve Jobs by people like Walter Isaacson—innovators are modern mystics possessed with powers of the divine.  This is the creation myth of Silicon Valley, whose prime pulpit is the Genius Bar, and it is tightly connected to questions of justice. If Apple is the origin of all that it creates, then it might seem fair that they keep the proceeds, particularly when they’re nice enough to let us use their free Wi-Fi. After the company recently won the race to surpass a one trillion dollar valuation, CEO Tim Cook emailed staff to explain, “Financial returns are simply the result of Apple's innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values.”  While seductive, this story is, like the Apple Store itself, a managed, theological fiction. Jobs wasn’t a saint—he was a control freak. Similarly, Apple’s system of operation, as we have seen, is less the result of genius than of capture and control. Semiconductors, microprocessors, hard drives, touch screens, the internet and its protocols, GPS: all of these ingredients to Apple’s immense profitability were funded through public dollars channeled into research through the Keynesian institution called the US military. They are the basis of Apple’s products, as the economist Mariana Mazzucato has shown.  Even the most distinctive parts of Apple’s lineup turn out to owe their existence to public funding. In 2000, for example, the US military’s in-house R&D arm, DARPA, sought to build a “virtual office assistant” for military use. The agency funded the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) to develop the assistant, which SRI then commercialized using Reagan-era legislation allowing public research to be converted into private property. To that end, SRI formed a spin-off company called SIRI. Thanks to a voice artist and the undisclosed sum Apple paid for the company in 2010, you can now talk to SIRI yourself on your state-funded phone.","completion":"Apple’s extraordinary wealth is not simply a reward for innovation, or the legacy of “innovators” like Steve Jobs. Rather, it flows from the privatization of publicly funded research, mixed with the ability to command the low-wage labor of our Chinese peers, sold by empathetic retailers forbidden from saying “crash.” The profits have been stashed offshore, tax free, repatriated only to enrich those with enough spare cash to invest in a belief in future profitability.  But, as the public well from which it has drawn past innovations runs dry, the company’s ability to repeat the success of the iPhone is evaporating. Federal funding for scientific research is in deep decline, and Apple isn’t likely to make up the gap. To keep profitability high, Apple is moving to ever-more-luxury price tags (like the iPhone XS Max) and expanding its ability to extract rent by controlling the creativity of others (through Apple Music or the App Store), all while its embassies sell a different story with a smile."}
{"prompt":"Command and Control All of this raises interesting questions about how Apple—and with it, capitalist accumulation more broadly—should be understood. Marx, on whose edifice most contemporary critiques of capitalism are built, assumed a cutthroat market that pushed prices ever downward. “The battle of competition is fought,” he wrote in the third volume of Capital, “by cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production.” Yet this analysis is far from adequate to understand how Apple is now able to charge over a thousand dollars for a phone—and not just because it’s hard to convincingly explain how the same labor of Apple’s geniuses, combined with that of Foxconn’s manufacturers, is transformed into climbing prices, or why similar labor performed in stores like J.C. Penney is not.","completion":"Instead, we could do worse than redeploy a concept recently resuscitated to think about Big Tech companies like Amazon: monopoly. As Lina Khan has argued in an influential article, Amazon has avoided regulatory intervention, despite its growing control over digital commerce and infrastructure, because price rather than market structure has become the optic for viewing corporate power. Amazon’s prices are low, so where’s the problem?  This definition of monopoly is quite new, developed by Chicago School acolytes like Richard Posner, a judge and economist, and Robert Bork, a former Attorney General and failed Supreme Court nominee. Part of the so-called “Law and Economics” movement (essentially the view of law as economics), they dissolved problems of monopoly into neoclassical price theory. Monopoly became the ability to raise prices above market norms, an exception to an otherwise equitable rule. Despite the obvious differences, political and theoretical, between this and Marx’s critique, both positions find ironic unity in their belief that markets are essentially competitive, and governed by the icy calculation of maximizing motives."}
{"prompt":"As we have seen, however, Apple’s success relies on something different. Apple neither hires nor sells to the homo economicus of economic theory—it produces emotive, devoted disciples. Apple neither cheapens commodities to battle the competition, nor does it raise prices above market norms for the simple reason that it has created its own. Instead, Apple suggests that monopoly is less an exception to the rule of competitive capitalism than something that speaks to its core. Here the connection between management and monopoly becomes clearer, because one is simply the scaled version of the other: Apple’s profits, at root, are a product of its power to control.","completion":"Apple’s ability to govern its employees, supply chains, and image allow it to restrict behavior and creativity in its interests—try getting a genius to say “crash,” the company to pay tax, or your music out of your iPhone. Apple’s ability to assert proprietary control over public goods, from the town square to government research, allow it to generate income far in excess of anything it could hope to wring from its staff. Apple’s performance of friendliness and innovation allow it to soothe customers while convincing both them and investors that it is the source of a happier, richer destiny. Apple’s profit does not come from packaging the labor of the past, in other words, but from the power to organize the present in a way that makes others believe that it is inventing the future.   Rather than clap the company’s ability to sell us that narrative, we should question it. We should use Apple’s history to help imagine something different—perhaps a future in which Apple is made public again."}
{"prompt":"The Kenyan tech scene was born in pain.  On December 30, 2007, Ory Okolloh was blogging as quickly as she could. A Nairobi-based lawyer and investment adviser, Okolloh was writing about the recent presidential election—which the incumbent, Mwai Kibaki, had just won amid allegations of fraud. The election had been violent. The post-election was going to be worse.","completion":"“I can barely breathe,” Okolloh wrote, “I’m so upset at the circumvention of democracy.” A few days later, as clashes continued between the ethnic group aligned with Kibaki and those that opposed him, Okolloh blogged about the deteriorating situation in Nairobi. “I hang out with people on both sides yesterday evening at different times and you cannot have a civil conversation if you’re not on the same side,” she wrote. “It is really very scary... I felt like I was on the set of some bad movie about ethnic cleansing.”  Soon after, Okolloh decided to leave the country and wait out the violence in Johannesburg. The number of murders would rise above a thousand: hacked, shot, burned alive. It was a lasting shock to a generation used to being shocked. Okolloh agonized over leaving Kenya, but felt she had to put her child’s safety first. Still, she wanted to find a way to help. From Johannesburg, she wrote: Google Earth supposedly shows in great detail where the damage is being done on the ground. It occurs to me that it will be useful to keep a record of this, if one is thinking long-term. For the reconciliation process to occur at the local level the truth of what happened will first have to come out. Guys looking to do something—any techies out there willing to do a mashup of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?  Over the weekend of January 5-6, 2008, two software developers teamed up to answer Okolloh’s call. One, Erik Hersman, had been raised in Kenya but was then based in Florida; the other was a Kenyan based in Alabama named David Kobia. Together they built a website called Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili. Gathering data from Kenyans and NGO workers and anyone else who seemed credible, Hersman and Kobia developed a crowdsourced map of the post-election violence. On January 9, Okolloh introduced it to the world: Last week, in between nightmares about where my country was going, I was dreaming of a Google Mashup to document incidents of violence, looting etc. that have occurred during the post-election crisis. Today, Ushahidi is born."}
{"prompt":"Ushahidi went on to become a great success story for Kenyan tech and an inspiration to entrepreneurs across the continent. Its tools for incident reporting have been deployed around the world, often for the purposes of election monitoring, crisis response, and human rights reporting.  Soon after launching the site, the Ushahidi crew started a tech hub in Nairobi called iHub. Within a few years, every major African city seemed to have a tech hub of its own, if not several. These ventures in turn built on the success of M-Pesa, a mobile payments system launched in 2007 by the Kenyan telecom Safaricom. M-Pesa revolutionized African banking and, like Ushahidi, quickly went global.  The Kenyan tech scene, soon dubbed the “Silicon Savannah,” had arrived.","completion":"Leapfrogging Politics The story of Ushahidi illustrates an important point about tech in Kenya, and in much of Africa. Tech is a metaphor as well as a business. It’s a metaphor for a future that is not only prosperous, but also free from politics. African tech promoters often talk about “leapfrogging” to accelerate development: for example, by skipping fixed phone lines and going straight to mobile. The biggest leapfrog of all would be to skip over corrupt states and parasitical elites to a post-political internet where Africa’s large and underemployed youth population might have a shot at escaping poverty.   But politics has proved hard to avoid. Even as a desire to transcend politics fuels the fascination with tech, politics finds ways to reassert itself. “Technology, especially digital technology, and politics are inseparable,” Nanjala Nyabola tells me. A leading Kenyan public intellectual and author of the Digital Democracy, Analogue Politics: How the Internet Era Is Transforming Kenya, Nyabola says that tech is often seen as something that “can cure the problems of Kenyan politics.” It’s a promise that tech can’t possibly keep, however: “Unless there is a political change, tech won’t fix it. You’ll just end up chasing your tail.” This dynamic is far older than the Silicon Savannah. Indeed, Kenyan tech has long been shaped by its complex relationship with Kenyan politics.  In early 1994, three young Kenyans—two at MIT, one at Harvard—started Africa Online, which would become the leading internet service provider (ISP) on the continent. Initially, the Kenyan government opposed the internet altogether. The state-owned telecom monopoly took out a full-page advertisement in 1995 warning entrepreneurs that offering internet access amounted to resale of services and was therefore illegal. It targeted the internet partly to protect its turf, partly to control political speech in an unstable country, and partly because it could hardly keep up with the demand for fixed voice lines, let alone internet service."}
{"prompt":"Yet the Kenyan state’s hostility to the internet didn’t kill Kenyan tech. In fact, it may have served as a catalyst. As the Kenyan consultant Muriuki Mureithi wrote in 2016, Kenya’s digital success was shaped by “government-imposed barriers that spawned innovations.”  For example, in 2000 several Kenyan ISPs formed an internet exchange point (IXP) in order to connect their networks. The state telecom considered this move illegal. A week later, the state regulatory agency sent officers to literally unplug the IXP. Yet over the following year, the ISPs built relationships with the regulators. The state telecom was struggling to maintain its fixed lines: if it couldn’t provide adequate service, the ISPs argued, then it shouldn’t have the power to prevent other companies from offering alternatives.  This point of view started to make sense to the regulators, who began to explore undermining the state telecom’s monopoly status. By 2002, the ISPs had won. They got their IXP licensed, just in time for the arrival of General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology, the first system that enabled mobile internet access. Because access to mobile internet ran through the ISPs, they gained serious leverage over the state telecom. The internet came to Kenya through cell phones: today, Kenyans get online mostly through mobile devices.  Kenya’s leapfrog to mobile internet was driven not just by technology, but politics. It wouldn’t have happened if Kenyan ISPs hadn’t skillfully exploited a power struggle within the state brought on by the hopelessness of existing telecom services.  Today, the Kenyan state has officially embraced its tech sector. The Silicon Savannah is good for the government brand: it makes the state seem youthful and forward-looking. Even Ushahidi and iHub, born in revulsion at election-related violence, now receive government funding. The government also fuels the hope that tech will somehow provide, through the magic of internet entrepreneurship, some significant portion of the jobs that Kenyan young people need.","completion":"Uber for Ambulances If an earlier generation of Kenyan technologists was forced to circumvent the state, the new generation is being asked to do the state’s job. I saw this dynamic at Nairobi Innovation Week, an annual tech conference. It took place in the gleaming new Chandaria Centre for Performing Arts—financed by the industrialist Chandaria family, of Gujarati descent—in the equally gleaming, equally new University of Nairobi Towers. A crowd of young entrepreneurs made their pitches to a room of investors, as the government’s cabinet secretary for information and communications technologies, Joseph Mucheru, looked on."}
{"prompt":"One pitch was for a company that would help girls understand menstruation and have access to pads. (The cofounder talked about a 25-year-old woman “who didn’t know menstruation was normal. She thought it was just her family.”) Another was for an SMS system to circulate study aids by phone, given that schoolkids can remain illiterate even after several years of attending public school. The founder hoped that telecoms might subsidize the rates so the service cost could be held at $1 per month. Another startup would provide help with “soft skills” like mastering email in order to boost employment. Then there was an “Uber for ambulances” so people might avoid having to take taxis to the emergency room. The seed money being sought was usually in the $10,000 range.  I began to hope the minister might simply get up and apologize for a government that was looking to penniless young entrepreneurs to provide, some day, basic social services. It wasn’t clear that even these tiny projects would be getting any funding—or that the government would take anything more than a spectator’s interest.","completion":"Much of the funding for Kenyan tech comes from non-Kenyan sources. Kenyan tech draws heavily from philanthropists and so-called “impact investing” funds. Ushahidi and iHub, for instance, were financed mainly by American philanthropists. And the design for M-Pesa came from a project financed by the UK’s Department for International Development, as the mobile payments system was seen as a way to provide the advantages of banking to the unbanked and to enable microfinance.   The founders who attract investment are often not African themselves. A 2017 study by Village Capital found that 72% of startup investment in 2015-16 in East Africa went to three companies: M-Kopa (a solar power company cofounded by the same Nick Hughes who pioneered M-Pesa), Off-Grid Electric (founded by three Westerners, two with Oxford MBAs, who had an interest in social entrepreneurship), and Angaza (a solar company based in San Francisco with an office in Nairobi). The report found that “investors are only investing in founders from the US or Europe or who attended a prestigious university.”   Anywhere in the world, investors usually invest in founders who look like them, which tends to perpetuate inequalities. But it isn’t as though that 72% of startup investment is crowding out other capital. There are African venture capitalists, but African investors have more lucrative and safer options in a capital-poor region — investing in urban real estate is the main one, a sector with high profits and relatively weak foreign competition. For African tech to grow, African capital might need to rearrange its priorities a bit.   The state can help, whether with tax incentives, educational initiatives, infrastructure investment, or simply by staying out of the way. Kenya, like Nigeria and other major African states, is now officially pro-tech and pro-internet, not least because tech provides hope for the young and the prospect of outsourcing some (already missing) public services to the private sector. But state commitments to tech are very thin, and states’ willingness to keep from interfering in internet speech is getting weaker."}
{"prompt":"Welcome to Sheba Valley Driving between downtown Nairobi and the airport, you see occasional flashes of white light. You are being photographed. Terrorism is a very real danger in Kenya and the state and its partners—Safaricom again—have been happy to work with both China and the United States to use advanced technology to improve surveillance in the city. Counterterrorism, for now, is that rare area where the two tech superpowers can agree that spending large amounts of money in the poor world on up-to-date technology is a good thing. For once, worries about technology transfer don’t arise.  Upon arrival in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, the pace slows a bit. A visa costs $50 in cash. Ethiopian birr are not convertible, and the country faces a grave shortage of hard currency. Once I had paid, the customs official looked awkwardly away. “I can give you a receipt,” she said, “but I don’t have a pen.”  Ethiopia and Kenya are the giants of East Africa and the Horn but in many ways are opposites: an authoritarian, vestigially Marxist state isolated from global markets versus a multiparty democracy with a relatively light-touch state and strong foreign investment. Yet both have robust tech scenes and ambitions. If tech is going to transform East Africa it will have to do so in both places, as dissimilar as they may be.  In some ways traveling from Kenya to Ethiopia is like going from the West to China circa 1995. With 100 million people, Ethiopia has more than twice the population of Kenya. The government recently embarked on reform after decades of stifling political speech, jailing opponents, and making its biggest decisions in secret. Blue Soviet-era Lada taxis still cruise the streets. With a development policy based on cheap labor and low-value-added manufacturing for export, the economy, fueled by government spending based on debt, has been among the fastest-growing emerging markets, if from a very low starting point. (Kenya’s GDP per capita is about twice that of Ethiopia.) Addis’s tin-roofed center is ringed by acres of new, quickly built apartment blocks.","completion":"Addis is bustling but it’s a hollow, rattling bustle. Many of Ethiopia’s universities barely function. The sole, state-run telecom struggles to address its backlog of phone-line requests. The internet cable is poorly maintained, and only businesses or the wealthy can afford to bring a line in and pay the high rates. Internet access for everyone else is through cell phones, but that too is iffy. When the government worried about political unrest in 2016-17, it cut off mobile access to the internet—and even, for a while, the fixed lines. When it worried about kids using the internet to cheat on exams, it cut it off for a week. When I was there, the prime minister had resigned so another state of emergency was declared and the internet got cut off.  This can make tech entrepreneurship difficult. Still, a tech startup scene has taken root in Addis, known as “Sheba Valley.” An Ethiopian expat coined the phrase, as a reference to the Queen of Sheba mentioned in ancient sources from the Torah to the Koran. The Ethiopian royal family claims descent from her, and her name functions as a kind of mega-brand: for example, Ethiopian Airlines calls its frequent-flyer program ShebaMiles.  Keeping the Power On To reach the offices of Apposit, one of Sheba Valley’s leading startups, I made my way along Addis’s main thoroughfares to a cafe which was said to be next to the building that housed the company’s offices. The cafe reference was important because, to the limited degree that Addis has street numbers at all, no one seems to know them. After dozens of conversations and an exploration of two other buildings, I found the air-conditioned, buzzing offices of Apposit.  “We started just less than ten years ago,” Eric Chijioke, Apposit’s head of technology services, told me in his glass-walled office. “The three founding partners, myself, Adam [Abate] and Simon [Solomon], we had all worked in Ethiopia on a project the Kennedy School was running, building out the government’s financial systems.” Chijioke and Abate had gone to school together at Brown; Chijioke got a bachelor’s in mechanical and electrical engineering, while Abate’s degree was in economics and development studies. Harvard’s Kennedy School was executing the project for Ethiopia’s government on behalf of Western government funders."}
{"prompt":"More than half of the enterprise-level work in Ethiopia, according to Chijioke and three other Ethiopian tech people I interviewed, is governmental. The government finds it hard to run its own IT systems, so it farms the work out to contractors. But there are neither enough vendors nor enough work to sustain a competitive market, so the government in effect sets the prices. One of the many challenges of building tech for the government, says Chijioke, is the extreme variability of state infrastructure: The systems that we built, and that still run, they needed to take account of the fact that it’s a distributed platform that’s supposed to run right down to the local government area level. But at the local government area, the actual functioning of the infrastructure is at a highly variable level, from nothing—you know, paper and pen—to computers that might run a few times a day to a few times a week, to some offices that might be highly automated and have satellite connectivity. You have to build for this: everything from zero to high-spec, everywhere in between.  Apposit’s leading project isn’t government-related, however. It’s in mobile finance. Apposit’s main client is Pagatech, a company that aims to build an M-Pesa-style mobile payments system for Nigeria. Pagatech is Chijioke’s responsibility. He got involved with the company early on: “I knew the founder — a gentleman named Tayo Oviosu. He’s an impressive guy — he went to business school with my younger brother, at Stanford, and he was thinking of starting up the business and he needed some technical advice.”  Apposit started out serving Pagatech when the company was still small. They did such a good job that Pagatech was willing to grow its developer team in Ethiopia rather than start a new one in Nigeria. “All of the developers and database engineers are based here,” Chijioke said. “On that particular team we have close to 30 people, and this is high-skilled jobs. Everyone on the team is Ethiopian except myself and one junior architectural engineer. The biggest problem is sometimes, for political reasons, the internet might be disconnected.”","completion":"Feleg Tsegaye, who runs Deliver Addis, Ethiopia’s largest e-commerce startup, also works at the mercy of an insecure, sclerotic, and capricious state. When the first internet shutdown came, Deliver Addis had to reconfigure its entire business to work offline, via text messaging. During another emergency, it had to configure its own email service. “Most people here don’t use the internet on a regular basis, besides Facebook and social media,” Tsegaye said. “There is not an impression that actual commerce is done via the internet, so the government doesn’t expect blocking it to have a great impact on businesses.”  To press their case with the government, Ethiopian tech companies have formed lobby groups—one for hardware, another for software—and startups have organized themselves around a handful of small institutions, all of which receive some funding from governments abroad, including RENEW, an American impact investing firm that backs Deliver Addis. The last time the government shut down the internet, beginning in October 2016, some 200 tech businesspeople met with the communications ministry to argue that technology, and the internet in particular, might actually have something to offer for the Ethiopian economy.  It promises to be a long battle. For now the government has placed its bets on manufacturing parks, complete with tax breaks and special immigration offices. Foreign companies, mainly Asian-owned, take advantage of low wages and the tariff-free access that manufacturers from Ethiopia, as a less-developed country, have to Western markets. But the inputs, such as those needed for making textiles, are often not from Ethiopia, and neither is most of the intellectual, manufacturing, or financial capital. Not even all of the labor is Ethiopian; managers and supervisors are usually Asian.   Still, even though the Ethiopian government has prioritized manufacturing, it hasn’t entirely neglected tech. Around 2002, the government announced it would be building an industrial park for tech companies. Sixteen years later, it is just opening—and there hasn’t been much take-up. Kenya built something similar, with roughly similar results."}
{"prompt":"The real flagship for Ethiopian tech startups is iceaddis. Like Nairobi’s iHub but about one-twentieth the size, it has an open workspace with young people working on laptops, whiteboards, a tiny kitchen, and a purposeful hum. When I was there a group of Seattle high-schoolers were visiting. I met with iceaddis’s energetic head, Markos Lemma, born and raised in Addis, who had learned his English, he said, “from Hollywood movies.” Lemma had just come from a long meeting with a government minister. “My argument is always that you can’t really have sustainable development without encouraging innovative and high-risk businesses, because those are how you compete in the future,” he told me. “How much capacity you have for producing technology is the best way to measure countries’ potential to grow. When I talk to ministers now they also understand there is a need for entrepreneurship.” And yet: “They don’t see the internet as the main accelerator of growth; it’s more like a threat, because it connects people.” Running With It All of Africa’s governments are facing a demographic explosion that they don’t know how to handle. “The internet” is a way to offer a bright future that would otherwise be hard to promise.","completion":"At the same time, states find censorship and surveillance hard to forego. Ethiopia is a good example. Its new government under Abiy Ahmed has encouraged the tech sector but, faced in August 2018 with unrest in the east, resorted to blocking the internet. Such a move inflicts a high economic cost: the Brookings Institution estimates that internet shutdowns in Africa cost $7.4 million per day.  The bright side is that today’s tech entrepreneurs know that they have to engage in politics in order to not be destroyed by it. African tech entrepreneurs are tough. As Nanjala Nyabola says, “We’ve managed to build exciting lives despite the challenges, and when you look at the tech space it is really evidence of a society that refuses to give up on itself. Give us a little space and we will run with it. Because we are so used to having no space at all.” The Muzic Box was open on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, staying closed on Wednesdays and Fridays only to give Chicago’s competing disco club, the Power Plant, a chance to draw a crowd a couple nights a week. If you were a young, gay person of color in the Windy City during the early 1980s, there was no better place to be. The Muzic Box was a sanctuary, free from the judgment of a still-restrictive society that, in the days of panic over an increasingly visible queer culture, inhibited the sense of celebratory pride sorely needed by the local gay community."}
{"prompt":"Between the Muzic Box’s four walls, dancers were welcomed in the embrace of an idea. As the attention of the mass audience shifted away from disco, and “Disco Sucks” rallies were held at Chicago’s Comiskey Park stadium, these clubs were the only place to hear the music of the future. The songs on rotation in the Muzic Box may not have been categorized in the same bin at the record store, but they all shared invigorating rhythms and futuristic tonalities that suggested a new genre cutting through those established categories. The fearless explorer breaking through the boundaries between them was Ron Hardy, a virtuoso who mixed records together in a spontaneous collage style inspired by New York disco DJs.","completion":"Hardy had begun playing at the club in 1982, when it was called The Warehouse, and remained the resident DJ until it closed in 1987. His predecessor Frankie Knuckles first brought the disco DJing style, with its aim of creating a seamless landscape of rhythm, to Chicago from his hometown of New York. However, in spite of its East Coast origins, this approach to mixing music—and the approach to producing music that these DJs would eventually create—took flight in the Midwest. To this day, it bears the abbreviated name of the club where it began its international ascendance. The music had gotten so popular by the mid-1980s that Chicago record stores started giving the records that got played at The Warehouse their own bin, labeled “house music.” It was on a night in 1985—whether it was Tuesday, Thursday, or Saturday is lost to history—that Earl “Spanky” Smith and Nathaniel Pierre Jones entered the Muzic Box with a reel-to-reel tape, containing a track that they had just recorded in Smith’s bedroom. Hardy would sometimes switch from vinyl to a tape reel to play productions by local amateurs, in order to keep up with the developing sound of the genre. House DJs had already begun making inroads into production, thanks to the availability of cheap synthesizers."}
{"prompt":"Smith and Jones recount the evening they debuted their new track in a documentary for the British broadcaster Channel 4 on house music called Pump Up the Volume: Pierre:\tWe thought, if anybody would be daring enough to play this, it would be Ron Hardy.Spanky:\tHe ended up playing it four times that night. First time he played it, people didn’t really know how to react to it.Pierre:\tHe played it again, people was looking like “Hm. It’s early, I guess he playing some crazy stuff.”Spanky:\tThe fourth time, they lost they mind. That was the birth of acid, right there.  A new era began that night. The track didn’t bother with song form, melodic development, harmony, or lyrical content; it was an investigation of the infinite permutations of sound itself. Winding through a pounding, jittery beat, an atonal three-note motif wriggled and thrashed, as though trying to escape, for more than twelve minutes.","completion":"It did not sound like it had been produced by a musical instrument. Nor did it sound like a pop song, with its structure more akin to minimalist experimental music. Disco had already been moving in this direction, emphasizing texture over song. But this dispensed with the song altogether. It took a forward-thinking listener to see its promise, in 1985, as a potential dancefloor hit. Fortunately, Ron Hardy was precisely that kind of listener."}
{"prompt":"The producers had called their composition “In Your Mind,” but that may have been too limiting—listeners had lost their minds upon hearing it. The track was not an object for contemplation, but a shockwave that affected the body. Either because of its fluid yet abrasive texture, or because of its tonal similarity to the guitars of psychedelic rock, or because some dancers at the Muzic Box were so blown away that they thought someone had spiked their drinks with LSD, the record became known as “Acid Trax.” The global phenomenon of rave music would eventually derive everything from “Acid Trax,” which was released as a 12-inch record in 1987 under the name Phuture. A subgenre of house music adopted its name: “acid house,” which would also become the label that rave music went by upon its earliest appearances in Europe. Acid’s abstract quality brought the futuristic nature of house music to the forefront, influencing the concurrent development of techno in Detroit and catalyzing the emergence of drum and bass in England. Today, aspects of EDM are uncannily similar to acid house as it was heard thirty years ago in Chicago.","completion":"What made “Acid Trax” so revolutionary was not just its structure or its sound, but its use of the technology that produced it. Jazz, funk, disco, and even rock and roll had emphasized timbre and spontaneity as much as melody and narrative, in the struggle over centuries to adapt traditional musical practices to new languages and new tools. “Acid Trax,” however, did not derive its complex sound from overblown horns or bent strings—or even distorted amplifiers. It was made almost entirely with one instrument or, more accurately, one machine: the Roland TB-303, which generated sound waves from scratch. Then bought for next to nothing at a pawn shop, the 303 has since entered into legend, and now commands thousands of dollars on eBay. Even today, producers of underground dance music try to capture the sonic force it holds."}
{"prompt":"In the writer Kodwo Eshun’s description, the machine itself shares authorship of “Acid Trax.” “Acid is an accident,” he suggests, “in which the TB-303 bass synthesizer uses Phuture to reproduce itself, to multiply the dimensions of electronic sound, to open up a nomadology of texturhythms, rhythmelodies.” The story of acid house begins in a factory.","completion":"Transistor Rhythm While house music’s sonic textures drew from both African-American music’s corporeal funk and European synth pop’s electronic sheen, it only crystallized as a genre and production practice after some help from Japanese technology. The Roland Corporation, founded by Ikutaro Kakehashi in Osaka in 1972, unknowingly provided the final ingredients for the futuristic dance music that would emerge in America over the next few decades. In 1980, Roland’s TR-808 Rhythm Composer, the “TR” designating “Transistor Rhythm,” became one of the first synthesized drum machines to become available to consumers."}
{"prompt":"Early synthesizers were as complicated—and as large—as electronic manufacturing technology. But Roland’s instruments were appearing in a new context. Before the widespread extension of electrical power to residential areas in the 1920s, machinery under capitalism had been an instrument of labor. In Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” he remarked on the place of technology in the capitalist mode of production: Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry: natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand: the power of knowledge, objectified.  Over the course of the twentieth century, consumer electronics dispersed scientific knowledge further still. Beyond being a tool that workers used in the factory, electrical machinery became present in the home. Automation took on a presence in everyday life as well as within the means of production. The amplification of sound was inextricably linked to this process, with the development and distribution of electricity tied from its origin to telephone communication and radio broadcasting. By the mid-twentieth century, most homes had radios, making their operation familiar to a far broader population than expert telegraphers.","completion":"In the mold of consumer devices like the portable stereo, the TR-808 was built for home use. Its target audience was musicians who needed accompaniment for practice sessions, and its interface more closely resembled a stereo than a circuit board. In the late 1970s, however, the TR-808 began to migrate from the home to the recording studio. It started to appear on pop records—Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” is a famous example—many of which may have been played by Knuckles or Hardy during their expansive DJ sets. Its rigid, aggressive drum sound may have driven professional musicians crazy, but its mathematically precise rhythmic divisions were perfect for DJ mixing, a process of matching up beats by adjusting the speed of rotation on turntables."}
{"prompt":"In 1982, Roland engineer Tadao Kikumoto designed a new machine as a supplement to the TR-808: TB-303, the initials standing for “Transistor Bass.” For $400, the 303 could be used as a supplement to Roland’s drum machines, giving a solitary musician in a domestic setting the experience of playing with a band. “Electric” is not to be confused with “electronic”—while a bass guitar amplifies sound that is produced acoustically, the 303 was triggered by a voltage-controlled oscillator cued by a one-octave keyboard, with knobs and switches to manipulate the timbre.","completion":"A traditional instrument like a bass guitar makes waves. What fluctuates in these waves, in the case of acoustic instruments, is the air surrounding a vibration in or around part of the instrument’s material body. When two frequencies occur simultaneously, they affect the shape of the wave, creating the effect that musicians call timbre—the character of sound that differentiates separate instruments playing the same note. While a pure sine wave creates a tone so pure as to sound lifeless, the sound produced by any instrument is complex, with a fundamental tone altered by harmonic overtones."}
{"prompt":"The early electronic synthesizer broke the relationship between the shape and substance of a physical object and the sound it produced, allowing for the formation of a waveform through a mathematical formula instead. There are two kinds of complex tones that formed the palette of electronic synthesizers like the 303: square and triangle. The square wave produces only odd-numbered harmonics of the fundamental tone, with a sound comparable to a clarinet. Though the wave looks like a square, it is in fact produced by a series of sine waves, embedded like a fractal set. The sawtooth wave produces both odd and even harmonics, making it sound something like a violin. The triangle wave resembles the square wave, but with less complexity.","completion":"The 303 had six knobs, reading TUNING, CUT OFF FREQ, RESONANCE, ENV MOD, DECAY, and ACCENT, controlling the parameters of the sound’s tone and articulation. This was not a conventional instrument like a clarinet or a violin, but more like a manufacturing tool, the kind that was being used on the increasingly automated assembly lines of the industrial factories then dominating the economy of the American Midwest."}
{"prompt":"As robotic instruments were incorporated into the manufacturing process, labor became oriented towards their operation and maintenance, rather than hand assembly. In a concert hall, an instrument is to be played; on a shop floor, it is to be worked on. The 303’s interface blurs the distinction: while it holds a portion of a piano’s keyboard, its primary mechanism is operated by means of knobs and buttons. Like a robotic arm, it is programmed as much as it is played.","completion":"Machine Music The TB-303 didn’t sell. It may have been because the advent of sampling technology made it possible to reproduce recordings of other instruments directly. Or it may just have been, according to Peter Shapiro in The Wire, because Roland accidentally forgot to ship out manuals to English-speaking countries. Either way, the machine was devastatingly unpopular for its intended purpose."}
{"prompt":"In the early 1980s, a handful of inventive pop musicians did begin to feature the 303’s unrealistic sound as a novelty. Still, the machine lapsed out of production in 1984—a year before the arrival of “Acid Trax” heralded the invention of acid house. Earl “Spanky” Smith bought one at a secondhand music store for $40—sans manual—knowing it was what Jesse Saunders had used for “On and On,” the earliest foray into house music production in Chicago. He programmed a beat into his Roland drum machine and called his friend Pierre: Spanky:\tWell basically, we started using the 303 just to try to make bass lines, because when we first started making music, it sucked. So I made this rhythm…Pierre:\t…and it’s just playing straight, and he said, “I can’t figure out how to work this thing,” and he’s still doing this weird sound. “I don’t know how to program it,” he said, “maybe you could figure out how to program it, ‘cause it ain’t come with a book.” So instead of trying to program it, I just started turning knobs. I was like, “woo-ooo-ooo.-ooo.” And he was like, “What you doing?” And I’m like, “I don’t know, I’m turning these knobs!” And he said, “Keep doing that!” So we was just sitting there for thirty, forty minutes, just turning knobs, going “I like that, I like that! In a 1988 interview, veteran Chicago house DJ Farley “Jackmaster” Funk explained  that before “Acid Trax,” the TB-303 was “an obsolete, old-fashioned piece of technology that no one had ever thought of using that way before.” House DJs had already begun to resist the conventional distinction between production and consumption in consumer society by turning the playing of records into the playing of music as a creative process. Pierre and Spanky extended this intervention in a way that called for a redefinition of musical sound.","completion":"Since the TB-303 was built to emulate an electric bass, its real-world referent was specified. If you were to imagine a visual representation, you might picture someone playing the instrument, albeit one that looked a bit weird. But by playing the 303 itself, through manipulation of its electronic interface, Pierre transformed his virtual instrument as the track progressed. The image would have to exist in an amorphous dream logic, as though the instrument were a shape-shifting mutant: a violin, then a trumpet, then a flute, then a timpani, until it could no longer be associated with a recognizable correlate. As Pierre put it in The Fader, while the 303 “was supposed to be copying a bass guitar, [the way we used it] doesn’t sound like any previous sound you’ve ever heard before. And you can only describe it as being acid.” “Acid Trax,” with its extended texture, was truly a track rather than a song. In fact, it was more than one; trax, in the plural, its name also describing every succeeding installment in the genre it created. In the late 1980s and early 90s, acid house spread like a virus. New records proliferated—not just by Phuture, but by other local producers like Adonis, Lil Louis, Mike Dunn, and the teenage prodigy Armando. Armando’s 1987 classic “Land of Confusion” epitomizes Kodwo Eshun’s contention that the 303 was a collaborator in the production of acid house. Its composition was described by Mike Dunn in Chicago’s 5 Magazine as based on the machine’s settings. “If you take the batteries out for a minute and put them back in,” he recalled, “that’s the first bassline that will come up.” By the end of the 1980s, the style had become influential not only in Chicago but in Detroit, where a similar kind of dance music, called techno, had been emerging. Juan Atkins, the founder of techno, had begun to fuse the experimental qualities of funk and progressive rock with the rhythmic structure of contemporary dance music. His friend and collaborator Derrick May, after taking frequent trips across I-94 to visit his mother, had been “baptised” at The Warehouse. May established a link between the cities, even buying Frankie Knuckles’s TR-909, the successor to the TR-808, to produce his own records. Techno emphasized the space-age qualities of synthesized sound over the disco and gospel influences that characterized house. But if a line separates the sound of the two genres, acid house sits directly on it."}
{"prompt":"Sonic Synthesis Acid house’s dissociation of sound from physical presence is now a fact of our sonic environment. For those who came of age after its emergence, acid has permanently altered our relationship to aural experience. Tones that might previously have been limited to sound effects in science-fiction cinema, intended as representation of alien objects, we now hear as musical in themselves. “For some, I guess, ‘synthesize’ means ‘duplicate,’” Juan Atkins told Wired. “But for me, ‘synthesize’ is synonymous with ‘create.’” Today, contemporary pop music has fully incorporated acid house’s sonic range, if not its production method. Producers used it as a starting point for the sound of R&B and hip-hop in the new millennium—in 2000, Timbaland’s backing track for Aaliyah’s “Try Again” used a TB-303 for its bass line, inspiring countless producers to imitate the sound on other synthesizers and computers. For his part, Pierre sees something prophetic in the name that he and Earl Smith chose for their work: Phuture. “Twenty-six years later and acid is still going strong,” he said in 2011. “You can see the proof of this when platinum-selling groups and artists like LMFAO and Skrillex are putting ‘acid’ in their songs.” But while the sound of acid has become incorporated into the output of what Adorno and Horkheimer called the “culture industry,” the act of its creation was a rupture of the equivalence that term assumes. Acid house was born in a space between the cultural and the industrial, between social life and the relations of production. It is here that we find not only art, but political action. Acid house relocates industrial sabotage from the factory to a domestic setting, allowing for creative acts that expanded the consumer sphere of the disco community to the practice of house music production.","completion":"In this sense, acid house fits into the spectrum of an ongoing struggle. In his 1963 book Blues People, Amiri Baraka traced the origin of jazz to the use, by African-American musicians in the nineteenth century, of unfamiliar tools. These musicians, lacking formal training, “developed an instrumental technique and music of their own, a music that relied heavily on the non-European vocal tradition of blues.” The result was a musical practice that used European instruments to achieve “the altered timbral qualities and diverse vibrato effects of African music.” On a guitar or trumpet, a fretboard or valve system provides an interface for producing tones corresponding to the chromatic scale of Western harmony. But through physical intervention, they can be made to deviate from that limited use. Acid house directs this intervention towards consumer devices, drawing altered timbres and vibrato effects from machinery."}
{"prompt":"This practice disrupts the presumption of autonomy between the spheres of art, consumer society, and industrial production—a presumption that was also investigated in Marx’s critique of capitalism. Italian political theorist Paolo Virno, in his essay “Virtuosity and Revolution,” shows that Marx had already addressed cultural production in his notes for Capital. Marx distinguished between two kinds of intellectual labor: “commodities which exist separately from the producer,” like paintings or books, and those in which “the product is not separable from the act of producing,” like the performing arts. As Virno argues, within the context of the service work that dominates advanced economies, “activity-without-a-finished-work moves from being a special and problematic case to becoming the prototype of waged labor in general.” The artist is in the same category as the service worker, in other words: “virtuosic activity comes across as universal servile labor.” In this light, an artistic practice in itself does not escape the boundaries of the capitalist mode of production, which has included service work and the dissemination of cultural phenomena since the days of the printing press. Speaking to The Fader, Pierre pointed out that the sound of the TB-303 itself has now become subject to imitation by an arm of the culture industry. “I think since people have made all these clones of the 303,” he says, “to me that’s just like other manufacturers making bass guitars or lead guitars, or pianos.” To his ears, much of the electronic music that has followed simply repeats an old formula: “Even dubstep, as crazy as that stuff sounds, has sounds that are connected to a previous instrument—it’s still copying something in some kind of way.” The real legacy of acid house may not reside in its sound, but in its method. Acid shows us a new way to relate to the machinery that increasingly populates our everyday lives, one that shifts our experience from the passive mode of consumerism into the realm of creative activity. The knowledge we share as operators of this machinery has the potential, as Virno puts it, to “affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere,” but only “if it cuts the linkage that binds it to the production of commodities and wage labor.” Acid house teaches us that the potential for a radical practice of culture may not lie in making a certain kind of sound, but in something more fundamental: not doing what it says in the manual.","completion":"How did you first get involved with Computer People for Peace (CPP)? In the 1960s, I was working at IBM, which was a marvelous job for me because I was a single mother with a kid. Programming was the only thing that paid a woman a living wage. And they trained me, so that was wonderful.  Around 1968, I joined CPP. We had a steering committee of six to eight people, which I served on. We were working for different companies, mostly doing programming. It was mainframe-based. We had a lot of demonstrations in New York because it was the 1960s. It was the war that started us out—that’s why we put peace in our name.  I remember you saying something at one point about a commune. Were you all living together? It was only a small part of CPP, but yes. In 1971, seven of us who met through the collective started a commune in Brooklyn. Our commune was in an amazing old brownstone with original oak panelling and a big kitchen on the lower level.  We reasoned that it would only take three people working at any one time to support the house and buy all the food and everything, and then the others could be doing movement work—anti-war work or what I got into, which was trying to organize a computer workers’ union.  You tried to organize a computer workers’ union at IBM? No, this was during the year I took off. We each took six months to a year off to do movement work.  CPP had the idea that if we could organize mainframe programmers and mainframe operators, then we could shut down everything. I worked on implementing that vision, but it was very difficult. The only inroads I remember making were at NYU and a city agency. It was difficult because the workers were well-paid and thought of themselves as professionals.  One of the things that the mainframe era did was to enable women and working-class people to walk into a professional job and earn a decent living. It just required a college education. My division of IBM had a lot of working-class young men who got draft deferments for working there. It was a leg on the rung of the middle class."}
{"prompt":"Were these programmers receptive to the idea of unionizing? Programmers were not really interested, but the operators were. Operators were the guys—and 99.9% of them were guys—who worked in the machine room, the mainframe room. They could shut anything down. And being an operator didn’t require a college education. There were a lot of African-Americans who hadn’t been to college and whose consciousness had been raised in the 1960s and 1970s.","completion":"But we had this idealistic vision of programmers and operators, together. Today it’d be like a union of… I don’t know what the job titles are now. Software engineers? I’m kind of confused by everyone being called an engineer now. In my day, an engineer was somebody who had an engineering degree, like a civil or mechanical engineer. But programmers or systems analysts weren’t that. Do software engineers have engineering degrees? They might have computer science degrees. My sense is that “engineer” is an umbrella word for people who may be doing a bunch of things: developing front-end applications, programming how interfaces work and connect to a database, people working on servers and maintaining infrastructure… Yeah, but there are a lot of class divisions within that work, and those are really important for organizing. I’ve been trying to follow the changes and crunch the numbers that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out to understand what’s increasing and what’s decreasing. What I’m looking for is the numbers of people in the field—and what is the field?  In 1973, when I started teaching, young people were told to go study data processing. “That’s the wave of the future!” And, of course, it wasn’t. It never was. For a while, you could get jobs in it just walking in the door if you were white. But there were never that many jobs."}
{"prompt":"Tell me more about your work with CPP.  I edited and wrote for the CPP newsletter, Interrupt. “Interrupt” was a signal. You could program an interrupt to the mainframe. We meant it in a political way.  A glimpse of Interrupt, as digitized by Eli Naeher and Jen Kagan. Several issues of Interrupt are available at Naeher's website.","completion":"The CPP steering committee had a lot of interesting tactics. We would meet regularly and come up with ideas like going to an Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) convention to distribute antiwar literature. The people at ACM were just dumbfounded by us. But there were others who came out of the woodwork and said, “I really think the war is a bad thing. What do you have?” And they’d get on our mailing list. Back then there was no email.  We had what we thought of as privileged jobs because we were making decent income and we had Xerox machines. That was the key to the movement: Xerox machines. In those days, most people had to crank out leaflets on mimeograph machines with this blue ink. It was a big drum and you had to roll it around. Xerox machines were much better. We would sneak in when no one was looking and make copies."}
{"prompt":"You had access to Xerox machines through the computing jobs you had? Yeah, we thought that was the main criteria for a job. Earn a decent wage and have a Xerox machine. We also raised bail for one of the Panther 21. His name was Clark Squire and he’s still in prison. Do you know about the Panther 21? No.","completion":"The Panther 21 was a group of Black Panthers arrested in New York in 1969. The trial went on for a long time and they were all acquitted. One of them was a programmer named Clark Squire. One of our members said: “Look, Clark Squire is a programmer. If we raise bail, it will raise consciousness among programmers not just about the war but about what’s happening to black people in America today.” So we went to ACM one year and raised a lot of money. People were aware that something really bad was happening to black people in America. Did we raise consciousness among a lot of computer workers? No. But enough of them ponied up money."}
{"prompt":"We got the money together but the judge wouldn’t take it. They kept all the Panthers in jail. They got out in 1971. I’m not sure what we did with the money, except then I went to work for the Women’s Bail Fund, which was an organization that included some Panther women. So we applied some of that money to women who were in prison.  Clark Squire is now known as Sundiata Acoli. He’s still in prison, on a different charge. He’s eighty-one years old. I write to him sometimes. He remembers everything about those days, things that I forget.","completion":"I’m curious about what you said about raising money but not consciousness. Sometimes I wonder whether tech workers who are speaking out now see themselves as part of larger movements and whether they’ll stick around for longer-term organizing that’s not directly tech-related. Did you ever worry about that? I believe everything starts with a single issue. You start with a single issue, and my issue was working conditions. You start with a single issue and people start to say, “Oh, it’s not me. It’s not my fault. I didn’t do that. It’s happening to other people.” And then it can go anyplace."}
{"prompt":"The people I worked with then and now came in at different points and on different issues, but could all see the larger picture.  So when you think about your work today, it’s not as if Interrupt stopped and now you’re doing other things. No, it’s a total continuum.  When did Interrupt stop publishing? 1973, I think. By then the energy wasn’t all in one basket anymore. The Panther trial made me very aware. It was also partly because we each took turns leaving our jobs to do movement work, and coming back was never easy.  In my case, coming back was particularly hard. In 1970, protesters had occupied the  Courant Institute, the computer center at NYU where I had tried to organize a union, and threatened to destroy some very expensive equipment there. So I had gone back to look for work and a woman who was a headhunter—this was totally new in the industry, that there were headhunters and that it would be a woman—sent me out on one or two interviews. Then—this is a wacky story but it’s true—she said, “Meet me at the public library on 42nd Street and don’t look like you know me. I’ll be wearing a big hat.”  She was dressed amazingly. She saw me and said, “Walk this way.” She said, “The FBI is after you. I can’t send you on any other interviews.” I was wondering because the two I’d gone on, I knew the people who were interviewing me. And they were chilly. They did not move or change expression.","completion":"She said, “You can’t get a job. You’ve got to change your name.” It was scary. I straightened my hair. I changed my name. I wore contact lenses. The job I ended up getting in 1973 was at LaGuardia Community College, which was just starting. They were mainly hiring political activists. It was an absolutely wonderful environment for cooperative learning and working. The two guys who hired me, one had been associated with the Panthers and knew my work with Clark Squire and the other had been my manager at IBM. He had later left to start a small consulting firm—we would now call it a “startup”—and hired me away from IBM. Then I tried to organize a union there and he fired me!  But anyway, I was hired to teach. I was very lucky. LaGuardia Community College was a tribe that I loved."}
{"prompt":"In one of the issues of Interrupt, there were transcripts of “security hearings” in which workers who were being interviewed for government security clearances were asked about their associations with CPP. That must’ve scared people in the collective. I was freaked.  We always knew that there was an informer in the group. All of our meetings were announced and anyone could come. There was one rather heavyset man who never said anything and turned up most of the time.  When I got married, he was the first one to come to my wedding party at the commune. Then, when I put in a Freedom of Information Act request several years later, the files showed our menu for the wedding, but almost everything else was redacted! COINTELPRO was very active then. It could have been our work with the Panthers. It could have been my work with the union. I don’t know, but it was scary.","completion":"And you continued doing technical work? Yeah. In those days it was called the data processing department. I taught programming and systems analysis and design for thirty-five years. That’s what I really liked: looking at the big picture. That’s what I got into at IBM and the skills were useful for CPP.  How do you connect the dots? How do you find the information? It was exciting. I think it was the beginning of my love of research and going on to get a PhD.  Is there anything else I didn’t ask that you wanted to talk about? We didn’t have a model, we didn’t know what we were doing, but we became a collective that, well, we had a lot of arguments—if you look at any organization, you’ll find arguments—but we’d reach a consensus on the issues that we worked on in Interrupt.  I think it takes a physical presence. I was just on a Skype call with collaborators in Belgium for a participatory design conference. You can do certain things that way, of course. But I think you need the tribe.  I’ve been organizing in different groups for fifty or sixty years. Whether it was CPP or the CUNY union, it’s been a lot of work. But you have an evolving belief system together. And some naivete! I mean, I thought in 1971, “Organizing computer workers, oh yeah, this needs to be done! Operators and programmers together, yeah!” I had no idea what the structure of unions was. I had no idea National Labor Relations Board classifications can keep workers at the same workplace from forming a union together.   If you slice and dice workers, you don’t have a union. You have mashed potatoes. Some battles we fought. Some we lost."}
{"prompt":"Can you start by telling us a little bit about your area of expertise? I work on behavioral economics and game theory, so I study insights from psychology and build them into mathematical models of human behavior. In particular, I’m interested in what we call market design.  For a lot of the history of economics, we've taken as given the way that market institutions work. Market design turns that on its head. It says that instead of taking the rules of the market as given, we should look at how those rules are written.","completion":"There are any number of times where the government or a private company needs to set up a market. For example, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) might be selling the rights for companies to broadcast over a certain band of the wireless spectrum. The agency needs to come up with a set of rules that determines who pays them what for which portion of the spectrum. That's a market design question.  How are big tech companies engaged in market design? Google and Facebook get most of their revenue from selling advertising. So they’ve had to design a system that enables advertisers to transact with them.  The evolution of that system has been very ad hoc. It started at Google. Early on, the company realized that it needed a way to allocate the different ad slots that appear next to its search results to different advertisers. So it started looking at something called a “second-price auction.” This is a kind of auction that gets invented by William Vickrey in the 1960s.  At the time, there were two standard auction formats: the first-price auction and the ascending auction. The first-price auction is where we all simultaneously submit bids and the highest bidder wins. The ascending auction is the one we generally think of when we picture an auction: there's somebody with a gavel and the price keeps going up and everybody drops out except the highest bidder and that person wins."}
{"prompt":"Vickrey recognized that both types of auctions have their advantages. One obvious virtue of the first-price auction is that everybody can participate asynchronously at a distance. We don’t all have to be in the room bidding at the same time. Logistically, it’s very efficient.  On the other hand, one virtue of the ascending auction is that it’s easy to know how to bid. You watch the price go up and once it's above your value, you quit. It’s simple: you keep bidding at all prices below your value, and you quit at all prices above your value.  Whereas in a first-price auction, you really need to strategize. You need to say, “Okay, I guess this object is worth $1000 to me, but if I get it for $1000 then I walk away no better off than I was before, so I should put in a bid somewhere below $1000.” But how much below $1000? That depends on what I think the other bidders are going to do—and what the other bidders do depend on what they think I’m going to do. It’s potentially a very complicated calculation.  So in 1961 Vickrey writes a paper where he proposes a new kind of auction that combines the benefits of both formats. In this new kind of auction, we can all submit bids asynchronously and we don’t need to strategize. Here’s how it works: everybody bids, the highest bidder wins, and then the winner pays the second-highest bid. Thus the second-price auction was born.","completion":"Why does that solve the problem of strategy? Why don't you have to strategize in a second-price auction? The trick is to see that there is a neat isomorphism between the price you choose to quit at in an ascending auction and a bid that you place in a second-price auction. Instead of running an ascending auction and having everybody decide dynamically at the time when to quit, you can just ask everybody when they are going to quit in advance and call that their bid. The highest bidder will win and then pay the second-highest bid.  This encourages you to submit a bid at however much you value the object. So if you value the object at $1000, it is better to bid $1000 than to bid any other amount. And that's true regardless of the other players’ behavior."}
{"prompt":"What happens to Vickrey’s idea? Mostly it gets ignored. No real auctioneers adopt this way of selling things. Then, about a half-century later, in the early 2000s, Google picks it up and dusts it off as they’re figuring out how to sell ads. If you’re searching for car insurance on Google, a bunch of companies that sell car insurance want to place their ads next to those search results. Google needs to figure out a way to determine which companies get to put their ads where. Let's say there are three slots for ads on the page with the search results. There is the top slot, which is the most valuable because people see it first. Then there is the second slot below it, which is less valuable, and the third slot even further down, which is the least valuable.  Google decides it’s going to run an auction to determine which advertiser gets which slot. Google knows roughly how many clicks each slot will get. For example, they may know that the top slot gets clicked 300 times for every 10,000 views, the second slot 200, the third slot 100.  When advertisers submit their bids in the auction, they’re submitting their bid per click. They’re saying how much they’re willing to pay Google for each click they get. The highest bidder gets the top slot, the second-highest bidder gets the second, and the third-highest bidder gets the third.  The payment works in the following way. The top slot is worth 300 clicks. If you bid ten and I bid nine, you win the top slot and you’re going to pay my bid—the second-highest bid—times 300 clicks. And if I bid nine and somebody else bids eight, I'm going to pay eight, the third-highest bid, times 200 clicks, which is how many clicks the second slot is worth. And then let's say somebody else bid five. That person, the third-highest bidder, pays the fourth-highest bid times 100 clicks, which is how many clicks the third slot is worth.","completion":"So Google implements something that looks a lot like Vickrey's idea.  Do they cite Vickrey?  Their advertising materials for what they called the “generalized second-price auction” claimed that it used “Nobel Prize-winning economic theory to eliminate... that feeling that you’ve paid too much.” So they directly draw a line to Vickrey and his academic credentials as a justification for the format that they're using. Except they get it wrong.  How so? A defining feature of a Vickrey's auction is the “dominant strategy property.” This means there is a strategy that will always perform the best no matter what any of the other players do. In the case of Vickrey’s auction, the dominant strategy is to bid your value."}
{"prompt":"Now, there is a correct way to generalize Vickrey's auction to preserve this property. But Google did not do it correctly, at least not at first. The way Google did it, there were times when you should strategize. Sometimes you can benefit by misrepresenting your value per click.  When is that? Let's say there are a bunch of advertisers who are already in the three slots. You come in as a new advertiser, you submit the highest bid per click, and you take the top slot. Now, Google's auction made you pay for displacing the previous top bidder down to the second slot. But that's not the full effect of your participation. What you've really done is knock everybody below you down one rung of the ladder, but Google’s auction instead charged you as though you knocked the top bidder out entirely. It doesn’t account for this waterfall effect.  The point of Vickrey's auction is that it charges you your externality. It charges you an amount equal to what all the other bidders lose due to your participation. It turns out that there were certain circumstances where Google wasn’t calculating that externality correctly—and advertisers could benefit from bidding slightly less than their value.","completion":"Was that miscalculation good for Google? It's certainly possible that if people misunderstand the auction this way, Google might make more money. But this also gets to an important issue: whether or not people are willing to play in your auction depends on how user-friendly it is. If Google's auction requires players to strategize in order to bid well, it's entirely possible that fewer bidders will be willing to participate.  It's one thing if your only job in Google's auction is to figure out how much a click is worth to you. That's difficult enough because you need to rule out the bots, you have to think about your sales model, and so on. But if on top of all of that you also have to think about how everybody else is bidding—and come up with an optimal strategy given the possible strategies of other bidders—the ensuing complexity will deter a lot of participation.  Anyway, the format that Google starts using in the early 2000s has this problem. And it remains for almost a decade. It's only fairly recently that Google has adopted the correct generalization of Vickrey's auction that accounts for the waterfall effect.  What about Facebook? How do they sell advertising? In Google you're mostly bidding on keywords. You're placing ads around certain search terms, like “car insurance.”  Facebook is selling a more personal product because Facebook knows a lot about you. It also has expert data scientists who can take everything Facebook knows about you and infer clever things from it.  The result is that advertisers can’t bid on Facebook the way they bid on Google because they don’t know what an ad is worth. They can’t take all that data that Facebook has—your gender, race, age, interests, social graph, online history, and so on—and turn it into, \"Here's how much we think it's worth to show this person an ad for a ski holiday.\" Moreover, there are black-box machine learning algorithms that Facebook uses internally to help calibrate each campaign. It would be difficult to explain them to potential advertisers—and it's not even clear that Facebook can explain them to itself."}
{"prompt":"So Facebook adopted a different solution to selling ads. Instead of placing a bid, you tell Facebook what kind of ad campaign you want to run and they bid on your behalf. And then there's something like Vickrey's auction running in the background deciding who bids what and at what price.  That doesn’t really sound like a market anymore.","completion":"That's the oddness of it. It’s as if you went to a supermarket and rather than the owner saying, “Here are all the prices, please buy what you want,” the owner says, “Why don't you tell me how you're feeling this week and what you have a taste for, and I’ll find the optimal bundle and tell you how much it costs. Don't worry, I know my warehouse much better than you do.” One of the weaknesses of game theory as a way of thinking about the world is that it assumes we all know the rules of the game we're playing. But when some players have the lion’s share of the information, and when there are black-box algorithms in the middle, it becomes impossible for all of the players to understand the game they’re playing.  Facebook isn’t telling advertisers, “Here's the price you would need to pay to buy Mary’s eyeballs versus Adam’s eyeballs and here's all of the information you would need to make the decision about whose eyeballs you should purchase.” Instead, Facebook is saying, “Tell us about your advertising campaign, and we will figure out what you would have rationally done if you had access to our troves of information.” Do advertisers not care about that lack of transparency? Whenever there is a black-box element to a system, that system has to run on trust. When Facebook says they know better than you what kind of advertising you want to be buying, you really have to believe that Facebook has your interests at heart. And in some cases it’s not that Facebook doesn’t want to explain their reasoning—it’s that they can’t explain it, because the machine-learning models they’re using aren’t explainable. So it’s up to Facebook to convince advertisers that they’re not taking advantage of them. That may be difficult to prove when everything is so opaque."}
{"prompt":"Thinking more broadly about this new kind of advertising, what do you think is most distinctive about it? How does it differ from what came before? One difference that springs to mind is the sheer individualization of it. There are some auctions where you can even bid for an individual human impression. For example, there’s a startup that will let you target a particular person with an ad campaign.","completion":"How does that work? Maybe you want your partner to stop smoking. This startup will generate a special link for you that looks like it’s an e-commerce site. You send it to your partner and when they click it, they get a cookie secretly loaded into their browser. This cookie enables the company to track your partner across the web. You write up an anti-smoking ad, and the company will ensure that your partner sees that ad everywhere. Now your partner’s entire internet experience is permeated with pressures to stop smoking.  You can design a similar campaign for a coworker you don't like. You can show them ads for job-hunting websites, to encourage them to get another job."}
{"prompt":"That's pretty funny. I knew about the extent to which Facebook and Google track you around the web, but I hadn’t realized that smaller companies could do it as well. Most people don't realize how many companies have access to the cookies that are in your browser, and how much information those companies can learn about you from those cookies.  Let's say you go to the New York Times website. Now, at various points in your browsing history, all sorts of cookies have attached to your browser. When you click through to the New York Times, as the page is loading, there is an instantaneous algorithmic auction for the right to show you an ad impression. That auction takes about a tenth of a second. In that tenth of a second, the New York Times passes on all of your cookies to an online auctioneer called a supply-side platform. These auctioneers then send out a query to a whole bunch of bidding companies that exist to help advertisers run online ad campaigns. They'll say, essentially, \"At 4:01 pm, from the following IP address in Cambridge, Massachusetts, somebody we think is female, twenty-five to thirty-five years old, is looking at an article about Trump.\"  Presumably the time and the IP address are logged by the New York Times, but how do they know I’m female and twenty-five to thirty-five years old? They’re guessing that based on your cookies, which are just strings of text that contain information about your online activity. But the New York Times may not be able to interpret your cookies. So they’ll pass the cookies on to the auctioneer, who passes them on to the bidders, and the bidders will interpret them.  Now maybe the bidders can understand your cookies better than the New York Times. Maybe they can make a pretty good guess that you’ve been looking for a ski holiday or that you've been looking for a divorce lawyer. And from that they'll compute how much they think your eyeballs are worth to them. They'll send their bid back to the auctioneer, who determines the winner and then sends the winning impression back to the New York Times. That's how you get an ad for a ski holiday or a divorce lawyer one tenth of a second later.","completion":"And so every time I go to the New York Times it is taking all this information and sending it to third parties who send it along to fourth parties?  Yes. Whenever you're accessing one of the many websites that sells advertising in this way, all of your cookies are being made public in this fashion. I think people don't realize that this is part of their everyday internet experience.  Is there any government oversight of this process? Who's even supposed to be regulating that? No, there's essentially no oversight. It's the Wild West out there."}
{"prompt":"Can you tell us a bit about your background? I work for one of the biggest AAA developers. We have studios internationally, and our games are worked on by teams that range from 400 to over 1,000 people—at least our big marquee titles.  I've worked there for about six years. I came to work at a game development company because I had a passion for games—I was excited to be part of a company whose products I really enjoyed.","completion":"The game development industry is unique because it's multidisciplinary in a way that I can't really think of having analogues in any other industry. Game development is this complicated intersection of software, tech, media, and Hollywood. There are so many different kinds of skills that come into making a game. And it can often feel like it’s just a lot of pieces that are hastily thrown together. The development cycle is very, very hectic—a game never feels actualized until the last few months."}
{"prompt":"In terms of revenue, the game development industry makes more than twice what Hollywood does any given year. It’s been ahead for almost a decade now. But that's not going to the creators—not the programmers, not the QA folks, not the artists. Game development is centered in metropolitan areas like San Francisco, London, Tokyo, Paris. These are places where the rents are going up, but the pay for game workers isn’t. So more and more, we're seeing people struggling to make it in this industry.","completion":"How have the jobs changed within the gaming industry over time? Similar to other parts of the tech sector, the game development industry is moving away from hiring people full-time and towards a gig model. It’s becoming commonplace to hire contractors and freelancers, instead of hiring full-time visual artists, sound designers, or writers for games. Or having fans submit speculative work to be used in games, paying them only a pittance."}
{"prompt":"We're also seeing executives increasingly try to pay people in exposure, particularly in the promotion of games. While most companies have dedicated marketing and community teams, there is also a trend towards trying to promote through “influencers”—often younger gamers with a sizable social media presence that will spend hours streaming their game sessions. If someone has a lot of views on their channels, the company will pitch a partnership, offering free games or flights out to flashy events—a moment in the sun. In reality, these people should be hired and paid a living wage to do this sort of promotion.","completion":"Twitch is another way that companies are exploiting players. A company will say, “Oh, your Twitch channel gets millions of views every month, why don’t you sign a deal with us?” And for a lot of these young players, maybe they've never signed a contract before. They have no idea whether what they are signing is a fair contract or if they are going to be compensated fairly. And unfortunately, with thousands of Twitch and YouTube video game personalities, they have to make hours and hours of content every week to stay relevant or they lose their viewership. Game companies will tease people with the possibility of full-time employment in one of the few cherished on-staff social media positions, in order to get them to keep grinding to stay in the good graces of the company.  In terms of the labor of game-making, if people have heard of anything, it’s often the idea of “crunch.” Could you talk a bit about that? What is your experience with crunch? Every developer has a story involving crunch—it’s existed as long as the industry has. It's generally a three-month-per-year period of mandatory unpaid overtime, sometimes up to twenty hours a day. Three to six months is average. I've heard people say that there are crunch periods that have lasted over a year, which is extreme. I’ll say, crunch time doesn’t exist solely in the game development industry. Tech companies definitely have crunch periods, as does Hollywood. But it is particularly acute in game development."}
{"prompt":"Crunch periods have led to things like people working so long that they suffer from memory loss and anxiety attacks. There was one developer who described working for so long that he had an attack of paralysis — he went out to his car and was literally unable to move for an hour. All sorts of health problems are attributed to crunch periods.  Anyone knows that working a sixteen-hour work day for three months will fuck with your health. And obviously those sorts of work hours are also detrimental to your relationships.","completion":"Crunch, in my experience, is almost entirely due to bad management practices. There have been plenty of studies that show that crunch is not only bad for your health, it’s actually ineffective and wastes money. It's not profitable. In every way, shape, and form, it is a bad labor practice that has no practical benefit. But it’s the thing that management has always done."}
{"prompt":"Crunch is contributing to a brain drain in the industry. The average burnout rate is around five or six years, after which people just quit. They can't take it anymore. They want to raise a family, but they're not making the money they need to be able to. They're too exhausted and don’t have time to do the things they want to do in life outside of work. So they leave the industry, and then we have to reinvent the wheel with a new batch of folks fresh out of college.","completion":"It's not a problem as far as management is concerned, because there are always plenty of new people that they can pay even less, who are told they should be grateful to work in this industry that they have idolized for their whole lives, who are willing to put in the same long hours. Until they burn out, and then the cycle repeats.  Now that most consoles are connected to the internet, do technological changes like digital patches and updates impact crunch time? You might expect that since we now live in a world where you can always patch a game after it is released, the pressure to crunch to get it perfect the first time might be lessened."}
{"prompt":"You would think so. Before we could patch games, you would finish the game, send it out, and then that’s the end of the project. But the reality is that this just means you get an extra three more months to continue the crunch cycle. What ends up happening is you produce an unfinished or under-polished game that will get patched later—and creating the patch then becomes even more urgent because the game has already \"gone Gold\" (industry parlance for \"finished and ready to ship\"). There are games that come out where if you don't have internet access, you are getting a markedly different product. It’s a playable product, because first party publishers (i.e. console makers) have thresholds that games are required to meet—but barely.","completion":"The pressure this creates just makes it more intense, because when an unfinished game is going to come out, you know that if you don’t continue to work on it you will have released a shoddy product. You feel like your future is riding on fixing it with a day-one patch, because otherwise the game you’ve worked on for two or three years will review poorly, which will affect sales, and as a result you’ll get laid off. And having a game that is critically panned on your resume doesn’t look great when you go looking for your next job."}
{"prompt":"Do conditions differ between indie vs. AAA studios? It really depends. There are some smaller independent companies which are co-ops, which is super cool. Motion Twin, who recently released a very popular game called Dead Cells, is a company of about twenty people in France who are all paid the same wage, and all have a say in everything about how the company is run. And there are definitely some smaller studios who are open to the idea of unionization.","completion":"But the finances are very different. It’s not like there is a culture of venture funding in game development, and a lot of smaller studios are folks who are doing it either on the side of another job or in their free time. So their development cycle is much, much different than for AAA. Most AAA games have a very strict two- to-three-year development cycle, whereas indie games can take up to five to ten years. And as far as compensation, working conditions, and stuff like that, it varies. It’s not as simple as, smaller studios treat people better because it’s a more familial setting or whatever. I have heard stories of small studios that are nightmares, and I've heard from people who work in AAA studios who really like their experience there. So it just depends on who you ask."}
{"prompt":"I will say that AAA studios are experts at giving the appearance that they are taking care of you. My company is constantly sending us emails emphasizing the amenities they are offering. There are rewards for working there for certain periods of time that are ludicrous when you look at them. Like if you’ve worked there for five years, you get to drive a sports car for a day. If you’ve worked there for ten years, you’ll get a paid weekend away somewhere.","completion":"And it’s like, ten years? If I’ve worked there for that long, I better be making a good living. My partner and I have plans for raising a family one day. In ten years, I don’t want to go on a weekend excursion, I want to make sure I can put my kids through college. There is this very paternalistic way that all the game development companies treat their employees. We’re often told, “We’re one big family.” And the workers are the children."}
{"prompt":"Yeah, exactly. It’s a way to manipulate you into feeling guilt for demanding more, for expecting a reasonable work-life balance.  Looking For Group You’re currently involved in organizing within the game industry. How did you get involved with that? When I started at my company six years ago, I had no nuanced political analysis, and no real idea that I could be bargaining for anything. I was just drinking the company Kool-Aid, and accepting everything they said. I really believed that the company was taking care of me. Only in the last three years have I started to piece things together through my own experiences and reading stories of labor abuses through the industry, which go back thirty to forty years—pretty much since the industry started.","completion":"I first got involved with GWU after the March 2018 GDC, which is the major annual industry conference for game developers. During GDC, there was what was effectively an anti-union panel, which galvanized people to join the organization. After I read about that, I inquired a bit more and reached out to folks on Twitter."}
{"prompt":"And immediately I was like, this is the intersection of the two things I’m most passionate about: the organizing work I’ve been doing for the last two and a half years with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), and game development, the industry I have been in for the last six years. I had been in the same position for a long time and felt like I was stagnating. I was weighing whether it was worth staying in the industry. But after hearing about GWU I thought, here’s the opportunity to organize the game development industry and make it something that that lives up to the expectations that people have for it. I definitely wanted to be a part of that movement.  So after the GDC action in march I reached out to Emma, one of the founders of GWU. I learned there was no chapter where I was, and I was encouraged to start one.  Can you give a bit more background on what you do within Game Workers Unite? GWU is a union advocacy group. Our job is to advocate for unionization in the games industry, generally advocate for game workers, and spread a grassroots movement internationally. If anyone feels alone, or that unionization is something they want to see but they don't know how to achieve it, they can reach out to us. We give training and education to workers so they can start organizing in their studios and communities.","completion":"We are a completely horizontal organization. There are no leaders, no one is “in charge.” To make things manageable and to be able to have a grassroots, bottom-up movement, we organize around local chapters so people have a place to plug into. But everyone has an equal say in the business of any chapter.  The organization has scaled up massively since starting. We went from essentially a Facebook group of frustrated developers to over twenty-five chapters internationally with thousands of supporters. We now have hundreds of members from all areas of the industry, from folks who are freelance or contractors to people who have been in the industry for years to students who are just getting interested in game development. Some have years of organizing experience, while for others this is their first foray into organizing."}
{"prompt":"I’ve never seen a movement grow so fast and so organically and remain so positive. In contrast to other groups I have been involved with, there’s far less worry about the politics of how we organize, and much more focus on making sure that people get the support they need to build the kind of industry they want to see.  We are involved with the effort to unionize, but I would say that the final goal of becoming an industrial union is many years away. It's thousands of steps away. We're on like step five. So right now we're focusing less on formally becoming a union, and more on just helping people start to organize their workplaces. And that begins with establishing some rapport with your coworkers, learning how to talk to them and identify their self-interest, seeing what they need that their company is not providing them, and seeing if you can organize around that.","completion":"Locally , we’ve started our education efforts with some basic initiatives, like giving people workplace organizing training and working with unions and organizations like Labor Notes and Tech Workers Coalition. We’ve also been learning about the history of the labor movement, reading about things like organizing in the steel industry.  We’ve started to form really good partnerships with existing unions. The stagehands union (IATSE), which is responsible for building all of the booths at GDC, has sent union organizers to our meetings to help guide us through things. Everyone I’ve spoken to in a union is very excited to see the industry unionize, which is really great.  So yeah, right now it’s still this massive scaffolding of an organization, but with a lot of exciting plans down the line.  Have there been any successful labor actions within the industry? The only labor action I’m aware of in the game development industry has been the voice actors strike of 2016. During that strike, basically all unionized voice actors stopped voice acting for games. The strike lasted for almost a year. They won—but honestly, it wasn’t as big of a victory as their union, SAG-AFTRA, played it up to be.  The voice actors were fighting for royalties on their games. They will work on these huge products like Grand Theft Auto that make over a billion dollars, but only get paid a few hundred dollars per session. In response, CEOs tried to pit workers in the industry against each other. They would say, “Well, it wouldn't be fair to everyone else if we gave you royalties—the programmers and the designers and the artists aren’t getting royalties.” And it’s like, “No, you’re absolutely right, they all should get royalties!” They try to play us all against each other, but really we should all be in this together."}
{"prompt":"Gamer Solidarity What has the reception been like with the player and fan community? People are really interested in what we're doing. There's been a lot of media attention. Prominent game developers and respected journalists have been writing about us and what we are up to, which has been extremely good for us.  Because that's the big challenge: any unionization movement needs a big solidarity effort from the community. We need players to be on board with our efforts to unionize and understand why we're doing it, and that it is not going to detract their experiences. It’s not going to make games worse, it’s not going to delay games—all these myths that are popping up.  GWU is not just against shitty labor practices. We’re also against shady business practices, and those impact players. A good example is the recent controversy around “loot boxes.” People will design systems that require a ton of grinding and say, you could toil through this game for 100 hours in order to get all the content, or you pay us five dollars and we'll unlock the Darth Vader mask or whatever it happens to be that you want to get.","completion":"That's an exploitative business practice, and it's shitty because game workers didn’t come into this industry to make little tchotchkes to sell to people. They came into this industry because they loved the great experiences they had playing games growing up, and they wanted to contribute to that and tell their own stories. And instead they're forced into making this cheap, exploitative content."}
{"prompt":"In building an anti-capitalist framework to fight back against shitty labor practices, there is a natural alliance with players who are exploited by shitty business practices—not that they always appreciate that. It sounds like the relationship between developers and players is pretty complicated. It’s tough, because to some people outside of the industry there is a perception that working in games is a dream job. That making games is so fun and easy because you get to play games all day. And it’s not like that. Sometimes it’s hell, all day, and then you go home and people troll you on social media for making something that didn't live up to their standards.  It’s not just frustrating, it's something that hurts the organizing, because it makes people not empathize with your situation. People think you’re doing fine for yourself because you’re working in the games industry—you're not working in service or whatever.  And there are a lot of examples where particularly toxic fan reactions have had a real impact on people’s lives in the industry. We saw this with GamerGate, where women in game development and games media were made targets of online harassment, including death threats, and in some cases companies folded under the pressure and fired workers for standing up for themselves.  In the last few months, ArenaNet, a company that makes an MMO called Guild Wars, fired two of their workers for defending themselves on social media. One of the narrative designers wrote a long Twitter thread about a complicated narrative puzzle that affects her as an MMO narrative designer. To which some dude with no actual experience making games responded with some incredibly basic, obvious response. And so she got frustrated and tweeted back the equivalent of: “I don’t need you to mansplaining my job to me.”  That spawned this tornado of vitriol, where people were like, how dare you treat one of your customers like that. And one of her co-workers defended her by observing that as a man, surprise surprise, he’d never received this sort of treatment from the community.","completion":"The two were unceremoniously fired the next day for “failing to uphold standards of communicating with players” —basically proving to the trolls that they have power. The bosses value their purchasing power more than the well-being of their own employees. This is absolutely a labor issue, because if these companies were unionized, there would be a defense against this. We shouldn't take this—we should have protection. We should at the very least not get fired for defending ourselves online."}
{"prompt":"Recently there was a huge exposé of the sexism that happens at Riot Games, the company that makes League of Legends. I have a friend who works at Riot who told me things that weren’t in the stories that were published—it’s just been toxic for years and years, and only has come to light recently when workers tried to defend them themselves publicly, and were fired.","completion":"This is unfortunately very common. In the game development industry, if you are a woman, or if you are trans or nonbinary or intersex, you've always had to deal with sexism or workplace discrimination, whether in the form of outright harassment or lower pay. I am hard-pressed to think of anyone that I know personally in the industry who hasn't."}
{"prompt":"And that's something you organize around.  We met with the Anonymous Game Worker in September 2018. In the days and months after our conversation, a number of new high-profile cases illustrated the volatility of the video game industry. Two days after we spoke, Telltale Games, the creator of the critically-acclaimed narrative game The Walking Dead, laid off 250 employees with no severance. A few weeks later, another 150 workers were laid off at Trion Worlds. Meanwhile, leaders at Rockstar games have been called out for speaking proudly of their companies’ exhaustive crunch periods for Red Dead Redemption 2, describing several “100-hour” weeks.","completion":"How did Project Cybersyn begin? After Salvador Allende was elected in 1970, a friend of mine, Fernando Flores, was appointed technical director of the State Development Corporation (CORFO). CORFO is a Chilean government agency that was created in 1939 to promote economic growth, and was responsible for many nationalized companies."}
{"prompt":"I joined CORFO as an operations research scientist. We were extremely young, and this was an extraordinary opportunity to do things that people who were much older than us would find difficult. Fernando and I started to talk about how to proceed with the policies of Allende's government, which included a plan to expand the nationalization of Chile's industries with the aim of creating a strategy of economic development that prioritized the production of affordable goods. We wanted to create simple, accessible, and efficient industries that would produce products that everyone could afford.","completion":"One way to do that was to centralize the economy. Now, Fernando and I didn’t want centralized planning. But, for at least the first year and a half of Allende's government, that's what CORFO was doing. Still, we thought there were more imaginative ways to bring together government policy with current developments in knowledge. It was in this period that we started to work with Stafford Beer, a British management consultant known for his work on cybernetics. Through Beer, we found how to achieve decentralization through devolving power. We needed to create the conditions where people could express their wishes and interests."}
{"prompt":"How did you first come across Beer? It was quite serendipitous that Stafford Beer had published his book Decision and Control in 1966, and that Fernando found it in a bookshop while he was visiting New York City. He brought it back to Chile, and a group of us read and discussed the book. At that time, I was a student of engineering.  The cybernetician W. Ross Ashby’s “law of requisite variety” is central to Beer’s method for controlling complex systems. According to Ashby, variety is the only thing that can control variety. To control a complex system like an industrial economy in order to get it to perform a certain way, you must ensure that the relevant people, such as workers and managers, can respond to all of the possible scenarios that might prevent the system from performing that way.","completion":"With great elegance, Beer developed these ideas about how to manage complexity. They appealed to us, because we were not intending to have a centrally planned economy. We were intending to develop organizations that had the capacity to make decisions within themselves to support the development of the economy."}
{"prompt":"In 1971, Flores wrote to Beer and requested his help to apply cybernetics to the management of Chile’s increasingly nationalized economy. A few months later, Beer arrived in Chile. What were some of Beer’s specific recommendations as you began developing Cybersyn? Beer said that we needed to move from a model of running the economy that was based on information to a model that was based on communications. That meant that you weren’t going to ask companies to send reports and have them sit on desk trays until someone had the time to read them. That isn't the way the world works. The world works through communication and on-the-spot interactions.","completion":"In one of the earliest ideas he produced for us, he proposed having Telex machines distributed throughout the country. Telex machines were teleprinters that sent text-based messages over a network. The previous government in Chile had bought about 500 Telex machines and didn't know what to do with them. They were in a warehouse without any purpose. It was very serendipitous that someone in the engineering team informed us that we had Telex machines available and he knew how to install them. What would have taken years ended up taking four months to put into place."}
{"prompt":"At the beginning, the idea was to transmit real-time figures from the factories to CORFO through the network of Telex machines, which we called “Cybernet.” Then the figures would be sent to a computer that ran a software program called \"Cyberstride\" that analyzed the data. The outcome of this analysis was displayed in the Cybersyn “operations room.” We worked with industrial designers at CORFO’s Committee for Technological Research (INTEC) to create a room conducive to non-hierarchical management. The chairs, which each had slide-control panels, were placed in a circular arrangement. The room did not have tables; data and graphics were displayed on a panel in the main wall. Everything was designed to facilitate a relaxed environment to produce ideas for the future of Chilean socialism.  The operations room epitomized the Cybersyn project. It was an extraordinary design produced by a transnational team. Many people thought it was too flashy, too technological, and not something that was connected to the workers. I think it was the opposite—the room was designed to facilitate creativity and imagination. It was offering something that couldn't be obtained by doing something trivial like sitting in front of a computer. Today, after all these years, I am amazed. I really think Beer was an imaginative man.  In hindsight, what do you think were some of the limitations of your team? We had more to learn about the cybernetics of organizations. Stafford Beer knew that subject well, but we were only learning. And when you’re only learning, your bias is towards the technology. So our approach tended to be technocratic. We wanted to design good indices of economic performance. And those indices would be designed by specialists, experts in operational research who could do all the technical aspects of economic modeling in mathematical terms.","completion":"However, while that work is necessary and useful, it is not sufficient in the social sense. We needed to get workers much more involved in the meaning of these indices. We needed to give them far more opportunities to influence the design of Cybersyn. To do that, we had to build up rapport with workers—but this wasn’t always possible."}
{"prompt":"Second, we had a limited understanding of Beer’s concept of the Viable System Model (VSM). The VSM is a management model that works on the premise that managing the complexity of factories, enterprises, sectors, and even whole industries is isomorphic to the way complexity is managed by the human nervous system. Autonomy was the essence of the model. What we struggled with was, how do you recognize autonomous systems within autonomous systems? How do you recognize the capacity of the government to organize the activities of state-owned industry and implement its policies while connecting these activities and policies to the specific dynamics of various factories? Today, we would do it with more sophisticated methodologies. We would have a better understanding of how to promote autonomy. That is very important, because if you are going to devolve power, then workers, managers, and administrators must understand how to close the loops locally. They must understand how to produce feedback locally. We shouldn’t insist on each unit sending information to the higher echelons and receiving decisions in return from above. Rather, we should explore ways of providing each unit with enough resources to match the complexity of its environment through local decisions.  What are the lessons of Project Cybersyn for today, in the era of Google and Facebook? Perhaps the most crucial thing that has changed is the abundance of data, and the possibilities for the peer-to-peer coordination of activities. Data is overwhelming us. Companies like Google and Facebook are greatly increasing the variety and the complexity of networks. But we hear very little about how to bring the data they are producing to a manageable level, one that can be managed directly by the people.  The VSM suggested the need to chop up a situational complexity into different autonomous units at a whole range of levels, each with their own decision-making capacity.  A simple system can proliferate a huge number of possible states. We need to learn how to \"chunk\" those possible states. The more we recognize constraint in the world in which we function, the more we can produce this chunking, and the more we can manage situations that appear to be totally out of hand. Constraint is where we need to focus our attention, because it increases our adaptability to complex situations.","completion":"And we need to carry out this chunking and adapt to those situations in real time. One of the most interesting aspects of Project Cybersyn was its attempt to perform economic management in real time. We weren't interested so much in the past as we were interested in the current situation. How do we recognize what needs to be changed today? We need to do cybernetics in time zero rather than trying to respond to past situations.   What is the role of artificial intelligence in a cybernetic socialist project? One thing that we need to understand with artificial intelligence is that, in one form or another, a person is responsible for the code. Whose values are then embedded in the code? Developers of artificial intelligence must communicate with citizens to understand their values, so that we are not living with technology created to support a set of values that only meet the needs of a small fraction of society. To build a system that benefits all people, experts must communicate with all different levels of society."}
{"prompt":"Let’s start by talking about your background. How did you get involved in finance? I was always interested in economics and had a quantitative background. Anyone who succeeds academically where I grew up ends up being very quantitatively oriented. After school, as I was trying to find a profession that would be financially rewarding but would also allow me to use what I studied, I started looking at the financial industry. I ended up taking a job on a trading floor in an investment bank.  Most large banks have at least one, typically several trading floors. It’s an actual floor, about the size of a football field, filled with traders who do business with large investors looking to trade stocks, bonds, or futures, or to borrow money. The bank makes money by taking a commission, or by “market-making”—intermediating between buyers and sellers, taking some risk with its own money while it waits for the two sides to match up.","completion":"When I think of a trading floor, I think of a bunch of guys screaming into the phone, Wolf of Wall Street-style. It’s not so much people yelling into the phones anymore. The trading floor has evolved quite a bit over time. It used to be more about being alive to the transactional flow of global markets. It’s increasingly about the operations that enable that flow, and the intellectual property that allows people to make money off that flow.  I liked it. The trading floor is still where a lot of the actual design and transactions of global markets take place. And it’s stimulating. If you want to use your intellectual muscles, you can do so pretty quickly. You’re not just sitting at a desk somewhere out of the way, or trying to pitch corporate titans with some arbitrary analysis to back you up —which can be more of a salesmanship game and less of an intellectual exercise.  Anyway, over time I migrated to the investment strategy part of the financial world. I started helping large asset owners—entities like pension funds and sovereign wealth funds—allocate their money to systematic investment programs. That’s where I migrated to because that’s where most of the financial world was migrating to after the 2008 financial crisis, as everyone realized that the old ways of investing were not really doing what they wanted them to do.  Portfolios had been too exposed to the same underlying risks. Technology was now enabling investors to understand their risks better, and to take more direct control over their investments. Part of the shift involved removing human decision-making when it wasn’t perceived as adding any value."}
{"prompt":"What do those new ways of investing look like? What are “systematic investment programs,” and how do they fit into the field of algorithmic finance as a whole?  There are many ways that algorithms are actually used in finance, so the term algorithmic finance gets used more loosely than it should.  There are at least two major domains in which algorithms dominate. The first is what’s frequently called algorithmic trading, which focuses on market microstructures. It programs computers to make split-second automated decisions on how stocks are bought and sold. Should you buy a whole bunch of shares at once? Or should you split up your purchases over time? How do you more intelligently execute trades? Algorithmic trading uses algorithms to help answer these questions—and it’s an enormous industry. There are a lot of hedge funds and traditional investment banks that try to make money there.  The other domain, which is the one that I’m more focused on, is sometimes called systematic investing and sometimes called quantitative investing. It’s also very much algorithmic investing. It involves using algorithms to allocate money systematically based on data.  An early version of quantitative investing—starting roughly in the 1950s, with the birth of Modern Portfolio Theory—was designed to create rules to save for retirement. These rules were supposed to help people decide how much of their money to put into stocks and how much of it to put into bonds. Once you’ve made that decision, you have a rule that lets you allocate money across stocks and bonds at some defined frequency automatically, without a human being going in and having to make any qualitative decision. This basic framework was rapidly adopted across investment portfolios at every scale, from mutual funds for individual investors to asset allocation decisions by the largest funds in the world.","completion":"Then people took that framework and applied it to an increasing number of underlying assets, with a much finer degree of granularity. So now you’re not just making rules that determine the overall mix of stocks and bonds in a portfolio but which stocks, which bonds, which commodities, which corn futures, and so on. And the rules used to distribute assets become far more complex."}
{"prompt":"When you say “making rules,” what exactly are we talking about here?  The simplest rules can be run on a basic spreadsheet. For instance, classic pension portfolios used to allocate 60% of the portfolio to large-cap stocks and 40% to bonds. Then Modern Portfolio Theory started to allocate assets accounting for mathematically measured risk and return. You run a giant optimization that promotes diversification—across stocks within your stock portfolio, across asset classes—to maximize the return you make per unit of risk.","completion":"These rules didn’t need any further human intervention, in the sense that they completely defined a portfolio. But in practice, investment wasn’t completely rule-based: investors used the model outputs as a baseline, and then tweaked it with their own decisions. Human insight could further improve the asset mix, in a variety of ways. Investors might want to buy cheaper stocks, for instance, or “time” the market by getting in or out at the right time. Or they might want to find new assets like commodities and mortgage securities, or improve the measurement of risk."}
{"prompt":"More recently, however, advances in computing power and financial engineering have vastly expanded the universe of analytical tools that can be applied to investing. The latest “rules” involve developing machine learning models that train on large amounts of data. It could be data from the financial statements of publicly traded companies. It could be macroeconomic data. It could be the price history of certain financial instruments. It could also be more esoteric data like satellite imagery.","completion":"What’s a concrete example of an investment decision driven by a machine learning model? You could purchase a “sentiment” score developed by a firm that trawls Twitter on a continuous basis to understand changes in the mood of the market, or around a specific company. You could use that data to train your model, which could then determine whether to buy or sell certain shares. Usually signals like a sentiment score decay pretty quickly though, so you would want to be able to make that trade fast."}
{"prompt":"How automated would that process be? Are we talking about software making recommendations to human traders, or actually executing trades itself? The level of human oversight varies. Among sophisticated quantitative investors, the process is fairly automatic. The models are being researched and refined almost constantly, but you would rarely intervene in the trading decisions of a live model. A number of hedge funds, mutual funds, and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) run on auto-pilot.  By contrast, most traditional investors use models to provide guidance rather than to generate automated trading decisions, since its unlikely that they could operationalize a complex trading strategy.","completion":"One of the challenges with machine learning is explainability. As the model becomes more complex, it can become harder, even impossible, to explain the results that it generates. This has become a source of concern as public scrutiny of the tech industry has increased, because you have algorithms making decisions that affect people’s lives in all sorts of ways while the reasoning for those decisions remains completely opaque."}
{"prompt":"When the financial industry plugs a bunch of data into a model in order to make an investment decision, how important is the explainability of the result? I think the result should be very explainable. But that’s not a universal view. In fact, there’s a fairly big split between people who have concluded that explainability is holding back the advancement of the use of these techniques, and the people who hold on to the rather quaint notion that explainability is important.  But to some extent, explainability was already an issue well before we started using machine learning, because even traditional models of investing were hampered by some of these same issues. Finance is not like physics. You have a lot of feedback loop mechanisms impacting how participants interact with financial markets.  To give you a simple example, you might look at the price data of a stock and conclude that because that stock went up last month, it’s a good idea to buy that stock today. And if you do that systematically, you might expect to make some money. But if everybody else comes to the same conclusion, then the stock could get overbought today based on the movement of the stock over the past month. And if it’s overbought, you might actually expect to lose money on it over the next month.","completion":"Looking at historical data to figure out where your investment is going to go is useless if you haven’t thought about the mechanism by which it’s going to do that. In the example I gave, if you didn’t have an explanation for why the stock was moving the way it was moving, you might have missed the fact that the underlying mechanism didn’t really exist, or that it wasn’t robust enough to weather a whole lot of market participants looking to take advantage of that phenomenon."}
{"prompt":"So explainability has been an issue for a while. Everyone is always looking for a story for why they’re doing what they’re doing. And many of those stories aren’t that robust.  But isn’t there a strong financial incentive to try to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, whether it’s an algorithm or a human executing the trades? Otherwise it seems very easy to lose a lot of money.   Sure. But the market structure of investing dilutes that incentive.  The people who are developing the most sophisticated quantitative techniques work for hedge funds and investment banks. For them, there are two ways to make money. You make money by charging fees on the assets you manage, and you make money on the performance of the fund. That split will give you a sense of why there’s a dilution of the incentive. Because even if your assets don’t perform well, you can still make money on the fees that you’re charging to manage those assets.","completion":"The rewards from those fees are so large that if you can sustain a story for why your technique is superior, you can manage assets for a long time and make a ton of money without having to perform well. And, to be fair, sometimes it takes a number of years before you know whether the quantitative technique you tried actually works or not. So even if you aren’t making money in the short term, you could have a reasonable story for why you aren’t.  At the end of the day, for the manager, it’s as important to gather a lot of assets as it is to run a successful strategy. And gathering assets can be largely a marketing game.  And you play that marketing game by talking about your algorithms and machine learning models and artificial intelligence techniques and so on."}
{"prompt":"That’s right. Let’s look at hedge funds in particular. Hedge funds are a very expensive form of investment management. So they need to justify why they’re getting paid as much as they’re getting paid.  There’s a large amount of data that suggests that the average hedge fund, after you’ve paid all the fees that they charge, is not doing much for you as an investor. The last several years in particular have not been very kind to the hedge fund industry in terms of the returns they’ve produced. So hedge funds have a strong incentive for differentiation in their marketing story. The first marketing question for a hedge fund is always, “Why are you not the average hedge fund?”  Investors want to know how a hedge fund is going to make money, given the poor performance of the hedge fund industry as a whole. These days, investors are excited by an orientation towards technology and big data and machine learning and artificial intelligence. These tools offer the promise of untapped returns, unlike older strategies that may have competed away the returns they were chasing. Regardless of whether you’re actually good at technology as a hedge fund, you want to have a story for why you might be.  Some of the most prominent hedge fund managers of the last few decades—Steve Cohen, Paul Tudor Jones—are going against type and launching technology-driven quantitative investment funds. They employ physicists and computer scientists to write algorithms to invest money, because that’s what investors want. You’re seeing a massive arms race across hedge funds to rebrand themselves in that direction.","completion":"It reminds me a bit of startup founders marketing themselves to Silicon Valley venture capitalists by peppering their pitch decks with buzzwords related to artificial intelligence or some other hot field. The startups might get funded, but the technology might not really work—or it might not even exist. What the startup is calling artificial intelligence could be a bunch of workers in the Philippines doing manual data entry."}
{"prompt":"In the financial industry, investors want firms that use big data and machine learning and artificial intelligence—but do those new tools actually generate better results?  That’s a good question. The best way to explore it might be to talk about the role of data. There’s a lot of excitement in the financial industry about the amount of new data that’s being made available. Think about what kind of data might be useful for predicting the price of an oil future. It might be a piece of political news, public announcements from regulators, satellite images of oil refineries to calculate oil reserves. There are tons of different kinds of data out there—pretty much anything you can think of.","completion":"Along with new forms of data, there are also new forms of data analysis. The early versions of complex data analysis included looking at the financial statements of publicly traded companies. But now you can parse through the data in those statements in more interesting ways. Back in the day, you might care about how much debt the company has or what its earnings are relative to its price, and you might compare those figures to the broader market. But you were ultimately limited by your capacity to source and process this data.  Now you can analyze more variables more systematically across thousands of stocks. You can also do more exotic things like use natural language processing techniques to figure out what the company is saying in its statement that isn’t reflected in its numbers. How did the commentary change from previous earnings reports? What is the tone of the words they use to describe the underlying business? How does this tone compare to words used by its competitors? Even though it’s the same data you had access to before, you have more processing power and better techniques to understand that data.  The challenge is that not all of these sources of data and ways to analyze them will be useful for predicting the prices of financial instruments. Many of the new data sets, like satellite imagery, tend to be quite expensive. And they may not add any information more useful than what is already available to market participants from the vast streams of data on prices, companies, employees, and so on. We’re still in the phase where we’re trying to figure out what to do with all the data that’s coming in. And one of the answers might be that most of it is simply not that valuable."}
{"prompt":"The Big Data Gold Rush Let’s say it does turn out to be valuable. What does the financial industry look like then? Everyone is competing against everyone else. If one firm succeeds in making the market more efficient through quantitative techniques, then there’s less money left over for other people to make exceptional investment returns. There will be one or two firms that are good at innovation and recognizing things that other people haven’t recognized. But everyone else will be fighting over scraps.","completion":"One of the fallacies that people have is the assumption that because the people who are working at certain firms are smart, they must be successful. But the fact that they understand artificial intelligence or machine learning or big data is somewhat useless as a competitive advantage if everyone else understands it as well."}
{"prompt":"So as those techniques get diffused across the industry as a whole, they start to be less of a differentiator. How does this impact employment? How do you see these technologies affecting either how many people the financial industry employs, or the level of skill required in different roles? Back before the financial crisis, there was a theoretical basis for the rise of the mortgage-backed security industry. If you can diversify the risk to the investor by bundling a bunch of mortgages together, then the investor should be willing to accept a lower return, which in turn should reduce the cost to homebuyers of taking out a mortgage. That’s the theory: when financial markets work well, the benefits should percolate throughout the economy. Obviously, in 2008, that theory broke down.","completion":"In the field of quantitative investing, the same theory plays out. Let’s say people are saving money for retirement by investing in a mix of stocks and bonds. Those assets are a little cheaper for them to buy because there are all kinds of participants in the market who are fighting over making the market a little more efficient because there’s a financial incentive for them to do so."}
{"prompt":"The flip side is that the entire financial industry also has an incentive to encourage people who don’t know as much as them to give them money to do all the things that ordinary investors don’t know about. “Give me money to use a machine learning technique to manage your money, even if the machine learning technique doesn’t work, because it’s very profitable for me to take 2 percent of your fund every year.” So the incentive to make the market more efficient is balanced against the excessive proliferation of financial services that don’t add value.","completion":"What is the mechanism that’s going to eliminate that? Well, it’s the recognition that the industry as a whole may be getting paid far in excess of the value it’s providing. How does that recognition actually begin to remake the industry, and what role will new technologies play in that process? The short answer is that tons of jobs are on the verge of getting wiped out because technology can do those jobs. And there are benefits to scale, so you may not need many firms to replace those that don’t survive."}
{"prompt":"Take the mutual fund industry. It has more than a hundred thousand employees in the US. And every one of those jobs is at risk from the realization that the economic value of those funds is replicable with the right computer systems. For the moment, those jobs are sustained by inertia, or they are sustained by a story about why a certain manager is going to make you more money than an index fund. But that’s changing. That change will play out over the next couple of years.","completion":"Take the big money managers in Boston like Fidelity and Putnam. Those are old, large institutions. Effectively all of those jobs are at risk unless they evolve fast. And even if they do, automation will cut deep. Hedge funds, same thing. Some of them will be able to eke out value from the development of new techniques, but everyone else will be replaced by computers."}
{"prompt":"You’re already seeing big changes at investment banks. Even though investment banks continue to be very large in terms of their physical footprint, number of employees, and impact on the economy, the actual participants inside banks have changed a fair bit. It’s far more automated. Many of the actual operations inside an investment bank are done by computers. It’s not humans deciding to buy Apple stock; it’s computers deciding to buy Apple stock. So that job shift is already happening.  Financial firms are increasingly becoming tech firms. JP Morgan Chase employs 50,000 technologists, two-thirds of which are software engineers. That’s more engineers than many big tech firms: Facebook, for example, employs about 30,000 people total.  You've been in the financial industry for a little while so you’ve seen this transformation firsthand. How has the influx of technologists changed the industry? The very clubby nature of traditional financial firms like investment banks has been diluted. You’ve got a lot more geeks and nerds. You don’t see certain jokes being made. Football conversations have been replaced by conversations about restaurants or other staples of yuppie culture.","completion":"The culture has mellowed quite a bit. It’s less driven by adrenaline. It’s less loud. The value is provided not by the person yelling into the phone but by the person who’s sitting at their computer, writing the right algorithm, who needs a little bit of thoughtfulness to do that work. The old model was about driving transactional flow through sheer energy. The new model is about driving transactional flow through computers."}
{"prompt":"So less Wolf of Wall Street and more The Social Network. Totally. But that tension is still playing out. For instance, there’s still a big disconnect between the way that HR divisions recruit, especially at large firms, and the kind of candidates that are actually needed. So you’re seeing the development of completely alternative hiring tracks within large firms. The traditional hiring track just doesn’t give you enough good quantitative candidates.  Returning to the question of employment: you said you expected that one of the biggest consequences of these technologies will be a reduction in the number of people the financial industry employs. Does that also affect the overall size of the industry? On the one hand, it seems like many jobs could be eliminated or deskilled. On the other hand, it also seems possible that the very large size of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy could be reinforced and even intensified by these technologies.","completion":"I think you’re right. There’s a contradiction built into managing money using quantitative techniques. Let’s say you’re a hedge fund and you get paid a lot for an advanced technique. In order to demonstrate to your customer that your technique really does make money and does so in a replicable and sustainable fashion, you need to be a bit open-kimono in talking about why the technique works. You probably have to talk about the actual algorithm itself. But of course once you’ve described the algorithm, well, why does the investor need to pay a manager to do it? It’s just lines of code. Once you’ve developed it, you can run it for the marginal cost of next to zero.  Some of the managers who have been successful at raising money for their quantitative funds may have done the work of educating investors on why people shouldn’t be paying that much money to invest using these techniques. The result is that fees are dropping fast."}
{"prompt":"Currently, the largest growth in investment industry funds is happening in entities like BlackRock or Vanguard. These firms are launching a number of funds that use algorithms to invest but charge very low fees. So they are competing with hedge funds, who are having to lower their own fees in response. But BlackRock and Vanguard are also competing with themselves, because they are educating the market on why their own previous products were too highly priced.  If you measure their scale by the number of assets under management, these entities have grown at an explosive rate. BlackRock manages trillions of dollars at this point. But the actual revenue it ekes out from its assets isn’t growing nearly as fast. So you see both forces at play: the expansion of funds being managed along quantitative lines, but also the difficulty in sustaining profitability on those assets as more customers become aware of the actual cost and value of managing those assets using quantitative techniques. Even though the footprint might expand, the profitability will probably start to retreat towards levels that reflect the underlying value created.","completion":"Does that create a tendency towards greater consolidation? As the revenue that firms are able to wring out of the assets they manage goes down due to the impact of quantitative techniques, there’s presumably an incentive to manage more and more assets.  That’s certainly what we’ve seen. In the new world there are many benefits to scale. BlackRock can charge .01 percent to manage a fund because it’s got $6 trillion behind it. A smaller firm can’t compete at .01 percent. Fidelity now offers a fund that doesn’t even charge a fee. And the reason they can do that is because they have incredible scale across the rest of the platform, and if you’re a customer you might buy something somewhere else on the platform."}
{"prompt":"So consolidation is a solution to the low marginal cost of these products. Once the algorithm is known, it’s a race to see how low you can go. And how low you can go is a function of how much you manage.  Irrational Cyborg Exuberance What new kind of vulnerabilities are introduced into the financial system through these techniques? What role will they play in the next financial crisis? The way that mortgage-backed securities precipitated the financial crisis is very much applicable here. One of the fallacies behind that phenomenon was the assumption that the world would behave in the future the way it had in the past. For instance, housing prices would go ever upwards.  That fallacy is intensified in the case of quantitative investing, because all quantitative models use historical data to train themselves. As these techniques become more widespread, the assumption that the world will behave in the future the way it has in the past is being hard-wired into the entire financial system.","completion":"Another fallacy in the lead-up to the financial crisis was the assumption that financial markets were so efficient that participants didn’t need to do the underlying work to figure out what the securities were actually worth. Because you could rely on the market to efficiently incorporate all available information about the bond. All you need to think about is the price that someone else is willing to buy it from you at or sell it to you at.  Of course, if all participants believe that, then the price starts to become arbitrary. It starts to become detached from any analysis of what that bond represents. If new forms of quantitative trading rely on assumptions of market efficiency—if they assume that the price of an instrument already reflects all of the information and analysis that you could possibly do—then they are vulnerable to that assumption being false.  Is Uber worth $60 billion? Well, Uber is worth $60 billion because we believe someone is willing to pay $60 billion for it. But maybe Uber is worth zero. Maybe that’s the actual value of the revenues that Uber will make in the future. In the current environment, we rely on liquidity to sustain prices for financial assets. When liquidity dries out and you’re forced to rely on the things that those financial assets actually represent, however, you could see painful shocks if there’s a big disconnect between price and reality—the kind of shocks you saw during the financial crisis."}
{"prompt":"If people didn’t want to do the analysis before, they’re probably even less inclined to do it now. They figure the machine learning models are taking care of it.  Right. The machines are taking care of it. Or other market participants are taking care of it.  I might think that the share of a particular company is worth 20 dollars. But its price can go up to 100 dollars well before it drops down to 20, in which case I can’t sustain my measure of its actual value. So if all of the computers are pushing the price to 100 dollars, I might as well not do the work of figuring out what the company is actually worth because it’s somewhat irrelevant to the price that it trades at. Paraphrasing Keynes, “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”  It sounds like algorithms have the potential to make that irrationality worse.","completion":"If the underlying computer models are less sensitive to measures of fundamental worth, they can create very large distortions in the prices of financial assets. You don’t need computers to do that, of course. You can have the Fed making a lot of cash available to everyone, cash that needs to go somewhere, and assets appreciate in response. Computers can do something similar. They can assume that prices will behave the way that their models tell them they’ll behave, and therefore drive prices to a point that is extremely disconnected from the things those prices are supposed to represent."}
{"prompt":"On February 5, 2018, the stock market fell off a cliff. The Dow industrials dropped nearly 1600 points, its worst intraday point drop in history. In the aftermath, there was a lot of discussion about the role of computerized trading in triggering the crash. Is this a preview of the world to come? Should we expect more of that in the future? There are certainly forms of instability that have been introduced by algorithmic trading that will increase as we put more and more faith in these algorithms. The February 2018 flash crash was instructive. The culprit was a slightly esoteric exchange-traded product that has a rebalancing mechanism inside of it. And that rebalancing mechanism ended up destroying the product on one specific day when the market moved a little bit more than the product was designed to handle. The product was required to trade a lot of instruments in response to that move. But then those trades exaggerated a small move and it became a big move, which required more rebalancing—and everything spiraled out of control.  What about the impact of a more algorithmic financial system on retail investors? We’ve mostly been talking about big institutional investors, which makes sense because that’s where the money is. But how do these types of tools filter down to the ordinary investor who’s maybe got a small retirement fund?  You’ve already got robo-advisors, which use algorithms to manage assets for retail investors. We’re also probably only a few years away from you being able to log into a brokerage account and run a sophisticated institutional-grade algorithm yourself.  People tend to assume that the diffusion of these technologies is a good thing. I’m more ambivalent. I think it could be a big mistake to have the population at large play around with algorithms. Some people who are very good at it might benefit from having access to this broadened toolset. But most people will just end up paying too much or make bad decisions because they’re being given access to a technology that they aren’t equipped to do anything useful with. They can lose money with it, however.","completion":"Looking ahead, what else do you see on the horizon as finance becomes more algorithmic? We’ve talked about the extent to which large financial firms are becoming tech firms. But I expect that it’ll start accelerating in the other direction: big tech firms will become financial firms. If you’re a tech firm, why would you assume that a traditional financial firm is better at tech than a tech firm? If we’re talking about using big data and machine learning, well, tech firms have been doing that for a while. They’re better at data structure and organization and processing than anybody. They’re also newer, so they probably started off with better architecture internally.  In China, this is already happening. Large Chinese tech firms like Alibaba are much further along in their integration into the financial industry than their equivalents in the US. They’re doing payments and deposits and loans. The regulatory structure is more permissive. Given the expected growth of financial services there, it’s likely also a more attractive investment than for large tech companies in the US. Entrenched incumbents may be harder to dislodge here."}
{"prompt":"What financial firms have is a large customer base, which can be sticky. They also have a lot of unique knowledge—customer, economic, regulatory—from their position in the economy. But Google and Facebook have a ton of information they can employ for the same purposes—I mean, it’s hard to compete with the sheer quantity of data that tech firms have, or the scale of their integration into people’s lives. Retail investors have to put their money somewhere. They’re currently putting it into traditional financial firms. But there’s no reason that Google and Facebook shouldn’t be accepting deposits, facilitating payments, making loans, managing assets, running quantitative investment funds.","completion":"Everything I’ve described to you in the field of quantitative investing, I would imagine those companies could do very quickly. The data, the analysis, the algorithms, the infrastructure. The only question is why they haven’t yet. Diogenes the Cynic lived naked on the beach, his only shelter a tub. His minimalist life only added to his reputation for wisdom, and many sought him out. One day Alexander the Great came to pay him homage. Standing over him, the world-conqueror asked if there was anything he could do for him. Diogenes replied: Yes there is. Stop blocking the sun.   This was the first of many times Diogenes egged Alexander on. Diogenes would goad and diss him, playing him like an instrument, pushing him until he was on the verge of flipping out, but then walk him back. Diogenes and Alexander were playing “chicken” to see who would lose their cool first, and Diogenes never lost.  Diogenes put himself in harm’s way to expose the violence of power and teach the powerful a lesson, and Alexander kept coming back for more. He knew he was within his rights to kill Diogenes for his lèse-majesté, but Diogenes would remind him that no one else would tell him the truth, and Alexander would back off.  Though in ordinary speech “cynicism” has come to mean disillusionment with lofty ideals, the original Cynical tradition was anything but nihilistic. In his lectures on the ancient Greek notion of parrhesia—free or fearless speech—at Berkeley in 1983, Michel Foucault treated Diogenes as a source of the critical tradition of speaking truth to power. By putting himself at risk of wrath and injury, Diogenes exposed the abusiveness and insincerity of the rulers. Socrates tried to get people to see that they were ignorant of their own ignorance, but Diogenes went for the jugular: pride. The Socratic dialogue showed people they were dumb; the Cynical dialogue showed them they were blind.   Foucault called these games “provocative dialogues.” The gamble was that wit and courage could defeat arms and rage."}
{"prompt":"Diogenes made a nice role model for Foucault and others. He was cool, aloof, and self-contained. He did what he wanted and didn’t owe anybody anything. He broke all the rules in public and lived a life of social transgression calculated to shame the powerful. He met his needs simply. When he wasn’t stark naked, you could imagine him looking good in a turtleneck, shades, and a shaved head.   Alexander, the king of the world, admired Diogenes for his freedom. Alexander was free to do what he wanted within the limits of other people’s gold and cooperation—meaning that Alexander was profoundly dependent on cajoling, flattery and coercion. In other words, not very free.  Embarrassing the Strong The kinds of provocations that Diogenes engaged in have long played a role in struggles of the weak against the strong. Jesus of Nazareth refused to answer his accusers and engaged in enough provocative public behavior, sarcastic metaphors, and contempt of ruling authority to invite some scholars to see him as a kind of Cynic. (His enduring image as a man with long hair, a beard, and flowing robes has the look of a Cynic.) Francis of Assisi once crashed his own birthday party disguised as a beggar to see how his professedly Christian friends would treat a stranger in need.  The “Yankee Diogenes” Henry David Thoreau made a show of going to jail to protest US imperialism in Mexico and was annoyed when a well-meaning person paid the poll-tax to bail him out. Gandhi led his followers into confrontations where he knew they would be beaten up, and he made sure reporters were on hand to witness and publicize the abuse.  Unions have practiced work-to-rule tactics to make corporate regulations look ridiculous by doing nothing not specified in the books. At Selma and elsewhere, African-Americans and their allies marched into the dogs, guns, and firehoses of Southern law. They provoked white supremacy to show its ugly face. When Martin Luther King Jr, who learned a lot about provocative dialogues from Thoreau and Gandhi, was jailed in Birmingham, the first thing he wanted to know was whether the protests had been covered in the national news.","completion":"In this light, the Cynical tradition looks like a formidable tool against injustice. The core Cynical tactic is the delegitimization of power through public embarrassment. If the powerful show themselves incapable of embarrassment, that has usually only served as further proof of their moral failing. But Cynical provocation, I fear, has been hijacked. Today, the tactics that Diogenes, Gandhi, and King used have been taken over by trolls.   Triggering the Libtards The alt-right has stolen a page from Diogenes’ book. The Essential TRS Troll Guide is written in a bro-ish slang that treats driving “senile old liberal cat ladies into apoplexy” as a kind of massive multiplayer video game; it directs the would-be provocateur not to show emotion, not to rise to the bait. The aim is to goad someone else into getting upset, an act known as “triggering.” In a comic-vulgar kind of sociology of the internet, the guide anatomizes different types of targets and notes the forums that offer a “target-rich environment” of “libtards.” The troll, like a drone operator, does his damage behind the safety of the screen. They get hot, but he stays cool.   The first and most obvious context for the hijacking is technological. It is so much easier to see and share the comic and exasperated results of goading when everyone is armed with a video camera. Gandhi and King relied on sympathetic reporters and editors who worked at trusted news agencies; trolls rely on viral video to stir outrage and lulz and have little interest in context, explanation, or getting their story into establishment media. The Cynical dialogue of provocation is in shambles today in part because it has become so promiscuous in its creation, editing, and dissemination.   But the proliferation of digital outlets does not explain the whole story. Alt-right cynicism is unhinged from an interactive relationship with the target. Diogenes, Gandhi, and King put their bodies on the line: they interacted with their adversaries in the dangerous meatspace of physical presence where face, name, person, and even address are mutually known. You don’t need to doxx someone you are talking to in the flesh."}
{"prompt":"Sure, most Cynics couldn’t resist a bit of teasing, but the best practitioners used it as a means to midwife the truth, not as an end in itself. Diogenes’ goading of Alexander was not simply hostile; it aimed to help him find a truth that he couldn’t on his own. The lulz-boys have little interest in such mutual discovery.  Trolling tactics lack the dialogical bond of questioner and answerer that goes back to Socrates. King, as a hard-headed activist, wanted Bull Connor to stop the violence, but as a Christian, he would have welcomed a penitent Connor into the fold as a brother. A troll, in contrast, relates to his victim as a Pac-Man to a Power Pellet or a windshield to a bug splat.   The Shameless Sovereign Many would-be Diogenes today do not seek to embarrass those who command armies or police forces but rather those in institutions of higher learning. The alt-right likes nothing better than a sputtering professor. Look online: never before have you been able to watch so many people losing their cool. There are compilations of all kinds of people losing their “sh*t” as YouTube decorously calls it. There is plenty of provocation; not a lot of walking back or revelation of truth.   By standing for reasonable debate, academics are painted as hypocrites who refuse “free speech” if they do not accept the forum-upstaging antics of their foes. The alt-right, who believes in no such thing, can make the liberal call for civil discussion look like the rankest hypocrisy. Cynics might strategically conceal what they believe for temporary effect, but trolls seem to believe in nothing but lulz. They recast what reason does—winnowing wheat from chaff—as an act of censorship. If the act of judgment, the very basis of rationality, is said to be oppression, no wonder liberals keep losing it!   To be a game, the participants have to agree on the frame that “this is play.” The anthropologist Gregory Bateson once made this point brilliantly. Hazing rituals, he said, were governed by the frame “is this play?” Trolls like to claim the prerogative to define an interaction as play when their conduct makes that frame completely unclear. Bateson called situations where the frame and the content clash “double binds.” Though nobody today thinks that they cause schizophrenia (Bateson did), they are still maddening in the deepest way.","completion":"Double binds are a recipe for paralysis. When a troll bites, he always claims it is a play bite, even if the victim bleeds. But trolls rarely get bitten themselves. It would be nice to see one put his body on the line for once. My imagination is battening on the schadenfreude of seeing a little scuffing up, but that is not very nice: to be true to the Cynical tradition, I should step back and see my urge to violence as itself the problem. In the economy of the troll world, however, such lofty refusal to fight back just offers another opportunity for attack. A double bind indeed! Today we have a troll-in-chief, a provocateur without a dialogical relationship to hold him in check, a master of the immobilizing double bind. Mr. Trump, prone to rage in the West Wing like a mad Renaissance king and breaking all the china in international relations, has no capacity for shame and no ability to contain his wrath. A showboat without a cause, he would have fired Diogenes.   Trump’s shamelessness, as many have pointed out, is part of his magical power.  Mere mortals are felled right and left for lesser transgressions than the ones he commits daily. In a society of shame, sovereign is he who defies that logic. The sovereign names the exception. Trump and his trolls name what they do as play but they are always changing the framing. Is that lean-in handshake affectionate or hostile? Is the next tweet going to be redescribed in a subsequent tweet as a joke? Should we be scared spitless or is old Donald just being an idiot again? He is an absolute master at metacommunicative messing."}
{"prompt":"The Cynics sought to expose the power of the sovereign. They took on empires—of Alexander, the Brits, whiteness. They risked everything in a game that could turn lethal at any moment. Today’s trolls hijack the posture and the provocation of the Cynic to reinforce power—their own.  Cynicism, the unique property of the outsider, turns rank once it enters the gates of power. Instead of stunning power into self-reflection, today’s cynicism shields power. Instead of the truth-seeking stuntsmanship of the self-risking Cynic, we have the collapse of the Cynical tradition into paralysis on the one hand and sovereign self-satisfaction on the other. I’d love to see Diogenes take on Trump and show him who’s boss. He’d find a way.","completion":"“A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them… such is my idea of happiness.” — Leo Tolstoy Several years ago, I bought a used copy of Rune Factory 3 on the way to an international flight."}
{"prompt":"The Rune Factory games are a fantasy-themed spin-off of Harvest Moon, the classic farming and village-life simulation series. Rune Factory takes the Harvest Moon model—rotate your fields, get to know your neighbors, grow crops, watch the seasons pass—and adds monsters, fighting, and an intensely anime aesthetic.  Rune Factory 3 isn’t a good game, but I wouldn’t call it bad, either. Rather, it is so deeply entrenched in genre cliche that the rules of “good writing” or “nuanced character development” don’t really apply. I picked it more or less at random, to keep me company over the turbulence.","completion":"One begins Rune Factory 3 by falling from the sky into a small village, where you wake up with amnesia in the arms of the mayor's daughter, Shara. Allowed to stay—in a giant treehouse, of course—your character is given basic tools like an axe and a water pot, and instructed to try farming some derelict land."}
{"prompt":"Farming is repetitive and tiring, both as a character and as a player. Each square of land must first be tilled, then planted and watered. Storms bring down debris from overhead, weeds populate empty squares, and large rocks must be moved or broken. It is difficult work and I barely manage to keep a quarter of my fields in production before my energy is depleted and I crawl back into bed each day.","completion":"Some days, I ignore my farming duties and walk to town. I slowly meet the villagers, a small community of shop-keeps, each with a one-dimensional character trait that defines them. Raven, the quiet one; Collette, the one who loves eating; Sophia, the rich one who talks in opposites; Daria, the artist. They joke with me and tell me about their lives here, and explain why they decided to be a cook or a blacksmith or a tailor."}
{"prompt":"As we get to know each other, they ask me to run them errands. I do my best, on the days that I have energy left over from farming. These tasks are often difficult—some of the villagers want things like silver rings, which I could never afford, or rare foods that I have never seen. More commonly, they ask me to fetch something from the wilds around town, fierce regions populated by dangerous monsters. If I run full-tilt through these spaces I can sometimes make it away with a particular herb, fruit, or stone before the monsters spot me.","completion":"Unsurprisingly, I fail to meet the desires of my new friends more often than not. But they always forgive me. They seem to know that what they want is near impossible. Struggle and Repetition As time goes on, our conversations become more personal. They tell me stories about their pasts and confide their fears and dreams. Hazel, the general store manager, is worried about her daughter Karina, who seems to show no interest in inheriting the store. A young and overeager witch named Marian is determined to make better medicine and be just like her grandmother Marjorie, the town matriarch. Pia, a mermaid who was adopted into the family that runs the hot springs, wonders what her biological family was like. A single dad named Blaise hopes he is doing alright at raising his two children alone. I feel like I have found real stories, hidden under the absurd premise of this place.  Years pass in the timeline of my village. I’ve finished my twelve-hour flight and well into my vacation, and I'm still playing. I've become friends with everyone."}
{"prompt":"I’ve never played a game that feels quite like this. Rune Factory 3 is actually engaged with the realities of daily subsistence in a small place. It doesn’t pull punches about the struggle and repetition of a hard life with the land. My tools are all rusty and my weapons don’t properly protect me. But this hardship is rewarded by moments of natural beauty as the seasons pass, and real intimacy with my friends.","completion":"We are all stuck here for different reasons—our children, our shops, our crops—but we have one another. Even though we might want valuables that our town cannot provide, we ask for them anyway and laugh, pretending—just for a bit—that they might be on their way. Although we struggle with legitimate difficulties in our private lives that may never change, there are the comforts of conversation and community. And despite the fact that the work is hard—and we all work so hard—we take time for festivals and birthdays. When I get sick or hurt, someone comes over with homemade medicine. They jokingly threaten to charge me next time, but they never do."}
{"prompt":"It is so rare to find a role-playing game like this. There is no plot, no mystery, no dragons, no romance, no treasure. I still don’t know who I am or where I came from: my amnesia is never resolved. But I know why I am here, and that is enough.  Finally, around hour thirty of playtime, the dialogue starts to repeat: my villager-friends have run out of things to say. I feel that I have spent as much of my vacation harvesting bell-peppers as I’d like.","completion":"An Orb in the Woods It’s around this time that everything collapses. I’m walking in the woods south of my village when I stumble across something atypical—a mysterious floating orb in a section of the woods I’d never seen. The screen goes white and I'm in a prerecorded cutscene where my amnesiac character regains a fraction of their memory."}
{"prompt":"“That’s right!” My character exclaims. “I’m half human and half monster!” And then I transform into a yellow sheep. Now, I don’t tend to use walkthroughs. I prefer to experience the story of a game without spoilers, and I generally won’t pull up internet guides unless I’m feeling bored or stuck. But immediately after the sheep-transformation, you can bet I would have been digging desperately for my phone, ready to use all of my international cell data to figure out what was happening. However, I had just boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad in rural Mongolia. I wouldn’t have cell service or Wi-Fi for another week. So I keep playing.","completion":"After the flashback, my character is human again. Back in town, I decide I’d best make the rounds, visiting my friends to chat just like every other time I’d had a problem. They’d know what to do. After all, we’d already been through so much together. However, these interactions are decidedly strange. I run into Rusk, the only other boy my age in the village, who introduces himself like we’d never met. Next, his dad Blaise reminds me that he “runs the restaurant” and tells me to “come by for a hot meal every once in a while.”  I’m spooked. I know they know me—we’ve talked hundreds of times. I check my save file, thinking that perhaps, somehow, I’d started a new game. But everything else is in place. My fields, my house, my name—everything is as I left it."}
{"prompt":"Of course, I can’t help but wonder: Was the game written this way? Is Rune Factory 3 about finding a community, and then losing it? Is it about aging? About forgetting, and being forgotten?  It’s then that I speak with Collette, who blushes, asks if I’d like to join her on a walk, and then brings up the idea of marriage. I panic, politely excuse myself by again transforming into a sheep, and then repeat this interaction with every young woman in the village within twenty minutes.","completion":"No, I decide, it wasn’t written this way. Something is profoundly, wildly, off.  I remember that there is a menu that lists the villagers and our level of friendship on a zero to ten scale, which I’d long since maxed out for everyone. I pull it up to find that I am at a one with Rusk and Blaise (who just reintroduced themselves), a ten with every eligible bachelorette, and a zero with everyone else. Those zeros had forgotten me. But even those who remember me seem to remember me differently. Our relationships have changed overnight."}
{"prompt":"I go home to find an extra room in my house. Shara drops by and launches into tutorial mode, explaining that all of this extra space would be a perfect place for a workshop. I could make new tools and farming equipment! Expand my kitchen! Learn to sew! Suddenly, it all makes sense. The impossible requests, the wildly difficult farming, the over-leveled monsters, the rusty tools, the non-upgradeable weapons, the dangerous wilderness, the villagers who claim they’ll charge me “next time,” the friendships that never became romantic, the lack of plot: I had been playing inside of an introduction sequence. I had built my whole life inside of the tutorial, and when I finally moved on, it triggered a waterfall of unstable behavior and glitches.","completion":"Slow Crawl Deciding to see it through, I play the rest of the game. I explore the various regions, even meeting new monster-people that live in a town to the west. I upgrade all of my weapons and get my neighbors the rare and expensive treasures they had wanted. I tame some monsters to work my field for me. I rush through the rest of the storyline, uncovering my backstory and uniting the town of monsters with my village of humans. Eventually, I marry (Raven, the quiet one). We have a child. It is utterly unfulfilling.  In truth, I am homesick.  What made the tutorial space remarkable was everything it excluded: fighting, dating, taming monsters, crafting better weapons, the actual story. I loved the punishment of working the land with the minimum viable tools, the slow crawl of the seasons, and the attempt at surviving on so little. I loved slowly getting to know my neighbors without aim or goal, doing my best to help them while knowing that I mostly could not. I loved my tiny world.  The work was hard and tedious. But my friends, programmed for endless kindness as I oriented myself in this new place, were soft and generous and forgiving. They truly didn’t want anything from me but to see me succeed. We were all in it together."}
{"prompt":"I choose to remember them like this, from before we had an economy, romance, and answers. I remember them as they were: goofy, one-dimensional, and poorly written, but profoundly good. Nobody can agree on what the first open-world video game was. Nobody, for that matter, can agree on what an open-world game is. There are some criteria that have to be met: a free-roaming environment you can wander at will, the ability to pick and choose your objectives. However, open worlds tend to defy the simple definitions of other game genres. In a platformer, you jump. In a shooter, you shoot. But what makes an open-world game is the promise of freedom.","completion":"It's a promise that can never be truly kept. Even with the ever-expanding potential of modern processing power, the digital world always has its limitations. We are offered the chance to explore to our heart's content, but invisible walls always lie somewhere to hem us in, and waypoints hurry us on to the next mission. Stray too far from the developers' vision and the illusion of an open world will collapse.  Players don't seem to mind, though. In an industry forever chasing the hot new trend, the open-world game has survived and thrived for decades, and is only getting more popular. The genre can lay claim to a long list of gaming’s most successful franchises: Final Fantasy, Minecraft, The Legend of Zelda, Grand Theft Auto. Even artificial freedom is enough to grab audiences."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps that’s because we're increasingly being denied the freedom to explore in the physical world. Open-world games sell the fantasy of sweeping landscapes and endless choice. Even if the games can’t ever fulfill that fantasy, they are enticing in an era when our physical movements have become increasingly restricted. In fact, the same decade that first embraced the open-world game saw the beginning of a decline in real-world freedom that continues to the present day.","completion":"The Destruction of Public Space Whether you trace the genre’s origins back to flight simulators or early role-playing games, open-world games had truly arrived by the mid-1980s. The decade’s booming economy sustained a burgeoning home console market in both Japan and the West. Customers and developers alike were eager to test the limits of their new machines and games like Ultima (1986), Elite (1984), and The Legend of Zelda (1986) demonstrated what was possible. The ability to roam a sprawling world at will was, and remains, the appeal."}
{"prompt":"While players were seeing their digital horizons expand, however, their physical space was contracting. Urban populations continued to grow throughout the 1980s, and the cities that housed an increasing proportion of the world's population were rapidly changing. In Japan and the West, the 1980s were the heyday of mall culture, which shifted the center of communities away from the publicly owned main street and into privately controlled shopping centers. There, behavior could be tightly monitored under the all-seeing eye of CCTV cameras, and transgressors forcibly removed by security.  By the end of the decade, the private security industry was generating $5 billion of business a year in the US. alone. Almost thirty years later we're accustomed to, and even enthusiastic about, being watched over—almost 60 percent of Britons now support implementing video surveillance in all public space in the UK. Cameras constantly loom behind us, as if we're each the protagonist of our own video game.","completion":"This reshaping of the urban environment over the 1980s was not confined to its public space. The decade saw a great surge in gentrification under the free-market capitalism espoused by figures like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan. Ironically, the deregulation of businesses and property developers that fueled the boom resulted in more regulation for the citizens of the communities they transformed. As Sarah Schulman wrote in The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to Lost Imagination, her memoir about the gentrification of New York during the 1980s AIDS crisis: Just as gentrification literally replaces mix with homogeneity, it enforces itself through the repression of diverse expression. This is why we see so much quashing of public life as neighborhoods gentrify. Permits are suddenly required for performing, for demonstrating, for dancing in bars, for playing musical instruments on the street, for selling food, for painting murals, selling art, drinking beer on the stoop, or smoking pot or cigarettes…[t]he relaxed nature of neighborhood living becomes threatening, something to be eradicated and controlled."}
{"prompt":"The 1980s also saw the expansion of privately owned public space, or POPS. First developed in New York in the 1960s, POPS are open-air spaces—parks, plazas and thoroughfares—that are open to the public, but privately owned and controlled. This leaves them under the authority of the landowner, who is free to set and enforce restrictions on “acceptable behavior” as they wish. The few responsibilities required of the owners of POPS in return for this power are frequently ignored—the city of New York's forty-year ordeal to get Donald Trump to abide by his 1979 agreement to maintain public amenities in the POPS in Trump Tower being the most famous example.","completion":"In 2000, Jerold S. Kayden, a professor of urban planning at Harvard, found that more than a third of POPS in New York were of \"marginal quality\" and half of the city's POPS had been illegally privatized by their owners. Landowners had locked gates and hired staff to declare their buildings off-limits. As a result, a significant number of POPS weren't public spaces at all. Still, the allure of outsourcing the cost of maintaining true public spaces has proven impossible for local authorities to resist, and POPS have spread to cities around the world. In London, where POPS began to be built during the 1980s building boom, many of the city’s busiest and most iconic public spaces are privately owned.  Google’s UK headquarters are currently being built within one of them: the Kings Cross Estate. The estate's four acres—the largest POPS in Europe—is under the control of King's Cross Central Limited Partnership, which maintains a secretive list of regulations governing behavior on their site and team of private security guards to enforce them. One homeless man in the area told The Guardian in 2017, \"I’m allowed to lie down on the grass, but not to close my eyes... I tried to take a nap the other morning, just for an hour or two, and every time my eyes began to shut I was woken up by security guards.\" Marginalized groups have always bore the brunt of efforts to control public life. They are priced out of homes and communities, arrested for “driving while black” or “walking while trans,” forced away by inaccessible design, and encouraged to stay inside “for their own safety.” While the “right kind of people” are largely free to roam at their leisure, the rest of society is kept under strict supervision.  Breath of the Wild Every year, surveillance is getting more sophisticated, police more militarized and public space more privatized. However, this growing lockdown on our physical space has happened side by side with an incredible growth of our virtual space. In 1986’s The Legend of Zelda, the playable world of Hyrule was around 0.058 km2 large; in 2017’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, it was 121 km2."}
{"prompt":"These open-world playgrounds extend the opportunity to act in ways often denied to us in the physical world. The criminality of games like Grand Theft Auto and its imitators may grab headlines, but often it’s the far more innocuous moments that feel the most freeing. Spotting something interesting in the distance and running over to investigate it. Driving around the city with the radio on full blast. Finding a scenic spot and just enjoying the view. All three are simple things we take for granted in open-world games, but are more than enough to arouse suspicion in the physical world if seen by someone who doesn’t like the look of you.  Simply being able to leave your character idling is a freeing act when, in the real world, loitering can result in your arrest—especially for people of color. (In a particularly egregious example from April 2018, Philadelphia police arrested two black men just for sitting in a Starbucks without ordering anything.) With our actions constantly monitored and our freedom to explore eroded, it's no wonder that more and more of us are choosing to spend our time in virtual worlds instead.","completion":"The year-on-year growth in computing power means that our open-worlds are growing richer and more immersive all the time. Today, video games can sometimes feel more fulfilling than the real world. The Legend of Zelda was inspired by creator Shigeru Miyamoto’s childhood exploration of the forests and caves around his home in Sonobe, Kyoto Prefecture. Sonobe is no more, having been merged into the city of Nantan in 2006. However, millions of people play in the “miniature garden” that Miyamoto tells interviewers he sets out to create in each game, a fantastical recreation of a countryside that no longer exists.  Can our miniature gardens really replace the real thing? Could they one day?  No Exit The idea of humanity abandoning the physical world for the freedom of a virtual life has long been explored in science fiction, but the concept hit the biggest mainstream stage possible in the Steven Spielberg-directed blockbuster Ready Player One that came out in March 2018. In the movie (as well as the book it’s based on), much of humanity finds an escape from their desolate Earth in a virtual-reality universe called the OASIS. The OASIS takes open-world gaming’s promise of freedom and makes it a reality: inside, you really can be or do almost anything.  It’s an idea as unrealistic as any of the technology that appears in the film. The appeal is obvious when you live in a world of countless restrictions. In the end, though, our games are still the product of that world, with the same issues we play to escape.  A woman playing Grand Theft Auto may be free to explore Los Santos or Liberty City in a way that she could never explore her own city, but she has to do it in the body of a man, in a world filled with sexism. The female player of Grand Theft Auto is encouraged to murder sex workers. The queer player of The Witcher has to role-play heterosexual romance. The player of color who picks up most of the games in the Far Cry series is going to find themselves in a stereotypically “exotic” land, shooting its stereotypically “exotic” inhabitants. Even within the seemingly infinite possibilities of the digital world, the marginalized will still find themselves at the margins."}
{"prompt":"Any player who looks too close, though, will start to lose faith in the open-world game’s promise of freedom. Compromises will always have to be made. Maps have to end, the plot has to be followed, and dialogue trees can only grow so far. Our virtual worlds aren't as free as we would like to think.  Neither, though, are our real worlds. Our gentrified neighborhoods and surveilled public spaces are just as limited and artificial as the cities and villages in our open-world games. They're the manufactured creation of developers, whether they're building software or property. In the physical and digital world alike, freedom is, in the end, a facade.","completion":"The term “DIY” is contested within music communities. But “DIY space” generally refers to a self-organized venue run by artists, often on a formal or informal collective basis, to house non-commercial music, art, and community organizing projects.  These spaces typically aspire towards ideals of accessibility and inclusivity, and are open to all ages. They have low ticket prices, and give most of the money made at the door to the artists. They are places where new bands can play their first shows, and where people can learn how to book and run events collaboratively. Above all, they foster participation. In an increasingly isolated culture, music remains a medium that can still get people into a room together. DIY venues offer real social spaces in an era when the concept of being “social” has been hollowed out by Silicon Valley."}
{"prompt":"In 2014, I moved into the Silent Barn, a three-story DIY space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. There were art galleries, a recording studio, a barber shop, murals on every surface, and shows every night. On one of my first nights living there, I came home to a kitchen filled with dozens of collective members, sitting on chairs and the floor, holding a meeting. It reminded me of an Occupy general assembly, but with the purpose of running an all-ages music and art venue. For four years, I stayed involved as a resident, collective member, and co-facilitator of programming.  These days, however, DIY spaces like the Silent Barn are under threat. The Silent Barn shut its doors in May 2018, about one year after the shuttering of another local, long-running DIY venue, Shea Stadium. Beloved Brooklyn spaces like Death by Audio and Palisades have also shuttered in recent years.  The closing of DIY spaces is nothing new. Their reliance on volunteer labor makes them vulnerable to collective burnout, while their shoestring finances make them vulnerable to bankruptcy. Moreover, one of their defining characteristics is often their semi-legal status, which exposes them to pressure from the authorities. For these reasons, the announcement of another closure never comes as too much of a surprise. Still, it seems that DIY venues in big cities face more challenges than in previous generations: namely the rising price of urban real estate, and the complex relationship that exists between art spaces and gentrification.","completion":"But there’s another factor fueling the crisis of DIY: Facebook. To be involved in a local music community today means maintaining an inextricable reliance on Facebook events, and Facebook-owned Instagram, for promotion. Further, some DIY spaces have become dependent on Facebook groups for everything from connecting with the public to hosting internal organizing conversations. Across the music world, digital platforms are reshaping the ways that community forms around music—and, in the case of Facebook, exacerbating the significant obstacles that DIY spaces already face. A platform that claims to bring people closer together is helping derail and destroy some of the few remaining places that actually do."}
{"prompt":"Communications Theater The original Silent Barn organizers were wary of underground arts organizing leaning too hard on “gigantic, panoptic” digital platforms, as one of the Barn’s cofounders G. Lucas Crane puts it. But eventually they came to rely on digital tools. As a non-funded arts organization perennially strapped for time and money, Crane explains, digital tools like Facebook offered the perception of convenience, but ultimately proved to be just that: a perception. Starting to use a Facebook group for internal organizing “ate away at the togetherness,” Crane says. “It just kind of makes you lazy. You get subsumed in the thing that Facebook wants you to do, which is to argue a lot with no actual outcome.”  “You think you’re getting something done. You think you’re communicating,” Crane says. “But you’re actually just performing communication. It’s communications theater. It doesn’t actually provide consensus.” Further, he noticed the nature of conversations on Facebook seeping their way into in-person meetings, “rotting away the ancient strategy” of getting people into a room to work things out because everyone had preconceived notions of one another from social media.","completion":"In Arcata, California, an all-ages, collective-run DIY venue called Outer Space balances similar concerns about online versus in-person decision making. They rely on a Google Group for communication, but also hold a weekly, recurring meeting. “Sometimes we have long, hard conversations where we don't always agree about how to move forward,” says Alex Norquidst, a member of the core collective that works with a larger volunteer base. “These kinds of conversations are really hard to have via text or email threads because people’s tone, body language, and the ability to take time out and check in with everyone goes away.” DIY Space for London (DSFL), a venue that opened in 2015, does not use Facebook for internal discussions. “People often need to take a break from social media, or aren’t on it altogether, so if we were to use Facebook to organize, we’d be excluding a lot of people,” explains collective member Amy. Another member, Ben, adds that many members of the space do not use Facebook or Google “due to their power/practices.” Instead, their primary all-collective organizing tool is Loomio, a free app specifically designed for collaboration, which they supplement with a WhatsApp group for emergency communications. DSFL members note Loomio’s usefulness for fair discussions, time polls, and decision-making. Its notifications system also seems to be built to prevent burnout—something Facebook seems to make worse."}
{"prompt":"On Facebook, there’s a feeling that the platform is actually creating more organizing labor rather than less. During my time at Silent Barn, being part of the booking team involved responding to daily emails and DMs regarding date requests, lineups, follow-ups, announcements, promotion, production needs, and liaising with staff. Other digital labor included making Facebook events, writing promo copy, sourcing artwork, adding listings to our site, and trying to spread the word online without getting algorithmically buried. As a Barn booker, I found promotion on Facebook, something that was supposed to make our jobs easier, actually just created more work—it made our jobs harder.","completion":"Digital Monocultures The rampant reliance on Facebook also complicates the long-held anti-commercial politics of DIY, which exists in opposition to the mainstream music industry. DIY spaces are in theory built on an ethos of valuing art over profit—sliding scale, suggested donation, and “NOTAFLOF” (or “no-one-turned-away-for-lack-of-funds”) shows are common. The use of Facebook weaves corporate infrastructure into the fabric of ethos-driven spaces."}
{"prompt":"It is a given today that engaging with corporate digital structures is a necessary compromise required to connect to communities. Facebook is a particularly murky environment: it positions itself as a social network, but is actually an advertising platform. Thus the interactions of socially motivated DIY organizers on Facebook are shaped by its advertising mechanisms. Facebook will naturally promote whatever has been paid for, or whatever will generate the most clicks in the attention economy.  This means that the kinds of small shows being pushed by DIY promoters are likely to get algorithmically buried, especially if they don’t pay for sponsored posts. Meanwhile, DIY venues and independent bookers are expected to use the same tactics as more established commercial venues that partner with corporate ticketing platforms like Eventbrite and Ticketfly, which in turn have deals to integrate more seamlessly with Facebook.  It’s hard to publicize unpopular artists on platforms that prioritize what’s popular. Indeed, the reliance on Facebook means DIY culture is becoming more closely aligned with the platform’s digital monoculture. The logic of social media platforms, of instant gratification and optimized “content,” requires pages (and spaces) to absorb streamlined “brand identities”—a logic that cultivates a more passive, consumerist approach to music that is inimical to scrappy, under-resourced DIY spaces.  While different DIY spaces have different approaches to navigating Facebook, generally the lack of resources means that DIY venues have difficulty maintaining a constant social media presence due to a shortage of volunteers. This in turn makes Facebook less likely to surface their content—for instance, by promoting their events with automated notifications that say, “We found concerts and other music events happening near you.” The first time I received such a notification, I couldn’t help but think that “music events” sounded like something an undercover cop might say. Relatedly, there is a history of undercover police using Facebook to snoop on DIY shows. In 2013, when Boston police officers busted up popular DIY show spaces, they bragged about the fake Facebook accounts they used to find addresses for gigs. Here is another ongoing complication of social media and DIY: the way it makes spaces vulnerable to surveillance from authorities that see these spaces as nuisances and shut them down.","completion":"Social Webs Digital tools haven’t always played such a destructive role for DIY. In fact, the early social web facilitated interactions that hugely benefited self-organized music culture. Think message boards, the sprawling landscape of independently run MP3 blogs, and even Tumblr communities where weird micro-genres and home-recorders could thrive. The MySpace era in particular is widely seen as a golden age for DIY: much has been written about how MySpace offered the ideal music site, perhaps for the simplicity of its interface or the highly customizable quality of its pages.  By contrast, the consolidated social web embodied by Facebook is damaging DIY by providing an illusion of convenience that reshapes communities in the image of Facebook’s preferred norms. Criticism of platforms is essential as they continue to take a stronger hold on the ways that we form community. There is still much to be thought through by DIY organizers when it comes to examining how platforms play into building DIY spaces.  We need to fight against the trappings of convenience, and make sure that it’s us using the digital tools and not the digital tools using us. Perhaps there is something to be gleaned from what DIY spaces are already learning about Facebook: as an advertising platform, it may have some utility, but as a tool for building community, it’s probably best to go somewhere else."}
{"prompt":"In 1984, the developer Will Wright had just finished work on his first video game, a shoot-em-up called Raid on Bungeling Bay. In it, the player controls a helicopter dropping bombs on enemy targets on a series of islands. Wright was happy with the game, which was a commercial and critical success, but even after it was released, he continued tinkering with the terrain editor he had used to design Raid’s levels. “I found out,” Wright later told the Onion AV Club, “that I was having a lot more fun doing that part than just playing the game and going around bombing stuff.” Enthralled by the islands he was making, Wright kept adding features to his level editor, adding complex elements like cars, people, and houses. He became fascinated with the idea of making these islands behave more like cities, and kept tinkering with ways to make the world “come alive and be more dynamic.”  Looking to understand how real cities worked, Wright came across a 1969 book by Jay Forrester called Urban Dynamics. Forrester was an electrical engineer who had launched a second career as an expert on computer simulation; Urban Dynamics deployed his simulation methodology to offer a controversial theory of how cities grew and declined. Wright used Forrester’s theories to transform the cities he was designing in his level editor from static maps of buildings and roads into vibrant models of a growing metropolis. Eventually, Wright became convinced that his “guinea-pig city” was an entertaining, open-ended video game. Released in 1989, the game became wildly popular, selling millions of copies, winning dozens of awards, and spawning an entire franchise of successors and dozens of imitators. It was called SimCity.","completion":"Almost as soon as SimCity came out, journalists, academics, and other critics began to speculate on the effects that the game might have on real-world planning and politics. Within a few years of its release, instructors at universities across the country began to integrate SimCity into their urban planning and political science curriculums. Commentators like the sociologist Paul Starr worried that the game’s underlying code was an “unreachable black box” which could “seduce” players into accepting its assumptions, like the fact that low taxes promoted growth in this virtual world. “I became a total Republican playing this game,” one SimCity fan told the Los Angeles Times in 1992. “All I wanted was for my city to grow, grow, grow.”  Despite all this attention, few writers looked closely at the work which sparked Wright’s interest in urban simulation in the first place. Largely forgotten now, Jay Forrester’s Urban Dynamics put forth the controversial claim that the overwhelming majority of American urban policy was not only misguided but that these policies aggravated the very problems that they were intended to solve. In place of Great Society-style welfare programs, Forrester argued that cities should take a less interventionist approach to the problems of urban poverty and blight, and instead encourage revitalization indirectly through incentives for businesses and for the professional class. Forrester’s message proved popular among conservative and libertarian writers, Nixon Administration officials, and other critics of the Great Society for its hands-off approach to urban policy. This outlook, supposedly backed up by computer models, remains highly influential among establishment pundits and policymakers today."}
{"prompt":"150 Equations, 200 Parameters Jay Wright Forrester was one of the most important figures in the history of computing, but he is also one of the least understood. He trained at Gordon Brown’s Servomechanisms Laboratory at MIT, spending World War II designing automatic stabilizers for the U.S. Navy’s radars. After the war, he led the development of the Whirlwind computer, arguably the most important computer project of the early postwar period. This machine, after humble beginnings as a flight simulator, morphed into a general-purpose computer which stood at the heart of the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment (SAGE), a multibillion-dollar network of computers and radars that promised to computerize the U.S. Air Force’s response to a Soviet nuclear attack by streamlining the detection of incoming bombers and automatically deploying fighters to intercept them.","completion":"In 1956, with the SAGE system not yet finished, Forrester abruptly changed careers, shifting his gaze from electronic systems to human ones. From the unlikely setting of the MIT Sloan School of Management, he founded a discipline called “industrial dynamics” (later rechristened “system dynamics”). At first, this field focused on creating computer simulations of production and distribution problems in industrial firms. But Forrester and his cadre of graduate students later expanded it into a general methodology for understanding social, economic, and environmental systems. The most famous example of this group’s work was the “doomsday” World 3 model that stood at the center of the landmark environmental text The Limits to Growth, a book that warned of a potential collapse of industrial civilization by 2050."}
{"prompt":"Urban Dynamics was Forrester’s first attempt to apply his methodology outside of the corporate boardroom. He came up with the idea of tackling the problems of cities after meeting John F. Collins, a conservative Democratic politician and the outgoing mayor of Boston, who had recently taken a position at MIT. Listening to Collins’s stories about his time as mayor in the 1960s, Forrester became convinced industrial dynamics could be used to study the poverty and capital flight associated with the US’s ongoing “urban crisis.” Even though Forrester had no expertise in urban affairs—or in social science more generally—Collins agreed that a collaboration could prove fruitful.","completion":"Over the course of 1968, Forrester devoted about twenty-five hours a week to his project with Collins. During that time, he met with the former mayor and his team of advisors and constructed a sprawling flowchart representing the relationships between different aspects of the city’s structure. Forrester translated this flowchart into the group’s house simulation language, DYNAMO. After a staff secretary or a graduate student punched the DYNAMO equations onto cards, it could be loaded on a machine. From there, the computer would generate a running version of the model, and output line-plots and tabular data representing the decade-by-decade evolution of the simulated city.  Forrester spent months tinkering with this model, tested and corrected it for errors, and ran a “hundred or more system experiments to explore the effects of various policies on the revival of a city that has aged into economic decline.” Six months after beginning the project, and over 2000 pages of teletype printouts later, Forrester declared that he had reduced the problems of the city to a series of 150 equations and 200 parameters."}
{"prompt":"Death Spirals At the start of a standard 250-year run in Forrester’s model, the simulated city is empty. No land is occupied, there is no economic activity, and there is little incentive for construction. As the city gradually develops, increases in housing, population, and industry all serve to reinforce one another, and the city enters a period of sustained economic and population growth. During this period, people are attracted to the city, and new housing and businesses are constructed at a brisk pace.","completion":"But as the city ages and its land area reaches full occupancy, growth slows. Areas which were considered “attractive and useful” have already been occupied. New construction takes place on more marginal land, and because this land is less attractive, the pace of construction slows. When no greenfield parcels of land are left for development, new construction becomes impossible, and new housing and firms can only be built when old ones are demolished. New migrants, once a boon to the city’s industry, continue to flow into the metropolis, causing overcrowding and underemployment, dampening economic vitality, and sending the city into a death spiral of blight and decay."}
{"prompt":"The arc of this story reflected the simplified, and sometimes entirely fictional, assumptions of Forrester’s model. On its most basic level, Urban Dynamics modeled the relationship between population, housing stock, and industrial buildings against a background of government policies. The city inside Forrester’s model was a highly abstracted one. There were no neighborhoods, no parks, no roads, no suburbs, and no racial or ethnic conflicts. (In fact, the people inside the model didn’t belong to racial,ethnic, or gender categories at all.) Economic and political life in the outside world had no effect on the simulated city. To the extent that the world outside the model existed, it served only as a source for migrants into the city, and a place for them to flee to if the city became inhospitable.","completion":"The residents of Forrester’s simulated city belonged to one of three class categories, “managerial-professional,” “worker,” and “underemployed.” As one moved down the class ladder in the urban dynamics model, classist assumptions about the urban poor piled up: birth rates were higher, tax contributions were lower, and the use of public expenditures increased. This meant that the urban poor served as a massive drag on the health of the simulated city: they did not add to its economic life, they had large families which strained public services, and they contributed only paltry amounts to the city’s coffers."}
{"prompt":"Forrester was cagey about how much this mapped onto real life. He cautioned that his model was a “method of analysis” and that it was unwise to take its conclusions as applicable without first ensuring that the model's assumptions fit a specific city’s situation. At the same time, Forrester used the simulation as a stand-in for cities in general, making sweeping claims about the failure of what he regarded as “counterproductive” urban policies.","completion":"To Forrester, low-income housing was an especially egregious example of a “counterproductive” urban program. According to the model, these programs increased the local tax burden, attracted underemployed people into the city, and occupied land which might otherwise have been put to more economically healthy uses. Housing programs aimed at improving the condition of the underemployed, Forrester warned, “increased unemployment and reduced upward economic mobility” and would condemn the underemployed to lifelong poverty. This idea wouldn’t have seemed new to anyone steeped in the conservative or libertarian tradition, but Forrester’s technical approach helped update it for the digital age."}
{"prompt":"The Perversity Thesis When we consider the social effects of computers in political and social life, we usually think in terms of expanded power and new possibilities. This perspective on computation permeates even our critical visions of technology. But we should also be attentive to the power that computers and the accompanying language of “systems” and “complexity” have to narrow our conception of the politically possible.","completion":"Forrester thought that the basic problem of urban planning—and making social policy in general—was that “the human mind is not adapted to interpreting how social systems behave.” In a paper serialized in two early issues of Reason, the libertarian magazine founded in 1968, Forrester argued that for most of human history, people have only needed to understand basic cause-and-effect relationships, but that our social systems are governed by complex processes that unfold over long periods of time. He claimed that our “mental models,” the cognitive maps we have of the world, are ill-suited to help us navigate the web of  interrelationships that make up the structure of our society.  For him, this complexity meant that policy interventions could, and usually would, have very different social effects than those imagined by policymakers. This led him to make the stark assertion that “the intuitive solutions to the problems of complex social systems” are “wrong most of the time.” In essence, anything we do to try to improve society will backfire and make things even worse."}
{"prompt":"In this respect, Forrester’s approach to the problems of American cities mirrored the “benign neglect” outlook of influential Nixon adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan and the rest of the administration. Indeed, Moynihan was an enthusiastic proponent of Forrester’s work and recommended Urban Dynamics to his fellow White House officials. Forrester’s arguments enabled the Nixon Administration to claim that its plans to slash programs created to help the urban poor and people of color would actually, counterintuitively, help these people.","completion":"Forrester’s central claim about complexity wasn’t a new one; it has a long history on the political right. In a 1991 book, Rhetoric of Reaction, the development economist and economic historian Albert O. Hirschman identified this style of argument as an example of what he called the “perversity thesis.” This kind of attack, which Hirschman traced back to Edmund Burke’s writings on the French Revolution, amounts to a kind of concern trolling. Using this rhetorical tactic, the conservative speaker can claim that they share your social goal, but simultaneously argue that the means you are using to achieve it will only make matters worse. When commentators claim “no-platforming will only make more Nazis,” that welfare programs lock recipients into a “cycle of dependency,” or that economic planning will lead a society down a “road to serfdom,” they’re making this kind of perversity argument."}
{"prompt":"What Forrester did was give the perversity thesis a patina of scientific and computational respectability. Hirschman himself makes specific reference to Urban Dynamics and argues that the “special, sophisticated attire” of Forrester’s models helped reintroduce this kind of argument “into polite company.” In the nearly fifty years since it has come out, Forrester’s “counterintuitive” style of thinking has become the default way of analyzing policy for mainstream wonks. For many, “counterintuitivity” is the new intuition.","completion":"Expert knowledge, of course, has an important place in democratic deliberation, but it can also cut people out of the policy process, dampen the urgency of moral claims, and program a sense of powerlessness into our public discourse. Appeals to a social system’s “complexity” and the potential for “perverse outcomes” can be enough to sink transformative social programs that are still on the drawing board. This might not matter in the context of a virtual environment like that of  Urban Dynamics or SimCity, but we have decades of real-world evidence that demonstrates the disastrous costs of the “counterintuitive” anti-welfare agenda. Straightforward solutions to poverty and economic misery—redistribution and  the provision of public services—have both empirical backing and moral force. Maybe it’s time we start listening to our intuition again."}
{"prompt":"They say you can’t go back, but I have backups of every computer that I’ve owned since I was thirteen years old. That was the year I built my first gaming desktop. Each folder is both a time capsule and a path not taken. A folder of images 500 pixels wide and 100 pixels tall recalls the time I taught myself Adobe Photoshop in middle school because I wanted to make cool banner images for my signature on Pokémon forums. A few more clicks and I am staring at a mound of receipts for computer hardware purchases, emulated versions of games that came out years before I could even type, and gigabytes of video game soundtracks.","completion":"Then there is the graveyard of compressed video recordings from when I used to play competitive Super Smash Bros. Most are of me and my friends (local or online). Others capture legendary fights from national tournaments like Major League Gaming (MLG), Apex, or Evo, or from local tournaments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, near where I lived.  Getting paid to play video games? It was the coolest job in the world and I wanted in."}
{"prompt":"From Pac-Man to eSports My gaming genealogy isn’t so unusual. In countless family photos, I am holding a Game Boy. My cartridges of Pokemon, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Castlevania, Sonic, and Kirby were constant childhood companions. I was nine when I swore to never return to Europe after losing my Game Boy and a bunch of games on a tour bus in Paris.","completion":"Aside from occasional multiplayer rounds on GoldenEye 007 with my brother, being a “gamer” (as I understood it then) was a solitary activity. This changed around the time I wrote my parents a two-page single-spaced letter on why they should pay $5 a month to let me have a premium RuneScape account. We had just moved (again) and my new friends in fifth grade all played together every day after school. Playing games was something I had always loved, but the stakes were higher now that I had a new social scene to fit into.  Many game scholars would argue that competitive video gaming—or “eSports,” as it’s often called today—has been around since the beginning of video games. In the 1980s, players used to jockey for the highest score on arcade games like Pac-Man. In the 1990s, local tournaments were organized for sports, racing, and fighting games. By the end of the decade, these had become big events, often backed by corporate sponsors.  The 2000s brought the growing popularity of eSports to new heights with major annual tournaments like MLG. And eSports became a global phenomenon, with many competitive communities throughout Europe and Asia. South Korea in particular emerged as an epicenter: in 2000, the South Korean government created the Korean e-Sports Association to regulate and encourage the industry."}
{"prompt":"The most popular genres for eSports are first-person shooters, real-time strategy, fighting games, and online multiplayer battle-arena games. Each genre has its own social rules and competitive culture, and most importantly, its own fan community. In fact, professional gaming is as much about the community as it is about the matches themselves. Every tournament is discussed, every replay is dissected, and every top player has a loyal following.  Game development companies largely see these communities as a lucrative target audience, and have invested heavily in eSports in order to market their titles. Elite players today can walk away with hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) from competitions, not to mention thousands of dollars in secondary streams of revenue from product sponsorships and live-streaming. The big money flowing in from game companies has further accelerated the growth of eSports: as of 2018, ESPN counts about fifty varsity collegiate eSports programs in North America, not to mention the many more teams associated with student clubs and independent college tournaments.  (Almost) Going Pro Super Smash Bros. is a series of fighting games that feature characters from throughout the Nintendo universe. The first title, Super Smash Bros.,  was released in 1999 for the Nintendo 64. While the original game didn’t have much of a professional scene in North America, its Nintendo GameCube successor Super Smash Bros. Melee (2001) quickly became a premier title in the competitive gaming circuit.  Subsequent titles in the series include Super Smash Bros. Brawl (2008) for the Nintendo Wii, Super Smash Bros. 4 (2014) for the Wii U and 3DS, and Super Smash Bros. Ultimate for the Nintendo Switch (2018). The exact mechanics differ, but the goal is to damage your opponent enough to knock them off the stage into the blast zones at the edges of the map. Some competitive players find Melee to be most “serious” option due to its fast-paced gameplay and complex on-hit interactions. Over the years, the game’s developers—under the direction of series creator Masahiro Sakurai—have gone back and forth on mechanics that lend themselves well to competitive play.","completion":"I never actually owned a GameCube, but I racked up hours and hours at friends’ homes playing Super Smash Bros. Melee in my pre-teen years. A fighting game that pitted all of my favorite Nintendo characters against one another had an appeal like no other. From 2004 to 2008, the golden age of the Super Smash Bros. Melee competitive scene was well underway. Players a decade or so older than me were competing at world-class tournaments, and finding fame and fortune with professional sponsorships.  I followed all of this closely through message boards, YouTube videos, and word of mouth from friends who were equally invested in what I saw as the holy grail of nerd culture. The allure was powerful: imagine being talked about by teens that lived on the other side of the country!  With the release of Super Smash Bros. Brawl in 2008, I decided to jump headfirst into world of competitive gaming. I joined AllisBrawl.com (AiB), a message board that served as a hub for competitive Super Smash Bros. Brawl players. The site encouraged players not only to socialize but to host tournaments using an application called Tio Tournament Organizer, designed by AiB founder “Nealdt.” The appeal was simple: if you used Tio, the results of your tournament would be uploaded to AiB for everyone to see.  The AiB leaderboards were a way to keep track of the top players in the competitive scene. At the height of the site’s popularity, from 2008 to 2012, it was the place to be if you were a serious Super Smash Bros. Brawl player. I joined AiB as someone who was initially too young to make the short journey to the regional tournaments in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I figured that I would learn as much about the scene as I could through the online community, at least until I was a little older."}
{"prompt":"But as I entered high school and started to attend a few local events, I realized that the amount of effort required to be an elite competitor was far more than I was willing to expend. I had made a very small amount of money, but I knew I was going to be on the upper end of average for a competitive player going forward.  To reach the top of even the regional leaderboards would have taken hundreds of hours of practice with no guarantee that any money invested would be fully recouped. Yet as I grew more ambivalent about eSports success, AiB and the competitive community around Super Smash Bros. was becoming more popular than ever. Looking for a way to stay involved, I became a moderator of AiB, as well as a writer for the site’s eSports journalism arm. Almost overnight, I belonged to a small team overseeing a monthly active user base that, at its peak, hit just under 100,000 people.   Choose Your Character Being an aspiring teenage professional gamer meant many hours after school and on weekends practicing technique, losing repeatedly to better players, and spending as much time as possible keeping up with the “metagame”—popular competitive strategies that dictate gameplay. Being a community moderator meant managing users’ expectations, developing complex procedures for dispute resolution, and coordinating content with other staffers on a weekly or sometimes daily basis. I may have been a mediocre competitive gamer, but I was an excellent moderator.  In the years that followed, I wrote dozens of articles about tournaments, interviewed rising stars, and led coverage of the often-overlooked women and LGBTQ players. It was my first experience occupying a position of power in an online community. It was also my first experience being out as a queer person online, and I did my best to promote others who gamed from the margins.  Being a community moderator for a deeply engaged fandom is hard work. No one teaches you how to advocate for yourself while you’re trying to resolve yet another complicated interpersonal dispute. If you ban someone, will they harass you in other online spaces? Was it worth pointing out that casual homophobia or misogyny wasn’t “funny” to everyone else? It should come as no surprise that these problems are exacerbated when you are both a volunteer and a teenager.","completion":"The most difficult parts of community moderation often came from small groups of toxic users and burdensome administrative obligations. After just a few years, I learned how responsibility can eat away at pleasure. While I loved the community that had seen me grow up, I started to distance myself from the site as I neared the end of high school.  These days AiB is no longer accessible and it’s unclear if anyone aside from the co-founders has a complete copy of the website’s archive. While I have some screenshots, draft articles, and chat room logs, a major part of my teen years is nothing more than a pixelated ghost.  I remain an eSports fan, and have been pleased to see increasing mainstream attention for the scene. At the same time, I find myself thinking about how young people today are dealing with the issues that I did. Would you drop out of school to play competitively? What does life look like after you retire from competitive gaming? How do you deal with harassment and abuse in your community? What are you willing to give up? What happens when play becomes work and work feels like play? 1."}
{"prompt":"The Chinese internet is coming for you. Or so we often hear. “China’s internal internet repression is world-famous,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders announced in 2018, condemning China’s “Orwellian nonsense” and “efforts to export its censorship and political correctness to Americans and the rest of the free world.” “A cold war is being waged across the world’s most advanced industries,” the New York Times declared the same year. Headline writers can rarely resist a martial metaphor. The battle for digital supremacy. The coming tech war. The AI arms race. When China rules the web.  Of course, there’s some truth to these stories. The internet has created menacing new opportunities for the Chinese surveillance state. Some Chinese tech firms have become hugely successful. The Chinese government is investing heavily in AI research. Americans should be thinking about and responding to these changes.","completion":"Yet the us versus them, winner takes all rhetoric raises as many questions as it answers. “We” who? And “all” of what, exactly? These claims of a zero-sum “cold war” share a common problem: they start from the American perspective. They may reflect some Chinese realities but they are also, in many ways, projections of American desires and American fears.  As a result, they provide only partial views of Chinese tech. Indeed, much of the American media coverage perpetuates centuries-old stereotypes even as they update them for a new era.  Twenty-first-century Orientalism reduces China—home to one in five humans on the planet—to a dreamscape of digital opium dens, where all-powerful despots demand tribute from foreigners as the price of trade, and new Shangri-las hoard the secrets of AI supremacy. Like all projections, these stories ultimately reveal less about their purported subject than about the people who tell them. How many hot takes on Chinese techno-dystopia have surveyed surveillance technology and unaccountable data collection as if the United States did not also need to grapple with these phenomena? This issue aims to push back against these prevailing clichés by centering on Chinese perspectives. Rather than Will China Beat Us at AI—whatever any word in that sentence besides “will” means—we set out to ask more fundamental questions. How have digital technologies developed in China since the 1980s? Who are the winners and losers? What are some likely futures? There are still, remarkably, few widely agreed-upon answers."}
{"prompt":"Leave the New Cold War framework to politicos and CEOs looking to score points in Washington. We set ourselves the task of taking Chinese tech on its own terms. In order to do so, we sought out voices, both within and beyond Chinese borders, who are committed to pushing aside the commonplaces that clutter the headlines. The picture they paint isn’t simple. It’s full of tensions, complexities, and contradictions. Indeed, it suggests that these may be the very source of the dynamism that has driven the most important geopolitical shifts of the twenty-first century.","completion":"2. Once upon a time, the Chinese Communist Party needed to play catch up. The isolation of the country under Mao Zedong had left it far behind. Deng Xiaoping, the preeminent leader who oversaw pro-market reforms after 1978, put technology at the heart of his vision for modernizing China. (Deng called it, in Marxist parlance, “a primary productive force.”) Throughout the 1980s, as they watched the emergence of new information technologies around the world, Chinese politicians called on the people to race ahead to match the West—stressing the importance of scientists and business leaders in particular. The original Apple Macintosh was released in January 1984; in November of that year, an engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences named Liu Chuanzhi founded the company that would become known as Lenovo. Lenovo would grow into one of the world’s biggest makers of personal computers, acquiring IBM’s personal computer business in 2005."}
{"prompt":"The sense of urgency that Party leadership expressed in the 1980s laid the foundations for the rise of the internet in the 1990s. In 1995, China had 40,000 internet users; by 2000, there were 22.5 million. In 1999, Alibaba was founded, and the Chinese internet’s first blockbuster app—the hugely popular QQ—appeared.  American elites viewed these developments as waystations on the inevitable path of post-Cold War liberalization. Many of them believed that the Chinese Communist Party, by embracing the internet, would inadvertently set in motion a process of political opening. Signing a bill into law that permanently normalized trade relations with China in 2000, Bill Clinton predicted that “in the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem.” Liberty would be lucrative too: American tech companies expected to make a fortune by dominating the Chinese market.","completion":"Both programs stalled, however: ERROR_ PATH_ NOT_ FOUND. Liberalization by modem didn’t materialize. Instead, the Chinese government developed a sophisticated system for controlling and censoring the country’s digital sphere. And while some American tech companies did make plenty of money in the Chinese market, they hardly dominated it. Instead, many of them ended up like eBay, which was outmatched by Chinese rival Taobao and left grumbling about the challenges of business inside the “Great Firewall.” Or Uber, which sold its remaining China business to competitor Didi Chuxing before abandoning the Chinese market in 2016.  Today, travelers from China to the United States often report feeling as if they have gone backwards in time. Yet what this sensation may really mean is that the developmental metaphor—history as staggered race on a single course—was wrong to begin with. For years, Americans disparaged Chinese tech, like Chinese goods, as knock-offs, shanzhai. But the Chinese internet is not a copy of the American internet. It’s a whole new world."}
{"prompt":"3. WeChat is a messaging and social media app. You can send direct messages to another user, or share photos and GIFs with groups of thousands—all of which is subject to state censorship. It’s also an e-commerce app. You can order anything from a new computer to an antique vase to your office, factory, farm, or home, and when it arrives you can pay by scanning a QR code. Your purchase can be as small as a dumpling or as large as your monthly rent. Passengers traveling over two hundred miles per hour on the gaotie, or high-speed train, can use DianPing (the “Chinese Yelp”) to find the best-rated Sichuanese restaurant in an upcoming city, then place an order on Meituan, the food delivery service—all without leaving WeChat. At the train’s next stop, a deliveryman in a yellow shirt will come to their seat bearing Chongqing chicken.","completion":"For many users, WeChat is the Chinese internet. By 2018, WeChat had nearly one billion monthly active users. But there isn’t one single story of the Chinese internet—or one “Chinese internet,” even if the phrase can be a useful shorthand.  Today, to the visitor arriving in a major city like Shanghai or Shenzhen, it’s clear that digital technologies are central to everyday life. The urbanized coast is where investment and infrastructure have been densest, and over the past thirty years, they have fostered high rates of technological adaptation and entrepreneurial activity. Yet the cities aren’t the whole story. Indeed, many of the most vibrant areas of online activity today are in less privileged communities that made the leap directly from offline to mobile.  When Ren Qingsheng first started selling homemade costumes on Taobao in 2010, he kept his computer in the family kitchen of his small home in the Shandong countryside. He used his daughter’s pinyin textbook to translate characters into letters he could type on the keyboard. A few years later, his small business grew large enough to hire several workers, and he was sending bulk orders of costumes to buyers from Taiwan to Thailand. By 2017, his revenues exceeded 10 million yuan, or nearly $1.5 million per year. But even this impressive level of success only put him in the top ten of the most successful entrepreneurs in his village.  Rural e-commerce gurus like Ren aren’t the only “winners” of the Chinese internet, of course. It has democratized certain kinds of cultural and economic participation across the country. Consider the rural grannies who produce riotous dance videos that go viral on TikTok: video platforms help bridge the digital divide by reducing the literacy barrier that might formerly have excluded such users.  But the biggest winners are the people at the top of the tech boom. The decisions of government officials crafting industrial policy or venture capitalists pouring millions of renminbi into risky startups have produced a handful of immensely wealth tech titans in an already unequal society. Yet these decisions haven’t pulled apart China’s so-called “socialist market economy,” as the national constitution officially calls it. Rather, they have helped entrench that mixed system."}
{"prompt":"Prominent tech investors like Eric X. Li have long doubled as defenders of the Communist Party. Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Party membership came to widespread attention when he was honored by the Chinese government as a “reform pioneer” in 2018. The figures who preside over China’s tech boom aren’t all Party members. But they have all found a way to coexist with the Party-state—even if only uneasily, and perhaps temporarily.  This proximity has strongly shaped how Chinese tech has developed. The app economy is built around real-name registration, proof of residence, and so on—requirements that enable state agencies to keep a close eye on users. The most-downloaded app of early 2019 is an ideology instruction program called “Study Xi, Strong Nation,” which Party members and civil servants are required to use to ensure their engagement with Xi Jinping’s thoughts and teachings. If the Chinese internet has enabled new forms of participation, it has also facilitated the detection and elimination of other forms of participation that the Party deems intolerable.  The Party-state has decimated the nascent feminist movement and undercut the work of criminal defense lawyers, journalists, and HIV/AIDS activists. The big, nationwide movements get the most attention, but crackdowns extend to localities far from Beijing. In January 2019, the Guangdong provincial public security bureau fined a thirty-year-old man 1000 renminbi for downloading and installing a proxy server on his phone.  The site of the most brutal and heartbreaking application of digital surveillance technologies within China’s borders is farthest from the capital, in the western region of Xinjiang. Digitally enhanced monitoring and gulag-style reeducation camps housing as many as one million detainees have devastated Uyghur communities. And there are indications that the technologies and techniques perfected in Xinjiang are designed for export—not only to other parts of China, but also to other countries around the world. In this way, the geography of Chinese technology can move swiftly from the local to the global and back again. These oscillations are one more reason why it is imperative for everyone, not just China experts, to pay attention.","completion":"4. As Chinese-built telecommunications infrastructure breaks ground around the world, as Chinese companies buy American apps like Grindr and offer cloud-computing services from Indonesia to Canada, and as WePay and Alipay become accepted everywhere from duty-free shops in European airports to New York City taxi cabs, it has become more difficult to say where the “Chinese internet” begins and ends. The writers in this issue travel across national borders, socioeconomic divides, and possible futures, pursuing glimpses not only of what the Chinese internet is but where it is—and where it may go from here."}
{"prompt":"When it comes to China, it feels difficult to make predictions. This may be one reason why so many observers seem keen to revive familiar paradigms, like the New Cold War. Instead of trying to breathe life into old ideas, however, we should be developing new ones.  This requires a bit of creativity. When everyday life takes on the feeling of unreality, seeking out the frontiers of imagination takes on a practical importance. China is one of those frontiers of imagination, and its technological innovations can sometimes feel like real-life speculative fiction.  Fortunately, Chinese writers are taking technological change head on, exploring the urgent problems of inequality, environmental degradation, and social discontent. Contributors to this issue represent some of the leading figures in Chinese science fiction, and their speculations blur the lines between future and fantasy—even as some of them would protest that what they are describing is not essentially Chinese, but universal. Look at South America. Look at South Africa. Not only will you find Chinese power in these places, you will find patterns driven by the dynamics of global capitalism. China may represent an extreme, but the differences are often differences of degree.  Sometimes, the most startling experiences for an American on the Chinese internet occur when you notice the familiarity of certain elements in an estranged form. Take Peppa Pig: you might see this adorable figure from a popular children’s cartoon recast as a badass smoking a cigarette. Or you might stumble on Pepe, icon of the American alt-right—known in Chinese as beishang wa, 悲伤蛙, or “sadness frog”—restored to his original slacker millennial identity, without the overtones of white supremacy that he has acquired in the US over the past few years.  Politicians and pundits in the United States will doubtlessly continue to craft grand narratives about the Chinese internet. Some will be accurate. Others will be full of projection—nightmares filled with monsters that Americans fear they may be creating at home, or the panic attacks of a superpower failing to invest in education and research. We hope this issue is not just an occasion to clarify or dispel myths and to elucidate complex realities, but also to underscore that the questions raised by Chinese tech hit uncomfortably close to home.","completion":"In the late 1990s, the Chinese government undertook two initiatives that would tie the country more closely to the rest of the world. It opened internet access to significant numbers of Chinese people, and it forged a path for China to join the World Trade Organization (WTO).  China was coming out of a long period of relative isolation. The country still bore the marks of the destructive Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. A period of opening in the 1980s was capped by widespread demands for political reform and deadly repression at Tiananmen Square—violence that cooled ties between the Chinese Communist Party and foreign governments.  But in the 1990s, Chinese leaders grew determined to deepen their country’s integration with the world. They saw the value in greater access to global markets and technologies like the internet, even at the cost of sacrificing a degree of authority. If the People’s Republic was to survive and flourish, they believed, it could no longer stand apart."}
{"prompt":"US thinkers generally welcomed these moves, expecting them to erode the power of the Chinese Communist Party. In March 2000, after the United States reached a deal with China that would lead to WTO accession, President Bill Clinton said Chinese leaders “realize that if they open China's markets to global competition, they risk unleashing forces beyond their control… But they also know that, without competition from the outside, China will not be able to attract the investment necessary to build a modern, successful economy.” American officials believed that greater integration with global markets had the potential to push China toward political liberalization.","completion":"They believed that the internet would have a similar effect. In the same March 2000 speech, Clinton famously quipped that trying to crack down on the internet was “like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” “We know how much the internet has changed America, and we are already an open society,” Clinton observed. “Imagine how much it could change China.”   China, of course, was not an open society, and its government would go on to develop powerful, carefully calibrated methods to control the way the internet operated there. Over the past twenty years, Chinese officials have been remarkably successful in reaping the economic benefits of both the internet and global markets—with significant costs to workers and the environment—while managing the threats to domestic stability and continued Communist Party rule.  More recently, however, the Chinese government has moved to assert even greater control. Since Xi Jinping’s ascendency to the Communist Party leadership in 2012, it has become clear that Chinese leaders perceive some forms of international economic entanglement as risks to the political system, and that they see closer state supervision of the internet as essential to preserving their power.  Despite American idealism about the liberating power of free trade, free markets, and the internet’s open architecture, neither joining the WTO nor getting online created a free society in China. It’s easy to understand why. China’s government, market, and society were not passive recipients of influence from external rules and principles. Instead, they actively adapted the structures of international connectivity to serve their own purposes. Life in China is indelibly transformed by the links forged in the late 1990s, but not in the ways that Americans observers expected."}
{"prompt":"When looking back on China’s life with the internet, five distinct eras emerge: The Late 1990s: Booting Up In the late 1990s, the Chinese internet grows fast. Starting from a small user base centered around major universities and research institutions, it rapidly becomes popular among a population that skews urban, well-off, well-educated, and young.  Mid-1995 – There are 40,000 internet users in China, up from only 3,000 earlier that year.","completion":"1997 – NetEase is founded. One of China’s foundational internet companies, it provides games, news, communications, and a good old-fashioned internet portal. Feb 1999 – Tencent QQ is released. A simple, lightweight chat app adopted widely by individuals and businesses. Users are identified by simple numbers that are still widely used in advertisements."}
{"prompt":"April 1999 – Alibaba is founded. A business-to-business e-commerce company that develops into a consumer and financial goliath. The Early 2000s: Awaiting Scale In the early 2000s, Chinese tech companies, especially Alibaba, lay the foundations for the pervasive urban e-commerce environment that would emerge fifteen years later. They’re waiting for one thing: scale. State control is relatively light and lags innovation, although online monitoring and censorship are already underway.","completion":"January 2000 – Baidu is founded. China’s top search engine, and now a company with great AI ambitions. March 2000 – Bill Clinton thinks trying to crack down on the internet is like “trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” But the internet in China develops within the context of a political regime finding mechanisms to ensure continued control—not a government sleepwalking into a digitally driven revolution."}
{"prompt":"December 2000 – There are 22.5 million internet users in China. May 2003 – Alibaba launches Taobao, bringing everyday online shopping to consumers and connecting small shops to a broader market. Alibaba, with its intense focus on China’s specific needs, out-competes eBay, which eventually leaves the Chinese market.","completion":"2003 – Severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. The spread of SARS news online, combined with the government’s efforts to cover up the severity of the outbreak, demonstrated the ability of internet and mobile phone networks to break the propaganda authorities’ hold on a major story. 2004 – Alipay launches, facilitating online payments. By holding payment in escrow until a buyer is satisfied with the product, Alipay gives buyers confidence in online platforms."}
{"prompt":"2004 – Journalist Shi Tao is arrested for leaking state secrets after Yahoo gives data to Chinese authorities that link him to an email account. The Late 2000s: Cat and Mouse Era In the late 2000s, China’s online censorship apparatus becomes more sophisticated. Censors suppress search results, block entire websites or specific pages within them, or give users a “connection reset” error when a restricted keyword appears in a URL.  At the same time, patriotic fervor around the Olympics and related controversies in 2008, as well as a thriving culture of euphemisms and ironic references, signal the explosion of China’s digital public sphere. It appears that, just maybe, the scale and dynamism of the internet could prove too hard for the government to control.","completion":"2005 — Yahoo China turns over control of its services to Alibaba after middling market performance and high political costs abroad after the Shi Tao case in 2004. December 2005 —  There are 111 million internet users in China. 2008 —  Major international platforms, especially YouTube, are blocked for a few hours or days at a time, and then unblocked. The government shuts down access when it deems necessary—but not permanently."}
{"prompt":"8/8/08 —  The 2008 Olympics in Beijing opens at 8:08 p.m. on August 8, 2008, in a country where the number eight is considered lucky. When protests against Chinese practices in Tibet and elsewhere greet the Olympic Torch Relay around the world, nationalism surges online around slogans like “Red Heart China,” signaling both love of country and communist red.","completion":"2009 – Users are blocked from using profanity or discussing politically sensitive topics online, so they use clever homophones to circumvent censorship. One popular homophone is “grass-mud-horse” (草泥马 cǎonímǎ), which sounds like  “fuck your mother“ (肏你妈 càonǐmā).   The coinage is popularized in a viral video that uses alpacas to illustrate the invented grass-mud-horse, and pictures of alpacas become a symbolic f-you to government censors."}
{"prompt":"July 2009 – Internet access is shut down in Xinjiang for months following violence in the region. August 2009 – Sina Weibo launches. Weibo means “microblog,” and the site offers a Twitter-like service for sharing short posts with followers.  The Early 2010s: Nailing Jell-O to the Wall Opening with the exuberance of Sina Weibo’s heyday and ending with the consolidation of internet authorities in the Cyberspace Administration of China, the early 2010s marks a transition from the free-wheeling aughts to the present era of tight control. As Sina Weibo rises in prominence, enabling millions of people to reach enormous audiences quickly, business titans and individual bloggers alike criticize the government. This dynamic chills precipitously after Chinese authorities crack down on the so-called “Big Vs”—verified accounts with large followings.  Meanwhile, Chinese officials are increasingly aware of the security risks posed by the internet after the eruption of the Arab Spring in 2011 and Edward Snowden’s 2013 revelations of US spying practices. Through technical means, as well as by creating an atmosphere of fear among the most influential online voices, the Chinese government nails Jell-O to the wall.  January 2010 – Google shuts down its mainland China search engine, which had controversially implemented Chinese government censorship orders. Google’s market share was never large, but its products had a devoted following.","completion":"December 2010 – There are 547 million internet users in China. January 2011 – Tencent WeChat launches. WeChat is a robust chat platform offering text, voice, and video, from the same company behind the ubiquitous QQ chat app. 2010–2011 – Arab Spring. A series of so-called “Twitter revolutions” unleash instability in several authoritarian states. For Chinese authorities, these events underline the risk of unfettered online communication.  November 2012 – Xi Jinping becomes General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party."}
{"prompt":"March 2013 – Xi Jinping becomes President of China. June 2013 – Edward Snowden leaks files on US spying, revealing US intelligence capabilities to Chinese officials and people around the world. 2013 – Crackdown on the Big Vs. The golden age of Sina Weibo ends as authorities target several prominent users with strong-arm tactics.  2014 – The Cyberspace Administration of China is founded, reflecting the administrative challenge of coordinating internet regulation among authorities focused on high-tech development, public security, and propaganda.    Late 2010s: China’s Own Innovations By the late 2010s, more than half of the population is using the internet, predominantly through mobile phones. But this means that the other half still aren’t online—a divide that is increasingly relevant as mobile apps become essential tools for personal finance, commerce, and transportation.","completion":"There is no significant loosening of government controls over speech and political mobilization since 2013. At the same time, services driven by mobile technologies and machine learning algorithms are proliferating. Tech companies handle so many types of transactions that their systems have reordered the streetscape, where workers move goods bought and sold online and people hop on and off of shared bikes. Despite China’s particularities and Communist Party censorship and controls, some Chinese internet innovations go big abroad—including those dockless shared bikes now seen around the world, pioneered by Chinese companies like Mobike and Ofo."}
{"prompt":"December 2015 – There are 688 million internet users in China. January 2017 – WeChat introduces mini-programs, which run inside the app and allow users to interact with other services. By the next year, mini-programs will number more than 1 million. June 2017 – China’s Cybersecurity Law goes into effect, laying the groundwork for one of the world’s most comprehensive internet regulatory regimes.","completion":"July 2017 – The New Generation Artificial Intelligence Development Plan is released, drawing international attention for its ambitions to make China a world-leading AI developer by 2030.  December 2017 – Official statistics report that 527 million Chinese use mobile payments, and the top services—AliPay and WeChat Pay—report rapid user and volume growth."}
{"prompt":"January 2018 – Ant Financial, an affiliate of Alibaba, is fined and publicly apologizes for an app that pre-checks the opt-in box for its Sesame Credit service, which provides credit scores. Greater public awareness of the risks around personal data begins to take hold. March 2018 – The main interagency regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China, gains greater political clout when its bureaucratic parent organization is upgraded.","completion":"April 2018 – As the US government escalates its economic confrontation with China, Xi Jinping emphasizes the need for “indigenous innovation” in “core technologies” such as semiconductors, especially in the face of US threats to block the flow of crucial components to Chinese telecommunications giant ZTE."}
{"prompt":"Early 2019 — The U.S. government, concerned about China-based companies such as Huawei and ZTE growing their presence in global IT infrastructure, charges Huawei with sanctions and intellectual property violations while urging friendly governments to block the company's products from next-generation 5G wireless networks.","completion":"Early 2020s and Beyond: What’s Next? Back in the 1990s, both Chinese officials concerned about retaining control and American observers hoping for liberalization believed that the internet would change China. Now that the fourth and fifth eras of China’s internet development have cultivated a largely separate online ecosystem, the question becomes whether China will change the rest of the world."}
{"prompt":"Efforts by Chinese companies to sell their technology overseas mean that products designed for China’s authoritarian context could form the backbone of connectivity in a wide range of societies. Assuming that China’s politics will travel with its machines, however, is a lot like assuming that US democracy would travel with the internet. Beware of confident predictions.","completion":"The coming years will present a profusion of automated and autonomous technologies, the deep integration of networks into physical space, and profound challenges surrounding privacy and accountability. How China’s state and society meet this moment will shape not only China’s future, but the rest of the world’s."}
{"prompt":"This summer I spent a month in Beijing. I’d last lived in China in 2016, and I was relieved to find my favorite noodle shops in their usual niches. But this time round, navigating the city felt inexplicably different. The cabs I tried to hail passed me by. On the subway, other riders jostled past me, swiping their phones at the turnstiles as I fumbled with my ticket. When I tried to sneak into the cafeteria in Renmin University for a cheap lunch, clutching my grubby backpack, I made it past the guards only to be stopped at the cash register—apart from student cards, the only form of payment accepted was Alipay.  It gradually dawned on me that that was why Beijing felt like a different city from the one I knew: in the two years since I’d left, the whole city had switched over to mobile payments on China-specific platforms to which I, a foreigner, had no access. These days in Beijing, the green and blue logos of mobile payment providers WeChat Pay and Alipay appear everywhere, from breakfast stalls to five-star hotels.  Just about every foreigner who’s visited China in the last ten years comments on the dizzying speed at which physical infrastructure is built. When I first moved to Shanghai in 2012, I worked in the city’s financial district, home to a skyscraper nicknamed the “bottle opener”: according to Wikipedia, it’s the world’s tallest building with a hole in it. But these days, China’s part in the race to build the world’s tallest building appears to be waning. China’s much-vaunted speed in infrastructure building has more recently been directed at the digital rather than the physical world.  This year alone, Chinese tech companies such as the social e-commerce company Pinduoduo and food delivery platform Meituan Dianping raised billions in IPOs on international markets. Chinese online spending during “Singles Day,” a one-day online sale event in November, far exceeded American spending over the Black Friday and Cyber Monday weekend.","completion":"Until just a few years ago, before smartphone purchases were ubiquitous, cash was king in China. Online purchases were generally made using offline payments, in part because credit cards have never been widely used. To buy a plane ticket via the internet five years ago, you could pay by following a link to your bank account, but that was a cumbersome process supported by a relatively small number of banks. If you didn’t have an account with the right bank, a courier would bring you the physical ticket the same day so you could pay for it with a wad of cash.  These days, cash has been almost entirely replaced by mobile payments in transactions both online and offline. The only accessory nearly as important as a smartphone is a portable charger: at most cafes and restaurants in big cities, you can rent a charger for several cents to fire up a phone that’s low on juice. Startups that supply these chargers, such as Laidian and Xiaodian, are themselves worth tens of millions of dollars."}
{"prompt":"The Everywhere Store The two biggest mobile payment providers, WeChat Pay and Alipay, belong to tech giants Tencent Holdings and Ant Financial. WeChat Pay is fully integrated into WeChat, the dominant Chinese app for messaging, social media, as well as just about everything—a Twitter, WhatsApp, Google Maps, Venmo, and Yelp rolled into one. Alipay started life as an escrow service for transactions on the e-commerce platform Alibaba in 2004 and began offering mobile payments in 2008, though uptake of the app has been fastest over the past five years.  WeChat Pay’s big break came in 2014: as a promotional feature for the Lunar New Year, China’s biggest holiday, users were prompted to send digital “red packets”—the cash gifts customary at the new year—to friends and family on WeChat. Would-be recipients had to sign up for WeChat Pay; tens of millions did. Before long, WeChat was a serious player in the mobile payments market. Between 2015 and 2016, mobile payments in China quadrupled; today, more than 80% of Chinese smartphone users have used their phone to make a payment.","completion":"With ubiquitous mobile payments, anything from a cup of soy milk to a pricey imported blouse can be bought using your phone. American consumers are used to a minimum amount below which smaller shops may not accept a credit card: with mobile payments, no charge is too minor, as evidenced by the enterprising homeless people who hold up QR codes instead of begging bowls.  On WeChat, you can make plans to meet a friend for dinner, look up directions to the restaurant, and pay the bill, all on the same app. Passengers on high-speed trains can pre-order meals to be delivered to their seats at the next station, and a handful of KFC restaurants in major cities are trialing mobile payment by facial recognition. The combination of convenient mobile payments and cheap courier services means that nearly any of the vast array of things made in China can be bought directly from their producers by urban consumers."}
{"prompt":"Over the past decade, China has systematically blackballed foreign apps. Didi Chuxing bought Uber’s China operations in 2016; Google, Facebook, and other US-based platforms have long been banned (though Google is reportedly planning a comeback). But with the growing ubiquity of mobile payments in daily life, China may also be excluding foreign users from its domestic platforms. Thus far, the major payment apps haven’t made significant efforts to reach potential users who are not holders of Chinese bank accounts, such as the tens of millions of foreign tourists who visit China each year, or the mostly rural domestic unbanked population.  For tourists, accessing the mobile system is prohibitively difficult: expats can generally do so by opening a domestic bank account with a valid proof of residence. Although both of the major payment apps say they have started integrating foreign credit cards, users report that the integration hardly ever works. China has long wooed foreign tourists, so at first glance this lacuna may seem puzzling: why make it more difficult for tourists to part with their money? The answer has little to do with technological limitations. Mobile technology is increasingly serving as the vehicle for a sophisticated national surveillance system that’s deeply intertwined with all kinds of necessary everyday transactions. If your phone knows where you got out of a cab and with whom you split the bill for lunch, then the Chinese government knows too.  Both WeChat and Alipay already require users to sign up using their legal names. An ambitious move to enable WeChat to function as a legally valid form of identification is underway. Chinese authorities are experimenting with all kinds of surveillance technology, from closed-circuit cameras trained on jaywalkers to facial-recognition glasses that allow the wearer to determine a person’s identity. But in the meantime, mobile-payment providers are already collecting a wealth of data that they are legally bound to share with the government. In comparison with using this data to tighten state control, accommodating foreign users is a relatively low priority. In fact, permitting users to pay with foreign credit cards would introduce an additional element into the equation, one that would be harder for Chinese authorities to monitor and manage.","completion":"Homegrown Hegemony It wasn’t so long ago that China’s economic policies and reforms were framed in terms of opening the country up to the outside world. As recently as the 2008 Beijing Olympics, authorities were going out of their way to impress foreign visitors, opening new subway lines and offering free wireless internet access throughout the capital. But over the past few years, appealing to foreigners and accommodating their needs has become less important to Chinese authorities and domestic companies.  The shift in focus to homegrown digital innovation and mobile technology suggests a change in the government’s priorities. These days, China hardly cares to impress the outside world with its rapid pace of development and enlightened policies. Rather, it is building a new, parallel world, a digital infrastructure that will fully capture its growing domestic market while permitting an impressive degree of social control in Chinese cities."}
{"prompt":"To that end, WeChat Pay and Alipay are prioritizing the reverse form of expansion: instead of catering to foreign tourists in China, they’ve calculated that it’s more lucrative to target Chinese tourists abroad. Both companies are competing to woo foreign airports with promises of more Chinese spending. At the Helsinki airport, one of the first European airports to offer Alipay, a spokesman states that Chinese tourists spend more than any other group of travelers. At the Mountain View, California outlet of 99 Ranch, a Taiwanese-American supermarket chain, the checkout counters are festooned with banners proclaiming that the store accepts Alipay. Teddy Chow, a marketing manager, says that discounts encouraging shoppers to use Alipay and WeChat Pay are paid for by the payment providers rather than by the supermarket itself.","completion":"For Chinese users, the expansion of WeChat Pay and Alipay offers the convenience of paying abroad as if they were at home, and allows them to legally circumvent currency controls governing how much renminbi each individual can take out of the country. For Las Vegas taxicabs and London department stores, offering Chinese mobile payment options allows them to capture more tourist spending without the pesky inconveniences of foreign currency conversion. And for the authorities, WeChat Pay and Alipay will permit them to track Chinese users even when they’re in foreign countries.  Notably, even in their overseas forays, Chinese platforms show little interest in targeting foreign users; their aim is to capture Chinese spending elsewhere. Given that Chinese tech firms have far surpassed foreign analogues in the seamlessness of the experience they offer, the fact that they’re not interested in exporting this technology shows that the Chinese government’s first concern is to tighten its domestic grip on power."}
{"prompt":"Throughout my time in China, the act of paying with coins and notes while everyone else around me brandished a smartphone reminded me that tourists inevitably inhabit a world parallel to that of the locals they brush past on the street. I’d lived in China for years: never before had each daily interaction so clearly reminded me that I was an outsider. Friends constantly told me how surprised they were that it’s possible to get around Beijing in 2018 without WeChat Pay or Alipay. I, for one, was surprised that so many of them told me they didn’t carry cash or credit cards when they left home—just their smartphones.  One evening on the subway, a gangly guy tried to badger me into joining his runners’ club by scanning a QR code on his phone. He was clean-shaven and soft-spoken, doggedly making use of every last moment while a screen above us counted down the minutes and seconds until the next train would arrive. He showed me the QR code on his screen, flanked by a profile picture of a scantily clad woman who was not in running gear. Even though I figured I probably couldn’t be scammed out of money that wasn’t on my phone, I said no.","completion":"The key to understanding the relationship between politics and technology in China is a word you might be surprised to hear in the mouth of its president Xi Jinping in 2019: Leninism. For the Chinese Communist Party, Leninism is more than just a dusty inheritance from the Soviet Union. It’s a guide to governance, shaping how the Party is organized as well as how it controls Chinese society. The Australian journalist Richard McGregor, author of The Party, defined Chinese Leninism as “keep[ing] control of the commanding heights of politics through the party’s grip on the ‘three Ps’: personnel, propaganda, and the People’s Liberation Army.” But there’s another dimension to China’s contemporary Leninism: the way in which Lenin’s ideas shape the Party’s relationship to information technology and electronic surveillance."}
{"prompt":"The history of Leninism is complex, contested, and violent. In the aftermath of the October Revolution, Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders faced the outbreak of a savage civil war. To mobilize for the war effort, commissars needed unimpeded access to networks of electricity, communication, and transport to execute their central planning. Through the \"commanding heights\" of telecommunications and transport, the Bolsheviks would wield a lever of political control, a force for economic growth, and a tool for reshaping consciousness itself. Leninism became a way of governing, emphasizing the role of a vanguard party leading the revolution—the Bolsheviks, in the Russian case—and the use of dictatorship to pave the way for transforming society.","completion":"Chinese intellectuals like the poet Xu Zhimo watched Lenin’s revolution with fascination. Xu visited Moscow in 1923, writing that in the Soviet Union, \"they believe that Paradise exists, that it can be reached. But between our world and Paradise, there lies an ocean streaked with blood.\" Technology was a crucial tool in the pursuit of this “Paradise.”  In China, the promise of Leninism was equally redemptive: some saw Lenin's approach as the only means to rescue and redeem a country mired in warlordism and humiliated by predatory foreign powers. They borrowed the Soviet Union’s term for this blend of ideologies: “Marxism-Leninism,” or Makesi-Liening zhuyi. Mao Zedong, a cofounder of China's Communist Party in 1921, set an organizational template for Party control that survived decades of ideological oscillations, and endures into the digital age.  Network technologies were a top priority from the start. Often, Chinese communists did not seize the telecommunication or rail lines—in this agrarian empire, much less developed than Russia, they built them. After the revolution's victory in 1949, Mao's propagandists lay a nationwide system of wires for radio broadcasting. Some privileged peasants had a loudspeaker in their own homes. The ideas they heard through these speakers were soon known as Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.  From the start of Communist rule in China, the regime developed massive state surveillance. Mao's secret police, trained in Moscow, tapped phones, opened letters, recruited informers, and closely monitored the populace. The Party's grip on information and logistics technology facilitated its campaigns and efforts at social and economic engineering. But during the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards “bombarded the headquarters” and overthrew Party leaders throughout the bureaucracy, including the broadcasting and media centers of Beijing. For a moment, the dictatorship's grip wavered. After a rebel Red Guard faction seized control at China National Radio, Mao personally issued a statement requesting that faction splits be resolved. Rebel factions claiming to support Mao set up secret radio stations with illegal transmitters, forcing central authorities in Beijing, sensing a loss of control, to issue orders banning their use."}
{"prompt":"Mao died in 1976, but Chinese Leninism survived and continued to shape China’s approach to information technology and surveillance. (Deng Xiaoping’s market experimentation also echoed Lenin's economic loosening under the New Economic Policy.) As markets blossomed, the party-state receded from everyday decisions in citizens' lives. But China's Communist Party never ceded ultimate control over strategic networks or abandoned mass surveillance, and never negated its Leninist inheritance. Even as a fourth official ideology joined Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought—so-called “Deng Xiaoping Theory”—Leninism remained the defining form of Communist Party governance in China.  The Digital Commanding Heights With the emergence of the internet, the Party’s Leninist approach was updated, but not discarded. For this reason, the German political scientist Sebastian Heilmann has coined the phrase “digital Leninism” to describe the Xi Jinping–era approach to digital technologies. In 2014, Xi chaired a national meeting about \"propaganda and thought work\" at which he decreed, \"We must firmly grasp in our hands the leadership, control, and speech power required for ideological work; at any given moment, we cannot stand idly by, lest we make irreparable historical errors.\" The Party, Xi continued, echoing Lenin, must \"occupy the commanding heights of public opinion, and always exercise and dominate the power of speech.\"  Advanced technology has certainly given the Chinese party-state’s Leninism new outlets for its impulses. The Party’s supremacy over information technology—its access to smartphone data, its power over private tech firms—offers an immense trove of data that can be used for social control. Today, through chat searches and predictive algorithms that flag potentially rebellious discourse, China's police are picking potential protestors off trains hundreds of miles away from the city where they intend to rally.  Social media also presents new opportunities for propaganda. People's Daily has opened a channel on WeChat, China's ubiquitous chat and commerce app, which blends emojis into bromides against foreign imperialist encroachment on China's \"internet sovereignty.\" China's vast scale, spotty privacy protections, and investment in technologies like facial recognition have created the world's largest natural laboratory for honing AI—a commanding height of the twenty-first century.","completion":"This leaves us with a final irony: Leninism's adaptation to the digital age is better articulated in practice than in theory. Data, like oil, is a critical sector for political and economic power, and the Party is working to occupy its commanding heights. But Xi Jinping is drawn to theory as well; his speech on the 40th anniversary of Deng’s “reform and opening” in December 2018 devoted a lengthy section to Marxism, and he has recently become the author of a signature ideology of his own: “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era.” Yet new ideological banner phrases, and new technologies, have not altered the underlying Leninist logic of the Chinese Communist Party’s handling the relationship between politics and technology. Expect continuing updates to  Leninism 2.0."}
{"prompt":"Every year at the end of August, the Nevada desert, with its dense, corrosive, dusty air, welcomes tens of thousands of pilgrims who call themselves “burners.” They come in house cars, peculiar floats, or private jets to this “Black Rock City,” which only exists for nine days. They build hundreds of art installations, attend sexy dance parties with roaring music all night long, and take part in more than one thousand activities—from yoga and meditation to S&M and orgies to artificial intelligence (AI) exhibitions. There is no commerce here. All you can get with money is ice and coffee. Everything else must be gotten for free or shared voluntarily. A hug or a song can be payment for bread and alcohol.","completion":"This is the legendary Burning Man Festival, a utopian gathering centered around performance art. The theme for 2018 came from Isaac Asimov’s sci-fi collection I, Robot, published in 1950. The choice of the novel, which discusses the various moral issues between robot and man, seems to be responding to the current worldwide fervor for AI."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps it was this theme that attracted a large group of tech entrepreneurs and investors from China. The media has reported that Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk have all been seen in the playa of the Burning Man Festival, and these figures are revered by Chinese tech entrepreneurs as the heroes of the present era. Some participants from prior years even attributed the success of their projects to the inspirational power of Burning Man. Admittedly, this neat combination of worshipping totems while pursuing practical benefits is quintessentially Chinese.","completion":"This year, I also came here with a group of friends from all over the world and became a “virgin burner.” I had already learned about the so-called Ten Principles of Burning Man—but experiencing firsthand this miraculous feeling of order emerging from chaos proved to be remarkably different from the Chinese social experience of myriad rules and stringent controls. I had to spend several days slowly assimilating before I could savor the joy of this so-called “techno-hippie orgy.”  I couldn’t help but feel curious about those Chinese entrepreneurs and investors who came in private jets from thousands of miles away. There was an entrepreneur training camp organized by the internet giant T———, and seventy startup owners were brought over by their investor, a leading Chinese venture capital company, M———. They hired a company to outsource their experience; this company set up expensive air-conditioned space-capsule tents and prepared large amounts of food, drinking water, and alcohol. One camp even had karaoke. But in the first four days, these luxuries, which were too high-end for traditional burners, sat untouched. Those Chinese guests only arrived, belatedly, on the fourth day. I heard that the most expensive slot for this camp cost $20,000, whereas a regular ticket for the Burning Man Festival cost only $425."}
{"prompt":"Of course, this sort of privilege and consumerism, which runs against the ideals of Burning Man, can also be found among Silicon Valley elites, and have been harshly criticized. But the difference was this: the majority of these Chinese burners seemed to know little about the festival and had no intention of trying to understand and respect the Burning Man spirit. They either saw the festival as an exotic, lawless place, or as just another holiday getaway for business-related socializing. They brought certain habits with them from the outside world, and especially habits from China.","completion":"So we witnessed the following scenes: most people lay in air-conditioned tents, drinking cold beverages and fiddling with their smartphones (though there was no signal); many used their senior executive titles when they introduced themselves; some took photos of other people’s nude bodies without consent; there was verbal or physical harassment of burners of the opposite sex, often occurring in the form of “inviting” them to the orgy dome; some were unwilling to share food and even called other burners fuwuyuan, or “waiter”; others refused to take part in collective work and set up individual entrepreneur training classes in the camps; and there were also people littering and spitting everywhere.  However, there was another group of Chinese burners, mostly millennials—artists, documentary directors, feminist activists, and Burning Man enthusiasts—who tried to communicate to the rest of the Chinese burners the principles of the Burning Man Festival: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy. But they didn’t have much success."}
{"prompt":"Looking at these tech elites who represent the new era of a rising China, I felt as if I were seeing something much larger played out in miniature. And I was forcefully reminded of several recent events that have sparked heated debates in China.  Wolf Instincts On August 7, 2018, the founder and CEO of the Chinese search giant Baidu, Li Yanhong (also known as Robin Li), commented in a WeChat post about Google’s possible return to the Chinese market: “If Google decides to come back to China, we are highly confident that we will take them on again, and win again.” This comment triggered a vehement backlash online, with tens of thousands of people expressing discontent about the quality of Baidu's search results, especially about the deceptive ads that it promotes.  Two years ago, a college student named Wei Zexi died as a result of delayed treatment caused by the so-called “Putian Medical Group,” which posted misleading ads for an ineffective form of cancer immunotherapy that were then promoted in Baidu’s search results. In the two months after this incident, the stock value of Baidu plummeted by over 15 percent, but even today fake medical ads still appear in Baidu Search, waiting to swindle users once more.  On August 25, 2018, a twenty-five-year-old girl from Zhejiang was raped and killed by a car driver after she had used Didi Hitch (an app similar to Uber Pool or Lyft Line). Public opinion was especially incensed because this was the second instance of rape and murder on the Didi platform within the span of one hundred days. Didi is the biggest online car-hailing service provider in China, yet its product design, driver screening, and customer service all still had serious security vulnerabilities that had gone unresolved. Furthermore, a former executive was discovered to have said that Didi Hitch was designed to be a “sexy” social platform—“like a coffee shop, or a bar, a private car can become a half-open, half-private social space. It’s a very sexy application scenario”—which further fanned the outrage. Didi eventually decided to suspend and reorganize Didi Hitch in an effort to address the problem, but it could not stop users from uninstalling and boycotting the app anyway.","completion":"The third piece of explosive news happened during the Burning Man Festival. Liu Qiangdong, also known as Richard Liu, the founder of the online retailing giant JD.com, which has a stock market value of $310 billion, was embroiled in a sexual assault scandal following a night of lavish eating and drinking at a Japanese restaurant in Minnesota. As a result, from August 31 to September 7, 2018, JD.com’s share price plummeted from $31.30 to $26.95 and the company’s market value evaporated by 43 billion RMB. Although the scandal was unrelated to the services of the company, it nonetheless gave rise to carnivalesque visions of the lifestyles of Chinese tech entrepreneurs as well as a significant critique of this nouveau riche class.  In the past twenty years, the Chinese tech industry has experienced explosive growth. Terms from the famous sci-fi novel The Three-Body Problem like langxing (“wolf instinct,” as in The Wolf of Wall Street), yeman shengzhang (“savage growth,” as in, “That was savage, man!”) and jiangwei gongji (meaning a blow so powerful that it flattens your opponent from three dimensions to two dimensions) have become popular among Chinese tech entrepreneurs. They act as the first generation of pioneers journeying into the virtual New World. They imagine themselves as packs of wolves in the Mongolian plains who can only survive and emerge victorious through bloody combat, incessantly stalking new territory and prey.  Objectively speaking, China’s technology companies have indeed greatly promoted technological progress in China and even around the world. According to an unpublished report by the China Development Research Center, from 1995 to 2015 nearly 80 percent of Chinese R&D expenditure came from private tech companies rather than the government, a percentage significantly higher than in developed countries such as the US, the UK, and France, where it hovers around 50 to 60 percent. In most Chinese cities, cash is seldom used, since in everyday life most consumers use mobile payment apps through their smartphones. Even street peddlers selling roasted sweet potatoes hang a card with a QR code to scan for payment. Concepts like AI, virtual reality, blockchain, and genetic editing have become deeply rooted in the public consciousness through relentless coverage in the media. Chinese people love technology, trust technology, and rely on technology. While fully (or even excessively) enjoying the convenience brought by technology, they have consciously or unconsciously forgotten about its possible negative impacts, such as infringements upon personal privacy and being misled by inaccurate data."}
{"prompt":"Thousands of years ago, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi said, “One should master the external world rather than be mastered by it.” His was a sober reflection upon the power relationship between man and material civilization. But just as the traditional idea of gewu, the study of the essence of things, did not blossom into modern science, so too did the relationship between man and technology only enter Chinese people’s field of vision in the last forty years, after the start of “reform and opening up.” Important tasks like public oversight and institutional design according to the rule of law are poorly developed, and often have been done only in hasty reaction to the exponential growth of the tech industry over the last twenty years. This lack of supervision has resulted in the vast majority of Chinese tech companies falling behind with regard to the ethics of science and technology.  But Chinese tech companies are starting to pay the price for their immaturity now that the entire market has become saturated, and hundreds of millions of users have both more experience with technology and the opportunity to reflect on it. At the same time, the government is beginning to actively intervene via supervision and legislation, which has made life increasingly difficult for these companies. For instance, the stringent controls over online gaming (including restrictions on the number of regulatory approvals granted to games and limiting the time minors spend playing games) imposed in 2018 have indirectly cost Tencent a stunning 1.2 trillion HKD in market value.","completion":"Burning Better Nevertheless, tech startups are still the hottest field. In our camp at the Burning Man Festival, there were two tech entrepreneurs, from Beijing and Hangzhou respectively, who tried to find inspiration from Burning Man to help them start new journeys. One, Mr. Miao, spoke only broken English but spent the day reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. At night, he went to electronic music parties and clumsily swung his limbs around trying to dance. Every day he discovered something new. “There is a kissing booth, and everyone can kiss strangers!” The digital platform he created was about to expand overseas into the North American market, and he was trying to find some kind of cultural affinity. The other, Mr. Yang, was an engineer from the hottest Chinese short-video platform. He imagined the Burning Man Festival as a giant TED talk but was often disappointed: “Those guys aren’t discussing Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat—they just literally believe the Earth is one giant flat board!” Although Mr. Miao and Mr. Yang might have been let down by the Burning Man Festival, I trust that this experience opened them up to new ways of thinking. Mr. Miao gradually came to accept the idea that people can walk around naked or make out with strangers if they are willing. Mr. Yang made friends with one neighbor who was sharing marijuana cookies and had a long conversation with another, who happened to be an IT engineer. I also met some founders of leading Chinese tech companies who thought more deeply about these issues after experiencing the festival. The founder of the search engine and internet company Sougou, Wang Xiaochuan, said, “In this utopian community, we can experience cultures or principles that have been discarded or distorted in the civilized world. If you take certain things back with you, they’ll make your daily life more creative and more powerful.” During the final night, a huge nebulous wooden structure called Galaxia was burned in a spectacular fire at a place called the Temple. The tradition is that many burners put photos and objects representing deceased family members and friends together with words of remembrance into the Temple to be burned as commemoration."}
{"prompt":"People gathered around the soaring flames. We sat quietly in the desert, below the vast, starry sky, and we seemed to have returned to a time thousands of years ago, when primitive humans yearned to connect and communicate with the gods and the dead. We were no longer lonely. Next to the flames someone shouted, “Thank you, Larry!” More people followed suit, shouting, and some people wiped tears from their eyes.  They were paying tribute to the founder of all this, Larry Harvey, who had just passed away that year. In 1998 he said in a speech, “This is the analog to cyberspace, but it’s different, because it’s not anonymous and it’s not vicarious like the internet can be. So it puts people in touch with one another . . . It turns out the world is changing fast and we’re teaching valuable survival skills out here, this is about radical self-expression and radical self-reliance.” And this is precisely what I felt over those eight days.  Then the camps and the art installations were removed. The house cars left. The desert returned to its original state, and the Milky Way reappeared in the night sky. Before departing, groups of burners voluntarily searched the sand for any trash left behind by human activity. Even a tiny shard of glass had to be found and taken away. Leaving no trace.","completion":"In the campsite where I was staying, which had become a sort of headquarters for all of the Chinese campers, a group of young people were having a heated discussion as they prepared to leave. They hoped to set up a screening mechanism next year, so that only true burners could be selected to attend. They also hoped to create art installations and campsites that would authentically represent Chinese culture so that all burners interested in China could partake and interact."}
{"prompt":"Consent. This word appeared repeatedly in their conversations. It represented a respect for others, for their communities and their cultures. Maybe Chinese tech entrepreneurs would remember this word every now and then, after they went back home. Maybe they would bring such respect to their future products and services so that technology can better serve everyone. Or maybe I am too optimistic.","completion":"Will I return next year? I ask myself.  I think I will return. The best way to change the future is to become a part of it. And I want to become a better Chinese burner. When I started writing this article, Feminist Voices had been deleted for six months and ten days. Yes, I have been keeping track of the time: ten days, fifteen days, thirty days, sixty days, three months, six months… The first week after it disappeared from the internet, my heart was filled with mourning; every day I lay in bed and cried. As time went by, I seemed to see a figure drifting away, but her soul was still near me. And her name will always linger in my mind.  Losing Feminist Voices was like losing a loved one, or even like having a part of myself die before my eyes. I must put this story into words, in the first person, because people should know that online censorship and persecution do not only erase information; they cause psychological and physical pain to real people. Another important reason to write this is to prevent the memory of Feminist Voices from being erased entirely. To preserve and spread the intellectual contributions that it has created—that is the real purpose of this essay."}
{"prompt":"Starting Out In September 2009, I founded the magazine that would become Feminist Voices. At first, I called it Women's Voices—a less confrontational name. I was the only editor. I had resigned from my job as a journalist several years earlier and was working with women's NGOs. My goal was to help spread feminist activism and ideas. In the introduction to the first issue of Women's Voices, I explained that I wanted to “provide a critical gender perspective in the media and help popularize China’s feminist movement.\" At the time, Women's Voices was an e-magazine in the .doc file format, which was distributed by  email and also available for download from several websites. It came out once a week. Every issue contained was a roundup of social and cultural news as well as feminist actions. The form was very rudimentary. I had no money to hire a designer, and I didn’t think design was important. Many people suggested that I convert the .doc files into PDF documents to appear more \"advanced.\" I refused, because most readers didn't have PDF reading software on their computers. I wanted Women's Voices to be able to reach the most readers possible in the cheapest and simplest way.","completion":"I also wanted to get readers to participate in the project. At the time, I had about 1,000 subscribers, many of whom had expressed their enthusiasm for the feminist movement by reading this e-magazine. I urged them to suggest topics and opinions, published their letters and contributions, and devised simple ways to interview them and compile their insights. For instance, I used a group text to send messages on Chinese New Year's Eve to ask readers about their views on CCTV’s coverage of the upcoming Spring Festival, which many feminists thought was sexist. And I relied on readers to help disseminate the e-magazine: to forward it to their relatives, friends, classmates, and students."}
{"prompt":"The mother of one of our readers told us that she was surprised by Women's Voices. She had never read anything like it before. Before our magazine, the conversation among feminists in China was quite academic and aimed only at a small audience. For the first time, Women's Voices made many people recognize that feminist ideas could address China's current social reality and give many people new, critical ideas. Women's Voices had no intention of producing a \"classic\" or eternal discourse. Rather, we wanted to work with our readers to better understand contemporary  issues and events. I hoped that our efforts would help illuminate the situation of feminists in China and strengthen our movement.","completion":"It was not possible to build a women’s movement solely through electronic media, due to the simplicity and constraints of the medium. However, through Women's Voices, I got to know young people who were interested in feminism. Many of them were only children, daughters, women who had gotten higher education, and were living in big cities. They were not only reluctant to live a life of conformity; they were reluctant to tolerate gender inequality.  By 2010, social media had become widespread in China. That April, Women's Voices set up an account on the microblogging site Sina Weibo—the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. Initially, we used it to publish our own original content. In April 2011, at a reader's suggestion, the Women's Voices microblog changed its name to Feminist Voices and became the first public platform on Chinese social media that had “feminist” in its name. From this time onward, our focus shifted to social media. Within the network structure of Weibo, we began to establish a feminist community online."}
{"prompt":"At that time, the word \"feminism\" was still taboo in China. I used to search for accounts tagged with \"feminism\" on Weibo, but I couldn't find any that were really oriented around feminism besides ours. So when Women's Voices began publishing the Feminist Voices microblog, my friends worried we would scare people away. However, the opposite happened. Feminist Voices began to take off. It grew as Weibo grew. At the same time, we established our own, independent channels.","completion":"Into the Streets On Valentine's Day 2012, under the direction of Feminist Voices, a group of young activists organized a public event at the Beijing City Center. The purpose was to call for the passage of anti-domestic violence laws—there were none on the books—and the theme was “injured bride.” Dressed in white wedding gowns with fake blood smeared on the front, women walked through downtown Beijing holding signs that read \"Violence Is Not Love\" and “Hitting Is Not Intimacy.” This was the first time that the new Chinese feminism appeared in public, bringing a significant strategic update of the feminist movement with youth as the subject. It was also the beginning of a new strategy at Feminist Voices: we started to coordinate online communication with offline organizations. Ten days later, feminists organized a public event called \"Occupy the Men's Bathroom,” which demanded more female public toilets to make the ratio of male to female toilets equal. (A young college student began the movement when she and a group of other protesters held signs outside men's public restrooms in Beijing saying, \"Men, please let women use the bathroom first,” and asking men to let women in line use the men's bathroom. The campaign spread across the country and was successful in Guangzhou, where the city government promised to build more female toilets.) The “Occupy the Men's Bathroom” action earned sensationalist coverage from the Chinese media and quickly became one of the top ten trending topics on Weibo. However, the keyword associated with the event was quickly banned from Weibo searches. The feminist topics emerging on social media immediately ran into trouble with censorship."}
{"prompt":"More feminist actions continued in the following months. In June 2012, a public post by Shanghai Metro on their Weibo account encouraging female passengers to “dress appropriately to avoid harassment” sparked a major debate on sexual harassment. On June 24th, a group of anonymous protesters demonstrated in the Shanghai subway by holding signs that said, “It’s fine for me to be sexy, it’s not ok for you to touch” (我可以骚，你不能扰, Wo ke yi sao, Ni bu neng sao, a rhyming phrase). Photos of these protesters were sent to us via text message and then posted to Weibo on the Feminist Voices account. This post made great waves—it was shared more than 2000 times—and triggered a heated online debate.  In the ensuing controversy, sexual harassment became a public issue for the first time, marking the beginning of a new wave of activism by young Chinese feminists. In the course of this media frenzy, I realized that effective activism required us to communicate with the mainstream, launching public debates to shed light on feminist issues—and that only by launching these debates would a broader audience become aware of feminist ideas. In the beginning, Women's Voices had advocated “alternative” views. But we now realized that if we wanted Feminist Voices to enter the mainstream, we had to use mainstream means of empowering ordinary people.  From 2012 to 2015, China’s young feminist activists created many news events through radical actions. These had two direct effects. The first was to force several government departments to make policy concessions. In May 2013, for instance, the Ministry of Education announced that universities cannot set separate test score cutoffs for applicants of different genders, or establish gender ratios for admission, after a months-long advocacy campaign by feminists. The second effect was to spread feminist ideas more widely. The actions raised the public awareness of feminist issues and established a core community of activists committed to those issues.","completion":"Feminist Voices became the mouthpiece for this group of young people on social media. Feminist Voices had always tried to play the role of leading and coordinating the online feminist community by posting daily discussions, but we now hoped to bring those discussions into mainstream society.  This was not an easy task, for many reasons. At the time, Weibo imitated Twitter and restricted the number of characters to 140. Within this extremely limited range, figuring out how to express ourselves thoughtfully was difficult for me and my colleagues. We had many arguments.  Another challenge we had to navigate was the emphasis that social media platforms place on getting more followers. From the beginning to the end, Feminist Voices was the most popular women’s rights platform on the Chinese internet. We were proud of this and we kept increasing our number of followers. On the other hand, popularity was not our only goal. I had told my young colleagues countless times that we shouldn’t be sensational or emotional, and that our tone should always remain resolutely cool and calm. In my opinion, sensationalism is a way of manipulating your audience. It’s a way to use your readers so that they do not think. In this way, it is anti-feminist."}
{"prompt":"Ultimately, we weren’t a media outlet. Our real goal was not to encourage more people to read us, but to encourage more people to join actions aimed at changing Chinese society. Therefore, for us, communication was only one path to a larger goal: organization and mobilization. This is the biggest difference between alternative media and mass media. Alternative media are the engines of social movements.","completion":"Closing In In 2014, Feminist Voice reached its peak. We had popular accounts across multiple platforms, including Weibo, WeChat, and Douban (a social networking site for young people). We developed a series of video programs and independent documentaries that we distributed on those platforms. We supported a feminist community center, which was open every day, and a theater group that put on feminist plays, while keeping in touch with young feminists, NGOs, and gender researchers across the country. We also gave dozens of public lectures each year at universities and communities in cities."}
{"prompt":"At this time, however, China's social environment was becoming increasingly repressive. Liberal intellectuals no longer occupied positions as dissenters or thought leaders within mass media and social media. In 2013, after Xi Jinping took office, the government placed  new restrictions on speech. It adopted stricter censorship rules and used criminal persecutions to crack down on citizens' speech and actions. The state also intensified its control of social media by censoring organic content and creating their own social media propaganda.  In August 2013, the government staged the “Eating Bao” event in Beijing. President Xi showed up at an ordinary bao shop, pretending to be a man of the people. Many users  posted photos of Xi ordering and eating on Weibo, giving a new image to his leadership. However, this performance was a coordinated, top-down propaganda operation. The government ensured that the photos of Xi dominated the Chinese internet. Moreover, this event had far-reaching implications. The “Eating Bao” event was one of the first cases where the Chinese government directly intervened in social media for propaganda purposes, and it inaugurated a new era of stronger state regulation of online speech. Afterwards, the internet would no longer be a so-called \"free zone,\" but would become an important site of authoritarian governance.  The space for activism was never large in China, but under Xi it has shrunk sharply. In 2014, the Chinese government arrested nearly 1,000 human rights defenders. China’s feminist movement was reaching a crossroads. On the one hand, a feminist community had taken  shape on social media by the second half of 2014. A broad debate on feminist themes no longer needed to rely on the instigation of core activists. Rather, it was happening spontaneously. On the other hand, the government was constantly harassing and threatening feminist organizers, including the editors of Feminist Voices. These two phenomena coexisted, bringing both excitement and anxiety. In early 2015, I said to a friend, \"People outside the inner circle will cheer because of the progress of feminism. People inside will feel more and more anxious. The government has seen the subversiveness of the feminist movement, so some of the feminist activists have been been targeted.\"","completion":"Online harassment—possibly directed by the government—became increasingly common. It came in multiple forms, and the platforms did little to prevent it. Early on, Chinese social media platforms had a \"free-for-all\" attitude. This could be seen in the phenomenon of the \"human flesh search\" on Weibo, where users publicly distribute the offline details and whereabouts of people who seemingly deserve public scorn. Similar to “doxxing,” this practice straddles the line between grassroots justice and pure harassment.  Features like creating a \"blocked list\" on Weibo was not possible until late 2009, and even then harassers could continuously create new, anonymous accounts that let them continue attacking you. Regulations to protect users of online platforms were nonexistent, with legal means often unavailable to pursue online harassers. It wasn't until after 2015 that new laws were put into place that increased a platform's accountability for user interactions (as well as opening the door to state surveillance). Overall, however, the platforms continue to prioritize engagement and traffic over the wellbeing of the users.  More importantly, online censorship became both more stringent and more subtle. It was as if people on Weibo were gathered in a town square, but everyone was trapped in an invisible cage. The self-censorship was exhausting. Where was the boundary of permissible speech? What was the cost of crossing it? No one knew, so each of us had to try to evaluate every instance for ourselves. Looking back on that period, I’m proud that I never let the fear of censorship prevent me from saying what I wanted to say on Weibo. It’s not that I didn’t consider the risks. But I didn’t feel that we should keep silent because we were afraid of having the account deleted by the censors. For example, we thought long and hard about publishing a piece written by the scholar Ai De Ming on the feminist activist Wang Li Hong. Even if censorship did end up happening, the deletion of our account was nothing compared to what happened to the feminist activists who were thrown into prison such as Wang, who was sentenced to nine months for organizing a demonstration to defend three Fujian bloggers convicted of defamation."}
{"prompt":"From the Square to the Alley Ultimately, however, we did become a target of state repression. During the Spring Festival of 2015, Feminist Voices launched an initiative to protest gender discrimination at the CCTV Spring Festival Gala. Feminist Voices started a WeChat group for the event, where people posted critiques. Some of the critiques went viral, as people from the group wrote articles that were circulated widely. However, we paid a price. In the aftermath, Feminist Voices suffered its first large-scale review by government censors. Many of our posts were deleted or blocked.  This happened around the time that the wave of feminist actions in China was coming to a climax. On March 5, 2015, I went to New York to attend a United Nations meeting and planned to stay for two weeks. The next day, five young feminist activists were arrested in Beijing, Hangzhou, and Guangzhou because they planned to organize volunteers to hand out flyers against sexual harassment in the bus stations of ten cities on the same day. This became known as the \"Feminist Five\" case. For the first time in its history, the Chinese Communist Party publicly suppressed a feminist action. Feminist activity was criminalized in a country where the constitution guarantees \"equality between men and women.\" After thirty-seven days, the five sisters were released, but young feminist activists were terrified. Since then, many offline feminist activities have been cancelled, and the state-controlled mass media has reported almost no public feminist activities.  As for Feminist Voices, we survived, despite thorough investigations by the state. Still, we were forced to downsize. We closed the community center, and almost completely stopped organizing public events. But we maintained our accounts on the two most important social media platforms, Weibo and WeChat, and we continued to release original content—although many of our posts were quickly deleted by state censors. Due to continuous monitoring and threats, Feminist Voices had to become much more low-key. Continuing to exist became a struggle.","completion":"During this period, we found that our WeChat account showed better growth. WeChat is a mobile social application developed by Tencent. On WeChat, messages can be seen by your social circle, but not on the open internet. If Weibo is a town square, where everyone can see each other, then WeChat is more like an alley, where only a limited number of people can gather. That’s why WeChat is more suitable for connecting a close community.   Feminist Voices became more active on WeChat, and our readers carried on many vibrant  feminist discussions in the comment area. On Weibo, by contrast, our influence declined. One of the reasons was that there were many other women's rights accounts. These accounts paid more attention to women's daily life, and weren’t focused on activism.   Even as we tried to be more low-key, however, Feminist Voices remained a target of the state. In February 2017, following the US women's strike, the government banned our Weibo account for one month. (The exact reason for the ban remains unclear, but the government was presumably concerned that our coverage of the US women’s strike would help further inspire the Chinese feminist movement; at that time the government was also restricting any communications critical of President Trump, since they expected Trump to be beneficial to them.) The editorial department decided to use this month as a special period. Through WeChat, we published many articles on the history of feminist activism, along with hundreds of photos from supporters from mainland China, Hong Kong, and other countries. (The photos included women wearing pink pussyhats holding signs that said, \"Sina Weibo does not care about equality,” and men in Rosie the Riveter poses with signs that said, \"I need Feminist Voices!\") At the end of the ban, the editorial department sent the following letter of thanks:  Feminism has gone from the periphery to the center of the public eye. As a movement, it is constantly facing new situations and challenges. We want to thank you, not only for your concern, your support and perseverance in the face of crisis and doubt cast on women’s voices, but also for your firm stand with feminism… We have always intended to persist; your choice to stand with us affirmed our mission. We know this was a choice based on your values, and not an easy choice to make."}
{"prompt":"Afterlives During the following year, the pressure on feminist activists in China escalated. In May 2017, the head of the All-China Women’s Federation—the country’s official women’s rights organization with close ties to the Chinese Communist Party—made a public speech accusing feminists of spreading Western ideas. They alleged that “Western hostile forces... actively peddled Western feminism” and “female supremacy” under the banner of “poverty alleviation,” “charity,” “empowerment,”  and other labels.  The All-China Women’s Federation is basically a megaphone for government propaganda. Its conflation of feminism with “Western hostile forces” isn’t something that the organization’s leadership came up with on their own, but rather absorbed from the official state-controlled discourse. And this discourse, backed by violent suppression, was becoming increasingly anti-feminist. It was becoming okay to openly condemn feminists and even to circulate the most ridiculous rumors, such as the false claim that Saudi Arabia funded Feminist Voices. These attacks not only sapped our energy—energy we could have otherwise used to help women. They also created a malicious environment that made feminists and their supporters silent, afraid, and isolated.","completion":"In January 2018, the #MeToo movement began to rise in China, and women‘s anger that had accumulated for a long time against sexual harassment finally broke out. Almost everything happened on the internet because it was difficult to move offline. At this time, Feminist Voices only provided support by sharing articles via Weibo and WeChat. But when the “relevant departments”—China’s domestic security agencies—tried to convict the organizers of the movement, they didn’t target the young activists and students at the forefront. They targeted Feminist Voices."}
{"prompt":"In the middle of the night on March 8, 2018, Feminist Voices was shut down on Weibo because of the “posting of sensitive and illegal information.” After a few hours, the WeChat account was also banned, under the vague charge of “violating relevant laws and regulations.” On its last day, Feminist Voices had 250,000 followers on both platforms.  The next day, on March 9, 2018, the WeChat index—similar to Twitter’s trending topics—showed a significant increase in the popularity of the word \"feminist,\" apparently related to the crackdown on Feminist Voices. Then, ten days later, a huge WeChat public account, whose daily theme was completely unrelated to feminism, issued a long article accusing Feminist Voices of being related to “criminal prostitution groups” and “outside reactionary forces.” This very sensational article quickly gained tens of millions of views online. However, when we tried to publish a rebuttal, it was removed after only 4,000 clicks. Any mentions of Feminist Voices’ legal work—such as our unsuccessful attempt to sue Weibo and WeChat in order to challenge the closure of our accounts—were banned, along with any articles or photos sent by our readers or supporters. WeChat shut down some supporters’ personal accounts, and Weibo even forbade users from using our logo as an internet avatar.","completion":"After that, the popularity of search terms related to feminism on the Chinese internet plummeted. Obviously, people had gotten the message that feminism was “unpopular” and should be taboo. This represented yet another front in the war that the state had been waging against feminism since 2015. However, this time, the means was no longer criminal investigation but online repression. Its purpose was to obliterate the social contribution of feminists, cut off our social network, abolish feminist actions’ legitimacy, and drive us out of the public spaces where we have been working hard for the past few years."}
{"prompt":"At that time, from New York, I wrote in an article:  Many people may not understand why feminism is a \"sensitive\" topic, and I have always felt the same way. Regardless of the personal views of its participants, China’s feminist movement does not oppose the government agenda, and it has always paid more attention to economic, social, and cultural rights than civil and political rights. The policies and reforms advocated by the feminist movement do not touch the core of political power. However, we do not make the rules. I have gradually come to understand that there are three other factors that had to be considered. The first is that feminism is ultimately critical and serves to ask, “Who is responsible?” Second, any force that shows social organization and mobilization will be taboo, no matter what its claims are. Third, when the public space collapses, feminism cannot escape that kind of disaster. When dissenting thoughts and opinions are removed, feminist thought is also removed. In the future, we can go underground, but we will become isolated. Feminists cannot publicly preach and advocate for our cause… At that time, I said, \"We have no choice but to resist.\" But how were we supposed to resist? Even though I was free, in the United States, I felt like a person who was being held captive.","completion":"In the most painful period, I was grateful for the companionship and dedication of my friends.  I had never met many of them. They were our readers, and they created pictures, articles, and comics for Feminist Voices. Their contributions that were now deleted by the online platforms, their accounts that were canceled and no longer existed—all that they had sacrificed became part of a precious friendship."}
{"prompt":"I have come to realize that it is not the wisdom of leaders, but the contributions of the many “ordinary” feminists that keep the feminist movement alive. The rank and file contribute a large amount of unpaid work, and broadcast the work of Feminist Voices by relaying articles and working around censorship. It is through them that I had realized more deeply than ever that Feminist Voices was so important to everyone. They remembered how they used to find Women's Voices in the past when it consisted of .doc files, starting from the era of desktop computers, starting in high school, reading every day, saving the articles.  Some people said that our magazine was their best friend. Some people said that our magazine was alive. Some people said that the death of Feminist Voices felt like the death of a famous singer. Of course, I didn’t make that comparison myself. It was only until after Feminist Voices was gone that I realized that the purpose of creating feminist knowledge was to share and disseminate that knowledge.  When one part of our life dies, we take what we are left with and work hard to move on. This is the responsibility of social activists. I will always mourn Feminist Voices. It is such a beautiful name. It carries the enthusiasm, persistence, faith, and love of so many people, and I am proud and sad for it. I will also guard the intellectual riches created by Feminist Voices and strive to ensure that its history is not forgotten.   But I can't end on that note. The government may have blocked Feminist Voices, but they cannot block the feminist movement. About a month after the closing of Feminist Voices, the Chinese #MeToo movement set off a new wave of conversation and activism. By August 2018, an unprecedented, shocking tide of feminist activity had taken off —even if participants were not foregrounding the term \"women’s rights.\" (In fact, some people online used emoji to avoid censorship. Instead of posting “#MeToo,” they used the emoji for a bowl of rice (mi) and a rabbit (tu), which together sound the same as “me too.”)","completion":"In 2012, I thought that we were starting a campaign. In 2015, I feared that the campaign was about to fail—I was wrong. In 2018, I finally realized that our campaign was just beginning. The movement is vast and networked: it has no central  leadership. But this does not mean that it doesn’t need competent communicators, organizers, and trainers. As I write this article, we have begun to pursue the next stage of our campaign."}
{"prompt":"In mid-2017, a Uyghur man in his twenties, whom I will call Alim, went to meet a friend for lunch at a mall in his home city, in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China. At a security checkpoint at the entrance, Alim scanned the photo on his government-issued identification card, and presented himself before a security camera equipped with facial recognition software. An alarm sounded. The security guards let him pass, but within a few minutes he was approached by officers from the local “convenience police station,” one of the thousands of rapid-response police stations that have been built every 200 or 300 meters in the Turkic Muslim areas of the region. The officers took him into custody.","completion":"Alim’s heart was racing. Several weeks earlier, he had returned to China from studying abroad. As soon as he landed back in the country, he was pulled off the plane by police officers responding to a nationwide warrant for his arrest. He was told his trip abroad meant that he was now under suspicion of being “unsafe.” The police then administered what they call a “health check,” which involves collecting several types of biometric data, including DNA, blood type, fingerprints, voice signature and face signature—a process which all adults in Xinjiang are expected to undergo. (According to the government, biometric data from 18.8 million of the region’s 21.8 million people have been collected through these checks.)  Then they transported him to one of the hundreds of detention centers that dot northwest China.  Over the past five years, these centers have become an important node in China’s technologically driven “People’s War on Terror.” Officially launched by the Xi Jinping administration in 2014, this war supposedly began as a response to Uyghur mass protests—themselves born out of desperation over decades of discrimination, police brutality, and the confiscation of Uyghur lands—and to attacks directed against security forces and civilians who belong to the Han ethnic majority. In the intervening period, the Chinese government has come to treat almost all expressions of Uyghur Islamic faith as signs of potential religious extremism and ethnic separatism under vaguely defined anti-terrorism laws; the detention centers are the first stop for those suspected of such crimes. Since 2017 alone, more than 1 million Turkic Muslims have moved through these centers.  At the center to which he had been sent, Alim was deprived of sleep and food, and subjected to hours of interrogation and verbal abuse. “I was so weakened through this process that at one point during my interrogation I began to laugh hysterically,” he said when we spoke. Other detainees report being placed in stress positions, tortured with electric shocks, and submitted to long periods of isolation. When he wasn’t being interrogated, Alim was kept in a fourteen-square-meter cell with twenty other Uyghur men, though cells in some detention centers house more than sixty people. Former detainees have said they had to sleep in shifts because there was not enough space for everyone to stretch out at once. “They never turn out the lights,” Mihrigul Tursun, a Uyghur woman who spent several months in detention, told me."}
{"prompt":"The religious and political transgressions of these detainees were frequently discovered through social media apps on their smartphones, which Uyghurs are required to produce at thousands of checkpoints around Xinjiang. Although there was often no real evidence of a crime according to any legal standard, the digital footprint of unauthorized Islamic practice, or even an association to someone who had committed one of these vague violations, was enough to land Uyghurs in a detention center. Maybe their contact number had been in the list of WeChat followers in another detainee’s phone. Maybe they had posted, on their WeChat wall, an image of a Muslim in prayer. It could be that in years past they had sent or received audio recordings of Islamic teachings that the Public Security Bureau, which polices social life in China, deems “ideological viruses”: the sermons and lessons of so-called “wild” imams, who have not been authorized by the state. Maybe they had a relative who moved to Turkey or another Muslim-majority country and added them to their WeChat account using a foreign number. The mere fact of having a family member abroad, or of traveling outside China, as Alim had, often resulted in detention.  Not using social media could also court suspicion. So could attempting to destroy a SIM card, or not carrying a smartphone. Unsure how to avoid detention when the crackdown began, some Uyghurs buried old phones in the desert. Others hid little baggies of used SIM cards in the branches of trees, or put SD cards containing Islamic texts and teachings in dumplings and froze them, hoping they could eventually be recovered. Others gave up on preserving Islamic knowledge and burned data cards in secret. Simply throwing digital devices into the garbage was not an option; Uyghurs feared the devices would be recovered by the police and traced back to the user. Even proscribed content that was deleted before 2017 —when the Public Security Bureau operationalized software that uses artificial intelligence to scour millions of social media posts per day for religious imagery—can reportedly be unearthed.","completion":"Most Uyghurs in the detention centers are on their way to serving long prison sentences, or to indefinite captivity in a growing network of massive internment camps which the Chinese state has described as “transformation through education” facilities. These camps, which function as medium-security prisons and, in some cases, forced-labor factories, center around training Uyghurs to disavow their Islamic identity and embrace the secular and economic principles of the Chinese state. They forbid the use of the Uyghur language and instead offer drilling in Mandarin, the language of China’s Han majority, which is now referred to as “the national language.” Only a handful of detainees who are not Chinese citizens have been fully released from this “re-education” system.   Alim was relatively lucky: he had been let out after only two weeks; he later learned that a relative had intervened in his case. But what he didn’t know until police arrested him at the mall was that he had been placed on a blacklist maintained by the Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP, or 体化联合作战平台), a regional data system that uses AI to monitor the countless checkpoints in and around Xinjiang’s cities. Any attempt to enter public institutions such as hospitals, banks, parks or shopping centers, or to cross beyond the checkpoints of the dozen city blocks that were under the jurisdiction of his local police precinct, would trigger the IJOP to alert police. The system had profiled him and predicted that he was a potential terrorist.  Officers told Alim he should “just stay at home” if he wanted to avoid detention again. Although he was officially free, his biometrics and his digital history were being used to bind him in place. “I’m so angry and afraid at the same time,” he told me. He was now haunted by his data.  Unlimited Market Potential The surveillance and predictive profiling systems that targeted Alim and the many Uyghur Muslims he met in detention are the product of a neo-totalitarian security-industrial complex that has emerged in China over the past decade. Dozens of Chinese tech firms are building and marketing tools for a new “global war on terror,” fought in a domestic register and transposed to a technological key. In this updated version of the conflict, the war machine is more about facial recognition software and machine learning algorithms than about drones and Navy SEAL teams; the weapons are made in China rather than the United States; and the supposed terrorists are not “barbaric” foreigners but domestic minority populations who appear to threaten the dominance of authoritarian leaders and impede state-directed capitalist expansion."}
{"prompt":"In the modern history of systems of control deployed against subjugated populations, ranging from North American internment camps to the passbooks of apartheid-era South Africa, new technologies have been crucial. In China, that technological armament is now so vast that it has become difficult for observers to fully inventory. The web of surveillance in Xinjiang reaches from cameras on the wall, to the chips inside mobile devices, to Uyghurs’ very physiognomy. Face scanners and biometric checkpoints track their movements. Nanny apps record every bit that passes through their smartphones.  Other programs automate the identification of Uyghur voice signatures, transcribe, and translate Uyghur spoken language, and scan digital communications, looking for suspect patterns of social relations, and flagging religious speech or a lack of fervor in using Mandarin. Deep-learning systems search in real time through video feeds capturing millions of faces, building an archive which can help identify suspicious behavior in order to predict who will become an “unsafe” actor. The predictions generated automatically by these “computer vision” technologies are triggered by dozens of actions, from dressing in an Islamic fashion to failing to attend or fully participate in nationalistic flag raising ceremonies. All of these systems are brought together in the IJOP, which is constantly learning from the behaviors of the Uyghurs it watches.","completion":"The predictive algorithms that purport to keep Xinjiang safe by identifying terrorist threats feed on the biometric and behavioral data extracted from the bodies of Uyghurs. The power—and potential profitability—of these systems as tools of security and control derives from unfettered access to Uyghurs’ digital lives and physical movements. The justification of the war on terror thus offers companies a space in which to build, experiment with, and refine these systems. In her recent study on the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” the Harvard scholar Shoshana Zuboff notes that consumers are constantly off-gassing valuable data that can be captured by capital and turned into profitable predictions about our preferences and future behaviors. In the Uyghur region, this logic has been taken to an extreme: from the perspective of China’s security-industrial establishment, the principal purpose of Uyghur life is to generate data."}
{"prompt":"After being rendered compliant by this repressive surveillance, Uyghurs are fed into China’s manufacturing industries as labor. Officially, the People’s War on Terror has been framed as a “poverty alleviation” struggle. This requires retraining marginalized Muslim communities to make them politically docile yet economically productive. China enforces this social order with prisons and camps built to accommodate over ten percent of the country’s Turkic Muslim population. The training that happens in the camps leads directly to on-site factories, for textiles and other industries, where detainees are forced to work indefinitely. The government frames these low-wage jobs as “internships.”  Controlling the Uyghurs has also become a test case for marketing Chinese technological prowess to authoritarian nations around the world. A hundred government agencies and companies, from two dozen countries including the United States, France, Israel, and the Philippines, now participate in the annual China-Eurasia Security Expo in Ürümchi, the capital of the Uyghur region. Because Ürümchi is a strategic entrepôt to the Muslim world, the expo has become the most influential security tech convention across East Asia.  The ethos at the expo, and in the Chinese techno-security industry as a whole, is that Muslim populations need to be managed and made productive. This, from the perspective of Chinese industry, is one of China’s major contributions to the future of global security. As a spokesperson for Leon Technology, one of the major players in the new security industry, put it at the expo in 2017, 60 percent of the world’s Muslim-majority nations are part of China’s premier international development initiative, “One Belt, One Road,” so there is “unlimited market potential” for the type of population-control technology they are developing in Xinjiang.  Over the past five years, the People’s War on Terror has allowed Chinese tech startups such as Leon, Meiya Pico, Hikvision, Face++, Sensetime, and Dahua to achieve unprecedented levels of growth. In just the last two years, the state has invested an estimated $7.2 billion on techno-security in Xinjiang.  Some of the technologies they pioneered in Xinjiang have already found customers in authoritarian states as far away as sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, CloudWalk, a Guangzhou-based tech startup that has received more than $301 million in state funding, finalized a strategic cooperation framework agreement with the Mnangagwa administration in Zimbabwe to build a national “mass facial recognition program” in order to address “social security issues.” (CloudWalk has not revealed how much the agreement is worth.) Freedom of movement through airports, railways, and bus stations throughout Zimbabwe will now be managed through a facial database integrated with other kinds of biometric data. In effect, the Uyghur homeland has become an incubator for China’s “terror capitalism.”","completion":"A Way of Life The Uyghur internet has not always been a space of exploitation and entrapment. When I arrived in Ürümchi in 2011 to conduct my first year of ethnographic fieldwork, the region had just been wired with 3G networks. When I returned for a second year, in 2014, it seemed as though nearly all adults in the city had a smartphone; downloads of Uyghur-language apps suggested approximately 45 percent of the Uyghur population of 12 million was using one. Many Uyghurs had begun to use WeChat to share recorded messages and video with friends and family in rural villages. They also used their phones to buy and sell products, read about what was happening in the world, and network with Uyghurs throughout the country and around the globe. Young Uyghur filmmakers could now share short films and music videos instantly with hundreds of thousands of followers. Overnight, Uyghur English teachers such as Kasim Abdurehim and pop stars such as Ablajan—cultural figures that the government subsequently labeled “unsafe”—developed followings that numbered in the millions.  Most unsettling, from the perspective of the state, unsanctioned Uyghur religious teachers based in China and Turkey developed a deep influence. Since the 1950s, when the newly founded People’s Republic of China began sending millions of Han settlers to the region, Islamic faith, Turkic identity, and the Uyghur language have been sources of resistance to Han cultural norms and Chinese secularism. Sunni Islam and Turkic identity formed the basis for the independent East Turkistan republics that predated the decades of settler colonization. Together with deep-seated attachments to the built environment of Uyghur civilization—courtyard houses, mosque communities, and Sufi shrines—they helped most Uyghurs feel distinct from their colonizers even in the teeth of Maoist campaigns to force them to assimilate."}
{"prompt":"The government has always pushed to efface these differences. Beginning with Mao’s Religious Reform Movement of 1958, the state limited Uyghurs’ access to mosques, Islamic funerary practices, religious knowledge, and other Muslim communities. There were virtually no Islamic schools outside of state control, no imams who were not approved by the state. Children under the age of eighteen were forbidden to enter mosques. As social media spread through the Uyghur homeland over the course of the last decade, it opened up a virtual space to explore what it meant to be Muslim. It reinforced a sense that the first sources of Uyghur identity were their faith and language, their claim to a native way of life, and their membership in a Turkic Muslim community stretching from Ürümchi to Istanbul.  Because of the internet, millions of Uyghurs felt called to think in new ways about the piety of their Islamic practice, while simultaneously learning about self-help strategies and entrepreneurship. They began to imagine escaping an oppressive state which curtailed many of their basic freedoms by such means as restricting access to passports, systematic job discrimination, and permitting the seizure of Uyghur land. They also began to appreciate alternative modernities to the one the Chinese state was forcing upon them. Rather than being seen as perpetually lacking Han appearance and culture, they could find in their renewed Turkic and Islamic values a cosmopolitan and contemporary identity. They could embrace the halal standards of the Muslim world, wear the latest styles from Istanbul, and keep Chinese society at arms-length. Food, movies, music and clothing, imported from Turkey and Dubai, became markers of distinction. Women began to veil themselves. Men began to pray five times a day. They stopped drinking and smoking. Some began to view music, dancing and state television as influences to be avoided.","completion":"The Han officials I met during my fieldwork referred to this rise in technologically disseminated religious piety as the “Talibanization” of the Uyghur population. Along with Han settlers, they felt increasingly unsafe traveling to the region’s Uyghur-majority areas, and uneasy in the presence of pious Turkic Muslims. The officials cited incidents that carried the hallmarks of religiously motivated violence—a knife attack carried out by a group of Uyghurs at a train station in Kunming; trucks driven by Uyghurs through crowds in Beijing and Ürümchi—as a sign that the entire Uyghur population was falling under the sway of terrorist ideologies.  But, as dangerous as the rise of Uyghur social media seemed to Han officials, it also presented them with a new means of control—one they had been working for several years to refine. On July 5, 2009, Uyghur high school and college students had used Facebook and Uyghur-language blogs to organize a protest demanding justice for Uyghur workers who were killed by their Han colleagues at a toy factory in eastern China. Thousands of Uyghurs took to the streets of Ürümchi, waving Chinese flags and demanding that the government respond to the deaths of their comrades. When they were violently confronted by armed police, many of the Uyghurs responded by turning over buses and beating Han bystanders. In the end, over 190 people were reported killed, most of them Han. Over the weeks that followed, hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young Uyghurs were disappeared by the police. The internet was shut off in the region for over nine months, and Facebook and Twitter were blocked across the country.  Soon after the internet came back online in 2010—with the notable absence of Facebook, Twitter, and other non-Chinese social media applications—state security, higher education, and private industry began to collaborate on breaking Uyghur internet autonomy. Much of the Uyghur-language internet was transformed from a virtual free society into a zone where government technology could learn to predict criminal behavior. Broadly defined anti-terrorism laws, introduced in 2014, turned nearly all crimes committed by Uyghurs, from stealing a Han neighbor’s sheep to protesting land seizures, into forms of terrorism. Religious piety, which the new laws referred to as “extremism,” was conflated with religious violence. The Xinjiang security industry mushroomed from a handful of private firms to approximately 1,400 companies employing tens of thousands of workers, ranging from low-level Uyghur security guards to Han camera and telecommunications technicians to coders and designers. The Xi administration declared a state of emergency in the region, the People’s War on Terror began, and Islamophobia was institutionalized."}
{"prompt":"Smart Terror In 2017, after three years of operating a “hard strike” policy in Xinjiang—which involved instituting a passbook system that turned the Uyghur homeland into a what many considered an open-air prison, and deploying hundreds of thousands of security forces to monitor the families of those who had been disappeared or killed by the state—the government turned to a fresh strategy. A new regional party secretary named Chen Quanguo introduced a policy of “transforming” Uyghurs. Using the language of public health, local authorities began to describe the “three evil forces” of “religious extremism, ethnic separatism and violent terrorism” as three interrelated “ideological cancers.”  Because the digital sphere had allowed unauthorized forms of Islam to flourish, officials called for AI-enabled technology to detect and extirpate these evils. Already in 2015, Xi Jinping had announced that cybersecurity was a national priority; now Party leadership began to incentivize Chinese tech firms to build and develop technologies that could help the government control and modify Uyghur society. Billions of dollars in government contracts were awarded to build “smart” security systems across the Uyghur region.      The turn toward “transformation” coincided with breakthroughs in the AI-assisted computer systems that the Public Security Bureau rolled out in 2017 and brought together in the IJOP. The Chinese startup Meiya Pico began to market software to local and regional governments that was developed using state-supported research and could detect Uyghur language text and Islamic symbols embedded in images. The company also developed programs to automate the transcription and translation of Uyghur voice messaging.  The company Hikvision advertised tools that could automate the identification of Uyghur faces based on physiological phenotypes. High-resolution video cameras capable of operating in low-light conditions were linked to AI-enabled software trained on an extensive image database of racially diverse faces; together, these technologies could determine the ethnicity of a person based on the shape and color of the person’s facial features—all while the person strolled down street. A Leon Technology spokesperson told one of the country’s leading technology publications that the cameras were also integrated with an AI system made by Leon that could flag suspicious behavior and individuals under special surveillance “on the scale of seconds.” Other programs performed automated searches of Uyghurs’ internet activity and then compared the data it gleaned to school, job, banking, medical, and biometric records, looking for predictors of aberrant behavior.","completion":"The rollout of this new technology required a great deal of manpower and technical training. Over 100,000 new police officers were hired. One of their jobs was to conduct the sort of health check Alim underwent, creating biometric records for almost every human being in the region. Face signatures were created by scanning individuals from a variety of different angles as they made different facial expressions; the result was a high-definition portfolio of personal emotions. All Uyghurs were required to install the Clean Net Guard app, which monitored everything they said, read, and wrote, and everyone they connected with, on their smartphones.  Higher-level officers, most of whom were Han, were given the job of conducting qualitative assessments of the Muslim population as a whole—providing more complex, interview-based survey data for IJOP’s deep-learning system. In face-to-face interviews, these neighborhood police officers assessed the more than 14 million Muslim-minority people in the province and determined if they should be given the rating of “safe,” “average,” or “unsafe.” They determined this by categorizing the person using ten or more categories: whether or not the person was Uyghur, of military age, or underemployed; whether they prayed regularly, possessed unauthorized religious knowledge, had a passport, had traveled to one of twenty-six Muslim-majority countries, had overstayed their visa, had an immediate relative living abroad, or had taught their children about Islam in their home. Those who were determined to be “unsafe” were then sent to the detention centers where they were interrogated and asked to confess their crimes and name others who were also “unsafe.” In this manner, the officers determined which individuals should be slotted for the “transformation through education” internment camps.  The assessments were iterative.  Many Muslims who passed their first assessment were subsequently detained because someone else named them as “unsafe.” In as many as tens of thousands of cases, years of WeChat history was used as evidence of the need for Uyghur suspects to be “transformed.” The state also assigned an additional 1.1 million Han and Uyghur “big brothers and sisters” to conduct week-long assessments on Uyghur families as uninvited guests in Uyghur homes. Over the course of these stays, the relatives tested the “safe” qualities of those Uyghurs that remained outside of the camp system by forcing them to participate in activities forbidden by certain forms of Islamic piety such as drinking, smoking, and dancing. As a test, they brought their Uyghur hosts food without telling them whether the meat used in the dishes was halal or not. These “big sisters and brothers” focused on the families of those who had been shot or taken away by the police over the past decade. They looked for any sign of resentment or any lack of enthusiasm in Chinese patriotic activities. They gave the children candy so that they would tell them the truth about what their parents thought. All of this information was entered into databases and then fed back into the IJOP."}
{"prompt":"The IJOP is always running in the background of Uyghur life, always learning. The government’s hope is that it will run with ever less human guidance. The goal is both to intensify securitization in the region and to free up security labor for the work of “transformation through education.” Quantified Selves My first encounter with the face-scanning machines was at a hotel in the Uyghur district of Ürümchi in April 2018. Speaking in Uyghur, the man at the front desk told me I did not need to scan my face to register because I had foreign identification. But when I left the city on the high-speed train, Han officers instructed me on how to scan my passport picture and stand “just so” to enable the camera to get a good read of my face. Exiting the train an hour later in Turpan, my face had to be verified manually at the local police station. The officer in charge, a Han woman, told a young Uyghur officer to scan my passport photo with her smartphone and match that image with photos she took of my face. When I asked why this was necessary, the officer in charge said, “It is to keep you safe.”  As I moved through Uyghur towns and face-recognition checkpoints, I was surprised not to find handlers following me. When the officers at one checkpoint seemed to have anticipated my arrival, I realized the reason: cameras were now capable of tracking me with nearly as much precision as undercover police. My movements were being recorded and analyzed by deep learning systems. I, too, was training the IJOP.","completion":"In order to avoid the cameras, I took unauthorized Uyghur taxis, ducked into Uyghur bookstores, and bummed hand-rolled cigarettes from Uyghur peddlers while I asked questions about the reeducation system. I hoped that slipping into the blind spots of the IJOP would help to protect the people I spoke with there. A few weeks after my trip, I heard that another American who had lived in the region for an extended period was interrogated by public security officers about my activities."}
{"prompt":"In the tech community in the United States there is some skepticism regarding the viability of AI-assisted computer vision technology in China. Many experts I’ve spoken to from the AI policy world point to an article by the scholar Jathan Sadowski called “Potemkin AI,” which highlights the failures of Chinese security technology to deliver what it promises. They frequently bring up the way a system in Shenzhen meant to identify the faces of jaywalkers and flash them on jumbotrons next to busy intersections cannot keep up with the faces of all the jaywalkers; as a result, human workers sometimes have to manually gather the data used for public shaming. They point out that Chinese tech firms and government agencies have hired hundreds of thousands of low-paid police officers to monitor internet traffic and watch banks of video monitors. As with the theater of airport security rituals in the United States, many of these experts argue that it is the threat of surveillance, rather than the surveillance itself, that causes people to modify their behavior.","completion":"Yet while there is a good deal of evidence to support this skepticism, a notable rise in the automated detection of internet-based Islamic activity, which has resulted in the detention of hundreds of thousands of Uyghurs, also points to the real effects of the implementation of AI-assisted surveillance and policing in Xinjiang. Even Western experts at Google and elsewhere admit that Chinese tech companies now lead the world in these computer vision technologies, due to the way the state funds Chinese companies to collect, monitor, utilize, and report on the personal data of hundreds of millions of users across China."}
{"prompt":"In Kashgar, 1500 kilometers west of Ürümchi, I encountered dozens of Han civil servants who had been told to refer to themselves as “relatives.” Several of these “big brothers and sisters” spoke in glowing terms about the level of safety and security they felt in the Uyghur countryside. Uyghur communities, it seemed, were now safe for Han people. The IJOP tracks movements of Han people as well, but they experience this surveillance as frictionless. At railway stations, for example, they move through pre-approved “green lanes.” The same technology that restricts the movements of Uyghurs makes the movements of Han residents even freer.","completion":"“Anyone who has been to Kashgar will know that the atmosphere there was really thick and imposing,” a Leon Technology spokesperson told reporters at the China-Eurasia Security Expo in 2017. He was implying that, in the past, the city felt too Uyghur. One of the Uyghur-tracking AI projects that Leon developed made that “thick atmosphere” easier for Han settlers and officials to breathe. “Through the continuous advancement of the project, we have a network of 10,000 video access points in the surrounding rural area, which will generate massive amounts of video,” the spokesperson said. “This many images will ‘bind’ many people.”  Like the rest of the IJOP, the Leon project helps the Chinese government to bind Uyghurs in many ways—by limiting their political and cultural expression, by trapping them within checkpoints and labor camps. The effect of these restrictions, and of the spectacle of Uyghur oppression, simultaneously amplifies the sense of freedom and authority of Han settlers and state authorities.  The Han officials I spoke with during my fieldwork in Xinjiang often refused to acknowledge the way disappearances, frequent police shootings of young Uyghur men, and state seizures of Uyghur land might have motivated earlier periods of Uyghur resistance. They did not see correlations between limits on Uyghur religious education, restrictions on Uyghur travel, and widespread job discrimination on the one hand, and the rise in Uyghur desires for freedom, justice, and religiosity on the other. Because of the crackdown, Han officials have seen a profound diminishment of Islamic belief and political resistance in Uyghur social life. They’re proud of the fervor with which Uyghurs are learning the “common language” of the country, abandoning Islamic holy days, and embracing Han cultural values. From their perspective, the implementation of the new security systems has been a monumental success."}
{"prompt":"A middle-aged Uyghur businessman from Hotan, whom I will call Dawut, told me that that, behind the checkpoints, the new security system has hollowed out Uyghur communities. The government officials, civil servants, and tech workers who have come to build, implement, and monitor the system don’t seem to perceive Uyghurs’ humanity. The only kind of Uyghur life that can be recognized by the state is the one that the computer sees. This makes Uyghurs like Dawut feel as though their lives only matter as data—code on a screen, numbers in camps. They have adapted their behavior, and slowly even their thoughts, to the system.   “Uyghurs are alive, but their entire lives are behind walls,” Dawut said softly. “It is like they are ghosts living in another world.” Almost every day, I receive an email from Google Alerts about a new article on China’s “social credit system.” It is rare that I encounter an article that does not contain several factual errors and gross mischaracterizations. The social credit system is routinely described as issuing “citizen scores” to create a “digital dictatorship” where “big data meets Big Brother.” These descriptions are wildly off-base. Foreign media has distorted the social credit system into a technological dystopia far removed from what is actually happening in China. Jeremy Daum, a legal scholar at Yale Law School’s China Center, has suggested that part of why the misreporting persists is because the United States and Europe project their fears about extensive digital surveillance in their own societies onto China’s rapid technological rise. Compounded by the rhetoric around a US-China “arms race” in developing artificial intelligence, the idea that China might somehow perfect an exportable model of a totalitarian surveillance state has made people more willing to believe exaggerated accounts of the social credit system.","completion":"In response to the misreporting, several researchers have attempted to correct the narrative with well-documented examples of where foreign press coverage gets things wrong. Common mistakes include the assumption that all surveillance technology in China feeds into a centralized database, that every recordable action is assigned a point value and deducted from a comprehensive score, and that everyone in China receives such a score."}
{"prompt":"In reality, social credit is a broad policy project for encouraging individuals, business, legal institutions, and government itself to be more “trustworthy” (守信, shouxin) through a mix of measures. These measures include the blacklisting of lawbreakers, the “red-listing” of those with exemplary records, and a range of rewards and punishments. In a few places, it also involves localized and experimental scoring systems that are meant to incentivize “better” behavior.  Some of the mischaracterized accounts in foreign media are understandable given the loose use of the phrase “social credit” (社会信用, shehui xinyong) in China. One law professor I spoke to in Beijing encouraged me to think of it as a “working term,” an umbrella category encompassing several moving parts of a broader policy agenda that includes both national initiatives as well as city-level pilot projects that do not generalize to a countrywide scale.  Just because the social credit system is less comprehensive than it appears in foreign media reports does not mean that it is incapable of causing harm, of course. Moreover, the Chinese government maintains a sophisticated and pervasive surveillance apparatus, which it regularly uses to curtail the civil rights of its citizens. It’s not so difficult to imagine how the misguided belief that the social credit system centrally integrates other state-operated surveillance technologies may have originated, given the troubling creation of DNA databases in Xinjiang and police procurement of facial recognition technology across the country.   But the social credit system as it currently exists is not aimed at Orwellian social control. Rather, the cluster of policy initiatives designated by the term are intended to promote greater trust—namely, trust between companies and their customers, and between citizens and the government. This trust-building can serve both economic and political ends. While many of the problems that the government uses to justify the need for a social credit system have economic considerations at their core—improving food safety, punishing debtors, cracking down on counterfeit goods sold online—others fit a broader theme of promoting institutional trust, such as by penalizing those who produce misleading or forged academic research.","completion":"Taken as a whole, the range of goals that the social credit system aims to address may suggest that the government is itself unsure, and is still in the process of figuring out, what such a system can accomplish. But the system’s most widely publicized aspect in China is how it punishes those deemed “untrustworthy”—which is also where the greatest potential for harm lies. Yet the techniques that the Chinese government is using to enact these punishments are not especially unique—some of them are already ubiquitous in the United States. In fact, the two countries’ approach to trust-building is more similar than one might expect.  Blacklists with Teeth The core mechanism of the Chinese social credit system is the creation of blacklists. The government uses blacklists to punish people for various infringements of the law that fall short of being considered criminal activity. Commonly blacklisted subjects include people who have the means to repay debt they owe but choose not to, colloquially referred to as 老赖 (laolai). The Supreme People’s Court, the highest court in China, complies a national blacklist of “judgment defaulters,” people who have not complied with court orders. These orders are typically financial in nature, related to repaying debts. But they can also include other kinds of instructions, such as making a formal apology to an injured party or regularly visiting one’s elderly parents.  Punishments for landing on certain blacklists include being barred from taking civil service jobs, from sending one’s children to private schools, and from booking air travel or riding “soft-sleeper cars” on trains—the most comfortable railway compartment class for long journeys.  The social credit system is often compared to the dang’an (档案) system, a set of government dossiers on Chinese citizens recording the minutiae of their lives, from expressions of political thought to their performance at school, compiled from accounts by peers and local authorities. But a closer point of comparison is the government blacklisting that predates the development of the social credit system. Blacklists provided more concise judgments about alleged misdeeds, but they have long been considered ineffective at changing people’s behavior. In the past, even though some blacklists were printed in newspapers and screened before previews at films, many people were unaware that they were blacklisted and continued to go about their lives without suffering any consequences. Courts send blacklist notifications to judgment defaulters now, but many of these continue to go unnoticed. The social credit system is meant to give blacklists teeth."}
{"prompt":"How? One way is by encouraging and enabling different government agencies to pool information. Under the social credit system, several government bureaus have not only developed their own blacklists, but to date have signed forty memoranda of understanding that enable them to share information with one another to ensure that blacklisted individuals are duly punished.  Another way that the social credit system strengthens blacklists is by fostering closer communication not just within government but between government and industry—in particular, with China’s biggest technology firms. Previously, people who could not purchase airline tickets through official channels if they were blacklisted might have still managed to use websites like CTrip.com or the in-app travel booking feature of the mobile wallet service Alipay to circumvent these restrictions. That is no longer possible under agreements that these companies and several dozen others have signed with China’s National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), the powerful government body that has spearheaded the social credit system’s development.  According to available government and state media reports, one type of agreement, called “information sharing,” involves companies receiving government-issued blacklists, which they then match to their user base in order to prevent blacklisted people from performing certain activities like buying airplane tickets. Another kind of agreement, called “joint rewards and punishments,” restricts the behavior of blacklisted individuals even further: blacklisted users of Alipay, for instance, are unable to buy so-called “luxury items”—although it is unclear whether it is Alipay or the government that determines which items fall into this category.   By forging partnerships with Chinese technology companies, the state ensures that blacklisted people can’t avoid punishment. These partnerships make it harder for individuals to evade restrictions in the non-state economy, which is otherwise farther outside of the government’s sphere of control. But they also open the door to the possibility of a much more expansive social credit system, since technology companies have a wealth of information about Chinese citizens. Still, it remains unclear when and how companies might share their data with the state—although it would be difficult for them to avoid doing so if asked.","completion":"Webs of Trust In addition to blacklisting, China also has “red-listing.” This involves identifying people whose behavior is considered exemplary of “trustworthiness,” which includes paying bills and taxes on time or, in some cities, doing volunteer work and donating blood.  There are also more specialized examples of how rewards are granted: the government has a national “action plan” for encouraging young people to do volunteer work, and those volunteers recognized as outstanding are red-listed. The benefits they receive as a result include having their job applications to Tencent prioritized, paying discounted mobile phone rates through Alibaba, getting coupons for shopping on Alibaba’s ecommerce site TMall, and enjoying free accomodations for 300 overseas volunteers in an AliTravel-sponsored program. The state may at some point also share information about their “red lists” with tech companies in order to confer more benefits. For instance, ride-sharing behemoth Didi Chuxing has partnered with the NDRC “Xinyi+” (信易+, akin to “credit convenience”) project, which may begin to offer red-listed riders discounts, priority booking of cabs, and deposit-free bike rentals.  In some instances, blacklists are adapting to new media while retaining their original function of shaming people into changing their behavior. The enormously popular social video streaming app TikTok (抖音, douyin) has partnered with a local court in Nanning, Guangxi to display photographs of blacklisted people as advertisements between videos, in some cases offering reward payments for information about these people’s whereabouts that are a percentage of the amount of money the person owes. Much like the other apps and websites that take part in these state-sponsored efforts, TikTok does not disclose in its user-facing terms of service that it works with the local government of Nanning, and potentially other cities, to publicly shame blacklisted individuals."}
{"prompt":"A similar initiative is taking place in the Yuhua district of Shijiazhuang, the capital city of Hebei Province. There, local courts have opted to offer a WeChat “mini-program”—a limited-purpose feature nested within the popular chat app WeChat—known as a “Laolai Map.” This map displays blacklisted people, companies, and other organizations within a given area, alongside slogans such as “Recognize laolai, avoid risks.” It’s not clear if real-time location data or individuals’ home addresses are used to populate the map. The mini-program also enables users to look up blacklisted entities with a search function, and to see the offenses that landed them on the blacklist in the first place. While some descriptions are straightforward, such as “failure to report property ownership,” most are simply listed as defaulting on court orders without going into further detail.","completion":"Other state-tech collaborations are more ambitious in scope. For example, the budding “credit cities” concept is a spin on “smart cities” that involves tech companies building out digital scoring platforms that use a mix of government data and private sector data. With such initiatives, people who are deemed more trustworthy can rent bicycles and even apartments without providing a deposit, or delay immediate payment for cab rides and hospital visits. The participation of large tech companies in these ventures tends to be downplayed, as the credit city platforms are associated with their respective municipal governments and generally rely on smaller local firms.Still, details on the specifics of these partnerships are scarce. While major Chinese tech companies are not serving the social credit system the way foreign media has thus far portrayed—surveillance cameras are not using facial recognition to link misbehavior to a centralized scoring database, for instance—the ways in which they do partner with the state to coproduce the system are generally kept from the public’s eye. What little we know comes from news coverage of the signing ceremonies held when tech companies conclude agreements with the NDRC. At each of these, representatives of the companies’ senior leadership refer to their joint efforts as a form of social responsibility. The CEO of Meituan-Dianping, an online group-buying and food delivery service, notably said that co-constructing a social credit system is “every industry's—especially platform-based internet companies'—duty-bound responsibility.”  But how effective is the social credit system at improving “trustworthiness”? Thus far, state media has portrayed blacklists strengthened by the social credit system as having succeeded at encouraging people to be more honest and to break the law less often. The official news agency Xinhua, for instance, praised Ant Financial’s use of blacklist data to restrict certain purchases via mobile wallet app Alipay and to lower scores in its Sesame Credit credit scoring product, arguing that the company’s punishment of 1.2 million debt defaulters encouraged over 100,000 of them to repay their debts."}
{"prompt":"It’s difficult to confirm how such assessments are made, or whether blacklisting actually influences behavior at scale, especially considering how many people consider themselves to have been wrongfully blacklisted, or who find it unfair that they are blacklisted for deceased relatives’ debt. Still, it’s likely having some effect: a recent book by Ant Financial employees claimed that within a month of directly notifying Sesame Credit users that they were blacklisted for being in debt, 46% of those users paid off their debt.The Market for Blacklists The use of blacklists to promote trust is by no means confined to China. It is also pervasive in the United States, although it takes a different form.","completion":"Blacklisting under the Chinese social credit system is a fairly overt means of influencing behavior. Blacklists are developed and enforced by the state. By contrast, similar practices in the US tends to be more covert. Private firms develop lists of people who have committed minor transgressions, and generally sell these in their capacity as data brokers in a relatively under-regulated market. The Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA) of 1970 reined in many types of invasive data collection that could be used as informal credit ratings. But plenty of other kinds have slipped through the cracks or are FCRA-compliant, creating hidden yet technically legal data judgments that affect the lives of millions of Americans.One example is systematically compiled lists of retail employees accused—not convicted—of shoplifting. These FCRA-compliant databases have barred people from being hired in other sales positions. Background check databases acquire these records to compile what one lawyer has referred to as a “secret blacklist,” given that employees accused of shoplifting are often made to write statements confessing that they committed the theft even in cases where they had not. They are typically unaware that these admission statements feed into such databases, which are consulted when they apply for other retail jobs.  On the customer-facing side, databases developed by firms such as The Retail Equation track people who display the characteristics of conducting “return fraud,” by looking at items they have bought, how often they made returns, whether returns were accompanied by receipts, and how much money was issued per return. Using real name-registered forms of identification such as driver’s licenses, these databases are able to track people across multiple retailers. The consequences for people on these lists include being unable to return or exchange goods at certain stores for a year. Notably, if records across different retailers are kept separate within the database, they are not treated as credit reports and therefore do not run afoul of the FCRA.An additional practice with severe consequences has emerged in the housing rental market, with New York’s so-called “tenant blacklist.” Tenant-landlord disputes taken to housing courts form a record that can even work against tenants who have won their cases. Rental screening data brokers mine housing court filings across the city to create databases of every tenant sued in housing court, regardless of the outcome of each case. Despite how little context is provided in these databases, landlords nonetheless check them when deciding whether to accept a potential tenant."}
{"prompt":"The database only indicates that a tenant was sued in housing court without listing the outcome (including if the tenant won) or cause (landlords have been known to raise cases in efforts to evict rent-stabilized tenants) of the case. Yet the mere appearance of a tenant’s name on a blacklist is presented as negative in and of itself. In a non-surprising parallel to Chinese blacklists, people often first find out they were on the tenant blacklist after having failed to secure housing and consulting a lawyer to find out why. An unhoused New York woman with no criminal record and a credit score of 760 was unable to secure an apartment reserved for the low-income elderly because of a tenant blacklist. The repackaging of blacklist data can amplify and distort their significance, yet they will persist as long as they profit data brokers, and in part for a failure to imagine viable alternatives. Notably, one of the proposed solutions to dealing with potential tenant-landlord disputes in cities like New York is to ask to remain anonymous in cases taken to housing court. The social credit system has yet to cover the fraud-ridden housing markets of China, though were a similar issue to arise, anonymity would be difficult to preserve under the nationwide push for real-name registration both on- and offline. Ant Financial, the fintech giant behind credit rating service Sesame Credit, has partnered with NDRC’s “Xinyi+” project to use the company’s data on individual and enterprise users’ finances in order to help landlords make decisions about housing and office rentals.","completion":"Listening to the Laolai In both the US and China, blacklisting systems enforce broad punishments that are disproportionate to the transgressions that land people on blacklists. Likewise, the burden falls on the blacklisted individual to discover they are being systematically prevented from taking certain actions and to figure out how to remedy their situation.  Demanding greater transparency and accountability from both systems has been a challenge, although US efforts have been more successful. In the US, activists have successfully pushed back against certain forms of blacklisting for violating the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Civil society and legal aid organizations have also spent years monitoring, and attempting to curb, various practices embedded in using ambiguous personal data for blacklisting."}
{"prompt":"In China, by contrast, there is less room for such activity. For one, it’s unclear how credit legislation could be used to mount comparable efforts. And, although a few Chinese consumer protection organizations have become attuned to the ways that tech firms’ use of customer data can lead to privacy abuses, they have not taken up the issue of blacklists because the practice is treated as socially acceptable in China.  Some avenues for contesting cases where people believe they are wrongfully blacklisted do exist, but they are unlikely to be widely known. In places like Shanghai and Hubei, local social credit regulations lay out steps for filing “objection applications” where individuals have found credit information to be incorrect or omitted. Yet, given the scope of what counts as “credit information,” it may be difficult for non-experts to understand and make a case for why their records should be modified. Moreover, it’s unclear if the punishments for being blacklisted leave individuals enough room to redeem themselves, or if the constraints are so stringent that they create insurmountable obstacles to clearing one’s name.","completion":"The current state of the social credit system is far less sophisticated than its portrayal in the foreign press. But if the scope of what can count as blacklist data widens, and if the tech sector takes an even more pervasive “searchlight” approach to seamlessly melding these data into their core offerings, the system could move much closer to the dystopian picture that appears in the media. In particular, if China embraces the marketization of blacklist data—so that data is bought and sold, like in the US—information about individuals would become even harder to track and contest.  Over the next few years, the Chinese government will continue to tinker with implementing the social credit system. People who are wholly unaffected by blacklists may view them favorably, as proof that the government is proactively combating the laolai phenomenon. Yet there needs to be a critical analysis of the social credit system that centers the perspectives of those who are most directly affected. We need to hear from the laolai themselves to understand what the unforeseen consequences of this vast policy project may be. Only then can we begin to see what the social credit system is actually achieving—and at what cost."}
{"prompt":"It was nearly 4 a.m. in China when I hit play on the video entitled “Zhao Benshan: King of Poetry!”, but the ghosts of a thousand past viewers were still distracting me with their chatter. The video is a remix collage of CCTV Spring Festival Gala skits starring iconic comedian Zhao Benshan—source material familiar to anyone who grew up near a TV in China—edited and AutoTune’d into a military-grade earworm. But I could barely piece that together through the fog of text left behind by previous viewers: laments about the catchiness of the song, compliments to creators, jokes, and echoes of favorite lyrics. In the end, I had to watch the video twice, as I often do on the social video site Bilibili: once with the bullet comments turned off so that I could follow the source material, and once more for the real experience, the chitchat obscuring the content.","completion":"Bullet comments, or 弹幕 (“danmu”), are text-based user reactions superimposed onto online videos: a visual commentary track to which anyone can contribute. When a beloved character dies in a web series, a river of grieving kaomoji (╥﹏╥)—a kind of emoticon first popularized in Japan—washes over whatever happens next. A child’s overly honest response to a TV anchor’s question triggers a blizzard of different ways to signify laughter (2333, 哈哈哈哈). When the (Chinese) good guy punches out the (American) bad guy in 2017’s blockbuster Wolf Warrior 2, jingoistic cries of “Long live China!” erupt across the screen. Each comment is synchronized to an exact moment in the video, and will fly across the screen on cue on every subsequent replay. On particularly popular videos, they pile up so thick that they can cover the original entirely. The result is a viscerally social experience, like an opening night crowd at a movie theater that you can summon anytime."}
{"prompt":"In the West, the Chinese internet is mostly depicted in negative terms: what websites and social platforms are blocked, what keywords are banned, what conversations and viral posts are scrubbed clean from the web overnight. This austere view is not inaccurate, but it leaves out what exactly the nearly 750 million internet users in China do get up to.","completion":"Take a look at bullet comments, and you’ll have a decent answer to that question. They represent the essence of Chinese internet culture: fast-paced and impish, playfully collaborative, thick with rapidly evolving inside jokes and memes. They are a social feature beloved by a generation known for being antisocial. And most importantly, they allow for a type of spontaneous, cumulative, and public conversation between strangers that is increasingly rare on the Chinese internet."}
{"prompt":"Stray Bullets Like much of what’s popular on the Chinese internet, bullet comments are an invasive species from Japan. When China’s borders loosened to enable freer trade and travel in the 1980s, Japan's well-established media industries were the best positioned, both geographically and culturally, to take advantage of the wide-eyed new market. Alongside Nikon cameras and Yamaha keyboards, Japanese “ACG”—animation, comics, and games—rushed into China. For Chinese kids growing up during the 1990s, manga and anime series like Doraemon, Sailor Moon, Slam Dunk, and One Piece became important cultural touchstones.","completion":"The most fervent fans began creating infrastructure to feed their hobby. Resellers smuggled or imported books, videos, and merchandise from Japan, sometimes via Taiwan and Hong Kong. Volunteer groups developed efficient pipelines for distributing and subtitling the latest episodes of anime shows first on VHS tapes, then online. Organizers created offline and online events and conventions for fans to gather. All of this activity opened the door to even more widespread interest in ACG in later generations. A recent industry report estimates that there are 300 million self-identified ACG fans in China, and that 97 percent of them were “post-’90s” and “post-’00s”—the generations defined by being born after 1990 and 2000, respectively."}
{"prompt":"When a Japanese site called Niconico invented the idea of writing comments directly on top of YouTube videos in 2006, it took less than a year for a clone of the platform to appear in China. In Japanese, the system was named 弹幕 (danmaku), or “bullet curtain,” after a subgenre of hardcore shoot-em-up games in which enemies fly in formation across the screen, like the famous arcade game Galaga on steroids. Both kinds of danmaku—the games and the comments—required their audience to process an overwhelming amount of visual stimulation at high speeds.","completion":"In China, several sites seeking to clone the Niconico experience copied the feature, as well as the Japanese characters for the name, which are pronounced “danmu” in Chinese. Today, the most successful of these clones by far is Bilibili, a social video site that has become an entertainment staple for young people in China."}
{"prompt":"Like many of the other video platforms in China, Bilibili combines officially licensed shows and movies (both domestic and international) with user-uploaded videos and livestreams. ACG content still dominates the site, but Bilibili’s hordes of bullet commenters can now react to just about everything else too: makeup tutorials, documentaries, music videos, vintage commercials, and “Kichiku,” a Niconico-originated genre of manic Auto-Tune’d parody remixes such as the one of Zhao Benshan mentioned above.","completion":"Bilibili isn’t China’s biggest video platform by a long shot, but it does maintain an unusually tight grip on youth culture: over 90 percent of Bilibili’s 93 million monthly active users are under the age of twenty-five. Bilibili’s finger on this pulse has translated into major financial success: the company has, at time of writing, a market capitalization of $5.41 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s also the primary sponsor of one of China’s most popular basketball teams, which Yao Ming was playing for when he was discovered by the NBA and which he now owns: the Shanghai Bilibili Sharks. Even the central government has embraced the platform in a bid to reach young people: in January 2019, Bilibili was one of two video sites chosen to distribute a government-commissioned, domestically produced anime series about the life of Karl Marx. During the opening sequence of the first episode, the bullet comments are a blizzard of check-ins from high schools and colleges around the country."}
{"prompt":"As the rest of the Chinese media industry tries to replicate Bilibili's success with the coveted post-’90s demographic, bullet comments have spread from platform to platform as if by airborne spores. Nearly every major video site in China—Youku, Tencent Video, iQiYi—now has a bullet comment feature, as do most of the biggest live-streaming platforms. In fact, many of them actually have Bilibili’s exact bullet comment feature, which was open-sourced by the company in 2015. The invasive social feature can also be found in more unlikely places: apps for reading comics or streaming music, e-commerce platforms, even narrative cutscenes in the middle of popular mobile games. Bullet comments have become a ubiquitous social layer woven into any digital experience.","completion":"The Primordial Soup of Memes Li Moqiang, cofounder of the Chinese electronics company Xiaomi, describes his first encounter with bullet comments in his 2014 book 参与感 (\"Togetherness\"). Fifteen minutes in, his eyes were watering. He felt overwhelmed, and had trouble focusing on anything. But after enduring it for another thirty minutes, he found that he had developed the ability to switch his attention between the comments and the underlying video at will—a sort of Magic Eye trick for processing content and commentary at the same time."}
{"prompt":"Tech leaders like Li are willing to risk eye strain to pay attention to bullet comments because the fast-paced conversations and roasting sessions they enable beget many of the memes and trends that eventually infect Weibo, WeChat, and the rest of the Chinese internet. Individual bullet comments rarely go over a dozen characters, so commenters rely on a rich repertoire of text-based memes—from internet shorthand to clever wordplay on ancient Chinese sayings—to express themselves efficiently. Even for people fluent in Chinese, deciphering a video’s worth of bullet comments can be a crash course in internet tropes, rudimentary Japanese, Chinese history, regional stereotypes, and continuously updated pop culture references.  On top of trading witticisms, bullet commenters also play informal, emergent games with each other and with the content. Commenters will synchronize their comments to create a wall of text that shields future viewers from gruesome or scary shots, or create 五毛特效 (“fifty-cent special effects”) like populating a night sky full of ASCII stars. Other commenters spontaneously collaborate to generate subtitles in various languages—both earnest and facetious—as \"the Eight-Nation Alliance Caption Club,” a wry reference to the international military coalition that invaded China following the Boxer Rebellion. If a character in a show holds up a sudoku puzzle for even a second, a bullet commenter will probably try to solve it.","completion":"To maintain a healthy comment culture on a platform where any toxicity would be literally foregrounded, Bilibili has taken an approach to community management that feels downright heretical in the growth-obsessed tech industry. While any visitor to the site can watch its videos, only fully registered members are allowed to upload videos or leave a bullet comment. Currently, registration involves passing a hundred-question test about anime trivia (“In the Fate series, which magic is the Einzborn family fighting over the Holy Grail in hopes of recovering?”) and bullet comment etiquette (“Which of the below comments is not trolling? A. Should I use cilantro or not? B. I don’t want to be a person anymore C. Which kind of tofu is most delicious? D. This show isn’t as good as XX” [The answer is B.]).  Incredibly, this is actually the simplified version: the test was once even longer and more difficult to pass, earning it the nickname the “Chinese otaku high school examination” in reference to the infamous, grueling, week-long test that single-handedly determines college admissions around the country. Despite this significant hurdle, 31 million users have completed the Bilibili registration process, many with the help of cheat sheets circulated around the internet. This self-enforced gatekeeping process has given the site an unique advantage on a playing field where any feature can be cloned: a community and a bullet comment culture widely regarded as the best around."}
{"prompt":"Heat and Noise 热闹 (rè nào) is hard to concisely translate into English with its personality intact. Literally meaning \"heat and noise,\" it describes an atmosphere of bustling conviviality: a balance point between hygge and lit. A night market sizzling with smells and chatter is re nao, as is a table-slapping game of mahjong after a big family meal. Re nao is as central to the Chinese vision of the good life as freedom is to America’s; it’s deep-rooted in a way that defies rationality.  For young Chinese people, bullet comments are a dose of re nao that fits better into their lives than the karaoke, mahjong, and alcohol-fueled banquets preferred by their elders. The post-’90s generation is stereotyped—and often self-identifies—as shut-ins. A Peking University study of 3000 post-’90s people from across China found that 62 percent ranked “staying at home to surf the web” as their favorite activity. “Hanging out with friends” came in at 39 percent, while “going to the bar” was ranked lowest, at only 3.4 percent.  This shift away from traditional conviviality is a consequence of societal changes that uniquely impact the younger generation. As people move away from their hometowns and alma maters, traditional social bonds fray. They are then further strained by the urban sprawl that makes it challenging to keep up with friends in the same city. Many members of the post-’90s generation are also exhausted from the “996” work culture that has taken root in Chinese startups and other young companies: 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, with no overtime pay. It’s easy to see the appeal of anonymous togetherness on Bilibili, a shortcut to re nao that requires no jostling commute, no reservation at a crowded restaurant, no friends in the same city or neighborhood.","completion":"The hyper-re nao enabled by internet features like bullet comments might be one of the more potent drugs ever created. In the US, we are just starting to understand the potential dangers of this high—how the addictive thrill of online togetherness can leave lonely people vulnerable to radicalization, how the echoing of one’s opinions by a crowd will always be more compelling than any fact. But the Chinese government has long been attuned to the thin line between a carnival and a riot; after all, the Cultural Revolution, a display of youthful re nao gone very wrong if there ever was one, is in living memory for everyone in charge."}
{"prompt":"In recent years, that insight has led the government to encourage more siloed digital nooks, such as WeChat’s 500-person-max group chats, and to more heavily police the open digital spaces where enough strangers can congregate to become a problem. The type of digital spaces, in other words, that bullet comments enable.  The government’s embrace of Bilibili, then, may just be a way of keeping it on a tight leash. In 2017, Bilibili’s app was temporarily pulled from mobile stores as part of a larger crackdown on “unproductive culture,” which also saw hip-hop artists with tattoos banned from television. This warning shot was fired despite the politically apathetic, if not downright patriotic tone of most comments on the site: Bilibili users are much more likely to bicker over whether Marvel or DC is the superior provider of superhero movies than to poke fun at Party leadership. But it is the very strength of its capacity for re nao that makes bullet comments a politically risky format: a crowd, no matter how anime-obsessed, just needs the right spark to become a mob.","completion":"In October 2017, the 5th Plenary of the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China announced the future direction of Chinese economic development: Fully develop the basic role of consumption in economic growth; focus on expanding household consumption; steer consumption in intelligent, green, healthy, and safe directions; and focus on expanding service consumption to promote the upgrading of consumption.  It was easy to miss the point amidst all the droning officialese. Small wonder, then, that government bodies and the business community simplified this directive into four easy-to-remember characters: 消费升级 (xiaofeishengji), “consumption upgrade.” In the past three years, the phrase has appeared in the policy documents of eleven provinces and autonomous regions, a dozen cities, the Ministry of Commerce (MoC), and China’s top executive body, the State Council.  The aim of the “consumption upgrade” is simple: to transition from an investment-driven economy powered by industry to a consumption-driven economy sustained by a consumer society. Promoting domestic consumption isn’t a new priority: the Chinese Communist Party has pursued this goal since at least the late 1990s, when the 1997 Asian financial crisis alerted the country’s leadership to the perils of an export-driven economy. But it has acquired more urgency in recent years, as investment-driven growth has slowed.  Moreover, the internet offers a powerful new tool for building a consumer society, one that the government believes will play a crucial role in China’s economic transition. The MoC, at a press conference in late 2017, identified the internet as a “channel” that would make the “consumption upgrade” possible—specifically, by linking populations in rural and remote regions with high-quality goods at low cost, ensuring that economic development reaches the whole population.  As a result, you might expect the Chinese Communist Party to love Pinduoduo (PDD), the group-buying app founded in 2015. PDD works like Groupon, but rather than events and services, the app’s listings are primarily consumer items, from fresh fruit to diapers to home electronics. According to a 2018 study by venture capital firm GGV Capital, around 60 percent of PDD’s users come from less developed regions of China, and the deals are considerable: 399 RMB ($60) for a LED TV, for example."}
{"prompt":"To top it off, the interface is addicting: cartoon-like icons on a red background; daily lotteries and games through which shoppers can win further discounts; and the ability to share your finds and recruit friends to buy together via WeChat, China’s biggest social media app. These attractions helped make PDD the youngest-ever Chinese startup to be listed on the NASDAQ stock exchange. At its IPO in July 2018, PDD raised $1.6 billion.  Yet for all its success, PDD has encountered constant trouble from the Chinese government. Why? The prevalence of counterfeit goods on the platform. Shortly after PDD’s IPO, the State Administration for Market Regulation called for an investigation of sales of counterfeit products on the app. Social media users shared images of “Shrap” TVs and “Phelips” razors listed for sale, while an anonymous blogger wrote a widely read post accusing PDD of “set[ting] China back in its “hard and bitter trade war…one of the core objectives of which is to showcase how far we have come in intellectual property awareness.” More recently, in March 2018, a rumor circulated on Chinese social media that in 2017 alone, WeChat blocked links sent from PDD more than 1000 times, presumably in response to government pressure.  The PDD controversy isn’t just about fake goods, however. There is a deeper dynamic at play. By using platforms like PDD, rural residents are staking a claim to China’s digital sphere. The Chinese internet has long catered to the urban middle classes. To Wu Changchang, a professor of communications at East China Normal University, the “invisible minority” of rural users “didn’t have any discursive power before.” Now, rural users are making themselves visible to the rest of the country in a radically new way—and provoking a confrontation with the state in the process.","completion":"Paper Towels and Tasty Fruits The countryside has immense importance to the Chinese Communist Party. Urban population only surpassed the rural population for the first time in 2011, and over forty percent of Chinese citizens still live outside cities. Economic development—and in particular, bringing an estimated 1.3 million people in rural areas out of poverty each year—has long been the basis of the party’s legitimacy. With rural incomes rising at an estimated 10 percent each year, compared with 5 to 6 percent in the cities, the countryside is also expected to boost China’s growth and consumption figures in the next decade."}
{"prompt":"On September 20, 2018, the State Council released a policy document that outlined how the government plans to promote growth in the countryside going forward. It defined the “consumption upgrade” for rural towns and villages as an effort to increase not just the quantity but the quality of what people buy—literally, in the form of higher-quality products, but also by changing the nature of of spending from necessities to “telecommunications, cultural and leisure products, automobiles, and e-commerce in general.” Getting rural users to embrace e-commerce can be challenging, however. One problem is the lower rates of rural connectivity: according to a 2017 study conducted by the China Internet Network Information Center (CINIC), the government body responsible for internet affairs in China, the countryside accounted for 43 percent of China’s total population but only 27 percent of all of China’s internet users. Even when rural users do have internet access, simply connecting them to products isn’t enough to ensure that they can afford to buy them. China has one of the world’s most unequal societies, and its countryside is poor: according to the National Bureau of Statistics, per capita income in rural areas is 39 percent that of the per capita income of urbanites.","completion":"This is where PDD comes in. The app has been remarkably successful in popularizing e-commerce among rural residents by giving them access to cheap goods. To PDD’s user base, affordability is essential. Wang Qunhong, a twenty-nine-year-old migrant worker from Ji’an, Jiangxi, put it to me this way: “The important thing about PDD is that it’s cheap, it really is.” She feels that the mainstream media had blown the fake goods controversy out of proportion. “You do find knockoffs, but you can’t say it’s all bad; you can find stuff as good as you’re willing to pay for,” she said."}
{"prompt":"Li Yinghui, a thirty-nine-year-old housewife in the village of Heyang, Zhejiang, agrees. “Wages around here aren’t high enough for me to be shopping online every day,” she told me. Low wages aren’t the only factor that constrain Li’s capacity to participate in e-commerce. “My phone can’t even run most [apps]; it’s a cheap one that I bought for 1,000 yuan ($150),” she explained. Her fifty-six-year-old neighbor, Zha Xiaolong, is even less interested in letting mobile technology change his habits. “What’s an app?” he asked as he squinted over the top of his screen. “I only use WeChat.” These are the obstacles that PDD has overcome so successfully to become a major platform for rural e-commerce. A 2018 study estimated that 40 percent of PDD’s users live outside even “fourth-tier” cities in China. “Those inside [Beijing’s] Fifth Ring Road won’t have heard of us,” PDD’s founder Colin Huang told the magazine Caijing, arguing that he was bringing the government’s vaunted “consumption upgrade” to the countryside. Upgrading consumption “doesn’t mean letting people in Shanghai live like Parisians,” he explained, “but letting the people of Anqing in Anhui province have paper towels and tasty fruits.” Viral Vulgarity From the government’s perspective, building a consumer society in the countryside is essential for economic development. Platforms like PDD are clearly serving that goal. Yet if you give people tools for participating in the national economy, you have to expect them to use them for their own ends—and this often gives visibility to economic conditions and desires that contradict the image of the modern nation that the government wants to project.","completion":"The urban-rural gap in China is not just an economic divide in consumption power but a cultural divide based on consumption habits. Rural residents don’t just consume cheaper goods. They consume different kinds of goods—including, in some cases, ones that the government may not approve of. This is no less true in online media than in e-commerce. If counterfeit goods on e-commerce platforms popular with rural users pose a challenge to the government, so too does “vulgar” content on social media apps popular with the same demographic. In both cases, the successful push to bring the countryside online has yielded unexpected consequences that the government is struggling to control."}
{"prompt":"The conflict over online media is aptly demonstrated by two other apps that have frequently showed up on the authorities’ watchlist: Jinri Toutiao and Kuaishou (called “Kwai” in English). Jinri Toutiao is a news aggregator, while Kwai enables users to watch, create, and share short videos. Both draw a large portion of their user base from less developed regions. (As of 2017, five of Kwai’s top ten most followed accounts hailed from “rust belt” communities in China’s economically depressed northeast.) And both have been hit with accusations of being “vulgar” (低俗 disu).","completion":"The content that has been criticized includes scantily clad women, tattooed gang members, domestic violence, pregnant teens showing off their bellies, and would-be “pranksters” groping women on the subway. It also includes cross-dressers, obese individuals, off-key singers, and hanmai performers—amateur rappers who record themselves shouting over the beats of small-town nightclubs—whose enthusiastic (if not exactly polished) acts have won them millions of fans around China."}
{"prompt":"Such material has caused Kwai to come under public scrutiny in a way very reminiscent of PDD. In 2016, the writer Huo Qiming published an influential essay on WeChat called “A Brutal Grassroots Saga: China’s Countryside Within an App.” He graphically describes the violent stunts that rural users perform in videos on Kwai, such as a farmer lighting firecrackers under his groin and a teenager who grins and eats a live snake on camera. And he blames China’s urban-centric economic development and the underrepresentation of the countryside in official media for forcing the rural population to risk their health and safety to gain a national following and a few hundred RMB with corporate sponsorships (selling, Huo adds, “inferior and counterfeit products”).","completion":"These views are clearly shared by government officials, who have repeatedly cracked down on Kwai. The authorities have twice ordered Kwai to “rectify” its content, and CCTV, the main state television broadcaster, has singled it out for criticism. WeChat banned the sharing of Kwai content for six months, only lifting its restrictions in October 2018. A month later, Kwai briefly disappeared from the Android app store."}
{"prompt":"Similarly, Jinri Toutiao has endured heavy criticism for vulgarity and faced government pressure as a result. In November 2018, the platform’s “life stories” channel was put on a one-month hiatus for “erotic content,” following the appearance of viral essays with titles like, “Her one-night stand turned out to be her new supervisor.” To date, the app has been taken offline many times, and hundreds of user accounts have been closed down.","completion":"In January 2019, the China Netcasting Services Association, an industry association authorized by the Ministry of Civil Affairs, issued new guidelines that required short-video platforms to review every piece of content before it goes online to ensure that it does not contradict official political positions of the Party, or promote vulgarity, violence, gambling, drug use, superstition, ethnic division, or sex. Another article in the regulations suggested video apps should try to attract “mainstream media” and Party or military-affiliated organizations to open accounts, in order to “improve the provision of positive and high-quality content.” As with PDD, though, apps like Kwai and Jinri Toutiao have their defenders. To them, the platform’s content is an authentic expression of grassroots rural culture. In 2016, Zhang Yiming, the founder of the company that makes Jinri Toutiao (as well as the popular short-video app TikTok, known in China as Douyin), told Caijing, “I don’t think it’s a problem to be labeled ‘vulgar.’ The magazines you read at the airport are different from the magazines at the train station, but some people will denigrate  [lower-class train station reading] in order to prove that they are elegant.” For Professor Wu at East China Normal University, the conversation around vulgarity signifies a deeper issue about the representation of rural life. “Technically speaking, mass media should already be giving this type of [rural] mass culture an opportunity to express itself,” Wu says. “But it’s also a fact that this culture doesn’t meet the standard for the type of culture that [the authorities feel] Chinese media is supposed to promote.” Long neglected by official media, rural residents are creating their own media online, regardless of whether it aligns with the public image that the government hopes to cultivate. To Wu, there will always be a market for the so-called “low end” of goods and media consumption, but this reflects a real divide in society under the current “socialist market” economy, rather than any conscious effort to provoke cultural conflict. Rural social media help “reinforce or even restore the bonds of community, and in-group and out-group relations within the villages.” They also expose the gaps in the official narrative of upward mobility, and function as a kind of implicit critique of the notion that anyone can succeed in the new Chinese economy—which may help explain why they have triggered a heavy-handed government response."}
{"prompt":"Better Products, Better People Counterfeit goods on e-commerce platforms and vulgar content on media apps may seem like distinct controversies. But from the government’s perspective, they are closely connected. Ever since market reforms began in 1978, and the focus shifted toward globalization and economic liberalization, discussions in official media about improving product quality—or pinzhi (品质)—began to happen alongside discussions about improving suzhi (素质), an ambiguous term that encompasses a citizen’s intellectual and moral qualities. Rural Chinese are often seen as particularly in need of improved suzhi, and the government has launched several initiatives toward that end.","completion":"One example is the “National Training Plan for Migrant Workers,” an ambitious policy to improve the suzhi of China’s rural-to-urban migrants through a mix of state-run job-training programs and media campaigns at the provincial and municipal levels. The goal was to encourage migrant workers to improve their manners, develop useful skills, and adopt an enterprising attitude to compete in the market economy in the absence of social benefits. Chengdu’s training program, for example, had lessons on municipal hygiene and traffic rules, as well as the “right” ways of sitting, walking, and even dressing for migrant ”new urbanites.” A 2009 program in the town of Zhangpu, Jiangsu Province, included lectures on labor law and job-search etiquette, as well as skills training in the accounting, security guard, and landscaping professions."}
{"prompt":"Vulgar content that goes viral on platforms like Kwai threatens to undermine suzhi, then, just as counterfeit goods that circulate through platforms like PDD threaten to undermine pinzhi. In both cases, however, a top-down order isn’t enough for the countryside to upgrade its lifestyle. Counterfeit goods, and “low-quality” content, continue to flow.","completion":"“Other men can go home and watch their wives. I watch my phone,” Zhu Hongfu, a laborer from Zhejiang province, baldly admits to me. A bachelor now in his fifties, Zhu is among the three million “surplus men” in China, many from rural or working-class backgrounds who, as a result of China’s skewed gender ratio and their own financial position, may never find a partner to marry. Besides using WeChat to keep up with friends, he says, his phone serves just two purposes: playing an online card game called Double Buckle, and browsing videos of attractive women."}
{"prompt":"“I’ll stop when I get married,” he jokes. His colleague from nearby overhears him, and shouts: “Then we may have to wait a long time!” Open the app. Watch a fifteen-second video. Double tap for more videos. Watch those. Tap. Make a fifteen-second video. Touch it up. Post it. More than 500 million monthly active users of TikTok perform this cycle countless times a day, as they create and share short videos on one of the world’s most popular social media platforms.  TikTok, also known as Douyin (抖音) in China, is a social video app made by the Chinese company Bytedance. Since its release in 2016, it has become phenomenally successful. By the spring of 2018 it had become the most popular iOS app worldwide, with more than 45 million downloads over the first quarter of 2018 in the App Store, surpassing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. And in late 2018, after a $3 billion funding round led by SoftBank boosted its valuation to $75 billion, Bytedance became the world’s biggest privately held startup.","completion":"Yet as TikTok continues to grow globally, boasting more users around the world than Twitter or Snapchat, its biggest impact back home in China is where you might least expect it: the countryside. The real story of TikTok and platforms like it isn’t in the booming megacities, but in the rural villages. The consequences for the future of Chinese society, and the future of Chinese tech, are immense.  Country Living Platforms like TikTok have played a central role in bringing inexperienced users from rural communities online. Perhaps the most important reason is the fact that they use video rather than text. Compared to text, video content is much easier to comprehend for rural users, who are likely to have lower literacy rates, less formal education, and less experience with the internet."}
{"prompt":"As part of my fieldwork, I interviewed a middle-aged female internet user in rural China who has only received a primary-school-level education. She prefers to watch cooking tutorial videos instead of reading descriptions of recipes, both because video tutorials are more convenient to follow while cooking and because she finds watching video easier than reading.","completion":"For many rural users, in fact, online video has lowered the education and literacy barriers that had previously prevented them from participating in typical internet activities, such as reading news articles. They can now watch news videos, often clips from local TV news broadcasts that are shared on social media. They can also join the lively conversations that spring up around these videos, as users from the same rural community interact with one another in the comments section."}
{"prompt":"Shun, sixty years old, used to work as the secretary of the Communist Party branch committee of a village in Henan province. He only recently became an active user of WeChat, a popular messaging and social-media app, after it began to offer more video content. Due to his lack of formal education, Shun says that he finds “watching short videos on the news posted by young people a more efficient way of information-seeking than reading long articles.” He belongs to a WeChat group chat for members of his village and, having silently followed the conversation for more than a year, he now shares videos that he finds informative with young villagers, hoping to connect with the new generation.","completion":"Online video also offers an essential source of information for acquiring new skills, especially for female villagers who are learning how to knit, dance, and cook. Feng, a forty-three-year-old housewife, has become the center of her social circle in her village by introducing group dancing techniques to her girlfriends. Feng has fewer than three years of formal schooling, but she followed tutorial videos on a popular mobile app called “Tangdou Group Dancing App.” Feng discovered these videos because of a recommendation algorithm. Video apps implement sophisticated tools to tailor personalized content for their users, and this is often how inexperienced internet users in rural China find content. The algorithm-driven recommendation systems are frequently mentioned by interviewees in my fieldwork in Henan Province, a less developed area in the central part of the country. They consider recommendations an easier and more intuitive way to discover new videos than search engines such as Baidu, which require some experience to know how to use effectively."}
{"prompt":"Content Creators Rural users aren’t just consuming video, however. They are also creating it. To help users make videos, apps like TikTok have embedded tools such as stickers, filters, transitions effects, and background music. These tools enable users with no special training to make well-produced videos relatively quickly. The videos have to be short: just like Twitter, where users are required to convey messages concisely in less than 280 characters, apps like TikTok only allow short videos—on TikTok, the limit is fifteen seconds—so users are encouraged to focus on the most attention-catching moments.","completion":"A vast online ecosystem of rural video has emerged as a result, as users document their everyday lives. They make videos about how they farm crops, raise animals, and participate in the social life of the village. Such content is widely popular among rural users, who get to see their own communities represented by actual members of those communities. Rural users are adapting the platforms to their own ends, telling their own story rather than having official media outlets tell their story for them. As one TikTok user in rural China told me, “Videos generated at a grassroots level and produced by ordinary rural users represent a more vivid picture of what everyday life is like in rural China.” These videos are also popular among rural users who must leave the countryside for work: they help migrant workers feel connected to their hometowns when working in the cities, offering daily entertainment that does not require too much of a time commitment."}
{"prompt":"But rural users aren’t the only consumers of these videos. The platforms also enable urban users to see rural life in far more depth and detail—and in the process are helping to bridge the significant divide between the two worlds. This divide has grown dramatically since the country began opening up in the 1970s. Industrialization, urbanization, and modernization have pushed rural and urban China in two very different directions, primarily due to economic policies of the central government that favor urban areas and the unequal distribution of infrastructure and wealth that has resulted.","completion":"Moreover, while migrant workers from rural China have fuelled economic growth in urban areas, the rigid hukou (“household registration”) system prevents them from becoming urban citizens and enjoying social benefits such as better pension funds, better healthcare, and better schools for their children. In recent years, many young migrants have returned to their towns and villages. They have brought the basic technology skills they learned in the cities back with them, and often put them to use in an entrepreneurial capacity: for instance, by starting businesses and then reaching urban customers with e-commerce websites, mobile social media, and short-video platforms. This has produced even more online encounters across the rural-urban divide."}
{"prompt":"Sometimes, however, such encounters have led to controversy. In 2016, just as short-video platforms were starting to appear, a public account on WeChat named “Doctor X” wrote a post criticizing rural users for the “vulgarity” of their videos. The author argued that rural users were seeking attention by showing particularly impoverished households or by performing dangerous stunts like eating glass or raw meat. If their content became popular, the users could then cash in by promoting ads or receiving gifts from fans. The videos reflected poorly on Chinese rural life, the author warned, and underscored the unbridgeable gap between the countryside and the cities.","completion":"Similarly, the official news has criticized short-video platforms for not designing “socially accountable algorithms,” and has called for them to take responsibility for feeding higher-quality content to users. In January 2019, the China Netcasting Services Association, a national industry body, published a set of guidelines on short-video platforms, which forbid the publication of 100 topics that are politically sensitive or considered “immoral” or “unhealthy.” It also required platforms to review content before it goes live, which would require hiring more moderators. Companies like Bytedance already employ thousands of moderators to review the content on their platforms, ensuring it remains within acceptable parameters. But the China Netcasting Services Association wants them to do more: “In theory, the number of reviewers should be above one a thousandth of the number of videos published on the platform per day.” Yet for all the controversy around short-video platforms, there is ample evidence that they also create opportunities for mutual understanding and exchange across the urban-rural divide. For example, the Huanong Brothers are two young men from the countryside who have become some of the most popular social-media influencers in China in 2018. After working in urban areas for a few years, they returned to their village and started a small business raising and selling bamboo rats, a type of rodent that’s used in local dishes in Jiangxi province. They document their everyday life of raising, cleaning, and cooking bamboo rats on Xigua Video, a platform also owned by Bytedance that allows longer videos than TikTok. The Huanong Brothers’ videos have gone viral on the Chinese internet, earning over 500 million views and 2 million followers. Their online success has also translated into offline income: in addition to earning advertising revenue on their videos, the Huanong Brothers have also sold an increasing number of pre-orders for their bamboo rats."}
{"prompt":"As more urban and rural users use these platforms, and the number of videos from both sides increases exponentially, the two societies within China are getting to know one another’s way of life. The platforms can even provide an income stream to rural users, as demonstrated by the Huanong Brothers and by e-commerce entrepreneurs who use videos to promote the sale of agricultural products to urban areas. And while urban and rural audiences still have different preferences when it comes to content, rural videos can become popular among urban users nostalgic for what they perceive to be a simpler life closer to the natural environment. Online video platforms offer a site of encounter where two very different Chinas can meet.","completion":"Going Global As the Chinese tech industry grows, its companies are increasingly looking beyond the domestic market to the international one. Here, Chinese video platforms have been uniquely successful. Apps like TikTok are also finding a large audience throughout the world. According to The Verge, “Bytedance is the first Chinese internet company with a significant, genuinely engaged following around the world.” It has opened offices in several countries, including Japan, Brazil, India, and the United States. It is also hiring speakers of more than a dozen languages, including Portuguese, Polish, Malay, and Arabic. Its American growth has been particularly intense: in the US, the iOS app has been downloaded and installed almost 80 million times. In October 2018, it was downloaded more than Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube. Meanwhile, TikTok’s smaller rival Kwai, known as Kuaishou in China, is also gaining ground overseas. In the spring of 2018, it ranked as the most downloaded iOS app in the Philippines and Indonesia, and the most downloaded mobile app in Vietnam and South Korea."}
{"prompt":"As Chinese video platforms become more global, Chinese users are encountering more overseas content generated by international users. Similarly, international users are encountering more Chinese content by virtue of using Chinese platforms. It remains to be seen whether these platforms can bridge not only the rural-urban gap within China, but the divides between China and the rest of the world. The linguistic and cultural barriers are certainly higher, but the financial rewards are far greater. Bringing the Chinese countryside and the cities closer together may end up being a rehearsal for a far more ambitious act of ambassadorship.","completion":"Graham is over six feet tall. He has a beaming smile, and the kind of charisma and confidence that is hard to ignore. He is an economist who recently moved to Hong Kong. Unwilling to relocate to Asia, his long-term girlfriend ended the relationship, which frustrated but also liberated Graham. He is now free to pursue a single life in Hong Kong as an expat.  In the dating scene of Hong Kong, heterosexual expat men like Graham enjoy a certain privilege but also a certain prey: Asian women. Graham’s thoughtfully crafted Bumble profile shows his acute awareness of this. It caters to those who might be intrigued by his knowledge of tea and Japanese and Chinese languages and calligraphies, or by his non-aggressive photos, such as one of him reading in a coffee shop—rather than photos of him working out in a gym, which is what most male users put in their profile."}
{"prompt":"We started chatting and arranged to meet for drinks. “Meeting for drinks” is synonym for “you know what happens after a few drinks.” But when I told my friend about this economist who shared my enthusiasm for teas, she immediately asked whether his name was Graham. “Well, I know very few Western academics in Hong Kong who are single and knowledgeable about tea,” she said. It turns out that Graham is a colleague of hers, and they had just “met for drinks” recently, and it had indeed led to physical intimacy. I was both surprised and sorry. “I am so sorry. I had no idea.” My friend smiled. “Don’t worry about it. This is Hong Kong.”  A Point in Between Hong Kong has long been known for its transience. People who come don’t come to stay. As a financial center without political autonomy, it is a capitalist utopia for the global super-elite, full of opportunities for those who have no intention of settling. This quality of Hong Kong once prompted the literary scholar Ackbar Abbas to assert that the city has always been, and will perhaps always be, a port in the most literal sense—a doorway, a point in between. Hence it makes little sense for transients to invest anything major and permanent, emotions included.","completion":"Against this backdrop, romance has always been strange. This strangeness is further amplified by factors such as a falling marriage rate due to high housing prices and long working hours, and a sense of uncertainty about the city’s future. Since the handover from British to Chinese rule in 1997, Hong Kong has been governed under the “one country, two systems” principle enshrined by Article 5 of the Basic Law, the city’s mini-constitution. While this arrangement isn’t set to expire until 2047, growing pressure from Beijing in recent years has constrained the city’s autonomy. In 2014, a set of reforms that gave Beijing greater control over local elections sparked the Umbrella Revolution, a massive street protest that shut down core parts of the city for more than a month.  Beijing’s influence has also shrunk the space for women’s self-determination. This space was never enormous: the patriarchal traditions of southern China, with their emphasis on family piety and male dominance, have long dominated Hong Kong. In the colonial era, these traditions were often embraced by Hongkongers as a form of opposition to British rule, and their power continued uninterrupted in the twentieth century. By contrast, in mainland China a wave of unrest during the 1910s and 1920s—the New Culture Movement, the May Fourth Movement—culminating in the Communist revolution of 1949 weakened the grip of old Confucian customs. The result is that traditional patriarchy is much better preserved in Hong Kong than in major mainland cities like Shanghai."}
{"prompt":"But the patriarchal turn under Chinese president Xi Jinping has introduced a new element. As Chinese state policy increasingly promotes traditional gender roles, Hong Kong is feeling the effects. This is particularly evident in the growing focus on “sheng nv” 剩女, or “leftover women,” in Hong Kong. The term refers to unmarried women who are over twenty-five. Although the phrase originated in mainland China, it gained popularity in Hong Kong very quickly. In 2011, Bride Wannabes, a reality show featuring single women trying to find suitors with help from matchmaking companies, beauty salons, and dating gurus, became an overnight sensation. Its mission was to “solve the worsening situation of leftover women in Hong Kong.” In an attempt to make the show sound more cheerful, however, the producers changed the character that stands for “leftover” (剩) to “prosperity” (盛), with the same pronunciation.  The show stigmatizes singlehood and puts pressure on women to get married. It also feeds the growth of a lucrative matchmaking industry that capitalizes on women’s fears of becoming “leftover.” Matchmakers charge as much as HK $2,000 (US $255) for a first consultation, and women are sometimes charged much more than men—which is justified by the unbalanced female-to-male ratio, but which further strengthens the patriarchal power structure. Some matchmakers will even bluntly tell their female clients that once they reach the age of thirty, they will be charged more and put on a different list.  For women who are striving to lead a meaningful professional life, it is often difficult to find a partner. In such a gendered and capitalistic market, Hong Kong men value looks above other criteria, while women tend to pay attention to education, profession, and whether potential matches appear serious about wanting to commit—a dynamic that once again reproduces family-focused, male-dominant arrangements.","completion":"Yet people in Hong Kong look for love as avidly as anyone—perhaps more avidly. “Hong Kong’s lonely hearts are among the world’s most desperate to find love,” says the South China Morning Post, citing data from the dating app Coffee Meets Bagel that shows Hong Kong users use it the most frequently of anyone. 66 percent of Hongkongers who have downloaded the app log on every day—the highest rate in the world.  For those who log into those apps regularly, the feeling of knowing there are a few good ones out there, if only in the form of glorified profiles, gives them some sense of comfort. Dating apps don’t just offer the opportunity to explore a pool of potentially interesting people, however. They also create a comfortable and safe distance between the user and their object of affection, and between such affections and oneself."}
{"prompt":"Products and Commodities John is a barrister originally from England. He seemed interested in my research, and we talked about dating and living in Hong Kong. I told him that I was surprised to see that many of the app users were looking for potential clients for their own business, be it personal fitness or organic food.","completion":"I had recently discovered this firsthand. On Bumble, I started to get tired of the question, “So what’re you looking for here?” So one day I abruptly answered, “I’m looking for love. And what are you looking for?” He replied, “I’m a yoga instructor. I’m looking for potential clients.” John laughed when I told him this. “Well, Bumble itself is a business. We are the products as well as the commodities.” The first night we spent together, something unusual happened, at least for Hong Kong, where personal space and personal time are priceless: he stayed. In the week that followed we kept in touch. One day I received a WhatsApp message from him: “I miss you.” But just as I was about to answer, the message appeared as “deleted.” It disappeared, literally, before it even appeared."}
{"prompt":"And I never heard back from John again. Could you start off by introducing yourself and what do you do? I am a partner at Primitive Ventures where we do early-stage investment and interesting cryptocurrency stuff. Before that I was a partner INBlockchain, which is the largest crypto fund in China with a couple billion dollars under management, depending on the daily price of Bitcoin. I'm still a venture partner there but I focus full-time on Primitive.","completion":"How did you get into this space and into the Chinese crypto space specifically? I got into Bitcoin fairly early on. I didn't buy very much of it because it was originally introduced to me by a friend who at the time was investing in a lot of weird stuff. He was really into weed stocks way back in the day—I think there was only one tradable stock in that sector at the time that was some company making a marijuana vending machine. It sounded totally ridiculous, but it became a proxy for Wall Street interest in marijuana."}
{"prompt":"This friend told me about this thing called Bitcoin that he was really into. He described it as a form of digital money that you could actually hold, unlike PayPal balances which are really just notional numbers in a database and at the end of the day are completely under the control of Paypal. I went on to read the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper and was instantly fascinated, especially because back then there was this narrative that it was going to an uncensorable payment system. That just seemed really exciting. So I bought a very small amount of Bitcoin with cash from some guy at a cafe in Soma.","completion":"I didn’t pay much more attention to the space until about 2015 or 2016, when there started to be a lot of interesting non-Bitcoin blockchain projects. Before that, it was basically Bitcoin and then a ton of scams. There was Megacoin and Feathercoin and all these things were just like... obvious scams. It didn't seem like it was going to be an industry so much as a ton of people trying to profit off of it by running their own hustle. But then it became apparent that there were some other uses for blockchain besides just Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin's the biggest, most interesting use-case, but there became a lot of other interesting smaller ones."}
{"prompt":"For instance? The two things I think are most interesting are coins for payments which preserve privacy, and Handshake, a coin that creates a separate DNS namespace for websites. On the privacy-coins, I think we’re on the verge of an explosive battle between Facebook, who have said they’re doing a coin that will probably be launched in Whatsapp, Telegram, who raised over one billion dollars to create a coin that can be used within their messaging app, and Signal, who are working to integrate a privacy-preserving coin called Mobilecoin. The messaging apps are a natural place for payments to occur, something which I became religiously convinced of after living in China for a while and using WeChat for absolutely everything. But WeChat, Paypal, Venmo, etc, are basically panoptic surveillance systems for governments, and if that’s the vision of digital payments we end up with, we’re in a pretty horrifying 1984-esque society that seems hard to get out of. Of the three messager-coins, I’m probably most excited about Mobilecoin/Signal because of Signal’s impeccable reputation for serious privacy and security--a coin by Facebook has serious trust issues to overcome.  Handshake, the other project I’m really excited about, uses a blockchain to auction off and then keep track of a bunch of new domain names. So for example you could bid on “.mango” and then have xiaowei.mango as your blog. Besides the obvious fun of having a bunch of new names to play around with, and not having to wait on a slow-moving bureaucracy to approve new TLDs, Handshake domains have the added advantage of being basically unseizable, so you can use them to host whatever content you want and not be worried that the government or a registrar will decide to stop you.  So when you started seeing more interesting non-Bitcoin projects, what did you do next? I formed a startup with with my friend Ben Yu to do a live-streaming platform using blockchain for micropayments. The inspiration for this was that when I was in college in China, I saw these live-streaming platforms where people were making huge amounts of money, but the platform took a 50 percent cut.","completion":"I asked some friends in Beijing if they could introduce me to any Chinese investors that were interested in investing in blockchain ideas. At the time there were not very many. One friend mentioned that he knew the most famous Bitcoin blogger in China, Xiao Lai Li, and offered to introduce me to him; if he liked my project he might tell his investor friends about it. I tried to set up a meeting with this guy. He was not around but introduced me to his partner, Lao Mao. I ended up meeting with Lao Mao in this beautiful coworking space, and he showed up in a new Porsche. In my mind I was like, “Huh, being a blogger is really lucrative in China.”  We ended up getting along. He was really smart, and we had the same outlook on the future of the space. At the end of it, he said that he was interested in investing in what we were doing. I was surprised because I didn’t know they invested. When I asked about it, he gave me this weird look and said, \"Yeah, we run this fund called INBlockchain. It's a fairly large fund in China.\" When I got home and read up on them, I found out they had the biggest Bitcoin holdings of anyone in China, maybe the world. I'm glad I went into the meeting feeling low-stress, thinking I was just going to talk to a blogger—it probably made the pitch a lot better."}
{"prompt":"They ended up inviting me to this crazy meeting in Shanghai that they were having. INBlockchain was running the biggest crypto exchange in China at the time, called Yunbi. They took the hundred biggest Yunbi customers and all their portfolio companies to a secret summit at the Park Hyatt in Shanghai. They also asked if we wanted to adjourn afterwards to a secret boat meeting, and I was like, “Definitely.” Ben and I thought, well, it’ll be expensive to fly back to China and we don’t have any funding, but let’s do it. Then when we got home, they had already bought us tickets and reserved a room at the Hyatt. My cofounder and I were kind of stunned.","completion":"When we got to the meeting, I gave the pitch for Stream, the project we were working on. I gave it in Chinese, which totally freaked everyone out. My partner Ben is Chinese-American, but he doesn't speak Mandarin very well. It was funny; I was this white kid on stage giving our pitch in Chinese, and my Chinese partner was putting on headphones to hear the English translation. All the people around him are looking at him like, \"What is wrong with you?\" I gave the pitch and people got excited about it and we ended up moving forward with it. I started helping Xiao Lai and Lao Mao with some of the platform stuff they were doing, and helped them localize their initial coin offering (ICO) platform to the US. I also sent over some suggestions for Yunbi and gave some advice on some of their companies. Eventually Xiaolai proposed that I come onboard as a partner and invest with them, rather than just run one of their startups."}
{"prompt":"I ended up taking him up on the offer, since I liked that group of people so much. They're all just really conscientious, smart people. Before I left, we figured out some people that could replace us at that startup, and I officially joined INBlockchain. One of the things I noticed with your newsletter is that you actually take things for a test drive, like spinning up a Handshake node. Would you say that’s rare for an investor? Yes, and it blows my mind. When you invest in something, you’re putting such a huge amount of money in it. You would imagine that part of your due diligence would be to go and actually use the thing.  But no! Many of these funds have no real-world interaction with the technology they’re investing in. So they often have these bizarre opinions about what it does. In my mind I would be wondering, “How can you actually believe that?” And the answer is that they have literally never used the technology.","completion":"The technical barrier is really not that high. I'm far from a programmer—I can write some vim scripts and stuff—but even I can spin up a Handshake node and make some bids, and get a feel for how it actually works, and get a sense for whether it is so hard that no one is ever going to use it, or if it is right on the brink of being usable. I think that insight is valuable, and it's not hard to get. So it blows my mind that so few investors in the space actually use the stuff."}
{"prompt":"Unevenly Distributed Futures  From your experience, do you feel like the Chinese crypto scene is pretty globalized, or is there “crypto with Chinese characteristics”? I feel very adamantly that crypto is a global phenomenon, and that there's no such thing as Chinese Ethereum or Korean Bitcoin or whatever—I think that’s ridiculous. However, from an investment perspective, there are definitely localized scenes. I don't think highly of most of the Chinese crypto projects, but the Chinese crypto infrastructure is way better than the US. If you look at the Chinese exchanges like Yunbi, Binance, Huobi, OKEx, they're just killing it. There is just no comparison to the US exchanges.  It’s funny: Mike Moritz, who is a partner at Sequoia, wrote an article speaking favorably about the crazy pace of Chinese startup culture and got crucified for it. People thought he was racist and was glorifying overwork. But all of my Chinese friends who read that article were like, “Right on, that’s 100 percent accurate.” The culture at these Chinese startups is incredibly high-paced and it makes Silicon Valley look relaxed in comparison. To my mind, that’s why they're dominating. As someone who invests in crypto infrastructure, my perspective is that if there's a Chinese company and a US company who are both working in the same niche, the Chinese company is just going to wreck it.","completion":"What is the average profile of a crypto trader or buyer in China? It's middle to upper class, both male and female. There are lots of people from business school, people with both finance and tech backgrounds. One thing I found interesting is that people in China understood Bitcoin on a more intuitive level very quickly, whereas in the US, people's reactions were way slower."}
{"prompt":"Similar to the five stages of grief, you can see the five stages of Bitcoin denialism: first people think it’s a toy, then they think it’s a scam, then eventually they come to the conclusion that it’s a useful thing. Whereas in China, it seemed like people skipped through a lot of that—they just immediately got it.","completion":"And their reaction, which I think is the correct reaction, was, “I'm not going to put my life savings in this right now, but I'm going buy a little bit in case this becomes a thing.” I think owning something like 0.87 Bitcoin puts you in the top 1 percent of Bitcoin holders. A very small amount of Bitcoin hedges the risk that Bitcoin becomes the world currency. Chinese people intuitively got that, whereas in America, people didn’t. I would tell Americans over and over again, just buy a thousand bucks of Bitcoin and forget about it. If it loses all of its value, whatever. Just have that hedge."}
{"prompt":"Yeah, I remember even my aunt who is a typical southern Chinese housewife was super into crypto. She talked about it in terms of diversifying, and it made a lot of sense to me. Totally. They’re willing to make small bets on risky things. I think China also has some amount of “neophilia” that contributes to it. People in China are excited about new technology. Even older people in China use WeChat Pay for mobile payments, whereas in the US there's a stronger Luddite strain in our culture. I have a friend who was born in China and moved to the US when she was really young. When I talk to her, she’s like, “The reason I want to go back to China to work is that no one ever goes to the US and thinks, ‘I felt like I was in the future.’” Proof of Work How much of the discussion about crypto in the US makes its way to China? There's a robust flow of translated articles about crypto from English to Chinese, so the Chinese scene is relatively in sync with the US one. If people start thinking about something in the US, within a week or two it will get translated into Chinese and there will be a lot of discussion about it.","completion":"Do you feel like the converse is also true, that the English-speaking scene in the US is synced up with the Chinese one? No, that direction is very poor. We occasionally try to help with that a bit, but to be honest, it's kind of an advantage for us that most US funds have such a bad understanding of China. I almost have an incentive to not translate much of what’s being discussed, because it’s good for me that we get it and they don’t."}
{"prompt":"We've definitely seen fund managers who don’t understand why we care so much about Asia, because they don’t have access to the exchanges and because of this perception that there are so many scams. Our perspective is, you have to care, because it's half the crypto volume. As an example, we know some people who shorted Ripple. And don’t get me wrong, I hate Ripple, I think it’s a scam. However, I would never short it, because I know it’s popular in Korea and Japan, so I know that if I shorted it, there would be a bunch of organic demand in Japan or Korea and I would get liquidated. That's exactly what happened to a fund manager we know, twice actually.","completion":"What are some of the more interesting blockchain projects in China that you've come across recently? There are areas that I think are exciting. One is that there are a lot of Chinese people making games on EOS, a delegated proof-of-stake blockchain project (ed. For explanation of building games on the blockchain see Singularity Hub’s “How Blockchain Is Changing Computer Gaming”) . EOS originally did a massive ICO and got tons of flack for it. A lot of my hardcore Bitcoiner friends think EOS was a big scam because of the ICO, and because it uses 21 validators to validate transactions rather than a massive number of miners and so it's much more easily censored. (Ed.: In cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, the validation of transactions into the canonical blockchain ledger happens through a process of a very large number of distributed “miners” competing to solve a computationally difficult validation algorithm, which imposes a strong barrier against someone who wishes to manipulate the ledger. “Delegated proof-of-stake” is a consensus-based algorithm where people who hold the most tokens vote to nominate a small number of delegates who can validate the network’s transactions. Because there are a smaller number of entities who at the end of the day validate the ledger, this algorithm is in theory easier for a nation state adversary to compromise, if the delegate validators end up being centralized in one geographical area.) My take was, well, I don't want to use EOS if my adversary is a government trying to censor my billion-dollar capital flight out of some nasty jurisdiction, but it’s fine if all I'm doing is making some game that the Apple app store won’t approve. It's not that easy to censor; you still have to go track down not only 21 validators but I think something like 100 back-up validators... It’s actually pretty hard. I think for stuff like games this is going to be in huge—this thesis was confirmed for me when I started seeing people in China making games like EOSbet, DaFuWeng (Monopoly), Fomo3D. I’m convinced that Fomo3D is made by a Chinese team, I've read their code comments, like it's got to be."}
{"prompt":"The other area that is interesting is the exchanges. A lot of our LPs (ed.: Limited Partners, or investors who contribute capital to venture funds.) are the bigger Chinese exchanges, so we have a lot of insight into how they operate. Binance, one of the largest Chinese exchanges, has a massive amount of actual trading volume compared to the US exchanges, and they seem to have an absolutely laserlike focus on growth. And the other Chinese exchanges (I’m including HK-based but mostly American-run Bitmex here too) seem to be more willing to ship regulatorily risky features that the market likes, including super high leverage margin trading.","completion":"In terms of popularity, it feels like Bitcoin is pretty big in the US now, and fairly mainstream. Celebrities like Jamie Foxx and 50 Cent have even hyped it. Is that similar in China? Celebrities are afraid to touch it. In China being a celebrity is very risky—look what happened to Fan Bing Bing. (ed.: Fan Bing Bing is a famous Chinese actress who disappeared suddenly for three months in 2018 following allegations of tax evasion.) Celebrities in China have to walk a pretty thin line. None of them want to talk about Bitcoin, but I can tell you they are for sure using Bitcoin, big time."}
{"prompt":"There's like a lot of confusion in the American media around whether Bitcoin or even crypto is legal in China… Can you clear up the legal landscape? Bitcoin is definitely not illegal in China; that's ridiculous. It's perfectly legal to own and sell Bitcoin to people if you want to. There's even a case law confirming that now. What is not legal is to operate a fiat bitcoin exchange in China, which means that while I could sell you Bitcoin and that would be fine, it would be illegal to set up a website where you can use a bank account to buy Bitcoin. It's also dubious whether ICOs are allowed in China—it might fall under some sort of illegal fundraising regulations.","completion":"Do you see the government crackdown on things like ICOs as an attempt to prevent scams? I largely do. Most of the ICOs that they've cracked down on have in fact been quite scammy. The Chinese government is much less worried about Bitcoin itself than they are worried about scams and highly leveraging people's assets into risky asset categories. If you look at the big crackdown, it didn't happen to crypto—it happened to the peer-to-peer lending stuff, which was really bad. The peer-to-peer stuff was super scammy and people were killing themselves over it."}
{"prompt":"I remember talking to a blockchain engineer this summer in China, and he told me that some of the vocabulary surrounding blockchain has changed in China, for political reasons. For example, “decentralized’ gets turned into “distributed.” Do you see that happening in the investing space as well? No one ever really talks about the political aspects of the blockchain in China, except maybe occasionally talking about capital control evasion. Everyone just talks about the benefits of decentralization for minimizing trust among counterparties. I think even in the US, people in the investment community don't talk about this stuff in political terms.","completion":"I get it: crypto isn't quite ready to fight the final boss of big government yet. We're pretty good, but it’s not that robust yet. I want another ten years before the government really tries to crack down on the space, and the best way for that to happen is to pretend that we're working on this cute little tech that's just for minimizing trust. Of course, it’s really a complete revolution that eliminates the government's power to print money."}
{"prompt":"How do you see crypto mediating trust in China? In China, crypto provides two things that are really nice. The first is to provide automatic transactions that denies parties the opportunity to cheat. I can swap thing Y for thing X, and it just happens, with no counterparty risk. The second is that crypto transactions happen on a transparent ledger, so you can audit what's going on. To the extent that you could move some organization entirely onto a blockchain, you'd have perfectly auditable books forever.","completion":"The Chinese government is excited about blockchains, and that’s part of the reason why. There is a huge problem in China with corruption, and blockchains bring increased transparency. What’s your take on all the big companies like Alibaba getting into the blockchain space? It strikes me as a classic innovator's dilemma. I’m a little skeptical because I don't know if they're actually going to be willing to cannibalize their main businesses to fully embrace this new thing. There are a lot of smart engineers working at those companies, so I can see them coming up with something interesting. That’s a good sign—the more smart programmers you have looking at the problem space, the better."}
{"prompt":"That's why I write my “Proof of Work” newsletter. Every week companies will send us two to three lines about what they're working on, and every week I am amazed at how much is getting done. Ultimately, what makes me obnoxiously bullish about this space is that so many insanely smart people are attracted to it. With all the brainpower of the people thinking about this stuff, there's going to be a lot of advances. If you look at it over the course of a week or two, it may seem slow. But if you look at it over the course of two or three months, it’s like, “Wow, this field is progressing fast!” And if you look at it over the course of two or three years, you'll be blown away.","completion":"Since 2017, speculation in cryptocurrencies has swept the world, and innovation in blockchain technology has been very active. Markets are flooded with specious ideas about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. In order to clarify popular misunderstandings, make financial innovations beneficial to society, and introduce necessary regulations, it is necessary to study cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology from an economic perspective.  I. Pricing of Cryptocurrencies Figure 1 shows Bitcoin price and its volatility between January 1, 2011 and September 7, 2018. During that period, Bitcoin’s annualized return is 266% and its annualized volatility is 171%. Overall speaking, cryptocurrencies represented by Bitcoin have become the first asset bubble in a global scale, and many irrational behaviors of individuals and groups can be observed.  There are two popular misunderstandings about Bitcoin price. The first viewpoint is that the demand from the underground economy has pushed up Bitcoin price. There are certain reasonable elements in this viewpoint. Bitcoin has the characteristics of anonymity and decentralization, and exists in an electronic form, which makes it suitable for the underground economy. However, there are no reliable data regarding the volume of Bitcoins used in underground economic activities. Lots of evidence indicate that due to the rising trend of Bitcoin price, a significant portion of Bitcoin is hoarded by speculators. Hoarding, of course, is a common phenomenon in speculation activities and helps to boost asset prices by reducing effective supply."}
{"prompt":"The second viewpoint is that the cost of Bitcoin \"mining\" supports Bitcoin price. As the \"mining\" cost increases, Bitcoin price will rise too. However, this viewpoint is hard to hold. At any given time, the supply of Bitcoin is determined by a prespecified algorithm and has nothing to do with how much computation power (measured by hashrate or the number of Hash operations per second) is engaged in \"mining\". If the price of Bitcoin goes up, hashrate will be higher, but the supply of Bitcoin will not increase correspondently, and the price of Bitcoin will not be held back. As more computation power competes for a given number of new Bitcoins, the cost of “mining” (measured by the number of Hash operations required to produce a new Bitcoin) rises. Similarly, if the price of Bitcoin falls, the “mining” hashrate will be lower, but the supply of Bitcoin will not be reduced, and the price of Bitcoin will not be pushed up. Under this scenario, less computation power competes for a given number of new Bitcoins, which reduces the \"mining\" cost.  II. Can Bitcoin futures stabilize Bitcoin price?  Bitcoin’s volatility is too high for it to be an effective medium of exchange, nor is it economically feasible to develop Bitcoin-denominated financial transactions. Figure 2 shows the ratio of Bitcoin’s volatility to that of the S&P 500 index since 2011. It is also very cheap to trade the S&P 500 index funds. Therefore, the S&P 500 index funds are a better medium of exchange than Bitcoin.","completion":"Price stability is a necessary condition for Bitcoin to become an effective medium of exchange.  One proposal is Bitcoin futures. On December 10 and 18, 2017, CBOE Global Markets and CME Group respectively introduced Bitcoin futures. In addition to price discovery and risk management functions, Bitcoin futures facilitate the participation of institutional investors in the Bitcoin market, which was a key driver of the sharp rise in Bitcoin prices between October and mid-December, 2017. In addition, it is straightforward to develop Bitcoin ETFs based on Bitcoin futures, which allows retail investors to acquire exposure to Bitcoin through mainstream stock exchanges rather than cryptocurrency exchanges or wallets.  The Bitcoin futures of CBOE and CME play a certain role in price discovery and risk management (figure 3), but Bitcoin’s volatility does not decrease significantly (figure 1 and figure 2). In fact, seeing from the general situation in commodity futures and financial futures markets, futures trading does not necessarily lower the volatility of underlying assets.  The transaction volume of Bitcoin futures is not large. This suggests that Bitcoin futures only carry out very limited risk-hedging functions, and that institutional investors’ interest in Bitcoin futures remains small.  III. Feasibility of stable tokens  Some practitioners are experimenting with stable tokens. There are two representative methods. The first category, represented by Tether, claims to issue a USDT token pegged 1:1 to USD and with a reserve rate of 100%. This amounts to a currency board regime. However, it is not clear whether Tether has sufficient reserves. If investors find that stable tokens such as Tether do not have sufficient reserves, a run on the currency peg will occur immediately. Indeed, Tether has become a source of systemic risk for cryptocurrency market.  The second category, represented by Basecoin, is still in the state of development, claiming that it will mimic the open market operations of central banks. In order to stabilize Basecoin’s prices in USD, it fine-tunes the Basecoin supply by issuing and repaying bonds denominated in Basecoin."}
{"prompt":"I think the success of the second category is very difficult. The \"impossibility triangle\" is a proper statement for this kind of stable tokens. Stable tokens can only achieve at most two of the three objectives, namely, fixed exchange rate against fiat money, free convertibility, and independent monetary policy. Stable tokens currently under experiment adhere to the first two objectives, which means abandoning the independence of monetary policy. Furthermore, these stable tokens try to implement monetary policy operations through algorithms, which is equivalent to giving up discretion in monetary policy. From the perspective of human history, it is the first time that a fixed exchange rate has been pursued solely through algorithms.  IV. Proliferation of blockchain forks  Theoretically, anyone can create a blockchain fork with the back of computation power. There is usually a limit on the amount of fork coins. A portion of them are \"pre-mined\" by the founder, another portion of them are given to the holder of original coins, and the rest of them are reserved for the communities of fork coins. In the secondary market, fork coins are traded independently of original coins.  The economic relationship between fork coins and original coins is quite complex. In many blockchain forks, holders of original coins receive fork coins for free (airdrop), the amount of which is proportional to the amount of original coins they hold. This makes blockchain forks look like stock splits or dividends. However, it is not technically necessary to give fork coins to the holder of original coins. The aim of airdrop is to win the support of the holders of original coins for fork coins, or to develop communities of fork coin based on communities of original coins. Therefore, it is not the inherent right of the original coin holders to get the fork coins for fee. In this way, blockchain forks are equivalent to the replacement of different versions of currencies, with new currencies already in circulation but old currencies still in use. This actually leads to an extra supply of coins and weakens the binding power of the upper limits of original coins. If blockchain forks occur without constraints, oversupply of coins will cause inflationary effects.","completion":"There is a competitive relationship between original coins and fork coins, which is close to the situation of private currency competition envisaged by F.A. Hayek. The cryptocurrencies that win the competition will have the following characteristics: (1) Its transaction cost is low and its transaction efficiency is high. (2) Its wallets, trading venues and other infrastructure are very safe. (3) Its price is relatively stable so as to better undertake monetary functions such as medium of exchange and storage of value. Because of the inherent network effects of money, only a few cryptocurrencies can win.  V. Token economy The token economy represents a category of promising blockchain application projects. In these projects, there are transactions with real needs, but these transactions were previously constrained by incentives, transaction costs, or payment tools. By introducing tokens, these projects not only solve the problem of fundraising, but also ease the constraints of incentive mechanism, transaction costs, and payment tools. Successful projects in this area remain to be seen. I think many token economies can be built through the following three steps.  (I) Exchange economy core  A token economy generally has an exchange economy core, around which other activities are built. The exchange economy is a basic concept in economics. It exists because different people have different endowments and because of the division of labor. It abstracts the production and consumption processes from economic activities and focuses instead on the scenario where the product has been produced and is held by different people, and the problem is just how to exchange the product among different people. E-commerce, sharing economy, browsers, web portals and search engines all have the characteristics of exchange economy.  (II) Tokenization  The meaning of tokenization is to replace the exchange medium in the Internet exchange economy with a certain token. At this step, we can assume that the token is issued and managed by a central entity."}
{"prompt":"There are two cases of tokenization. First, when the exchange medium is fiat money or a virtual currency, because of the existence of price mechanism, it is very straightforward to replace the exchange medium with the token. E-commerce and the sharing economy belong to this case. Second, when the exchange medium does not have any monetary characteristics, because there is no price mechanism, tokenization also means the introduction of price mechanism. Browsers, web portals, search engines, etc., belong to this case. The price mechanism can effectively aggregate market information, improve the efficiency of resource allocation, and maximize social welfare.  (III) Blockchain overlay  Blockchain overlay means: (1) The tokens issued and managed by the central entity in the second step are replaced with decentralized tokens generated within blockchain; (2) Through the distributed ledger of blockchain, the efficiency of division of labor in exchange economy can be improved. Also, the problem of asset registration and transaction records are solved; (3) A compatible incentive system is designed for the participants in token economy (including not only exchange participants but also entities providing ancillary services for exchanges) so as to encourage them to jointly maintain the sustainability of the token economy.  Blockchain overlay shows the triple attributes of blockchain in economics: a decentralized payment system, a distributed ledger, and an incentive mechanism. These attributes enable blockchain to support economic activities in a decentralized and self-organized environment. However, in the process of applying blockchain to achieve these goals, there are very complex problems regarding transaction costs and the governance structure.  At present, a highly controversial issue is that, although a token economy project has not yet been successful, the tokens issued by the project may be hyped up to a very high price through ICO (initial coin offering) and cryptocurrency exchanges.","completion":"VI. The unsolved problems of ICO  Blockchain projects generally have two financing channels: equity financing and ICO. ICO is chaotic and risky all around the world, which is reflected in the following three aspects.  First, the economic functions and intrinsic value of the tokens given to investors by ICO are often ambiguous. Generally speaking, tokens have three possible characteristics: (1) Medium of exchange; (2) Certificate of equity, and ICO with the issuance of such tokens is close to equity crowdfunding; (3) Certificate for goods or service, and ICO with the issuance of such tokens is similar to crowdfunding for product development. Many tokens combine multiple characteristics and it is difficult to value them. Nevertheless, many tokens become hyped even before their intrinsic value is fully revealed or discussed.  Second, speculation in tokens occurs after ICO. Unlike crowdfunding, after many ICOs happen, tokens can be traded in the secondary market, especially in cryptocurrency exchanges. In theory, if the token is a certificate of equity, goods, or services, its valuation should be \"anchored\" to some fundamental factors. But in reality, many token prices are hyped up to the levels far above the fundamentals. Some tokens began to speculate even before ICO (i.e. the so-called pre-sales or pre-ICO stage). It is difficult for ICO to ensure the suitability of investors. ICO projects usually are in early stages with high risks. Theoretically, ICO should be limited to qualified investors with adequate abilities to identify and take risks, and it must also limit the exposure of a single investor. However, some ICO projects are actually open to the public through cryptocurrency exchanges.  Third, ICO distorts the incentive mechanism for blockchain start-up teams. The secondary market of tokens provides the start-up teams an easy way to “cash out” even when the blockchain venture projects may still stay in the white paper stage. In contrast, in the venture capital industry, the time from start-ups getting investment from venture capital firms to IPO is much longer. The fast “cash out” mechanism of ICO will distort the incentive mechanism of the blockchain start-up teams. Besides, token holders are often in a vague position in the governance structure of blockchain projects, and lack effective measures to align the interest of the start-up teams with theirs."}
{"prompt":"Finally, in the field of cryptocurrencies, ICO has formed a positive feedback loop between \"central currencies,\" such as Bitcoin and Ether, and other tokens. ICO generally collects Bitcoin 6 and Ether, which will increase the demand for Bitcoin and Ether and push up their prices. And the prices of Bitcoin and Ether serve as the valuation benchmark for the tokens issued by ICO. In this way, a mutually reinforcing feedback mechanism has been formed between Bitcoin, Ether, and other tokens. This is a key driver behind the spectacular rise in the cryptocurrency market in 2017. However, if the prices of Bitcoin and Ether enter a downward path, this positive feedback mechanism will also cause the prices of other tokens to fall faster.  VII. Central bank digital currency  First, when it comes to its economic function, central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a replacement for cash. CBDC is issued directly by the central bank to the public and consists of the liability of the central bank. It is a form of fiat money and can pay interest to its holders. By contrast, the interest rate of cash is always 0.  Second, in terms of technical means, CBDC is not necessarily based on blockchain. The robustness and security of distributed ledgers are the primary considerations for the adoption blockchain. But a public blockchain (with free entry and exit of nodes) represented by the Bitcoin blockchain and its proof-of-work consensus mechanism will lead to a waste of social resources, mainly in computation power and electricity consumption. Thus, CBDC tends to take the form of a consortium blockchain, and the distributed ledgers are maintained by the central bank and certain preauthorized institutions.  Third, in terms of monetary policy, CBDC will become a new monetary policy instrument. Particularly, CBDC can pay negative interest, thus helping the central bank to break through the zero-lower bound of nominal interest rates and magnifying monetary policy stimulus during economic crises. In contrast, when cash is still in circulation, negative nominal interest rates are impossible because people will withdraw their bank deposits and change them into cash.","completion":"Fourth, when it comes to financial stability, CBDC will have a major impact on the payment and settlement system. Payment and settlement will not necessarily go through commercial banks and can be carried out directly on the balance sheet of the central bank. Therefore, CBDC helps to get rid of the special position of commercial banks in the payment and settlement system and the accompanying \"too big to fail\" problem. But this could also cause instability in bank deposits, as people may withdraw bank deposits and change them into CBDC.  VIII. Regulation of Cryptocurrencies  Speculation in cryptocurrencies directs limited social resources into unproductive areas. Once the speculative bubble bursts, it will have a negative impact on wealth distribution. Speculation is also accompanied by frauds, scams, and illegal conduct. Therefore, there is no doubt that regulation of cryptocurrencies should be strengthened. In addition, cryptocurrencies move across borders, and the speculation is global. Therefore, global regulatory coordination should be strengthened.  (I) Regulation of the production and issuance of cryptocurrencies  Cryptocurrency production consumes lots of electricity, especially for cryptocurrencies with proof-of-work consensus mechanisms. According to Digiconomist, the annual electricity consumption by the Bitcoin blockchain is equivalent to that of Peru and is still growing rapidly. Considering the pollution caused by thermal power generation, the Bitcoin blockchain is actually causing serious environmental problems.  (II) Regulation of the circulation and transaction of cryptocurrencies  Cryptocurrency exchanges are widely distributed around the world. Exchanges provide liquidity for cryptocurrencies. Once a cryptocurrency is listed on an exchange, its price usually rises significantly. Essentially this shows the effect of the liquidity premium. Cryptocurrency exchanges have fueled speculation and have also taken on high risks themselves.  First, similar to ICO, cryptocurrency exchanges have few proper checks on account holders, and many exchanges allow anonymous accounts."}
{"prompt":"Second, leverage-based speculation exists. Some cryptocurrency exchanges offer leverage to investors, which amplifies the price fluctuations in cryptocurrencies. But if the cryptocurrency market enters a system-wide and large decline, high leverage will amplify the downward trend.  Third, there are problems of market manipulation. Many cryptocurrencies are held in a concentrated way, and the cryptocurrency exchanges do not have the same information disclosure requirements as the stock exchanges, making market manipulation possible. A typical manipulation strategy is the so-called \"pump and dump,\" where a number of large cryptocurrency holders conspire to push up prices and attract retail investors, then suddenly sell their holdings. Retail investors without \"roof escape\" suffer losses.  Fourth, some cryptocurrency exchanges have opened the door to fraudulent ICO projects, actually colluding with them to deceive retail investors.  Fifth, incidents such as the cryptocurrency exchanges being attacked by hackers, leading to theft of customers’ assets and even bankrupting exchanges, have occurred many times.  Finally, cryptocurrencies, because of their anonymity, are associated with illegal transactions or activities in the underground economy. The former \"Silk Road\" website is a typical example. Cryptocurrencies help ISIS to get access to funding. Cryptocurrencies are also used to circumvent capital controls.  To handle the above problems, regulators all around the world should implement the following measures: (1) The requirements of \"Know Your Customer\" (KYC), anti-money laundering and anti-terrorism financing, especially for cryptocurrency wallet providers and exchanges; (2) Tax on cryptocurrency transactions; (3) Requirements for investor suitability; (4) Combating frauds and market manipulation; (5) The exchange between cryptocurrencies and fiat currencies, which is the area where regulators should and are best able to strengthen regulation.  IX. China’s Role in the Cryptocurrency Market","completion":"China has a large presence in the cryptocurrency market. The three largest Bitcoin mining hardware companies—Bitmain, Canaan Creative, and Ebang—are all in China. By some estimations, Chinese mining pools control more than 70% of the computational power of the Bitcoin network. Three of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, namely Binance, OKEx, and Huobi, are run by Chinese. However, since 2013, Chinese government has become more negative towards cryptocurrencies. In 2013, Chinese government warned domestic financial institutions against the risk of Bitcoin. From late 2016 to early 2017, the Chinese government investigated major cryptocurrency exchanges, especially regarding their roles in money laundering and capital outflow. In September 2017, the Chinese government banned ICO and centralized cryptocurrency trading. Many cryptocurrency exchanges moved abroad but still offered trading services to domestic investors. In January 2018, the Chinese government blocked online access to overseas cryptocurrency exchanges. Since August 2018, the Chinese government has clamped down online platforms promoting ICO projects and cryptocurrencies trading. It has also introduced more restrictions on over-the-counter cryptocurrency trading.  It is worth noting that Chinese government is very positive on the potential of blockchain technology. For example, China’s central bank, the People’s Bank of China, has a dedicated team for CBDC. This team has conducted extensive research and experiments on the application of blockchain technology in the financial sector. However, due to the restrictions of China’s securities law, ICO and cryptocurrency exchanges won’t be legal in China for the foreseeable future. In China, only certain categories of financial instruments are considered securities. Security tokens aren’t covered by the securities law. Therefore, fundraising via token issuance is considered to be illegal and subject to severe punishment. As a consequence, cryptocurrency exchanges facilitating trading in those tokens are illegal, too. Those situations will not change without revising the securities law. By comparison, the Chinese government is neutral towards mining pools as long as they purchase electricity in a legal way and pay due tax. Mining hardware companies are considered to be high-tech companies. Chinese government encourages them to apply their chip design skills to areas more relevant to the real economy such as artificial intelligence."}
{"prompt":"Let there be light, Mimi 0 thought. She saw them. Hundreds of thousands of dynamic images loomed in front of her eyes, data so complex that the human brain was incapable of processing them. She felt dizzy, nauseated, lost. Welcome to the “Compound Eyes” system of Shantou, which connected hundreds of thousands of cameras and image recognition artificial intelligence. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the system kept under surveillance the city’s every street, every corner, every expression on every person, searching for signs of crime or acts of terrorism and protecting the lives and properties of the inhabitants. Mimi was now an invader in its heart. She was looking for something special.","completion":"Soon, she realized that her search technique was too inefficient, like looking for a needle in a haystack. Mimi 1 reorganized the logic for presenting the video feeds and re-created all of Shantou from a first-person point of view based on the geography of the streets and the locations of the cameras. Unlike regular human vision, this was a view where each perspective was all-encompassing, panoramic. It was like Corregio’s dome fresco, Assumption of the Virgin, at the Cathedral of Parma, where everything around the observer appeared in a vortex of concentric rings, with the vanishing point of the perspective the apex of the dome. As the observer moved closer, more details were revealed at the center of the vortex without end."}
{"prompt":"Imagine the world as a strange apple. The depressions at both poles are deformed and deepened until they connect, turning into a doughnut. The skin of the apple, meanwhile, remains intact and can slide up and down the “hole” of the doughnut like an endless treadmill. The observer is situated somewhere in the hole, and what he sees is the ring-shaped world endlessly unfolding.","completion":"More fantastically, as the observer moves towards any point in the wall of the doughnut, the point would automatically open up, expand and surround the observer in a new doughnut-view. A perfect, self-organizing, fractal structure. Hundreds of passengers wriggled under Mimi’s wings, getting impatient."}
{"prompt":"She moved. Rationally, she knew that her body was still imprisoned in that tiny corrugated-iron shack quaking in the storm and that her consciousness was only about a dozen kilometers away, wandering inside the dull, metal boxes of a data center. However, the images swirling around her gave her the illusion of having transformed into a winged angel gliding over this concrete and steel jungle. Her virtual body swept over streets, passed through houses, shops, bridges, parks, elevators, trains and buses, and glanced quickly into countless lit windows, not overlooking any spot.","completion":"It was dusk, but the city was already awakening into a sparkling tapestry. In the rain, the traffic crawled through the city’s main arteries and capillaric side streets like gleaming blood. Hundreds of thousands of equally anxious and numb faces hid behind the windshields, cleared by the unceasing sway of wipers that polished the wet glow of neon against glass. The self-driving cars were stuck between cars driven by those who refused to trust computers, and horns blared as the decibel counters on noise monitors rose and rose. Many glanced in the rearview mirror with a crooked set in the mouth that indicated ill intentions."}
{"prompt":"Three hundred thousand windows automatically lit up; the smart sensors understood the moods of the men and women coming home and automatically adjusted the temperature, the color of the lighting, the channels showing on the TVs or the music playing through the sound systems; five thousand restaurants received automatically generated take-out orders; the health monitoring systems synced up with the body films, and, based on dozens of parameters such as body temperature, heart rate, caloric intake/consumption, galvanic skin response, suggested plans for the next day’s activities. Exhausted face after exhausted face.","completion":"The offices in the skyscrapers were lit bright as day. The giant eye zoomed in and observed a hundred thousand faces staring at computer monitors through closed-circuit cameras; their tension, anxiety, anticipation, confusion, satisfaction, suspicion, jealousy, anger refreshed rapidly while their glasses reflected the data jumping across their screens. Their looks were empty but deep, without thought of the relationship between their lives and values, yearning for change but also afraid of it. They gazed at their screens the way they gazed at each other, and they hated their screens the way they hated each other. They all possessed the same bored, apathetic face."}
{"prompt":"Below an overpass, the homeless picked through trash for food; a woman who had consumed too many useless calories walked by with her dog. An aging dancer at an adult club carefully applied her makeup in the mirror, paying no attention to the black shadow noiselessly approaching from behind. A naked man wielded a whip to force the girls before him to caress an albino alligator whose skin was studded with tactile sensors; the electrical signals were transformed into sexual stimuli injected directly into the cortices of wealthy patrons.","completion":"In a luxurious apartment, a man sat stiffly on his bed, impassively observing the exaggerated expressions and stale routine of a comedian on TV. He stared at his own face on the giant screen, sobbed noiselessly, and lifted a gun. A flock of birds rose into the evening air, dissipated like a column of black smoke, and then gathered back together, forming a series of irregular shapes against the indigo sky. Occasionally, the beam of a searchlight swept through, and the black smoke transformed into a flickering patch of silvery gravel. The cameras went through a series of quick cuts and the focal distance was set to maximum in an attempt to follow the flight of one particular bird. All the birds looked like the same bird, following the direction of the flock, imitating the posture of companions nearby; no one dropped out; no one set out on its own; in the jungle, this meant food and safety."}
{"prompt":"She browsed through the cameras rapidly and patched the disparate images into a smooth, dynamic vision. Like a diving bird, she swooped past a glass wall hundreds of meters tall, and in the mirror was the strange, deformed reflection of the city with its flashing neon lights that engraved the mental patterns of consumerism into the retinas of all viewers, drifting and changing with their shifting gazes.","completion":"She saw everything, except herself. Mimi saw even more: the lonesome, the gamblers, the addicted, the innocent … hiding in brightly lit or dark corners of the city, worth millions or penniless, enjoying the convenient life brought about by technology, pursuing stimuli and information loads unprecedented in the history of the human race. They were not happy, however; whatever the reason, it seemed that the capacity for joy had degenerated, had been cut off like an appendix, and yet, the yearning for happiness persisted stubbornly like wisdom teeth."}
{"prompt":"Mimi felt a wave of pity for them, civilization’s favorite children. When we first met, you were visiting Harvard in your professional capacity as an economics researcher. But you are probably better known to the general public as one of China’s most successful science fiction writers from the younger generation. Are these two pursuits, economics research and science fiction, separate for you, or do they have a connection? I think about questions and problems in human societies. If the problems seem to have solutions, I write them into economic and policy research. If the problems seem to have no solutions, or there are dilemmas, ambiguities, and philosophical debates, I write them into stories. Economic research is more objective. Stories are richer and more emotional. They come from the same roots in my head, but turn into different outcomes. The forms don’t bother me much. I care more about the problems.","completion":"One such problem that your writing describes vividly is inequality—whether the temporal and spatial inequality of your story “Folding Beijing” or the interplanetary inequalities of “Invisible Planets.” China and the United States are both seriously unequal societies. Technological changes, especially increasing automation, seem likely to make this problem even worse. Do you think humans are powerless in the face of these shifts? I think inequality is the most difficult issue to tackle. It is perhaps the most persistent phenomenon in all human societies in history, regardless of nation, race, or period. In China, we’ve seen the cycle of peace leading to prosperity, then leading to rising inequality, then leading to war several times over two thousand years of history. So I’m not surprised at all that inequality has risen from its postwar level to a historic high in all major countries in the world today. For large economies, perhaps only wars or revolutions can eliminate inequality. The technological changes that have taken place in recent years only exacerbate this problem. I think humans are perhaps powerless in the face of inequality, rather than powerless in the face of technological shifts. There will be various kinds of technological changes in the future, and people can handle them, but inequality will still persist."}
{"prompt":"Amid those technological changes, I’ve noticed that Western observers often describe contemporary China as a kind of real-life science fiction—a place where the future seems to have already arrived, whether it’s because of striking architecture in the cityscapes of big cities, huge investments in cutting-edge scientific research, or more advanced governance and surveillance technologies. Do you think this has some truth to it, or is it a kind of projection, a techno-Orientalism? No, I don’t think China has become a frontier country with advanced technologies that represent the future—if this is what you mean by “real-life science fiction.” China has changed very fast in the past few years. That’s for sure. However, it has a long distance towards becoming the real global leader in science and technology. It devotes only a small amount of resources towards basic science research every year, which makes it rely completely on advanced countries for core technologies. A lot of investment projects in China are shortsighted and won’t turn out to bring long-term prosperity. I’d rather call today’s China “real-life magic-realism” than “real-life science fiction.” Ha! I like that phrase. And your critique of “shortsighted” investment makes me think of your recent economic research examining the connections between the slowdown of the Chinese economy, industrial policy, and China’s path to becoming more innovative in the future. It’s certainly a timely set of challenges. How did you become interested in those questions, and what did you conclude? As a researcher, my colleagues and I have been analyzing the slowdown of the Chinese economy for several years. We studied various indicators and aspects of the Chinese economy, and finally I felt that the slowdown of efficiency growth is much more important than people have suspected. If China cannot allocate its resources and plan its investment and innovation strategies properly, it will face the problem of continuously losing momentum in the future.","completion":"Although the Chinese government and venture capitalists in China also have noticed the importance of technology and innovation, their behaviors are still quite “shortsighted.” Government and VCs are keen to invest in products’ experimental development, rather than basic and applied science. Industrial policies and the systems for rewarding research also tend to promote the short-term growth of nominal research results (such as patent quantity) rather than true innovations (such as patent quality).  Since global value chains shortened after the 2008 financial crisis, it has not been easy for China to absorb foreign knowledge directly. Thus more emphasis on science research is important for China to develop into an innovative economy. The educational system also must be reformed to promote creativity among children, in order to foster the next generation of innovators."}
{"prompt":"What do you think the place of economic policy research in contemporary China should be? And a potentially related question: Do you think that economists—whether in the United States or in China—fully understand inequality? I hope that economic policy research can give the government valuable suggestions to help policymakers carry out the right decisions. But sometimes policymakers have other considerations besides economic concerns, such as how to maintain political stability, gain power, beat other countries in certain ways, fulfill personal interests, and so on. These considerations might send the country on a harmful path affecting the whole economy.","completion":"I think the government understands the phenomenon of inequality, but maybe not the origin of it. In modern economies, where human capital formation has become the determinant of income inequality, it is important to guarantee everyone access to resources like education and training.  I want to return to what you said earlier about your view of fiction as a way of exploring ambiguities and problems that seem to have no solutions. Do you see your work as also seeking to inspire people to imagine alternative and perhaps even fairer futures? Yes, I always hope to inspire people to imagine different futures, whether those futures are good or bad, bright or dark. Sometimes even if we can predict a dark future, it is still impossible to prevent that result. The more we think about different possibilities for the world, the deeper understanding we can have of the world."}
{"prompt":"1/ Francis of Assisi called his body “Brother Donkey.” He did not mean it in a bad way. For the patron saint of animals, the point of having flesh was to “bear burdens, be beaten, and fed little.” For all the temptations it created to sin, the body was a blessing. Its suffering was the one way to be saved.  (According to legend, Francis also called money “dung.” One day, when a follower picked up some coins someone had left at their church as an offering, in order to fling those coins out of the window, Francis scolded the follower for touching them and made him scrub his hands.) Catholic saints may not be a representative sample. But even philosophers who are not so extra about it have tended to have mixed feelings about the mortal coil. We may know all we know from our senses. But those senses are fallible. Human infants are born too early, and sooner or later our bodies will betray every last one of us.  Any successful religion must find a way to make these contradictions and failings sacred. More practically minded, technologists have often promised to solve them—to build tools that help us escape or extend ourselves, which may add up to the same thing.  2/ You have to have faith.","completion":"This issue will look at technologies made to make our bodies safer, stronger, and more capable. 3D printers in Gaza churn out life-saving medical devices. “Bio-bags” in a Philadelphia lab promise to replace the original (and tiring and dangerous) 3D bioprinting process: pregnancy.  Smart mirrors allow precariously employed fitness instructors to build followings beyond the studio—and overworked users to perfect their form from home. Who has time to go to an exercise class? Telerobots enable the elderly to work from the comfort of their sickbeds—and skirt the question of what kind of conditions, exactly, would make the elderly want to do that."}
{"prompt":"Sometimes the tools that we need most urgently are the lowest tech. When cutting-edge fertility medicine fails, you can find counsel and comfort in a decades-old web forum. Sometimes it may be harder for a blind user to master the Be My Eyes app on his iPhone than to call a friend. Sometimes the benefits we get from tools are unintended. If cryptocurrency enthusiasts can’t mine enough bitcoin to pay the heating bill, at least the heat from the mining rigs can warm their house through the winter.  But some digital technologies hurt bodies in predictable ways. The most cutting-edge facial recognition software encodes centuries of racism and helps the police perpetuate tragically familiar forms of racist violence. The technocrat says: Let’s enlarge the corpus of training data! The moral response may be: This tool should not exist.  We tend to think of information as abstract or disembodied. When cattle rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist turned Electronic Frontier Foundation founder John Perry Barlow wrote “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, he declared that the internet was “the new home of the Mind.”  “Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.”  Perhaps not. But, as feminist anti-racists quickly pointed out, if the internet was the Empire of the Mind, not everybody could afford the ticket there, or had the right entry and exit visas. If you had the kind of body that put you on the wrong side of redlining, historically, you could not bring computers into your school district through a sheer act of will.  Moreover, the internet itself has a body that needs care and protection. Many of the most dangerous threats to networks come from physical errors: fat thumbs on the keyboard, a USB stick a startup employee is foolish enough to insert. Late at night, the graveyard shift arrives to guard the servers.","completion":"3/ In the past decade, cheaper and smaller computers have brought cyberspace into meatspace. Now that the internet is everywhere, it is not only tracking our bodies. It is changing them, too.  What even is a body? It may seem like the original ground truth. But the word is also a metaphor. It can mean anything we are supposed to see as one thing, anything we want to hold together. As in: A body of land. A body of knowledge. The body politic."}
{"prompt":"It’s a myth, this idea that we could ever be whole, or entirely singular. No body is an island. Hiccups are catching; menstrual cycles sync. The artificial hormones used to make plastics and pesticides seep into the soil and rivers and make mutants: male lizards start spawning eggs.  A pregnant human is a two-hearted monster. The aquatic creature within feeds and pisses across a fleshy interface. As you meet eyes with a stranger across the library, mirror neurons fire: the part of your brain for hand lights up as they wave at you.  New technologies network our bodies in new kinds of relationships.","completion":"Science fiction has often imagined artificial intelligence as a woman with a beautiful body. Or, at least, a husky voice, the kind our hero can fall in love with. But what contemporary data analytics and machine learning actually do is break us up—into composites and probabilities. Your Facebook likes say you are 67% female, 48% African American, 80% Democrat, 28% likely to like Spike Jonze’s Her.  If digital technologies break us apart and scramble us up, though, they can also create new combinations. This issue will look at new forms of knowledge production and political organization that the internet has made possible: from activists using the web to make anti-corporate media to engineers using the web to automate debt strikes, from Mormon mommy bloggers joining forces with Silicon Valley transhumanists to Amazon warehouse workers who realize that the surveillance software used to exploit them can be gamed, or smashed."}
{"prompt":"If technologies are making new monsters they are also making new affinities and solidarities that carry new potentials. As somebody once said, No one yet knows what a body can do. Your project is called the Glia Project. Does the name mean anything?  No. It just sounded medical and we all liked it. One of the engineers was like, “Glia… I like Glia.” Okay, great. We didn’t really care about a name, but we needed one to apply for a medical license and The High-Quality, Low-Cost Open Access Medical Device Project just didn’t seem like the thing to write on that application. It was picked remarkably quickly and for no good reason.  Ahead of this conversation, I was reading about your work and I have some sense of how I might summarize it, but I’m wondering how you frame what you’re doing in the world.  The Glia Project is first and foremost a project about independence. That can be confusing to some people who aren’t familiar with the project because they look at it and they think it’s about technology. They think it’s just about 3D-printing medical devices for Gaza.","completion":"I’m Palestinian. But I’ve been so indoctrinated with white privilege from living in Canada that when I first started going back my thinking was, “I have this great Canadian education and I’m going to teach them how to be good doctors and then everything will be fine.”  When I went, however, I realized that the problem is actually multi-partite. There is a lack of training, but there’s also a lack of access to medical devices. When I would train my residents in Gaza, they would say, “Great training, but we don’t have access to any of this stuff.”  At the time, Egypt was a little bit open. So we started bringing things in through Egypt. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Egyptian tunnels, but there were 1,800 tunnels between Egypt and Gaza at one point. All subject to the whims of the Egyptians. The Egyptians were junior partners in the blockade of Gaza by the Israelis, so we in turn were also subject to the whims of the Israelis.  The problem in Gaza is not a problem of the place being poor or the people being stupid. The problem is that, quite literally, the Israelis stop us from receiving equipment, from getting training, from doing anything. When I looked around, I realized that what we actually needed wasn’t medical devices. It was independence.  I’m guessing you’re in the United States?  Yes."}
{"prompt":"Americans are the most hopeless people on the Israel-Palestine conflict. They’re like, “Oh my God, the occupation has been there for seven million years and it’s going to be there for seven million thousand more years.”  No. It’s not. It’s collapsing. What’s really difficult to understand until you spend some time there is that it’s obvious that the occupation’s days are numbered. The occupation is collapsing right now, so if we were to run a project that was aimed solely at disaster relief — which is what some people think we should be running — then what would we do after the disaster of occupation is over and we’re left with the other disaster: capitalism? Now I’m sounding like I’m fucking crazy, but hear me out. When I first started going to Gaza, I thought that I was going to see a place abandoned by capitalism. Then I got there and guess what? KFC was delivering chicken through the tunnels for free. I mean, you had to pay for the chicken, but the delivery was free. Why? I couldn’t understand it. It’s soggy by the time it arrives. It’s like KFC at the bus station. I’m a KFC addict and, like any KFC addict, I recognize that stuff is shit and it’s shit when it’s fresh. Four hours in, it’s really shit.","completion":"So why is KFC doing that? Why are they subsidizing free delivery? I also saw billboards everywhere for Coca-Cola and Pepsi, which weren’t readily available at the time. There were also billboards for products that people could never afford, like a BMW or a Mercedes. And they weren’t just in rich districts — they were everywhere.  That’s when I realized, “Oh shit, these guys understand that this thing is almost over too.” Coca-Cola opened a bottling plant there in 2016 that uses more water than all of Gaza has available to it each day. What are they thinking? They’re thinking there’s going to be a day when people can buy Coca-Cola. They’re thinking, “We want to be there first.”  How does that translate into medicine? The moment that medical companies think they can get in there, they’re there. But what if we had the ability to create the alternative before the bad guys show up? The guys who love patents, the guys who love copyright, the guys who love all that shit. What if we could create a culture that was resilient enough that it could resist the coming influx of capitalism?  That was one of the big drivers for the project. I mean, I am actually trying to solve a specific problem — the problem of access to medical devices — but my problem could be answered in a million ways. I could go to the United Nations and ask them to buy some shit and import it. Why aren’t we doing that? It’s because we want to play three-dimensional chess. We want to do something that’s good for today and good for tomorrow."}
{"prompt":"Are people on board with that? Inoculating Gaza to capitalism by building up the culture around open source and open access? Or do they get on board because you’re a Canadian doctor? Palestine, like most post-colonial places — let’s call it post-colonial although it’s more complicated than that because it’s still actively being colonized — has an inferiority complex. And we use this inferiority complex against them.  Your doctor’s stethoscope at the doctor’s office costs $200. People see these and associate them with quality because they’ve been around for so long and they’re shiny. And then we show up in Gaza with a 3D-printed stethoscope. It’s plastic. Usually, it’s one color. The first thing they say to me is, “That’s shit. Just look at it. It looks fucking homemade.” I say to them, “Oh really? Because we use it in Canada in the emergency department.” And they’re like, “Gimme that.”  So we’ve leveraged people’s inferiority complex against them. We also flip the development model. The development model, traditionally, is that you go into the Third World, you test on poor people who are defenseless against you, and then you go to the First World to sell your product there.  What we are doing is exactly the inverse. We’re doing all of our development in the First World, and then deploying it in the Third World — the idea being that mistakes are very expensive in the Third World and very cheap in Canada. For example, right now we’re doing a study for a 3D-printed pulse oximeter. That’s the device that goes on your finger and says how much oxygen you have. To test it — even in 2019, if you can believe it — you actually have to suffocate people. You literally put a mask on them and you bring their oxygen down to 70% while you’re draining off blood to test it. If something were to happen, we’re in Canada. I can give these patients the best care in the world. If I were testing it in Gaza and something were to happen, it would be bad news.  The only device we haven’t done that with is the 3D-printed tourniquet. That’s because it was an emergency situation and we needed to deploy them before we could test them. We were testing them on people who were dying. It was awful and totally the wrong way to do it.","completion":"What happened? Any engineer who is not in the field has no idea what the fuck is going on. Paramedics in Gaza were telling me, “These tourniquets are breaking.” And I was like, “Why, what are you doing wrong?”  Then I went to the field. Two tourniquets in a row broke in my hands. I did not have the humility to understand the problem until it was happening to me. What was the mistake we were making? We were testing the tourniquets on people sitting in chairs in Canada. Super calm, super chill. Usually, they were even tourniqueting themselves.  In the field, I was literally running while applying a tourniquet. We had four stretcher bearers and I’d be in the middle, on the right side or the left side of the patient, trying to apply a tourniquet. While we were getting tear-gassed, so I couldn’t see. While there was live fire, so we were getting struck by shrapnel and running for our lives. So, yeah, I applied the tourniquet too tight and it snapped. You’re telling me to twist the tourniquet three times, but not four or it will break? Forget it.  After that, I went back to the engineering team and said, “Okay, we really need to over-engineer this tourniquet and make it something that can withstand 1600% of the force that we expected.” The engineers said, “This is stupid. Why are we doing this?” Because I was there, I knew that the amount of adrenaline pumping through you forbids you from making sound decisions in that exact moment. And since we had that intervention, we have had zero failures in 500 deployments. The commercial brand fails 20 percent of the time. We’re not just equivalent: our tourniquet is better than anything out there on the battlefield.  Innovating Outside the Market Tell us more about your development process. How do you develop and produce these 3D-printed devices? We create the designs using FreeCAD, a free/open source CAD software program. And we have medical students doing the production in my basement in London, Ontario. It’s Health Canada-approved. [Ed.: Health Canada is the Canadian public health department and the equivalent of the FDA’s medical licensing division.]"}
{"prompt":"Your basement is Health Canada-approved?  Yeah, they did a site visit this week.  There are six 3D printers down there and a few tables where we quality-check and package each stethoscope. A full print job produces enough parts to make four stethoscopes and that takes fifteen hours. In other words, every fifteen hours, we get four stethoscopes.  The 3D printed parts are the chestpiece, which is circular and holds something called a diaphragm, which is what we put to the patient’s chest; a “y-piece,” which is connected to the chestpiece by some tubing and lets us create a fork; two ear tubes, one for each prong of the y-piece so that sound can flow to both of the wearer’s ears; and finally a piece called a spring, which supports the ear tubes and keeps them a constant distance apart. We put earbuds on the ends of the ear tubes, but we don’t print those.","completion":"For the tubing, we use huge rolls of Coca-Cola fountain machine tubing, actually, and cut them up into the size we need. We’re able to leverage the fact that the FDA approves this kind of tubing for both food and medical devices — the “F” and the “D.” We buy food-safe material and then can get approval to use it for medical stuff.  Finally, our diaphragms — inserts for the chestpiece I described earlier — come from file folders, which are super cheap.  You cut circles out of file folders to make the diaphragms?  Yeah, we use a craft punch. We wanted to make it very simple. What’s the good of a process if you need a $2 million lab to implement it? My entire lab can be put together for about $5,000. And half of my machines I made myself. It works not just on the best equipment you can buy, but on anything you can scrounge together.  Once the pieces have been quality-checked, we put them in plastic packets and seal them. They arrive disassembled. The reason we do that is because we want to change people’s relationship with their equipment.  Speaking of quality-checking and making sure everything works, I know that you published a paper in an open-access medical journal where you describe how you validated the 3D-printed stethoscope against the traditional stethoscope."}
{"prompt":"We looked around and discovered that there isn’t broad agreement on how you test a stethoscope because nobody really cares. We picked a method that uses a “chest phantom,” which is a simulation of a chest that’s a polyurethane balloon filled with two liters of water.  You put sound in on one side and you collect it on the other side, with the understanding that there are a lot of reverberations in there that happen along the way. And then you compare the two stethoscopes to see how the sound is attenuated by the stethoscope. The stethoscope will take away some of the sound, but you want to make sure it’s not taking away sound in important places.  So you record two audio files: one of the sound that travels through the traditional stethoscope, and one of the sound that travels through the 3D-printed stethoscope?  Exactly. And then you run both files through a spectrum analyzer to see how they stack up. The spectrum analyzer we used was Audacity, which is open source.  We used a Hello Kitty balloon, so colloquially we call it the Hello Kitty Protocol, but we couldn’t write that in a publication — we made it sound more scientific. The cost of new materials for the validation study is about $15, and then you also need the traditional stethoscope to validate against. You could say that’s a capital cost. You also need headphones with a microphone in them. And, of course, you need a Hello Kitty balloon filled with water.  Beyond stethoscopes, what are the other kinds of devices you’re developing? Our big project that I’m really looking forward to is dialysis. Dialysis is also an interesting problem of capitalism. A good analogy is disposable razors. Broadly, in Canada, there’s Schick and there’s Gillette. You can’t use a Schick razor on a Gillette handle and vice versa. That’s called vendor lock-in.  Fundamentally, dialysis machines are a pump, a controller, a flow meter, and a little bit of tubing. Nothing special. The only way for companies to make them profitable is to create vendor lock-in and collude with each other. In California, there was a ballot initiative [Ed.: Proposition 8] to figure out a way to reduce the costs of dialysis treatment. Fresenius and DaVita, the two biggest companies in dialysis, spent $111 million to stop the proposition and they got it killed. That’s good for them because they don’t want competition, and they don’t want price controls. That’s not how they make money.","completion":"In Gaza, this creates a problem. Let’s say white people in the United States under Obama decide they want to donate to Gaza, which happened. They donate a bunch of dialysis machines and what are called “disposables.” Machines are about $35,000 a piece. A disposable is a filter plus a circuit of tubing that hooks into the patient to connect them to the machine. Together, the machine and the disposable do the work that a functioning kidney would do: they filter the patient’s blood. Each disposable is about $100 and should only be used once per session. It’s supposed to get thrown away.  But in Gaza, patients take disposables home and wash them and bring them back the next time until they totally disintegrate — which is bad, bad news. It’s circulating your internal stuff. It should be sterile.  Now let’s say that Trump is in office and the Americans have lost interest, but the French have decided that they like Palestine. So the French donate a bunch of disposables that don’t work with the American machines. We put away the American machines, retrain our nurses on French machines, and start using French disposables. It’s the same thing with the Spanish, the Russians, whoever.  We have rooms of machines with no disposables, and rooms of disposables with no machines. Fucking crazy. So patients aren’t getting enough dialysis because we don’t have enough machines or disposables that work together. It’s like if a car manufacturer said you’re not allowed to use anything but Goodyear tires. The tire is the disposable, the car is the machine. This is what the companies are doing to us. They’re making it impossible for us to use anyone else’s disposables.  How can 3D printing help? Our idea is to make a machine that’s generic, where we can create templates for each of the different companies’ disposables. The template would become an interface between our machine and the proprietary disposable, so that different disposables become compatible with our machine. It would consist of printed parts at every place where the disposable touches the machine, a sheet or a board with a cutout to hold each of those 3D-printed parts, and instructions for putting the disposable, template, and machine together."}
{"prompt":"The machine that we’re developing, instead of costing $35,000, costs about $500 to make. But each brand new tooling of a template will cost about $15,000. In that situation, if a country wanted to donate, we’d say, “No, no, don’t give us any machines, just give us your disposables.” Even if we have to spend $15,000 each time a new company decides they’re going to give us their disposables, we’re still way ahead financially. Plus, we don’t have to retrain our nurses each time, which leads to mistakes and errors.  So you have to create a new template for each country’s disposables.","completion":"What’s tragic about it is that it’s not even one template per country. The United States has two main dialysis machine manufacturers and their stuff doesn’t work with each other. You can’t take a Fresenius disposable and put it on a non-Fresenius machine. It’s the same in Spain, France, and Germany. I wish it were one per country because that would reduce our problem set.  This is why we’re open-sourcing the templates. We’ll open source the whole process, really — the files to 3D-print parts and lasercut the board they plug into, as well as any validation studies we do, and any data we use in those validation studies so people can quality-check their own work. That way, you only have to spend the $15,000 to develop each template once. Let’s say the Americans donate one set of machines to Gaza and the French donate one set of machines to Kenya. We spend our money to make our template and they spend their money to make their template. Then, later on, if the French donate their machines to Gaza and the Americans donate their machines to Kenya, everybody is all set. Because the Kenyans would already have our template for the American machines and we would already have their template for the French machines. A shared open source repository makes it possible for us to not duplicate each other’s work.  What you are describing — bringing technological innovation to a product to make it better and cheaper and more widely available — is what we’re told capitalism already does well. But in your experience, the reality is the opposite. The market is making the product worse. So you’re forced to innovate outside of the market."}
{"prompt":"The idea behind patents in a capitalist medical model is that, at a certain point, either the benevolence of these companies or their competitive nature should cause them to reduce their prices and make generic versions of their products. Maybe the first version of a particular medical device belongs to a company and you pay an exorbitant amount for it. But then it becomes cheaper and more accessible to everybody.  That promise isn’t being fulfilled in the realm of medical hardware. It is being fulfilled in generic medicines, although the United States has even found a way to fuck that up, which is amazing. Almost no country has allowed drug companies to fuck up generics the same way the US has, where very simple 200-year-old generics cost $20,000. In Canada and in Europe, that shit is just not allowed.  What is a patent? A patent is the government incentivizing innovation by encouraging inventors. It does this by spending people’s freedom — it gives the inventor the right to prevent other people from making or using that invention for a period of time.","completion":"Similarly, the government spends people’s money to make a highway. You want the government to make highways. But if the government is spending $20 billion per kilometer of highway, you might say, “Wait a second. I want you to spend some, but not too much.” When highways cost too much — when one kilometer costs $17 million to develop — it’s almost always associated with mafias and corruption. To bring it back to patents, how can there be a kilometer of innovation that costs all of people’s freedom to develop? There must be corruption involved.  What people like myself can do is to force that realization by operating outside of the usual system. A 200-year-old medical device like the stethoscope should not cost $200."}
{"prompt":"Blockade Runners Let’s talk about how your medical devices are printed on the ground in Gaza. 3D printers use plastic to create objects. Where do you get the plastic? It’s recycled ABS plastic. Gaza actually has a 100 percent recycle rate because no plastic is allowed in.  Really?  Yeah, almost everybody’s plumbing in Gaza is made out of recycled plastic. It’s really quite wild. For the printers, we use recycled ABS and we mix in as much virgin plastic as we can get because you always need some virgin plastic — there’s no such thing as 100 percent recycled plastic — but sometimes it’s not very much.  Where do you get the ABS from? I’m imagining a bunch of plastic bottles.","completion":"You’re halfway there. Plastic bottles are made out of a material called PET. We don’t use PET; we use ABS, which is the plastic that’s in Lego pieces. It’s also in chairs and tables, picnic tables, shit like that. What happens is: you take those plastic parts, you grind them down, you wash them and dry them. Then you melt them and extrude them into spools of “filament,” which is what 3D printers use to make things.  To process all the recycled plastic in Gaza, they’ve made their own recycling machines, their own grinders, and their own cleaners."}
{"prompt":"Are those machines open source? Are the plans online somewhere?  Yeah, man. One of them is called the Filastruder. It takes plastic pellets and turns them into spools of filament. The company that makes it open sourced their stuff — and that’s a prerequisite for everything of ours, since we have a 100 percent free/open source stack.  Why are we religiously free software? I don’t know if you’re religiously free software, but zealotry is painful. It sometimes takes us five times as long to do anything, but that cost is paid up front and we’re then able to pass what we learn on to other people and get them on board. FreeCAD, the software I mentioned earlier that we use to design the stethoscope parts, has improved dramatically since we started using it. We’ve filed bug reports against it.","completion":"Anyway, we got a Filastruder into Gaza and started doing some amazing shit. And we began ordering parts from the company in a really weird way. One day they emailed me and said, “We’ve never seen anyone order parts the way that you’re ordering them. What are you doing?” So we explained what we were doing and they were blown away. They sent me lots of replacement parts for free, which was kind of them.  We’ve since had to go more industrial: the Filastruder was good at the beginning, but now we’ve got twenty printers in Gaza and we’re producing many kilograms of filament each week, so we can’t use it anymore. But it will always be in our hearts.  Are those twenty printers all in one place, or spread around? They’re in our offices in Gaza. But we help make printers for anybody who wants them, by printing the parts that they can then assemble into a functioning printer."}
{"prompt":"There are two reasons we do this. One is that we want to promote the culture. The other is that we’re going to get bombed at some point. When that happens, if we are the only place that has all the 3D-printing knowledge or equipment, then we’re going to set back the entire movement by two or three years. The more we hoard the knowledge or hoard the equipment, the worse it will be. As it is, when our offices eventually do get bombed, we’ll probably only be set back a year. If somebody dies, obviously it will be even worse.  So while we have twenty printers of our own, we’ve “birthed” approximately thirty-five more by printing parts for them. It’s easier for people to get up and running if we give them some parts to start, kind of like a sourdough starter. But what’s really cool is that printers have started showing up that we had nothing to do with.  How did you know? How could you tell that these weren’t printers you had helped make? Historically, everybody had what’s called the Prusa printers, so it was always easy to trace them. At this point, there are Prusa printers that are second and third-generation. We’d make a printer for somebody and then they’d make a printer for somebody. The first thing we ask people to do is print themselves backup pieces, and the second thing we ask is for them to help somebody else.  Still, it’s a monoculture. Monocultures, even when they’re open source monocultures, are not good. So when we finally started to see printers that weren’t ours, we knew they weren’t ours. The culture is growing in a way we didn’t expect.  We’ve started working with universities and high schools. The goal is to get a 3D printer into every high school in Gaza within the next five to ten years. For us to have as many 3D printers as they have in the Netherlands per capita would mean having around two thousand printers. And Gaza needs more printers than the Netherlands because they’re making essential stuff. For example, if your light switch breaks in the Netherlands, it’s usually cheaper and easier to go buy it at the hardware store. In Gaza, these breakages are permanent. When you go to somebody’s house and the light switch is broken, it’s always going to be broken. Introducing 3D printing to that culture is empowering repair culture.","completion":"What about the cost and the availability of electricity? Does that create an obstacle for 3D printing in Gaza? Our office in Gaza is solar-powered. We knew right away that the electricity instability in Gaza would kill us if we wanted to print consistently, so early on we rigged solar power for the entire place. We have panels that power the equipment during the day and charge a set of batteries, which we can then use for backup. I’ve also participated in several multimillion dollar projects to put solar power in hospitals in Gaza. Those are important, because if you’re trying to help a patient and then the electricity cuts out for eight hours, it’s not good.  Does democratizing access to basic goods, leveraging solar power, and creating self-sufficiency pose a threat to the Israelis and the occupation? Since their withholding of those things is a large part of how they maintain control?  There are three main components to building a solar power system in Gaza. The first is batteries. In a country like Canada, you wouldn’t have to bother with batteries because you can always access electricity through a reliable, always-on grid if the sun isn’t shining. But in Gaza, batteries are essential. The other components are the solar panels and an inverter, which translates the different kinds of current into each other — so the photovoltaic power generated by the panels, which is DC, can be converted into the kind of power that our building uses, which is AC.  There is no moment in time since I started my work that the Israelis have allowed all three of those components into Gaza at the same time. It’s always one and the others are banned.  It’s clear that the intent of the blockade is to take away independence. So maybe the logic behind the Israelis preventing those components from entering Gaza is part of that. Honestly, I don’t think about it that much. What I care about is building a project that’s sustainable and that’s decentralized. Decentralization is deeply Palestinian. The context is partly religious: Islam is a decentralized religion. But Palestinians have not had good centralized leadership for a very long time. Historically, they organized themselves into villages that were more or less independent. So we’re not introducing new concepts to people. What we’re doing is simply refreshing what they think their community should be, in a technological way."}
{"prompt":"Lucky and Grateful Have you always been interested in 3D printing? Or did your experiences in Gaza spark your interest? In other words, were you thinking about the problems in Gaza and matching 3D printers to the problem?  A little bit of both. I understood that the technology might be usable, but as long as the tunnels were open, it didn’t make sense. I was meeting my needs in other ways, so why bother?  Now, it’s just too expensive. If I were to distribute a stethoscope to each doctor in Gaza — that’s 4,000 doctors — that would be $200 per stethoscope, but probably more like $350 by the time you got them into Gaza because of the corruption, the problems with the Israelis, and so on. You’re talking about $350 times 4,000 people. That’s really serious cash. And for what? For stethoscopes. Whereas 4,000 3D-printed stethoscopes — even with packaging, distribution, training, and everything — are $5 a pop. For $20,000, you can kickstart an entire medical system. That’s nothing.","completion":"Now that you’ve kickstarted that medical system, why keep going? At this point, the office in Gaza has the designs and the printers. Why have you continued to show up in person?  There are a couple of reasons for that and they all have to do with benefits to myself. It’s common for people who travel and volunteer to imagine that they are giving and to minimize the amount they’re taking from the society they’re in. The reality is that without absorbing the resilience of the Palestinians, I would have never understood what resilience was. And so I took hope from them. I took from them the idea that when somebody builds a wall, you dig a tunnel.  That recharge of my energy is hard to do when I’m not there. I’m not the kind of person who can easily empathize with a situation without seeing it. I’m also not smart enough to be able to read what’s happening in the news and tease out the reality on the ground. Had I not been there in the first place, I wouldn’t have understood these problems. Someone might understand that there’s a shortage of medical equipment, but it’s hard to understand how that shortage is actualized. What does it look like? Going there, I take a lot that helps me to do the work here, which makes me a better doctor both for my Canadian patients and for my Palestinian patients. That’s the main reason.  But above all, Gaza is a vanguard. It allows us to acid-test our ideas about freedom, about non-violent resistance, about healthcare provision, and about independence.  In May 2018, you were shot in the legs by Israeli soldiers in Gaza and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called for an investigation into your shooting since you were clearly marked as a medical personnel, and shooting marked medical personnel is a war crime under the Geneva Convention. You responded that you weren’t interested in an investigation and that you’d rather have investment in infrastructure projects. I’m wondering if you can talk about why.  There is no possibility of justice through the Israeli system as it currently exists. Things like investigations are fig leaves to pretend there is justice. Ultimately, whether there’s justice for me or not is irrelevant. What I want most is to improve the conditions I saw around me that triggered people, week after week, to go to the protest. [Ed:. The protest is the Great March of Return, which began March 30, 2018.] It’ll be fifty-two weeks on March 30, 2019. 20,000 people shot. 250 deaths. More by the time you publish this. Why are people going? It’s because they are desperate. If we can alleviate the desperation, that’s the key."}
{"prompt":"Whether Tarek Loubani gets justice is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. If we could get a couple million dollars to put solar panels on some hospitals, that would be a legacy I would be proud of. What’s the best case scenario if there’s an investigation? The absolute best case scenario is some fucking nineteen-year-old getting thrown in jail for a year for what he did to me. So they would destroy some nineteen-year-old’s life even though we all know it’s a systemic problem? No thank you. I would rather make it so that that nineteen-year-old is never in the position where his whole life depends on him shooting a doctor. I would rather make it so that Palestinians don’t have to go up to the fence with their hands up begging for their humanity.  I’ve never seen an honest figure or independent judicial process from the Israeli government. In fact, the Israelis came to interrogate me. They sent people in army uniforms calling themselves an “independent fact-finding mission.” I joked to one of the guys, “Having the word 'independent' doesn’t make you independent. You are a literal soldier.” He said, “Yes, but we take this very seriously.”  You work in and on bodies. What’s your relationship to your own body? And does it change when you’re in Canada versus Gaza?  My main relationship to my body is gratitude. I felt incredibly lucky when I was shot that I wasn’t hurt more severely. I could see how important everything that we were working towards was. We are — collectively, not me specifically or even the Glia Project — trying to make it so that these fragile vessels we all inhabit are as well-cared for as possible in a way that’s just and equitable across the world. There is no reason why patients in Gaza shouldn’t enjoy the same medical care that my patients in Canada enjoy. There’s no good reason for that.  A lot of people look at the fragility of their own body and they’re terrified by it. But those same people look at a glass sculpture and aren’t terrified by its fragility. You can look at fragility as a kind of beauty and as an invitation to protect. I take up that invitation. I take it up professionally and I take it up in this work. But your question is philosophical and I’m not a philosophical person so it’s hard to answer.","completion":"The other part, in addition to gratitude, is luck. The guy that rescued me the day I was shot was killed about an hour later.  Musa, right?  Musa. He was a father of four. His wife, when she talked to me, asked, “Why did he die and not you?” Good fucking question. It’s part of that fragility. Have you ever dropped a glass that didn’t break and wonder, “Why didn’t it break?” And another time, it just taps the side of the sink and shatters into a thousand pieces. Why did it break?  Musa died because of a totally preventable condition. Well, treatable, not preventable. I guess it was preventable because they could have not shot him, but I could have treated it with a ballpoint pen. And the wild thing is: my mind can’t look further than my people. I can only think of the paramedics who were shot that day. I can’t even begin to fathom the 1,700 other people who were shot that day. I don’t know how big your high school was, but my entire high school was 1,700 people. It’s like every one of them being shot in one day. So I felt lucky. Lucky and grateful."}
{"prompt":"The Debt Collective platform launch announcement came in my inbox just a few months ago, but the collective has been around longer than that. How would you describe Debt Collective before it became a platform? During Occupy Wall Street, there was a small group of us who started working together. We started thinking about debt, and talking about debt as a site for organizing. We realized that everybody was in debt: we were in debt, everyone we knew was in debt. We realized that indebtedness was a material condition that defined our era.  After Occupy, a bunch of us formed a group called Strike Debt. We were studying what the debt system was, how it was operating, who the creditors were. We wrote The Debt Resistor’s Operations Manual, which is still available on strikedebt.org. Later, we started a project called Rolling Jubilee, which bought defaulted debt for pennies on the dollar and then canceled it. This was a series of projects over several years that came from trying to figure out: what should organizing around debt look like?  Through working on Rolling Jubilee, we came to the conclusion that we needed to build power from the bottom up. We needed a membership organization, something millions of debtors could join. That’s the idea behind the Debt Collective platform.","completion":"Labor organizing is a model that inspires us. Getting together with your fellow workers to go to the boss and say, “We want more money, we want time off, we want healthcare” — this is a model that works. Today, more than sharing the same employer, people share the same creditor. Everybody’s got Sallie Mae, everybody’s got Navient, everybody owes the same credit card companies. What can we do together if we join forces and bring some of those labor organizing tactics into the space of finance? That framing — that we might not all share the same employer, but a lot of us share the same creditor — is so striking.  Creditors have so much power over us. They have all this data about us that they’re constantly buying and selling. But we don’t know very much about them, or about each other and our shared situation.  During the housing crisis of 2008, millions and millions of people were foreclosed upon illegally, including disproportionate numbers of African Americans. Our lesson from that is that debtors must be organized. What if all of those folks had been in debtor’s unions and could have pushed back against what was being done to them? That really motivates us. Because what happened then will happen again — in the same way or in a different form — and we should be ready."}
{"prompt":"It seems like that vision informed the whole idea of the Debt Collective platform. Can you tell me about building it? What inspired the technical and the design decisions that you made? In 2015, as a pilot project, we launched a student debt strike with a group of fifteen borrowers who had attended a scam college called Corinthian that’s now bankrupt. Corinthian was a chain of for-profit schools with campuses across the country. They preyed on low-income people and had developed some pretty evil tactics to target low-income folks, racial minorities, and women.  Our campaign had two components. The first was a student debt strike, where former students refused to pay their loans. The other was a complementary legal campaign, where we activated a provision of the Higher Education Act of 1965 called “borrower defense to repayment,” often shortened to “defense to repayment.” The law says that if your school scams you or lies to you in the process of issuing you federal student loans, you have the right to have those loans canceled.  Since 2015, we’ve won over one billion dollars in debt relief from that work. When we started, we didn’t know that’s how it would go. We were a small group of volunteers who had a website and some very basic infrastructure. And we got flooded — flooded — with people who had student debt of all kinds. We couldn’t keep up.  Our takeaway was that we needed to have solid infrastructure, online and in-person, that would enable us to accommodate everyone who wants to participate the next time we campaign. The last three years have been spent trying to figure out what that infrastructure looks like. That’s what led to creating the Debt Collective platform.","completion":"When I go to the platform, I see that the first two links in the navigation menu at the top of the page are “Dispute Your Debt” and “Community.” “Dispute Your Debt” takes you to a landing page for six debt dispute tools and “Community” takes you to a forum. How did you decide on those features? The debt dispute tools are important because they help people stop predatory creditors and collectors in the short term. People are struggling with their debt today, right now, and they can’t necessarily wait for the student debt jubilee that we must organize together to win.  At the same time, one of the aspects of indebtedness is a feeling of isolation and shame. People don’t talk about their finances even with their friends and family, so lots of people think they’re the only person this has happened to.  We hear stories from debtors who tell you, “I didn’t expect to lose my job and then my car broke down and I had to take out all this debt.” They may think that if this one bad thing hadn’t happened to them, they wouldn’t be in this situation. But once you start talking to other people, you realize that everybody is in the same boat. The forum is about enabling debtors to make connections with each other. Eventually, the platform will also enable people to work together to develop a campaign for our collective benefit. As more and more people, especially the young, are beginning to talk about socialism and how we have to transition our economy to save the planet, we believe that the time is right to think about how debtors can contribute to efforts that make bold, visionary demands such as student loan cancellation, free health care, and more.  I’d never heard of “a debt dispute tool” before I visited the platform. Tell us more about that."}
{"prompt":"The best way to explain it is to tell you about the first tool we ever made. For our campaign in 2015 with borrowers who had attended Corinthian, we worked with lawyers to develop an app like TurboTax to file for defense to repayment.  TurboTax is easy. A little wizard comes up and asks you questions, you answer them, and, at the end, it tells you what you owe. We thought, “What if we made something similar?” So we developed an app that submits a letter to the Department of Education that says, “You lied to me and here’s the evidence. I want my loans canceled.”  Based on the success of that tool, we decided to replicate that model with other types of debt on the new platform. So now we have six tools. But what’s funny is that when you click on the “Defense to Repayment” link from the tools landing page, it just takes you to the Department of Education website because they’ve taken over the process. We started it and they sort of… stole it.  Seriously? Yeah. A hundred thousand people filed for defense to repayment in the year after we launched our tool. The Department of Education couldn’t allow us to do that. Who were we to submit these letters en masse? So they created their own web app, which looks suspiciously like ours. Now borrowers have to go to the official Department of Education website to file. But the process of applying didn’t exist before we invented it.  They co-opt your work, they don’t pay you, and they don’t credit you in any way. It just blends into some federal website.  The federal bureaucracy takes it over.  There are so many cases like that in the history of labor organizing as well. Victories that are hard won just get sucked into existing systems and made to appear as if they were always there.  It erases the struggle that led to the change. And, like I said, about a billion dollars in debt have been erased now due to the operationalization of that law. The law had existed, but people weren’t using it. A billion dollars is a drop in the bucket, but nevertheless a good sign that organizing in this way can be effective.","completion":"You mentioned that a campaigning feature is coming to the platform. How do you envision campaigns coming together? The intention is to organize democratically, so people on the platform determine the campaigns. What if Debt Collective members in some city found each other on our platform and decided to do something together locally? Maybe there’s a payday lending store you want to shut down, so you work with your neighbors and have the support of our organizers and our resources. Maybe there’s a predatory for-profit college, a hospital that’s gouging people, courts and police who are sticking people with fines and fees. The bonds of solidarity can be created at the local as well as at the national level."}
{"prompt":"How has this kind of organization not existed before? Do you know of precedents in other other places or times? There are some examples in other countries. In Spain, when the mortgage crisis hit in 2012, people organized to stop foreclosures. There have been examples in Latin America where people go to the bank as a collective and say, “You’re not going to foreclose on these homes.”  But not us. Seventy-five percent of Americans are in debt. It’s really almost everyone. It’s astonishing that organizations for debtors don’t exist yet, even though we’re all in this situation. That must change. We really have to catch up.  Our theory of change is that massive social transformation does not happen without insurgency from the bottom up. But insurgencies require infrastructure to sustain them. The Debt Collective platform is our attempt to begin building that.","completion":"Tell us a little bit about yourself. Where did you grow up, study, develop your interests? How did you come to want to work on open source hormones? I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley of Los Angeles, which has the densest population of Chinese inhabitants in all the US. From early on I already loved both biology and visual art, and chose to study both as a combined degree at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. I was very lucky to get exposed to “bioart” as a self-aware practice through one of my professors Rich Pell who taught a course called Post Natural Studio.  After graduating, I began an amateur documentary project, filming interviews with other bioartists and biohackers. Critical Art Ensemble and subRosa were very influential for me because their projects demonstrate how biology and biotechnology could be used for social and political resistance. In 2014, the documentary project led me to Yogyakarta, Indonesia where I met a much more subversive group of practitioners in the global Hackteria community, such as noise artists, fermenters, and of course the Transhackfeminists, who were making DIY sex toys and performing DIY gynecology. Following this trajectory of do-it-together science, critical hacking, and its possible “emancipatory potential” I think it was only logical that I would stumble across open source hormones.  What were your most important sources of inspiration?  My sources of inspiration for the Open Source Estrogen project are plenty:  Paul B. Preciado and his book Testo Junkie, where he outlines the meaning of the “pharmapornographic regime” that governs our subjectivities especially in relation to gender, sexuality, and reproduction.Anne Fausto-Sterling whose writing fights static notions of gender and the body.Giovanna di Chiro and her paper on “polluted politics,” which made me aware of how cultural dialogue manifests around something like hormone disruption.Heather Davies and her writing on “the Plastisphere,” which brilliantly outlines the symbolic and the material of plastic as a queering potential.Legacy Russell on “Glitch Feminism” and the idea that bodies could “glitch” and resist traditional binary code.Laboria Cuboniks on “Xenofeminism”: “If nature is unjust then change nature!” Astrida Neimanis’s essay “Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water.”"}
{"prompt":"My sources are quite broad because the project is not a finite and finished one, but rather an open framework for addressing the multiple layers of the molecular colonization that currently traps us and the planet in a collective mutagenesis — mutation to our bodies, sex, gender, fellow non-humans, and environment.  How did you start to work on your open source estrogen project? What materials did you need? What kinds of collaborators, if any?  Initially I collaborated with a Canadian artist Byron Rich who introduced me to the possibility of an open source birth control pill that contains primarily estrogen or progesterone. Although we are far away from an open source platform for producing hormones, through this journey I was able to form collaborations with many others in the open source community, such as Paula Pin from Transhackfeminists and Gynepunk Lab; Ryan Hammond, who is working on Open Source Gendercodes; Spela Petric, who I collaborate with in a collective called Aliens in Green; and most recently with the Lifepatch citizen initiative based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where we investigate various strategies for addressing the most polluted river in the city. The materials of our bio hack sessions are usually low-cost and easy to find, and have ranged from transgenic yeast biosensors to silica gel, urine, cigarette filters, methanol, plastic, and of course, hormones.  Why estrogen, in particular? Are you working on other hormones, or would you consider doing so? Estrogen is interesting because not only does it code for our social and cultural ideas of “femininity” and regulate so much of our basic endocrine function in the body (for example, reproductive development, mood, and metabolism), but it can also be mimicked by hundreds of other toxic industrial molecules of our late capitalist efforts, molecules we call “xenoestrogens.”  Some popular examples of these molecules are plastics — BPA and phthalates — synthetic hormones, PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, and soaps. For decades since the 1930s, these molecules have caused much of what Rob Nixon called the “slow violence”: environmental degradation and the marginalization of bodies and communities. There have been severe population declines in certain marine vertebrates because they can no longer reproduce, and humans as well are directly affected. The question is how our cultural notions of sex, gender, and reproduction will shift if we are surrounded by molecules that mutate our bodies and physiology. Ultimately this is an issue of body sovereignty and agency. Toxicity is never consensual!","completion":"What materials does a person need to make open source estrogen? How much knowledge of chemistry, and how much of code? It is currently out of reach for the average citizen to make estrogen in the kitchen. But even if it were possible, there are many risks involved with dosage and purity. Nonetheless I collaborated with two trans-femme artists, Jade Phoenix and Jade Renegade, and the production team Orgasmic Creative to make the short film Housewives Making Drugs, a speculative fiction piece that performs a urine-hormone extraction protocol as a way to make DIY hormones for you and your trans community.  Although based in both fiction and in reality — the protocol originates from some of my estrogen geeking sessions where we extract hormones from the urine by a column chromatography method using cigarette filters, silica gel, and methanol — I wanted to show the possibility that we can create alternative pathways to access our own health, especially as marginalized people who don’t usually have a voice in the scientific or medical community. At the same time, the film shouldn’t take away from the already long and enormous efforts by the LGTBQ community for gaining greater access to hormone therapies."}
{"prompt":"What are the social or political obstacles to such a project? What are the social and political reasons to undertake it? How do you see your work on open source hormones in the current environment, in the US or elsewhere? The obstacles for open source hormones are plenty, the primary one being the science, since it’s currently not possible at the citizen level. I think the artist Ryan Hammond may be the closest example, since they are currently developing transgenic yeast or tobacco plants to be biofactories for hormones, which are organisms that are easy to cultivate and share once they can be properly engineered. But I hope Ryan doesn’t run into a patent or copyright infringement battle with larger pharmaceutical companies — it would be stupid of them to go after a sole independent artist.  As for my own work on open source hormones, my practice exists primarily as “workshopology” with the public. Now I’m on a ten-month Fulbright scholarship in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where I’m collaborating with the Lifepatch citizen initiative and Gadjah Mada University, focusing on environmental hormones (xenoestrogens) in the Code River, and how we can form strategies for manufacturing embodied affect in the local citizens who live intimately with the river.  I think working in open source doesn’t always have to produce a practical result. It can also be used as a discursive exercise for generating new subjectivities. I think it’s great that with hormone hacking protocols, we can open up the cultural discussion about sex and gender — what is female and male — and how has molecular colonization also extended to our social ideologies of (eco)heteronormativity, the idea that nature also follows rules of purity and male-female reproduction. We can hack the hormones themselves, but it’s equally interesting to hack our social ideologies that are related to hormones. These are all deeply entrenched and subconscious notions, when you look at something like the gender binary. Bringing them to surface, like the way we do with detecting hormones in the local river, is what I try to strive for.","completion":"Could you describe at a high level what your role is and what you do? I have worked in security control centers at different companies for the better part of ten years. I’ve been a supervisor level since 2010 or 2011. In that time, I’ve mostly worked at the global control center level, which means: monitoring travelling employees and events around them, monitoring world events to make sure they don’t impact our sites worldwide, monitoring the sites themselves to make sure they’re secure, and monitoring any other incidents that might be going on around the sites that might put them in jeopardy. My role is to protect people, assets, and property — basically in that order."}
{"prompt":"I’d always worked for security contractors up until recently when I was hired by a manufacturing company. My position is very rarely in-house; usually, it’s only more senior positions. My current company has much more in-house staff on the control center site. The rest, such as the guard staff, are for the most part contract.","completion":"How did you originally get into this line of work?  I’d say part nepotism, part strength. I started in 2003, and I got the job because my mom worked in the legal department, and at the time security was under legal. They had a split swing/grave shift position open that I started in. In my first position, I was in the role of an “operator.” I was the one on the computer monitoring the alarms, answering the phones, doing the basic point-of-contact stuff, and doing the radios for the security officers."}
{"prompt":"After a few years there, I saw the writing on the wall that they were closing that control center and moving it to Austin. I had a friend who was working at a tech company and reached out to him to get an introduction. That’s how I got into security operations work in the tech sector. Were you specifically interested in the security industry when you took the role? Not really. I did it because it seemed decent pay for not very stressful work. I mean, it’s a stressful job when shit’s going down, but 95 percent of the time it’s a whole lot of nothing. It was a relatively non-stressful job. I’d go in, I’d do my job, I’d come home, and I got a decent amount of money for it.","completion":"When I got the job, I was just out of school and didn’t really have a degree. I had been working in retail, getting paid maybe nine bucks an hour. It was a 50 percent raise to go into security for a whole lot less work, so I was like, sure, why not?  Could you talk a little more about control centers? What is a control center?  Control centers are the central communications hubs in most companies. We’re the intake point of calls to “security” — someone in a regional or global control center will be the one answering the phone if anyone calls into security."}
{"prompt":"We triage those calls depending on their content. We have people respond on the ground if it’s a security event, dispatch 911 if it’s a medical or police event, or, if it’s minor, just document what occurred. Say someone calls to say they lost their cell phone: we’ll document it so it’s in our records, so if it turns up we can give them a call.","completion":"The job spans from pretty mundane customer service — hey, we found your phone! — to things like the building next door blowing up, disabling all power and causing damage to our building. That would trigger us reaching out to upper management to let them know something’s happened so they can start a crisis management process and connect to the site to make sure everyone’s okay, evacuated, and accounted for."}
{"prompt":"What does your job look like at its most mundane? At its most boring, which is the vast majority of the time, there is nothing going on and we’re getting run-of-the-mill phone calls. When you’re on the operator level, you’re basically just staring off into space between calls. As a supervisor, I’m a little bit more flexible than some other people I’ve worked with — if nothing’s going on, as long as the work is getting done, I don’t care about anything else you’re doing. If you’re on the internet and watching YouTube, I don’t care. So long as everything else gets done, that’s fine. Just don’t fall asleep; give me plausible deniability if someone higher than me walks in the room. Everything else? I don’t care.  Some companies are more strict about that. Thankfully, the control room I work in now doesn’t have cameras in it, but that hasn’t always been the case — I’ve worked at places with cameras that look at people’s monitors. I’ve had someone at the management level call me and tell me they saw someone on their phone, and that I should discipline them. And I’m thinking, “Why are you watching the camera? Don’t you have something better to do?” It could be pretty dumb sometimes, but when you’re contract, you have to keep up the appearance of being 100 percent on your A-game at all times, or you might lose the contract. I understand it on a conceptual level, but that doesn’t mean I like it.  Since I’m in a supervisory role, I now get to spend downtime on things that are partially outside of the day-to-day scope. I use that time to get projects done that better both the SOC (security operations center) or myself or the security department as a whole.","completion":"What about on the opposite end of the spectrum — what is an example of “shit going down”? The most intense is when national or international incidents happen, the sort of things that you see in the news. For example, I was on duty when the Boston Marathon bombing happened. We had a site in Boston, and when the bombing occurred, it was three blocks from our office, and we had people on the ground in the race. The whole city basically went on lockdown. People were stuck at the office and at home, and we had to make sure that everyone was okay, everyone was accounted for, and that our management was aware of the situation going on, how close it was the site, how many people were impacted.  Then a few days later, all hell broke loose and the whole city closed down trying to find the guys. That was one of my busiest days.  I was also on duty when the Mumbai attacks happened in 2008. That was when the terrorists came in on boats and started shooting up a hotel. Our office was a mile or two away from that. That was an almost two-day affair and we were updating the CEO every six hours.  Another example is that I was also on the job when the coup happened in Turkey in 2016. Thankfully, our office was on the Asia side and most everything happened on the Europe side, but half of our employees were on-site at the time. We gave them direct instructions to stay on-site until the coup was over. Don’t leave, stay accounted for. We accounted for everyone who worked at the office, down to the last person. The last person ended up being on vacation in an island just off the coast of Turkey, and we were able to get a hold of him too."}
{"prompt":"So yeah, there’s been a few all-hands-on-deck, nothing-else-matters moments where it’s very intense until everyone is accounted for. Shoestring War Room Are there any generalizations you can make about the background of people who go into this area of work?  The easiest generalization I can make is ex-military and ex-police. A lot of companies will specifically try to hire people from those backgrounds. I know a few people who were actually pushed out of positions they were in because the company wanted someone with military or police experience.","completion":"I also see a lot of students because the hours are pretty flexible. And then I see a lot of people who might not fit a mold specifically in a company, but still need to work — that was more or less where I fit in when I first started. I don’t really have a relevant degree to work with and was not getting considered by interviewers in other realms."}
{"prompt":"Once you’re in, you also tend to stay in. Security has a stigma, so once you have security on your resume, it’s hard to change into other industries. Interviewers will look at your resume and say, “That’s interesting, buuuuut you were kind of a mall cop?” No, no I was not.  Unfortunately, pop culture has given security a very poor reputation. People either think of us in an ultra-high-tech Las Vegas casino war room, or they see us as Paul Blart: Mall Cop types. I’ve never seen it depicted the way it actually is, although I’ve seen it come close on occasion. Don’t get me wrong; some people who are hired on the rank-and-file frontline are not the sharpest tools, all things considered. But it’s unfortunate because it ends up being looked down upon as a career path.  It’s funny because I had a picture of that casino war room in my mind as well. I’m picturing something like a big room with thirty monitors on the wall with a map of the US and glowing lights on it. What is it actually like? It depends on how much budget the company has. At my current company, we have no budget since the nature of manufacturing is that it’s penny-pinching. Our control room fits four desks. Each desk has maybe two to three screens and we have eight big screens on the wall showing cameras or news or some combination thereof.  [E-commerce Company] was probably my fanciest, but I’ve seen fancier. [Social Media Company] has one of those ultra-high-tech war rooms. They have more money to burn than sense. [Big Company] has a fancy, twenty thousand dollar window where you press a button and the glass leading into the room fogs up. It’s all about budget.  That’s the other thing about security: security is always a cost center. It does not make revenue for the company, so you’re the last in line for budget — unless something happens, and that’s when the budget explodes.  So you tend to get more budget after an incident happens?  At one company, just before I got hired, they had a bomb go off at one of their buildings after hours one night. After that, they staffed every exterior door 24/7 with a guard, installed a ton of super high-def cameras at all the driveways, and built up their SOC significantly. It was basically like, “We never want that to happen again, here’s more money so hopefully it doesn’t.”","completion":"Is there a general preference for how well you are funded or treated as a contract worker versus in-house employee? It pays significantly more to be in-house. Not only because you’re typically getting a higher base pay, but because the benefits are usually better. When you’re a contractor, benefits packages and everything are all dictated by the specific contract. So if a company you’re working for is the lowest bidder on the contract side of things, you’re probably getting crappy coverage unless the company is very nice.  This is also the first time I’ve received stock options, too. I got hired on with a pretty significant stock grant — or at least I think it’s significant. Obviously I know people who get that in base pay raises all the time. I’m not high on the scale, all things considered, but I’m up there.  Just Following Procedures I’m trying to imagine what your org chart looks like. Can you describe your reporting structure? The organization is typically broken down by region. It just makes life easier, especially when you have 150 sites worldwide. You divide everyone up — the three typical divisions are Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and APAC (Asia Pacific). Then you just divide down from there.  Most control centers are in North America, so they will typically fall under the NorAm or Americas regional manager. Each center will have a manager who runs the SOC itself. Below the manager, there’s a supervisor. The manager will do more of the strategic side of things, where the supervisors are still doing the day-to-day stuff. I’m a shift supervisor, so I cover the day shift, there’s someone who does swing, there’s someone who does grave. I have a bevy of operators who work for me on my shift, and same with the other shifts. People in these roles report either up to the Americas region or up to a global security manager of some variety.  That’s from top to bottom. Starting from the bottom moving up, typically you start at operator, move into a lead operator, and then into management of the security team or a security niche within another team. When you’re an operator, your job is to follow the path through the procedure; when you’re in the lead, you have the option to bend the rules a little bit more, or to have a say in making decisions on things outside of the scope of the existing procedures."}
{"prompt":"Developing the procedures is usually a collaboration between the control center’s management team and the physical security managers of the spaces they’re involved in. So if there’s a certain site that has certain requirements, like OSHA requirements, those have to be built into our procedures. For example, if there’s a medical event where someone lost a hand, has 911 been contacted, are we handling it, is the patrol team on-site handling it, is it some combination thereof? That all goes through a long committee process over time.","completion":"When you mentioned strategic work that is done at higher levels, what is an example of what that means?  Sometimes, it involves networking into other teams. We communicate what our wheelhouse is at the moment, and we think about how we can make other teams function better or have other teams help us improve. Other times, it involves reaching out to stakeholders, outlining the communications we send when incidents occur, and understanding: do they want to be involved in those communications, is there any information they need that we may not be including now, that sort of thing."}
{"prompt":"The long-term strategy is just to prove, and to increase, the value we provide to the company. Like every other department, if we’re not adapting and changing and building better, we’re just costing the company money.  What are the other sorts of niches or connections to other teams? Myself, I’m trying to go into the technical side of things — the side that involves the cameras, the card readers, the systems and the design thereof. I’m currently working on a project with a tech team collaborating to improve systems for both their team and my own. The company I’m at was previously run cowboy-style where everyone was doing their own thing, so there’s seven different systems for cameras, there’s five different systems for alarms, and there’s no unity to it. Decisions were made site by site, or regional manager by regional manager, or whatever the budget allowed.  As they get to higher levels, a lot of people will go into the analysis side of things. Most security departments will have people who investigate larger incidents using some form of intelligence analysis. So security will look into some of the smaller, nickel-and-dime stuff, but it’s the investigation team that comes in when it’s big money losses, sabotage, or IP theft on incremental levels, where it’s someone who’s been taking out a little at a time for a long time.  Travel security can sometimes be a separate team. They make sure everything goes well when people are abroad. That can be looped into a control center team, though it’s not always. They’re also the ones who will look into best practices for higher risk countries like China, for example. Don’t bring your work phone, bring a burner phone; don’t bring your laptop, or bring a laptop you don’t care about. You need to have a VPN that works in that country; you need to have an anti-USB keylogger adapter system; you need to have one of those special power cords that only passes power through, so you don’t get any viruses when you plug your cell phone into a wall charger that was provided to you by the hotel.","completion":"Did the different companies you worked at have different levels of paranoia about that sort of thing? When I worked at a non-customer-facing hardware company, they weren’t too worried about it. Obviously, they had IP theft concerns, but they licensed their stuff out anyways. Manufacturing tends to be more super secret about it than the tech companies I was at. They are a lot more fearful of intellectual property disappearing and then being duplicated because it’s literally their livelihood.  When I worked at an e-commerce company, there wasn’t much IP to be stolen. The worry was more about user information getting out."}
{"prompt":"You mentioned that you’re interested in getting more into the technical side of things. How do you currently use technology in your role, and what kind of tools are at your disposal?  A lot of companies use a program called Lenel, which is made by a company called OnGuard. I’m well versed in Lenel because it’s something I’ve been using for almost twelve years now. But it’s getting a little dated and other companies are starting to branch out into other things. There are also about a half dozen different camera systems.","completion":"I’ve done surface-level programming in these sorts of systems: generating alarms, naming those alarms, timing them for certain things. Alarms can tell you many kinds of things; one door can generate a dozen different types of alarms. They’re usually either technical or security-related. If a wire is not connected properly, it’ll generate an incorrect voltage alarm or an intermittent disconnection alarm. Those are technical alarms, and only the technical side of the organization really needs to know about them."}
{"prompt":"But you also have security-related alarms, like if a door is forced open, if it’s held open for more than thirty seconds, or if it’s an emergency exit that has a screamer on it. Or maybe it’s a glass break alarm, a duress alarm, or someone is pressing the button that says, “Oh my God, there’s a guy with a gun in here and I’m pressing this button, so hopefully someone looks at the camera and sees the incident going on without triggering the guy with the gun.” Obviously, my team needs to see those.  For the most part, no company uses any sort of in-house technology because they don’t want to spend the money on it — because it would have to be developed, it would have to be serviceable, it would have to have more than one person who knows how to fix it. So it’s always farmed out to other software systems or contract companies.","completion":"At Your Service How does the work that you do relate to security guards? Is that in the same organization? Or do security guards work for different companies and you coordinate boots on the ground?  If the SOC is contract, security guards are typically part of the same contract company. It depends on the site and company. Some companies will cherry-pick contract companies based on their strengths — one company for on-campus security guards, one for travel security, etc. — and other companies will pick one contract company to cover everything. In general, if it’s a small enough company, the SOC will also control the biggest site, or direct the local site’s guard force.  The guard force is partially autonomous — unless otherwise given instructions, they do their own thing for the most part. Then when something happens, we act as an override on top of their typical procedures. That can be as small as needing them to go unlock the conference room for someone, to having this belligerent person in the lobby and making sure everyone responds to make sure he’s escorted off the property. If there is a medical incident, it’s making sure they respond to that — once they are there, they have their own process and procedure they follow. Or when it’s a security event, or heaven forbid an active shooter — which thank God I’ve never dealt with — we direct them and they take over."}
{"prompt":"So your job is to deal with everything from active shooters to people locked out of conference rooms.  This job is in part an over-glorified add-on to an insurance policy. In essence, your being there makes their insurance cheaper. But it’s also in large part a concierge service. Security is customer service before it’s actually security. We’re there to say yes more often than we are to say no. With manufacturing it’s a bit of a different story, but with tech it’s 100 percent, we’re there to help people get what they need, more than tell them they can’t do things.","completion":"Huh. When I think of infosec at least, that emphasis on customer service seems like it could be a vulnerability since social engineering is a big threat — so being overly-friendly to people could lead to malicious actors trying to take advantage of you. Have you ever had to be rude to people?  Not to sound terrible, but having worked at the control center — which is all just customer service over the phone — those times when I could say no was a glorious thing. It felt great for once to be able to tell someone, “No you can’t do that, fuck off.” But it was a very rare occasion, and it had to be like a pure breach of protocol. We could bend things every once in a while, but not break them.  We are customer service to a point where we’ll help someone get to the information they need, though we won’t necessarily give them that information. And obviously understanding social engineering from a basic level — to not just volunteer stuff — is important.  Tech is a lot more customer service because, even though it’s all on a server somewhere and it’s easier to sneak stuff out because it’s a lot smaller, there’s very little we could do to prevent things that aren’t already dealt with by infosec, or with all the stuff that’s built into your laptops. Manufacturing is a lot more keeping track of material stuff, because every ounce that goes out that isn’t in the product is basically money lost.  When I was working at an e-commerce company, whenever sellers called in because they were experiencing a technical problem with the site, it was typically their livelihood on the line. It was like, “Oh my God, my store isn’t working, and if it doesn’t work in the next forty-eight hours I’m going to go kill myself.” I had to call police departments in more countries than I care to count, since if someone says they are going to kill themselves, it’s a liability and we need to make sure they’re okay. Or at least do the due diligence of reporting it, so that it’s on the police if they don’t actually go and do anything about it."}
{"prompt":"Beyond answering phones I assume you’re also monitoring security cameras. How much of the job is that? People always assume someone is watching a camera at all times. I can 100 percent say no one is watching a camera at any time. We might have some up for peripherally keeping an eye on trouble spots. For the most part, though, the cameras are recording at all times, but no one is ever watching them.  Once you get past a certain number of cameras, you are past the point where it makes any sense for someone to be watching all of them; it’s 100 percent looking back retroactively and seeing what exactly happened.  On average, at my current manufacturing company, I do maybe three to four of those investigations a day. And the previous tech companies I worked at, it was maybe three to four a week depending on the scenario. It was kind of feast or famine with tech. With manufacturing, they care a lot more, because they’re keeping an eye on when people screw up, when things break, or when damage is done — because every penny counts.","completion":"So in manufacturing, beyond security and managing the infrastructure or assets of the tech company, it sounds like there is also a level of surveillance over the work that people are doing?  In a way. They have cameras on the production itself. It’s more a matter of making sure that if there is damage done, the person who does it is held accountable, and it’s dealt with in a timely fashion. Because they need to investigate — was it just an accident? Was it malicious? That sort of thing. If it is malicious, they deal with it rapidly; if it’s just an accident, the safety team is there to determine how it happened and how to prevent it in the future."}
{"prompt":"The degree of surveillance differs a lot when you’re dealing with the US versus Europe. In the US, we have a lot more liberty in terms of what we can watch and how we can document things. In most of our US sites, we have high-def cameras at all corners of the building, at all entrances, and cameras that even look out into streets in the area.  For a lot of the European sites nowadays, with GDPR, those cameras are required to be blocked off or blacked out. They cannot have any visibility into public space or anyone’s workspace. We have limitations on how much can be recorded and how much an investigative body can share with us when they’re requesting access to our footage. We’ve had cases where the police will reach out to us and say, “We had an incident here, we want the video from X time to Y time, and we can’t tell you anything else.” And we say, “You realize three days’ worth of footage is like ten gigs of video file, you sure you want this? ‘Cause we could narrow it down really quickly if you told us…” And they’re like, “Nope, we can’t tell you.”  After applying all those rules, what can you record? Where are the cameras pointed in Europe?  The cameras are typically on entrance doors. If it’s an exterior camera, it’ll be looking at just the door; if it’s an interior camera, it’ll typically looking at just the door or the hallway leading up to the door. They’ll be looking at lobbies, elevators, stairwells, and that’s pretty much it. Maybe server rooms or networking closets on occasion.  So any places where people are entering and exiting, or enclosed spaces that are meant to be sensitive.  Yeah, high-risk zones basically. That’s actually one of the weird things having come to manufacturing from typical Silicon Valley companies. Most companies will put cameras in places where the highest volume of OSHA violations or OSHA-like issues could occur. As I said, stairwells, hallways, elevators, and entry doors are the big places accidents can occur. Manufacturing companies are looking at the process on the floor; they could care less about stairwells or elevators or anything else. Where there are machines, there are cameras.","completion":"No Can Do What kind of interactions do you have with other people in the companies you work at, if any? You sometimes hear about the different badge colors at some organizations and there being a kind of caste system, I’m curious if you have experienced that.  There is some kind of caste system, obviously. Most companies see their own employees as the top line, and then everyone else is down the chain. Most of the service-level stuff gets contracted out — janitorial, cafeteria, security. Facilities is a big one that’s typically contracted out. We work directly with facilities fairly regularly. We’re the ones who will find all the issues with the building and let them know when glass gets broken, or ceiling tiles are falling out, or there’s a water leak somewhere, that sort of thing. We work pretty heavily with janitorial as well."}
{"prompt":"But we treat everyone pretty equally, unless they have a C in their title or a V in their title. For the most part, everyone else is stuck following the same exact policy and procedure. There are no exceptions. There are some policies that are employee-specific versus contract-specific — who has physical access to what areas of the building, some contractors can only work eight to five Monday to Friday whereas employees have 24/7 access, that sort of thing. But for the most part, everyone else is treated relatively equally.  Do you see any difference in how you as someone on that team are treated? At best, security tends to get ignored, and, at worst, we get sneered at or yelled at. Because we’re the ones saying, “No, you can’t do that — it’s against the policies and procedures that you signed up for when you joined the company and you have to follow the rules.” I’ve had many occasions where someone’s like, “Well I’m important in this company and it shouldn’t apply to me.” And I tell them, “Sorry, you’re like everyone else.”  My running joke for engineers is that you could paint a door red and write “You will die if you walk through this door,” and certain engineers and still walk through the door. Many times, people will walk through doors that literally say in big giant letters “Do not walk through this door. Audible alarm will occur.” Then we get angry calls from people who sit at the desk near that door. That’s pretty common.  When those cases happen, is it that people are clueless, or they think rules don’t apply to them?  A little of column A, a little of column B.","completion":"How these incidents get treated depends on the company. In manufacturing, when someone breaks a rule, our job is to reach out to the person and their manager and have the manager enforce that they never break the rule again. In tech when someone breaks a rule, our response is usually limited to reaching out to the person and saying, ”It would be nice if you did not do that again.” The previous two tech companies I worked at told us to be very, very nice when we told people these things, versus in manufacturing, where we are encouraged to lay down the hammer.  I would say 20 percent of the time, we can get people who are understanding of it and will acknowledge it. But the other 80 percent are like, “But I need that, I need to do this thing now, it needs to be done now, let’s do this now, why can’t we do this now.” And we’re like, “We can’t because it’s against policy, sorry.” Are there escalation paths for things like that?  We can bend rules on certain occasions, but it’s context-specific. Is this person an intern or are they a vice president? It literally is dependent on: are they in the upper echelon of the company, or do we not care about them at all? They can escalate it all they want, and if it escalates far enough we might make changes to the policy. But most of the time, even if it escalates up to our senior management, the senior management will go, “Well, they followed the procedures to the letter. Everything’s good.”  Caught on Tape What are some of the things about the job that you think would be most surprising to people outside the industry? The biggest thing I’ve come across over the years working security is how much people think they can get away with things, or operate under the assumption that there aren’t cameras in an area, or the cameras aren’t recording. Which, to be fair, that’s sometimes the case. But 99 percent of the time, if they’ve done something stupid, it’s probably on camera. A control center operator has probably seen it or has been asked to look into it and found it."}
{"prompt":"To give another example of how much info we have: any time there’s a card reader and you tag on it, it generates a “granted access” or an “invalid access” code depending on if you have access or not. So if there is ever a time where we need to find out where someone is, we can trace their badge and see, oh, at 8 a.m., they badged here, at 8:20, they badged into this conference room. That’s the last badge-in they have and it’s 8:30 now, so they’re probably in that conference room.  This typically comes up during investigations, anytime we’re trying to track someone. For instance, if we have a high-risk termination, HR will reach out and let us know that someone is high-risk because he’s made threats to his manager or something. We’ll then be asked to track him and let them know when he comes on-site, so we can make contact immediately and have security on standby in case something goes wrong. In cases like that, we can trace his badge, set it up so we get a ping when he comes on-site, and bring up cameras to track his movements.","completion":"But back on the topic of getting away with things: I’ve had times where we’ll see an incident occur in a parking lot. Someone will ding someone else’s car and then we’ll see them park, get out of their vehicle, and walk into a building. From our perspective, we know which building entrance they used and what time they walked in. We can run a trace on that door, look at that time, see the person, look at their badge picture, and call them up. This is a pretty common occurrence. We can also reach out to the victim because we can go back, watch them park, get out of their car and badge into the door, and see who they are too.  There are always occasions of petty theft, where people who make six figures will walk up to a desk, see a phone charger or a laptop on the desk, and just walk away with it. It’s just like: why? You have a perfectly good job, making really good money, and you’re going to steal someone’s phone charger or their laptop or their cell phone or their wallet? Why? And then on the flip side, one of the first things that happened at one job was someone tailgated into the parking lot — a non-employee who was wearing a lanyard with a convincing-enough badge. They went upstairs, walked up to someone’s purse, took the credit cards out of it, and within an hour had charged five or six thousand dollars on their cards. They did that two or three times, at multiple companies, until they finally got caught."}
{"prompt":"I’m always surprised by the cleverness of the people outside the company who try to steal things, and the stupidity of the people inside the company who feel they can get away with things. In the first days after I found out I was pregnant, my number one pleasure was tracking my embryo’s growth on various apps. As nausea set in, my morning ritual consisted of crunching Cheerios in bed while clocking the latest developments: one week the apps told me my baby was the size of a poppy seed, the next week a pea. When only my inner circle knew that I was knocked up, these apps acted as chatty confidantes. Their girlfriendy tone assured me that everything was moving along fine.  If I scrolled far enough or swiped the wrong way, I would occasionally land on the “community” sections of these apps. A typical series of posts might look something like this:  Light spotting at 12 wks normal?Nub & Skull Theory BFP or BFN? Thoughts? Constipation! 12 Weeks and Couldn’t Hear the Heartbeat — But all is OK!**Update 7dpo test** Who else just started their TWW… 3 DPO hereVeiny boobs LOL Early miscarriage, cervix feels weird Lord help me  Most of the time, I would click away. I was mystified by the acronyms and uncomfortable gawking at their naked vulnerability. On the one hand, I felt for these women, who clearly had nowhere else to take their fears, frustrations, and disappointment. On the other hand, I was trying to enjoy my BFP (Big Fat Positive) in peace. I found that these conversations were more likely to inspire new anxieties than to assuage the ones I already had.","completion":"I got my first exposure to such “communities” through pregnancy tracking apps like Glow. But when I did Google searches for things like “round ligament pain” or “morning sickness when will it end,” I discovered another place where people were discussing pregnancy online: website forums that look like relics of the AOL era. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would spend their time poring over the comments on these sites, let alone posting them. But millions of women do, posing (and answering) every conceivable question.  BabyCenter.com claims to be the world’s number one digital parenting resource, reaching 100 million people monthly and attracting eight out of every ten new and expectant moms each month in the US. Since its publication in 1984, the blockbuster pregnancy guide What to Expect When You’re Expecting has done brisk business enlightening and terrifying parents-to-be. Today, the online home of the pregnancy-guide-turned-empire, Whattoexpect.com, has a new community post every three seconds. These sites (and a handful of others) play host to groups as broad as “birth clubs” (comprised of women due the same month) and as narrow as “40+ Expecting 8th LO” (Little One)."}
{"prompt":"Despite the proliferation of slick apps dedicated to fertility and pregnancy, much of the conversation still happens on old-school, web 1.0 forums like BabyCenter and What to Expect. Hectic, disorganized, and largely anonymous, these message boards recall the chatrooms of the 1990s, where you could be anyone and say anything under the cover of a screen name. While plenty of the pregnancy action has made the move to social media — where both “mommy” groups and branded pages abound — the forums maintain the upper hand in one key way. Whereas on Facebook users have to join the group in order to see the conversations, traditional message boards are far more lurkable. “Many studies show that there are way more lurkers than posters,” says Anna Wexler, a bioethics fellow at the University of Pennsylvania studying the rise of do-it-yourself medicine. “If you look at the number of posts on these forums, the number is tremendous — on some of the What to Expect ‘birth clubs,’ it’s over 500,000 posts already.” I stopped finding the forums so pitiable as soon as I got my first bad test result. When I was around ten weeks pregnant, I went in for a routine test called a nuchal translucency. Analog and old-school, the ultrasound scan measured the fluid behind the fetus’s neck to look for Down syndrome, which previous tests had indicated the baby did not have. It didn’t even occur to me to be nervous about this test, so I didn’t pay attention to the Very Bad Sign of the ultrasound tech quietly turning the monitor away from me.  I waltzed into my midwife’s office, ready to learn about breathing techniques and placenta smoothies. Instead she gently explained that the baby seemed to have excess fluid behind her neck — we learned it was a her — and that it could mean a few different things, none of them good. I was so shocked and distraught that I lost the ability to hear and process information. As soon as I got home, I descended into a Google vortex, which led to countless conflicting perspectives across multiple message boards.","completion":"Down the Rabbit Hole Once I was referred to a Maternal-Fetal Medicine practice to run more tests, I quickly understood the primary reason women take to the boards: getting a hold of a doctor is too annoying and takes too long. “If you have a question and you don’t want to wait until your doctor’s appointment and don’t want to make the call, the forums are just really immediate,” explains Wexler. Most ob-gyn offices also employ a firewall of nurses to answer more basic questions and refer the complicated ones to doctors. “I can’t directly contact my fertility doctor,” explains Aba Nduon, a psychiatrist who moderates a pregnancy subreddit. “She has a nursing team that I can email or call with questions and then wait until they’re able to get in touch with her, or you can post on a forum and get a much quicker answer.” Intended or not, the effect is to shame patients into being very selective about what issues they bring up to their medical team.  It turns out another very good reason to hit the forums is to decode the complicated answers (or opaque non-answers) that busy, impatient medical professionals actually do tell you. For every casual aside (“you’ll probably be fine”) or stern command (“stay on bedrest until the bleeding stops”), there’s an online army of amateur experts ready to explain, debunk, reassure, or raise the red flag. As Wexler points out, “Even if you have the most amazing OB in the world, just hearing from your OB that something is normal is not the same as hearing from twenty people who are going through the exact same thing as you that it’s normal and you’re okay and you’ll get through this.” While the forums may seem like a potential hotbed of misinformation, the volume of voices tends to serve as a check on bad advice. The more science-minded threads offer an unexpectedly effective form of crowdsourcing, providing both quantity — multiple users chiming in with their own experiences — and quality — laypeople who are so deeply immersed in the finer points of fertility treatments or fetal development that they can competently address even the most obscure questions. Nduon told me that she’s also part of a Facebook group for female physicians going through infertility. Compared to the laypeople equivalent, she said it’s “honestly not too dissimilar — we have a lot of the same questions because a lot of this stuff is very specialized information.”"}
{"prompt":"If you question the wisdom of trusting strangers on the internet over your clinical care team, you probably don’t know how perilous a condition pregnancy in America is. The United States is the most dangerous place in the developed world to deliver a baby, with 26.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 births as compared to fewer than ten in Germany, England, France, Japan, and Canada. The US is one of just thirteen countries globally where the rate of maternal mortality is worse than it was twenty-five years ago. The CDC reports 700 deaths and more than 50,000 near-deaths annually. If things have gotten worse for women, they’ve gotten disproportionately worse for black women, who face three to four times the risk of pregnancy-related death as compared to white women. Black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a disparity that’s wider than it was before the Civil War.  According to a USA Today investigation, half of those deaths could be prevented and half of the injuries reduced or eliminated with better care. The life-saving interventions aren’t dependent on cutting-edge technology, but on basic monitoring that’s standardized in the rest of the developed world. Since many US hospitals don’t require widely recommended measures like quantifying blood loss or quickly treating dangerously high blood pressure, doctors and nurses rely on their own intuition rather than best practices. And if you can’t trust your doctors to follow simple rules to keep you alive, why should you take all of their other directives at face value?  Sick of This Shit When I started bleeding at work a few weeks after the grim test results, I called my ob-gyn’s office in a panic. I got the automated answering system, and pressed 1 for “health care providers and true medical emergencies” with conviction. The man who answered acted as if I had casually mentioned that I was experiencing some cramping and wondered if I might swing by for a consultation. He begrudgingly penciled me in for a 12:30 appointment (it was noon). When I arrived, the receptionist told me to have a seat, like I was waiting for a dental cleaning.","completion":"Before any examination, the doctor told me that I might just be passing a clot and be okay, or I might be starting to miscarry, in which case I would just have to let it happen. I was appalled that these radically different outcomes were being offered up as two equally valid prospects. An ultrasound showed the same scene I was used to: fetus squirming around like it was a regular day in the uterus; heartbeat whooshing away. I think the doctor might have actually shrugged when she turned to me and said, “Everything looks fine.”  Unfortunately, this didn’t change her previous statement, meaning that I could still be kicking off a miscarriage. Unbelievably, her prescription was to send me home and see whether it got better or worse. “So just wait and see if I stop bleeding or if I’m having a miscarriage?” I tried to clarify.  “If you’re soaking through more than two pads an hour, call us,” she told me.  In the days that followed, I waited, and watched. I couldn’t manage going to work physically (I was put on bed rest) or emotionally (I was constantly on the verge of tears). I was stuck at home with nothing to do but watch bad TV and occasionally sneak a glance at the various apps, peeking through my fingers like I was watching a horror movie. All of the breezy talk of fruit sizes and organ development quickly started to feel very dark. The apps’ daily tips about iron-rich foods and how to spot the first kicks were bleak reminders of milestones I might not reach. But a hop-skip over on the community section were thousands of women whose fertility experiences deviated significantly from the joyful journey of belly selfies and gender-reveal parties.  For me, dwelling on stories of fetal anomalies and miscarriages felt grim and panicky; reading about other women’s awful experiences made the prospect of an unhappy ending that much more real. I felt like I was jinxing myself — and my baby — by even remotely identifying with them. Still, it was weirdly reassuring knowing that other women were finding some solace while going through the same type of misery. Alongside those happy posters “staying positive” or “waiting for that BFP” was an equal and opposite chorus bemoaning their latest setback or saying they were sick of this shit. The latter group tended to rely less on hope and faith than data and odds, whether dealing with a complication or trying to get pregnant in the first place. While I couldn’t bring myself to join them, this was my tribe: science-minded cynics who still refused to give up."}
{"prompt":"But I found it technically challenging to lurk effectively, because the communities are so steeped in their own impenetrable lingo. Nduon, the psychiatrist, tells me that the conversations in her pregnancy subreddit can be difficult for outsiders to parse. “It’s very hard to understand what on earth people are talking about if you’re not familiar with the medications or different procedures.” She contends that it’s not just a pregnancy thing, but a human thing: “You create a language whenever you join a new group. You fall into the language that the group uses; it makes you feel like a part of the community.” The lexicon not unites the in-members, but also effectively shields them from intruders.  The amateur scientists who can rattle off their hormone levels and treatment protocols are bound not just by their common language, but by the many ways in which modern medicine has failed them. These women have sought out the top doctors and the soundest science, scouring the research and polling fellow lay-reproductive endocrinologists to maximize their chances of conceiving or giving birth to a healthy baby. But for all the promises of cutting-edge technology, the common denominator for women heading down that road is past disappointment.  When faith in the latest innovation falters, a trustier form of tech is waiting in the wings. And an older form of tech: old-school message boards that promise anonymity rather than the interconnectedness of social media. The web 1.0 setup of these forums is a feature, not a bug: that wild and wooly quality of the early internet makes room for a rare kind of openness and honesty among intimate groups of strangers.  Keeping it Sticky in the Cyber Sweatshop Long before branded content was a twinkle in any media corporation’s eye, early internet companies recognized the value of building communities that produced the “‘stickiness’ that maintains users’ attention and increases the emotional cost of shifting sites,” in the words of feminist theorist Kyle Jarrett. According to a 1999 Wired article, AOL deployed (not employed) tens of thousands of “community leaders” to keep its chat rooms and message boards humming, compensating them in the form of free AOL memberships and select online perks — that is, until a group of them brought a class-action lawsuit against AOL’s “cyber sweatshop.”","completion":"Two decades later, women are still providing the same free labor, keeping the leading pregnancy sites nice and sticky. If they feel like a vestige of the past, it’s likely because there’s not a lot of incentive for their owners to update them. “They’re still getting a ton of content, and that content is coming up in searches on Google, so as it is it’s probably drawing a lot of traffic without them having to invest anything,” Wexler, the bioethics fellow, explains.  When I reached out to one such site, The Bump, to find out more about its community, a representative was keen to steer me toward their social media content instead. She explained that while their forums “originally served our users by fostering a sense of community for new and expectant parents,” they have “taken note of the shift away from forums and towards social media” and shifted their own attention accordingly. I had a hard time squaring this supposed migration with the numbers: The Bump’s Facebook page has fewer than 300,000 followers, while over at the message boards, the “Trying To Get Pregnant” section alone has 223,500 discussions and nearly three million comments. A single thread titled “what does a positive pregnancy test really look like??” has over 500,000 views.  A quick scroll through The Bump’s Facebook feed may help explain why. It shows plenty of upbeat material and clickbait-y headlines, with the occasional frazzled mom or baby with spaghetti on his head as the only nod to the tougher side of pregnancy and motherhood. But if you’re panicking over bad test results or low hormone levels, the knowledge, support, and advice of like-minded women is a lot more useful — and comforting — than a funny #momfail. As I faced down the prospect of a terrifying diagnosis or miscarrying altogether, the sanctioned kinds of “problems” discussed in the official content on sites like The Bump — morning sickness, body image issues, and worst of all, “baby brain” — began to enrage me more and more. It was as if the worst thing that could happen to you was throwing up at your desk."}
{"prompt":"The social channels of all the major pregnancy players are also peppered with paid partnerships — tie-ins with eczema creams and baby food and diapers. It’s no wonder that The Bump and its ilk would prefer we spend our time browsing monetized social content rather than reading the forums for free. It’s hard not to conclude that the more sanitized version of pregnancy has become more lucrative, while the messier version remains more popular. Despite companies’ best efforts to mold the communities they want, women continue to carve out the communities they need. As long as the pregnancy narratives in mainstream culture stay relentlessly positive, women will go underground to find (authentic) stories and experiences that actually reflect their own.  The fact that women have to go underground to find these narratives is partly a function of how much the experience of pregnancy has changed. In her book Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, renowned midwife Ina May Gaskin describes the “techno-medical” model of maternity care as a “male-derived framework” built on the assumption that “the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects.” In this framework, which unsurprisingly arose alongside the Industrial Revolution, doctors are the ultimate authority, while the responsibility for any failure to progress in pregnancy or labor is placed squarely on women’s shoulders.","completion":"Before the techno-medical model of maternity care took hold, these communities existed IRL: midwives, mothers, and sisters formed a core support group for pregnant women. As Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz point out in Lying In: A History of Childbirth in America, childbirth in the United States was seen as a social experience through the nineteenth century — an opportunity for women to express their love and care. While there are plenty of reasons not to glorify those days, this approach had its upsides.  According to Gaskin, before the new model of birth had fully taken hold, nineteenth-century (male) doctors recognized the importance of staying out of a laboring woman’s bedroom until “women helpers” determined it was time to assist. As long as labor stayed in the home — where doctors couldn’t shoo away persistent women helpers — labor stayed social. In the humanistic (read: woman-centered) model that once reigned supreme, monitoring the physical, psychological, and social well-being of the mother-to-be was considered as important as minimizing technological interventions. But once the business of birth transitioned to the hospital setting, men and machines took over. While midwifery continues to gain traction in the US, the masculinized/medicalized approach remains dominant. Absent women helpers to do battle for us in the delivery room, we turn to the internet for the social experience we still crave.  Unruly Forums for Unruly Bodies I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t. There was before, and there was after. After, I operated in a constant state of dread. I dreaded anyone asking me about it and I dreaded having to explain myself. Not because I was sad (I was) or ashamed (I wasn’t) but because I didn’t want to do the emotional work of managing their discomfort. Faced with unnerving news that they’re ill-equipped to respond to, most people will just say they’re sorry. But this puts the suffering person in the uncanny position of comforting the un-suffering person, reassuring him or her that everything is fine, which of course is a lie designed to end the conversation. Every interaction continues to remind you that it’s easier to keep your feelings to yourself than to apologize for other people’s unease."}
{"prompt":"Supposedly we live in a society where we can talk about anything. Technology has ended privacy; everything (and everyone) is fair game. Tabloids scrutinize celebrities for the faintest hint of a “baby bump” and announce every confirmed pregnancy with great fanfare. But we’re not equipped to handle the cognitive dissonance of a pregnancy gone wrong, or a failure to conceive in the first place. As Jen Tye, COO of Glow, puts it, “Sometimes I think the uncertainties that come along with being pregnant — the questions, the worries — some of the concerns may be harder to share because there’s this idealized view of what pregnancy is. You’re just supposed to be glowing and happy and that’s it, but it’s not.” Even the most well-meaning, genuinely caring friends and family struggle to navigate tales of fertility woe.  In the US, most of the pregnancy literature says to wait until the second trimester to announce your pregnancy. Most of my friends who’ve been pregnant seemed to respect this rule of thumb, and it has the standardized feel of medical truth. Even those most notorious oversharers, the Kardashians, have gone to great lengths to keep their pregnancies under wraps for as long as they could. But when you read between the lines, there’s no concrete reason to wait that long other than that, if you’ve made it that far with a clean bill of health, the risk of birth defects and miscarriage drops to almost zero. Which sounds reasonable, until you realize that traditional wisdom dictates that you shouldn’t tell anyone about your pregnancy until you know a (healthy) baby is definitely coming out the other end of it. The unspoken part of the second trimester “rule” is: keep your miscarriage or abortion secret. This effectively enforces a code of silence about an already-isolating experience.  As anyone who’s experienced pregnancy loss quickly discovers, it’s an incredibly common phenomenon: 10-20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and at current rates almost a quarter of American women will have had an abortion by the age of forty-five. So, so many women told me about their own experiences when they found out what I was going through — women my age who worked in the next cubicle, or women my mother’s age who had raised my best friends. Some I had even known when they were going through it, and I never had an inkling. And in all cases, I wouldn’t have heard their stories if I hadn’t volunteered my own. These points of connection were some of the few shreds of solidarity I felt during the most alienating periods of my life.","completion":"The problem is that since people rarely talk about pregnancy loss, the act of conveying a matter-of-fact life occurrence — I was pregnant, now I’m not — takes on the ick of an overshare, reinforcing the pressure to keep quiet. If you’re lucky, close friends and family will rally around you. But more likely than not, acquaintances and colleagues will be discomfited by a revelation about something that happened inside your body. Given the choice, they would probably prefer not to know, and be left to privately wonder why you never ended up giving birth."}
{"prompt":"This extreme discomfort with any deviation from an idealized version of pregnancy — let alone any discussion of it — is what forces women underground, to unruly forums for unruly bodies. When the bodily machine malfunctions and all of the short circuits are exposed, the infrastructure of the internet forms a protective shield. On the forums, you’re only as visible as you want to be: they provide cover in the form of a username disconnected from the rest of your social media presence; a persona without a personal brand.  Suddenly, internet strangers start to look a lot more appealing. You don’t have to explain yourself, and no one says I’m sorry. And if anyone feels uncomfortable, they can show themselves the virtual door.","completion":"Inside the Collins household fireplace, underneath nine Christmas stockings that hang year round, sit the cryptocurrency mining rigs. In the winter, these screenless computers are moved below the furnace, where the excess heat they produce helps warm the house. That way, Owen, Cassie, and their seven children can save some money on the energy bill for their rural Washington home. It also helps them avoid unwanted attention from the power company — which, if it found out about their power-hungry endeavor, might ask for bills to be paid up front."}
{"prompt":"Owen maintains the mining rigs as they search for whatever cryptocurrency earns them the most per watt, but it is his wife Cassie’s trading that really keeps the family afloat. When not homeschooling the kids, she is glued to her computer, hoping to multiply their earnings by trading the cryptocurrencies that the mining rigs bring in for others she hopes will grow in value. Now that she has a few years of experience, she knows how to spot a “scam coin” and which forums to trust. Most days, she earns a profit.","completion":"The children, who range from first grade to college, help with both sides of the business. The oldest daughter has been in charge of keeping the miners cool since she was fifteen. In exchange for fixing the fans, reapplying thermal paste, and maintaining airflow, she gets a cut of the profits. Other kids help with the trading. Those who aren’t legally old enough to have their own accounts use Cassie’s spreadsheets to simulate swapping crypto. Owen reads crypto articles aloud at the dinner table to stir up discussion, and even the seven-year old has an opinion on the family business. (She likes DigiByte, an obscure security-focused coin.) The Collins can keep everyone fed by mining and trading crypto, but only because everyone pitches in."}
{"prompt":"True Believers The scholar Langdon Winner once observed that all technologies have their own politics. When it comes to cryptocurrency, the politics of its underlying technology, blockchain, are built around distrust — or, as crypto enthusiasts like to call it, “trustlessness.”  To understand how this works, imagine the following scenario. The White House announces that in order to increase voter turnout, the 2020 election will be held online at WhiteHouse.gov. Naturally, this upsets Americans who do not trust the White House to count and collect the votes fairly. One solution would be to let people run the vote-counting program on their own computers. If everyone’s voting program could be kept in sync without depending on the White House, people could trust this “distributed ledger” to keep a list of the votes. This is the blockchain: a technology that keeps data on many computers synchronized without having to trust a central authority, or even each other.","completion":"In 2008, an author with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper that introduced both the blockchain and a decentralized digital currency built on top of it called Bitcoin. The problems that Bitcoin had to solve were: How do new coins get issued without a centralized mint? And how do you prevent people from spending those coins twice? Nakamoto solved both problems by having computers on the network compete an energy-intensive mathematical lottery to determine who gets to add the next “block” of transactions to the ledger. To compensate them for spending that energy, the winning computer is awarded some newly minted currency. This process is called “mining.” Bitcoin soon attracted a colorful cadre of early adopters, many of whom became fabulously wealthy as the price went from $22 in 2014, to $800 at the start of 2017, to a peak of $17,900 by the end of that same year. Some were asset managers who could afford to take the risk early, like the Winklevoss twins or Barry Silbert. Others sought to improve or specialize Bitcoin’s functionality and earned their fortunes by building their own blockchains or cryptocurrencies, like Vitalik Buterin with Ethereum or Chris Larsen with Ripple."}
{"prompt":"A large contingent of these early acolytes were ardent libertarians who saw Bitcoin as a technology that encoded their beliefs. They came for the politics and stuck around for the profit. In “trustlessness” and “distributed ledgers,” they saw a way to build a monetary system free from the government control — a goal that gained greater urgency in the aftermath of the massive bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis. Perhaps no one exemplifies crypto-libertarianism better than Brock Pierce, who started mining Bitcoin in 2009 and went on to reach number nine on Forbes’ 2018 Richest People in Cryptocurrency, even as he faced a laundry list of financial and sexual abuse scandals. Today, Pierce is working on Puertopia, a crypto-libertarian society built from the rubble of Hurricane Maria that takes advantage of Puerto Rico’s sunny weather and unparalleled tax incentives.","completion":"If these nouveau riche are crypto’s landed gentry, then the Collins family are its subsistence farmers. They put in long hours to keep the mining rigs running, the hackers at bay, and the stomachs of nine family members filled. Their yield is unpredictable at best and at worst, catastrophic. They may share the same principles as the crypto elite, but they aren’t making money hand over fist: in fact, they’re just barely getting by. They have made crypto their whole lives for ideological reasons, not financial ones. They are true believers in the principles around which crypto is organized, and their commitment to those principles is rooted in bitter experience. “I’m on this adventure because 2008 almost killed me financially. I’m not on dollars, I’m on Satoshi,” Owen says in his Texas Hill Country drawl. “When you come at me and ask what the value of something is and you say dollars, I’m gonna say fuck off.” Into the Ether After the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, the Collins were in dire straits. Owen found himself on Craigslist, responding to people offering freezer-burned meat or, once, an old goat he could butcher. Just as the Collins started to recover, they were dealt another blow — this time by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. Owen was working as a licensed electrical engineer, helping upgrade the facilities at a nuclear site. But within a month, Owen’s company lost over ten million dollars worth of projects as nuclear sites all over the country put upgrades on hold to reevaluate their systems. He was out of work."}
{"prompt":"The only option to support his family and get them out of debt was for Owen to pick up government contract work, bouncing around federal nuclear sites. “From 2011 to 2017, I was gone. [I was] living in a hotel, going on an airplane, sleeping in a minivan,” Owen says. He would FaceTime in for the Advent calendar, to say grace at the dinner table, and even to catch the occasional dinner and a movie with Cassie, who was raising and homeschooling the children on her own. The kids called him “Daddy-in-a-box.” Working for the government, Owen was overwhelmed by the inefficiency. The bureaucracy was farcical, the technology was wildly out of date, and the cubicles made for an environment less “move fast and break things” and more Dilbert. Worse still, Owen, a privacy hound, had to give up a lot of personal information to receive a security clearance. Every place he ever lived, every relative he ever contacted, and every illicit substance he ever used were just some of the data captured in the 127 pages of his SF-86 clearance form. And when hackers breached the Office of Personnel Management in 2015, all of that information was stolen. “Damn feds lost my DNA sample… they got intel on my whole family,” Owen says.","completion":"In 2014, during his ample free time at work, Owen came across a white paper about a new blockchain called Ethereum. While Bitcoin is a distributed list of financial transactions, Ethereum is that plus a distributed list of computer states. In other words, it stores programmable ones and zeros that act as a giant, decentralized computer running public, uncensorable code. It’s like Amazon Web Services (AWS) in that users can pay to run applications on it (using its native currency, Ether) but without a central Amazon-like authority. Today, even though it is thousands of times more expensive and millions of times slower than AWS, the Ethereum distributed computer runs code simultaneously on the computers of a few thousand strangers."}
{"prompt":"Ethereum appealed to Owen right away, not only as an inveterate tinkerer but as a staunch libertarian. The government had failed Owen too many times — first as a facilitator of the 2008 financial crisis, then as a soul-crushing and privacy-annihilating employer. Owen finally had the chance be part of something built by engineers, for engineers. Most importantly, it was specifically designed to resist oversight from some CEO or government official. He had just received a $1,500 signing bonus for his latest gig, and over the phone, he walked Cassie through spending it on two hexadecimal numbers that together represented a couple thousand Ether. And as quickly as they decided to buy it, the Collins forgot about it.","completion":"Buried Treasure To compare trading stocks to trading crypto is like comparing the Westminster Dog Show to a back-alley dog fight. Stocks are regulated by laws around market manipulation, hours of operation, and insider trading; cryptocurrency regulation is practically non-existent. That means the Collins are left to find their own way when it comes to taxes and record keeping. “I can’t call a lawyer or an accountant and say, ‘Help me!’” says Owen. “I have to call them and explain them everything, teach them. I’m tired of it.” Scant oversight also means the Collins have to be extra careful about security. When Cassie buys any cryptocurrency, she gets a “public key,” which lets her prove to others she owns it, and a “private key,” which lets her spend it. If a hacker steals Cassie’s private key, there is no bank or credit card company she can call up to get her money back. And since most cryptocurrencies are pseudonymous — she could only see a hacker’s public key — there isn’t anyone to take legal recourse against. Like early homesteaders burying their valuables, Owen and Cassie combat thieves by storing their private keys on hard drives and slips of paper hidden around their home: in the chicken coop, by the outhouse, under a flat rock. Cassie likes to joke that they even have one tattooed on Luke, a duck the family rescued from Tropical Storm Bill.  The Collins also tread carefully around the power companies. The family has moved around in search of cheap energy and landed in rural Washington, where electric rates are as low as one fifth the national average thanks to hydroelectric power from the Columbia and Snake Rivers. They weren’t the only itinerant crypto miners to move to the area, especially when the price of Bitcoin grew by over 1,700 percent in 2017. According to the Wall Street Journal, some small local utilities in Washington were receiving upward of twenty calls per week from miners looking to use more electricity. Without sufficient infrastructure to meet demand, power companies have recently clamped down on crypto miners by placing limits on energy usage, requiring hefty deposits, and turning off power to those who don’t comply."}
{"prompt":"Still, the mining rigs in the Collins household run most hours of the day. And so does Cassie’s trading. “If something comes up, I’ll drop everything to look at the chart… I can think of times that I’ve been pulled out of bed at three in the morning when my husband has seen something on my phone,” Cassie says. Even though Owen and Cassie get up early, go to bed late, and don’t take weekends, they seem to thrive off the work. “We’re the kind of people that can’t take a vacation,” Cassie says. “We got married young, we didn’t have a honeymoon, we had kids, we’ve never taken a break.” A Fork in the Road There is one way to get a refund for stolen crypto: every miner can agree to undo the transaction. In other words, if a blockchain is just a list of transactions that a group agrees upon, then a coordinated effort can be made to get every individual in that group to remove the theft transaction from their list. This involves what is called a “hard fork,” and it is a massive undertaking, both technically and politically. It is also extremely rare.  Only an unmitigated catastrophe can prompt such a response. In the summer of 2016, this is exactly what Ethereum was headed for. The first major application for the Ethereum network was about to be released: the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO (pronounced “dow”). DAO was designed to be a democratic venture capital fund. Anyone could purchase shares using Ether, and then be able to vote on projects for the fund to invest in.  Buzz about the DAO reminded Cassie and Owen to check on the Ether they had bought a while back. When they did, they found it had grown close to seventy times in value. It was more money than they had ever had in their life together. Swept up in DAO euphoria, they were ready to make another big investment. Or, as Owen puts it, “Like some dumbass newbies, we took our Ethereum, one hundred percent, and put it in the DAO.” They were hardly alone: the DAO was the largest crowdsale ever up to that point, raising over 10 million Ether — worth $200 million at the time.","completion":"Then disaster struck. Within a month of DAO’s launch, a hacker found a hole in the code and began to drain funds out at a rate of $4,000 worth of Ether every three or four minutes. The attack ran into its own bug six hours after it began, but the hole was still exposed. The Ethereum community was divided over how to respond. Some DAO victims begged the developers to get them their money back by doing a “hard fork” and reverting the attack. However, a group of ideological purists argued that a “hard fork” would erode Ethereum’s promise of running code that no authority could interfere with. The Ethereum developers were too chummy with the DAO developers, they insisted. And, by leading an effort to clean up the mess, they were undermining the decentralization that made Ethereum so appealing in the first place."}
{"prompt":"Even though it would mean losing all their money, the Collins were hardline supporters of the anti-fork camp. “I thought there was no way we were going to roll back the blockchain,” Owen says. “I thought, they’re not gonna do it man… No one is going to do the bailout like they did in ’08.” In the end, though, the hard fork went through. But the fight was so vitriolic that the anti-fork group forged on. They released a “Crypto-Decentralist Manifesto” and continued to mine the old currency, now rebranded “Ethereum Classic.”  It was in this split that Cassie found her sea legs trading. Over the next few days, the prices of the sister Ethereum currencies oscillated violently as they fought for dominance. If she timed it right, Cassie could double her money every couple hours. “I think I was up for two days straight. Trading Ethereum Classic was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Cassie says. She was so glued to the charts on her phone that she couldn’t look away even while driving her daughter to violin practice.","completion":"The Collins had learned the hard way not to put all their eggs in one basket, and they didn’t make the same mistake twice. Cassie was soon trading around thirty different cryptocurrencies, and Owen had bought mining hardware to get their hands on more. They picked up their investment tips from the “trollbox,” a freewheeling crypto chat room filled with pump-and-dumpers, flamewar sparkers, and a select few seasoned traders who would dispense occasional nuggets of wisdom. During Owen’s few Friday nights at home, he and Cassie would often crack a beer and watch the trollbox."}
{"prompt":"Cassie’s homeschooling materials were on the same screen as her trading spreadsheets and eventually the two became mixed. The children already had a STEM-heavy curriculum, with a particular focus on hardware and software. (“They definitely know how to crimp a Cat6 cable, use the amp meter, the fluke meter, ping, configuration setup,” says Owen.) Once they started asking questions about her trading tables, Cassie had them learn all two-hundred-odd currencies on her exchange. “It’s like pulling teeth sometimes,” she says.","completion":"An All-Liquid Diet While the Collins kids were learning their cryptocurrencies Aeternity through Zcash, my friend Dan and I were just catching wind of the cryptocurrency hype. Some time in the first half of 2017, we thought we might as well invest a couple hundred bucks into Ether on the offhand chance that it would make us wildly rich. More than that, though, it was something for us to talk about. Dan and I had been friends since kindergarten, but we were living on opposite sides of the country. The day-to-day price fluctuations gave us a reason to keep in touch, and made for pleasant conversation when the price was up, which it usually was."}
{"prompt":"When the price of Ether hit a thousand dollars at the start of 2018, Dan and I were elated. Our investment had paid off and we were hailed as brilliant prognosticators. People came out of the woodwork to seek advice on whether or not they too should buy: a college classmate I hadn’t heard from in years, the owner of a diner in my hometown, my dad. Dan and I started fantasizing about blowing our profits on an opulent party, with free drinks and flights for our friends from around the country.","completion":"This was also around the time I met Owen and Cassie while doing research for a piece I was writing about Ethereum Classic. We met on Discord, a chat application popular in crypto circles, and after a while, Owen and Cassie suggested I do some crypto day trading. They provided tips on how to avoid scams and what to buy — including Ethereum Classic of course. They also set me up on a more reputable exchange and gave suggestions about how to store my crypto more securely. Cassie even offered to share some of her spreadsheets."}
{"prompt":"But I was barely able to handle the little bit of crypto I already had. I had gone from checking the price once a week to several times a day, sometimes in the middle of conversations. It was the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before I went to sleep. Should I sell before the bubble pops? Or was I on the brink of getting rich? As the price slipped, I picked up a new habit of grinding my teeth. Despite Owen and Cassie’s advice and assurances, I cracked under the pressure and sold most of what I had. The pain in my jaw from holding just one cryptocurrency had reduced me to an all-liquid diet. I was not cut out to be a trader.","completion":"As for Dan, he has always been more relaxed than I am and wasn’t bothered by the daily ups and downs. While I was stuck drinking soup, he was living entirely off his crypto earnings for months after having been laid off his job. But one day, Dan went to the exchange website to chip a little off to refill his bank account and found his entire account emptied. All of it. His private key had been compromised, likely by malware. Our crypto adventure was over."}
{"prompt":"Keeping Warm in the Crypto Winter Business has been rockier for the Collins since the value of cryptocurrency peaked in 2018, right around the time that Owen quit his job. The mining rigs are less profitable than ever. The threat of government regulation looms large as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network consider how to treat cryptocurrencies. The promised “killer app” that will do for crypto what email did for the Internet has yet to materialize. Crypto-enthusiasts call the downturn a “crypto winter,” a reference to the “AI winter” of the 1970s and 1980s when interest in AI declined. Still, Cassie has a knack for trading and can still consistently turn a profit. The family had a nice windfall when one of their holdings, a currency called Verge, was selected to be the coin of the realm for pornography conglomerate MindGeek.","completion":"In his spare time, Owen is trying to get his own mining consulting business off the ground. Unfortunately, most of his inquiries come from shady clientele — perhaps because he is reticent to tell clients his real name or what state he lives in. After one man from Montana wanted to open a mining business suspiciously fast, Cassie did some snooping and found out he had defrauded senior citizens out of millions of dollars. Another potential client had an FBI rap sheet. Owen took on neither project."}
{"prompt":"Meanwhile, the piece that I was writing about Ethereum Classic became a piece on the Collins family. Wired picked it up and wanted to fly me out to Washington to see the crypto homestead in person, but Owen and Cassie wouldn’t have it. The magazine insisted on using their real names and the Collins thought such prominence would make them a target. (I have changed their names for this piece.) I pleaded with Owen — this was his chance to help others escape what he called the “cube farm.” Maybe he could even stir up some legitimate consulting business! My pleas fell on deaf ears. He stopped responding to my messages and Wired dropped the story.","completion":"I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Collins are true believers in anonymity and autonomy, values they believe the blockchain embodies. Their principles had already been tested in the DAO hack — there was no way they would compromise them for a little press coverage. The newly minted crypto millionaires may begin to divest as the crypto winter chills the industry, but the Collins, like true homesteaders, are battening down the hatches.  “I’m not a rich dude,” Owen says. “I’m still living the same lifestyle — broken down cars, broken down house. The reason that I do this is the freedom to make my own choice. I don’t want to be told it’s Hawaiian shirt Friday.” The costs of such freedom are considerable: the paranoia, the anxiety, the endless hours spent mining and trading. But for the Collins, it’s the only life they can imagine."}
{"prompt":"In the winter of 2018, I started to hear rumors about miraculous clinical developments taking place in my hometown of Philadelphia involving growing sheep fetuses in plastic bags. “Bio-bags” was what they were called. Eager to learn more, I got in touch with the renowned pediatrician Dr. Thomas Shaffer. Shaffer wasn’t involved with the bio-bag experiments, but he knows a lot about fetuses. He is a pioneer of “liquid breathing” techniques designed to help prematurely born babies survive.  “As we’ve known for some time, fetuses are not little adults,” he told me over the phone, in early 2019. “Have you read Water Babies by Charles Kingsley? Have you watched James Cameron’s The Abyss? Fetuses’ survival comes down to what a deep diver needs to do: fill his lungs with water.” I nodded, hoping for Shaffer to say explicitly what I (a creature of the humanities) had not yet felt able to argue: that fetal humans are a distinct, aquatic species.  Intrauterine space is wet. The amniotic sac that holds the fetus contains up to about a quart of oxygen-rich fluid that is mostly composed of urine. Exposure to the air stops fetal lungs from completing their development. Before we turn into “land babies” (that is to say… babies), we breathe amniotic liquor. Though we have no gills, we move our tiny diaphragms and intercostal muscles in a dedicated rehearsal of future gaseous breathing, and we do not drown.","completion":"Some escapologists and deep-water divers try to slow their heart rates by “remembering” this time before fear — this state of non-antagonism towards water — to calm themselves. These trance-like attempts at becoming-amphibian are not, I feel, what the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family had in mind when it gazed, via ultrasound, into the abdomen of Abby Johnson — the Planned Parenthood volunteer turned abortion opponent whose memoir Unplanned made her into a heroine of the anti-choice movement, and is now the basis for a movie with the same title — and declared the contents “human.”  Dr. Thomas Shaffer did not explicitly say whether or not he agrees with the anti-abortion political thrust of this kind of humanization of the fetus. Yet, as he himself explained to me, breakthroughs in the field of neonatology have frequently been predicated precisely on the recognition that fetuses are simultaneously part of land-based humans, and nothing like land-based humans. They are another species. The wetness of the womb — or, rather, the wetness of the entity some academics call “the motherfetus” — is both moat and membrane, bath and barrier, bridge and buffer: it is both what makes gestator and gestatee dissoluble, and what makes them indissoluble. Wetness is, in this sense, intrinsically Janus-faced and inhuman: “we” cannot live there. Liquid is villainously difficult to control, contain, and put to work within “wet tech.” It is lethal to the gestator when it floods her from the inside in, for instance, a hemorrhage. Water is just as much a killer as a nourisher, just as much a threat to life as a source of life.  Born in a Ziploc I started contacting neonatal scientists in Philadelphia because I wanted to talk about what water does in the context of a pregnancy, and to what extent the process might be automated through something like a “bio-bag.” Eventually, I managed to find a researcher directly involved in the bio-bag experiments: a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia named Dr. Emily Partridge. I also learned something extraordinary: while the bio-bags currently involve sheep fetuses, the researchers plan to begin trials with human fetuses next year."}
{"prompt":"Partridge is an unlikely candidate for the role of Dr. Frankenstein, as I already knew from watching her kindly and unthreatening TV appearances on YouTube. When I first emailed her, I received an enthusiastic reply. She floated a future coffee date but, being a cursedly impatient person, I couldn’t wait. I started hanging out around the reception areas of the hospital that I imagined would be nearest the bio-bag unit. My hope was to glimpse the half-gestated lambs-in-the-making — breathing, growing wool, and kicking their little legs in outsized Ziploc sachets.  Alas, I didn’t. And soon there was a change of tone in my email inbox, after I unwisely mentioned my interest in the “history of ectogenesis” — artificial gestation — to the hospital’s public relations officer. She was polite but firm: “We are going to pass on this opportunity.” No more emails with Partridge.","completion":"It could have been a coincidence that our communication chilled at a time of rapidly worsening abortion politics. This was just a few days after Trump tweeted, falsely, that “[Democrats] don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth.” It would sadly be astonishing if the hospital board didn’t want to keep its hands as free as possible from contamination by the struggle over abortion.  Dr. Thomas Shaffer, for his part, was explicitly worried about the Trumpian “news” that — as he put it — some doctors were now “killing viable babies.” He seemed to be trying to depoliticize his work by focusing as narrowly as possible on saving preemies. He recounted to me how “huge” it felt in the 1980s when it dawned on him that “preemies” (premature neonates) required a completely separate body of medical care. “The lungs were always the bottleneck, and we have broken that ceiling,” he explained, charmingly mixing his metaphors.  His team at Temple University is widely recognized as having revolutionized the standard approach to caring for fetuses’ still unformed pulmonary apparatuses: filling them with surfactant fluid rather than prolonging their premature exposure to gas. Preemie death-rates — and their age of viability, counted in weeks — plummeted as a result. “But that doesn’t mean we can go younger and younger,” said Shaffer, listing to me a number of other fetal organs it is as yet still impossible to envision not failing at fewer than twenty-two weeks’ gestation.  I noted carefully, here, that he said “can” rather than “will.” Indeed, I got the distinct sense that, whoever that “we” was, it would cater to “younger and younger” preemies. Could scientists keep going younger and younger, to the point where they are automating gestation entirely? Put another way: in the image of the bottleneck, what is the bottle? If we’ve broken the ceiling, where is the sky? Is the ultimate goal to remove the human gestator from gestation altogether — and if so, cui bono?  Building the Bag Type Emily Partridge’s name into a search engine, and you will find her on CBC, stressing the “awe-inspiring” character of the bio-bag she has co-designed: the gravid see-through amnion that exposes the process of pregnancy to the gaze for the first time in human history. The news anchor is determined to play and replay the few seconds of footage Partridge’s lab has seen fit to release, of a visibly alive lamb-to-be plastic-wrapped in brine. Partridge cheerily evokes the “dogged three years” she spent developing prototypes, “camping out” on a sleeping mat next to the waterborne lamb fetuses “for weeks and weeks at a time.” She helpfully explains that the sheep is the standard scientific surrogate for the human where fetuses are concerned, due to its similar size and pace of physiological progression in utero."}
{"prompt":"While long-term data on Partridge’s fetal sheep does not yet exist, the cyborg brood are reported stable and “not distressed” after four weeks inside the bio-bag. For now, animal protocols dictate that specimens plucked from organic wombs and inserted into inorganic ones cannot be mechanically “gestated” for longer than that. In the last few years, the patent-holders — Partridge and her fellow researchers Alan Flake and Marcus Davey — have published a slew of reports and research papers with titles like “Development of the artificial womb” and “EXTENDING fetal physiology beyond the womb.” (The official name for their product is EXTEND™, for EXTrauterine Environment for Neonatal Development.)  The perfected bio-bag system is remarkably small and simple. It works like this: uncover your target fetus via caesarean-section (at a point equivalent to a human’s twenty-three-week gestation), then clamp and cannulate the umbilical cord so as to connect it, not to the mother anymore, but to the “artificial placenta — which is basically a lung.” Immediately submerge the cord and fetus in your artificial amniotic liquid, where twenty-eight days of simulated pregnancy will pass uneventfully (the maximum ethical guidelines for livestock allow) — an extraordinary improvement on the mere four hours (the previous record) that researchers, also in Philadelphia, were managing in 1998. Then remove the lamb, put it on a ventilator and (this is the bit that will not be replicated with humans next year) euthanize it for dissection.  As anyone who has recently wandered down South 33rd Street in Philadelphia will know, Partridge and her collaborators work in a newly renovated and dazzlingly glitzy hospital complex. Yet until now, they have operated without significant funding: relegated, with their plastic tubs and tubes and slimy livestock, to a space that resembles a fairly dingy school basement. This is where they brooded over their facsimile uteri; this is where they camped. Partridge clearly thinks it’s all about to pay off, big time. With an investigative device exemption in hand from the Food and Drug Administration, the bio-baggers are hoping to schedule trials with human preemies in 2020 or 2021.","completion":"Back in 2018, Partridge’s collaborator Flake had predicted that “the next obstacles we’ll need to overcome will be regulatory.” But later that year, the Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services declared that “life begins at conception.” For the bio-baggers, this new political mood means they have to be especially careful in how they present their work. In an era marked by “personhood bills” and “fetal rights,” it is plainly in the interests of those seeking bio-bag funding to focus on its potential for saving preemie lives, and to see those water babies swimming inside the twenty-two-week amnion as human. It’s undeniably compelling: you could reach your finger out and watch them react to your tickle through the polyethylene.  A History of Frankensteins Philly’s bio-bags are part of a long tradition of fantasizing about the artificial womb, the politics of which are complex. Most obviously, the tenacity of the dream of automating human gestation, across the centuries, seems attributable to “womb envy” on the part of those without viable wombs: an arrogant determination to annex, expropriate, and (crucially) even outperform the female-coded capacity to build human life. In an 1896 short story by Fred T. Jane, “The Incubated Girl,” for example, male scientists engineer an egg-shaped vessel and then break it open to reveal a fully formed person suspended inside who is more perfect than any human “of woman born” hitherto.  But there’s more to the trope, too, than male jealousy vis-à-vis the female. The mechanical uterus was imagined in the socialist debates and science-fiction bestsellers of the turn of the last century variously as: a feminist plot to overthrow men by escaping women’s domestic work burden; an anti-feminist plot to render women redundant and hence disposable; and, more diplomatically, a gender-neutral means of assistance to those unable (as opposed to merely unwilling, note) to gestate. Some saw in it the actualization of Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris, laid out in the much earlier science-fiction novel Frankenstein (1818)."}
{"prompt":"Aldous Huxley was of this mind when, a full decade before penning the famous “hatchery” scenario of Brave New World, he wrote a character in Crome Yellow (1921) who predicts the dissolution of “the family system” at a dinner party, in favor of “vast state incubators”: “rows upon rows of gravid bottles… supplying the world with the population it requires.” But it was common, a hundred years ago, and not only among fashionable cosmopolitan men and women, to espouse opinions on how best to legislate and regulate artificial womb technology. Communists like Charlotte Haldane and J. B. S. Haldane; socialists like Dora Russell and Eden Paul; pacifist moderates like Huxley or Vera Brittain; and crypto-fascists like D. H. Lawrence and Anthony Ludovici all believed that procreation, for better or worse, would fairly imminently be freed from the necessity of passing through nine months in the “female” body.","completion":"But this dream has been continually disappointed. In reality, the closest thing to fetuses subsisting, alive, outside of the human womb, is when delicately swaddled preemies receive an infusion of Dr. Thomas Shaffer’s perfluorochemical surfactant liquid to fill their lungs. Otherwise, it’s just dry incubator technology. It was a doctor from Germantown, Philadelphia, Charles Chapple, who patented a simple incubator prototype in March 1938 that was later developed into the Isolette model now used in neonatal intensive care everywhere. The lamp-warmed Perspex boxes most people are familiar with in a hospital setting are, undeniably, nothing like the miraculous “goldfish bowls filled with chemical fluids” (as one daily newspaper described the New York Medical Society’s proto-bio-bag prototype in 1952) that the media relentlessly raised false alarms about in the 1950s. Yet nothing has ever stopped newspapers from describing even the driest, most rudimentary methods of preemie incubation as uterine. When, in 1894, the wife of a Madison Avenue millionaire died while giving birth to an infant that weighed only two pounds, its life was saved by placing it in a hurriedly warmed suitcase with a viewing-window cut into it. A suitcase! — yet the New York Daily News still reported this improvised response as “an artificial womb.”  It’s worth noting that even dry incubators, which have officially existed since 1880 and been subject to only minor tweaks and improvements, never really stopped commanding the mesmerized attention they did in their first guise as carnival attractions. Preemie display-cases and “hatcheries” served as massive money-spinners for quack doctors and certified physicians — who funded their research by selling tickets — in the freak-shows of Coney Island as well as the great international inventors’ Expositions in Berlin, Chicago, and London.  The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, with its genuinely innovative wet tech, is open about its worry that the weird “optics” of the sealed, marinated “preborn” human will “put parents off.” But their aqueous version of incubation evidently represents the future of a highly marketable opportunity to “look in wonder” at “prenatal sublimity,” as the scholar Nathan Stormer puts it. The question remaining, however, is whether the bio-bag has more to do with ectogenesis than its dry predecessors did; whether it automates something that warm-air capsules do not."}
{"prompt":"Making Mom If Philadelphia’s bio-bags have the potential to realize the old dream of the artificial womb, they also force us to return to an old question: Why would we want to automate gestation in the first place? In our own era, people have a variety of answers to this question. For some of us, the fact that 300,000-odd people still die of their pregnancies every year, while millions more incur injuries, represents a glaring humanitarian problem in need of urgent remedies. In this view, given the extreme harm and danger gestators risk (especially black and working-class ones) in gestating their own young, researching alternatives that would enable people not to gestate if they don’t want to — while still making babies together, perhaps in non-dyadic ways — is not only justified, but highly ethical.  On the other hand, there are many who see artificial womb technology as a means of shoring up the power of the patriarchal private nuclear household, removing all doubt about biogenetic paternity from the equation and indeed removing the human gestator — especially her (already legally and biologically constrained) ability to harm and/or kill the fetus — from the scene of gestation. For them, ectogenesis is the “solution” to the “abortion debate” in that, once it’s perfected, it would theoretically obviate the “need” to kill fetuses of any age. It points to a world (not so far removed from this one as I would wish) in which a pregnant person might be entirely deprived of the right to decide whether or not the living thing inside her stays alive. In this lens, the glass and plastic is there, not to alleviate the labor of the “mother,” but to save the “baby” [sic] from her.","completion":"The official line agreed upon by scientists like Dr. Emily Partridge is that these questions are irrelevant, since improving care for preemies has nothing to do with the pursuit of automated pregnancy. The translation of the lamb-in-a-bag findings to neonatal clinical practice is not, they believe, about replacing anything. It is merely about “supporting,” “transitioning,” and “bridging” preemies from the twenty-three-week gestational mark (considered just above the threshold of viability) to the twenty-eight-week mark (where their chance of survival can be over 90 percent).  In framing their enterprise this way, EXTEND™ attempts to sidestep the thicket of political issues that the ectogenetic resonances of their device immediately call up. “I want to make this very clear,” states Partridge’s collaborator Alan Flake, “We have no intention and we’ve never had any intention with this technology of extending the limits of viability further back.” Seeking to artificially manufacture fetuses from scratch is not (repeat, not!) the aim, here. The aim is to look after preemies we are “caring for anyway” — even while Flake himself elsewhere calls the possibility of handling fetuses younger than twenty-two weeks “a pipe dream at this point.”  The doublespeak is not conscious, the stated motivation not exactly a lie. Partridge, Flake, and their colleagues are, I believe, motivated by tragic professional encounters they’ve experienced with specific beings over the years, proto-persons who simply weren’t “supposed to be here yet” and who, they sense, are “desperate for solutions and for innovation.” Still, there is a remarkably schizoid character to these assurances, where, on the one hand, the imputation of any kind of ambition to replace biological maternity is sharply repudiated while, on the other hand, the scientists happily state on camera that “our system is essentially a re-creation of the environment a fetus normally resides in” and that “the lamb is getting everything it would be getting inside Mom.”"}
{"prompt":"Re-creation. Everything. Mom. The simultaneous avowal and disavowal of life-giving ambition goes hand in hand with comments like neonatal unit director Kevin Dysart’s: “compared to where we’d like to be, we’re still not close.” Adopting this delicately ambivalent tack places the hitherto underfunded initiative in what they no doubt calculate is the optimal position for receiving support from a “pro-life” federal administration vehemently opposed to using “fetal parts” in research, but highly enthusiastic about ministering to the “pre-born.” The situation-in-flux is certainly anxiety-inducing for neonatologists. No wonder, then, that when I betrayed an interest in ectogenesis, the bio-bag unit shut me out.","completion":"Towards the Queer Gestational Commune The work of a gestator is not reducible, as Dr. Emily Partridge implied, to that of a lung. Partridge even tacitly admits this. Undeniably, something of late-stage ovine gestation is being automated, down the road from my house, at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. But only something: in our species at least, pregnancy is a multifaceted and part-consciously creative undertaking. It is defined, as Irina Aristarkhova writes in her book Hospitality of the Matrix (2012), by a quality of nursing — a complex, bidirectional, sometimes loving, sometimes abusive (and usually both), orchestration of touch.  And, for better or worse, the machine, at least for now, cannot nurse. For better or worse, polyethylene sheath + salt-solution + electronic oxygenator ≠ gestation. Unaccounted for in seeing the bio-bag as an extension of the uterus are the bidirectional flows, nonverbal communications, and symbiotic becomings and violences that characterize human placentation, which is “naturally” very colonizing and aggressive."}
{"prompt":"Unaccounted for, too, are the transitive and intransitive valences of the verb “to gestate” — the fact that gestatees gestate, as co-participants in their gestation, and that they gestate us back. I have a hunch that the utopian political horizons of the artificial womb — as explored in feminist works ranging from Shulamith Firestone’s classic The Dialectic of Sex (1970) to Marge Piercy’s science-fiction novel Women on the Edge of Time (1976) — has everything to do with the extent to which the dreamer grapples with this interpenetrative character of prepartum nursing — the sense, even, that fetuses are in some ways a strange species, demanding all of the same ethical agonisms of a multispecies companionship.  Today, the perfection of intensive techniques for forcing preemie survival has nothing whatsoever to do with reproductive justice struggle. But I would love to one day see the queer gestational commune in which “bio-bags” of some kind enabled gestators to pause, share, transfer, redistribute, and walk away from pregnancies. I would love to see these technologies help denaturalize motherhood and liberate those with uteruses from the imperative to gestate. This would require the expropriation of the means of safer obstetrics and maximally assisted reproduction currently monopolized by capitalism’s elites. I hope we do it, and I hope we will know what it’s like to manufacture our children with the help of a wet technology enabling a form of common gestational touch that inflicts no more harm to a fetus’s many parents than we can collectively accept.","completion":"The streets that night were carless. They were blocked, but there was no room for cars anyway. There were thousands of people outside. Some were running, some were locked arm-in-arm. Others were clad in full body armor — those were the Seattle Police. The cops wore helmets with screens to shield them from the smoke grenades and tear gas they were spraying directly into the crowds, forcing people coughing and crying down to the pavement, which was covered in glass from chain-store windows smashed by roaming protesters. “You suck, you fucking cocksucker,” a man yelled as an officer in front of him began firing rubber bullets that left painful welts on the legs and arms of the people they hit.  That night, November 30, 1999, the opening ceremony of the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference was supposed to be held. But demonstrators had taken over the city, confining the world leaders from over 150 governments who had arrived in Seattle to participate in the round of global trade negotiations to their hotel lobbies. At one point, the action moved to a street downtown where a group of activist-journalists had set up a newsroom in a donated storefront. They called it the Seattle Independent Media Center (IMC). As smoke thickened the autumn air, protesters poured inside to seek refuge from the tear gas that made it nearly impossible to see and even harder to breathe. The cops tried to follow them in, but those inside quickly locked the doors. Their cameras were rolling, filming the police the whole time. This was where Indymedia was born."}
{"prompt":"The Seattle IMC was stocked with donated computers for uploading and editing video and for writing articles. This content would then be posted to a website, indymedia.org, which went live days before the protests began. The motivation behind opening an activist newsroom, according to Jeff Perlstein, one of the founders of the Seattle IMC, was to provide a different perspective on the protests than corporate media. “We couldn’t just let CNN and CBS be the ones to tell these stories,” said Perlstein in a 2000 interview. “We needed to develop our own alternatives and networks. That’s where the idea for the media center came from — the necessity for communities to control their own message.”  It worked. During the WTO meetings, IMC journalists provided up-to-the-minute coverage and produced daily video segments. The Indymedia website clocked in 1.5 million unique visitors in its first week of operation, surpassing traffic to CNN’s website during the Seattle protests.","completion":"The success of the Indymedia website and the Seattle IMC newsroom behind it soon inspired the formation of local IMCs and websites in other cities around the world, where they duplicated the publishing platform developed for Seattle. By 2004, there were over 150 autonomously operated IMCs in some fifty countries across the globe, which all ran websites that branched off the mothership: indymedia.org. What started in Seattle grew into a network.  This was at the turn of the millenium, when the anti-globalization movement was in full swing. Activists in North America and Europe mounted major protests against powerful multinational corporations and the international agreements that empowered them. Indymedia’s founding members understood that defeating this enemy would require taking on some of its traits. A movement to oppose globalized, networked capital needed to be globalized and networked too. And that meant getting online.  An Anti-Capitalist Internet  Indymedia activists wanted to build an alternative media system. They wanted to use the internet to circumvent institutional power. But they weren’t the only ones. Another, more influential group of digital pioneers in the 1990s had a similar idea: the techno-libertarians, who dreamt of building a boundless digital future where inhabitants could craft their own rules, free from the confines of government control. The philosophy of techno-libertarianism was most famously articulated by Grateful Dead lyricist and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder John Perry Barlow in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours… Cyberspace does not lie within your borders,” Barlow wrote in his Declaration, which he penned at the World Economic Forum, of all places, in Davos in 1996. While Indymedia organizers shared Barlow’s image of cyberspace as borderless, anti-hierarchical, and anti-institutional, they were guided by a very different political vision."}
{"prompt":"The same year that Barlow published his manifesto, Subcomandante Marcos offered his. Marcos was the spokesman of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN), a rebel group of primarily poor and rural indigenous people in Chiapas that took up arms when Mexico signed the North American Free Trade Agreement. From the start, the EZLN used the internet to get the word out about their deadly struggle against the Mexican government. In 1996, at an anti-globalization conference held in Chiapas, Marcos laid out his vision for how social movements could harness the internet: We will make a network of communication among all our struggles and resistances. An intercontinental network of alternative communication against neoliberalism… This intercontinental network of alternative communication will be the medium by which distinct resistance’s communicate with one another.","completion":"The organizers who went on to build Indymedia heard this call. Marcos’s “intercontinental network of alternative communication,” as Todd Wolfson chronicles in his book, Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, provided the guiding inspiration for the formation of Indymedia.  The Indymedia organizers would be the children of Marcos, not Barlow. While the two philosophies had points of contact, they came from different places of concern. Indymedia activists would agree with the techno-libertarians that politicians and police couldn’t be trusted in their networks. But they didn’t see cyberspace as an open frontier of individuals unhindered by governments. Rather, the activists saw cyberspace as a place for communities.  They drew from a history of community media and radical self-publishing, which emphasized the need for those who are marginalized and silenced by mainstream media to share stories, cultivate solidarity, and build grassroots power. For Indymedia, the internet was a gathering place: a space not merely for individual liberation but collective liberation, where communities and movements could communicate, consolidate, and form a “network of resistance,” as Marcos put it, against government and corporate control.  Yet it was Barlow’s vision that attracted entrepreneurs like Eric Schmidt and Steve Wozniak, who hoped to carve out new markets in a digital world unbound by national borders and government regulations. For the techno-libertarians, a healthy internet was one where people could do and say whatever they pleased. Protecting individual rights of self-expression took precedence over protecting marginalized communities — who, in practice, don’t always get to enjoy the same rights.  Today, techno-libertarianism has terminated in a corporatized internet, where individuals can express almost anything they want, so long as their speech is monetized by a handful of big platforms. Only recently have these platforms been forced to reckon with the problems that have plagued communities of minority users for years. Meanwhile, corporations like Facebook and Google, rife with hate speech and funded by surveillance, lack a clear understanding of how to serve the information needs of the diversity of users worldwide who depend on them."}
{"prompt":"In contrast to the digital frontiersman of Barlow’s declaration, Indymedia activists built a platform that prioritized communities. Within Indymedia, communities built their own trusted online spaces. Autonomous groups were then connected to others in a common network, with the aim of providing mutual support and mounting resistance to institutional power.  Opening Doors with Open Publishing When Indymedia was at its height between 1999 and 2006, new IMCs were going online at a rate of one every nine days. Many were started to support anti-globalization protests, like in Seattle in 1999. The Indymedia center in Miami, for example, started in 2003 in the aftermath of the Free Trade Area of the Americas meeting, when labor organizers, farm workers, and anti-globalization demonstrators descended on the city to protest the trade negotiations.  Though many IMCs formed in response to local anti-globalization actions, like the one in Miami, starting a new Indymedia site wasn’t bound to that movement. The IMC in Philadelphia, for example, emerged in preparation for the protests surrounding the Republican National Convention in 2000. Others were built as general-purpose outlets for local activism. One of the first projects of the San Francisco Bay Area IMC — later known as “Indybay” —  was a list of the forty-five worst slumlords in the city. Indymedia journalists compiled the list after interviewing and meeting with local tenants’ rights advocates in response to rising rents during the dot-com boom.","completion":"Whether an IMC was started to cover an anti-globalization protest or to serve as a community media outpost, one thing they all shared was a website with some level of “open publishing.” This meant it had a usable interface that made it relatively easy for anyone to post on the central newswire. Most Indymedia sites had three columns (similar to Facebook today). The left column had a menu for navigating to other local IMCs. The center column was a feed of stories, and the right column was usually reserved for submitting a post or listing calendar events. “It was the first self-publishing platform I had encountered,” Lee Azzarello, who started working with the Indymedia center in New York City in 2001 and helped with global Indymedia tech support, told me, echoing other IMC members I interviewed. “This was before WordPress existed and blogs took some expertise to start and use.”  Open publishing also opened the doors to abuse. “We had constant battles with trolls the whole time,” Mark Burdett, an Indymedia veteran and former colleague from EFF, told me in an interview. One key way that Indymedia sites dealt with trolling was by having an editorial policy: members who monitored the posts submitted to the newswire used the policy to decide what got promoted to the top. But as more people used Indymedia sites, the more the trolls and spammers did too. Indymedia organizers eventually built tools that automatically detected spam or hateful content to flag for review before it was allowed to go live.  Issues with trolling, however, never eclipsed the real appeal of open publishing: it provided an easy-to-use platform which non-tech experts could use to elevate their stories online. Activists had long recognized that skewed narratives and silences from corporate media were part of what they had to fight in order to mount political resistance. Even so, those who were in a position to write and publish stories to counteract the mainstream media were relatively few and far between, relying on community radio and public access television, newsletters, or individual blogs."}
{"prompt":"With Indymedia, thousands of people were publishing stories and sharing photos and videos across movements and across the world. Indymedia’s open source codebase, of which multiple versions emerged over the years, had been created specifically for this purpose. As Mansur Jacobi and Matthew Arnison, software programmers who were core in developing the open-publishing framework for Indymedia, put it in the very first post published to the Seattle site: The web dramatically alters the balance between multinational and activist media. With just a bit of coding and some cheap equipment, we can set up a live automated website that rivals the corporates. Prepare to be swamped by the tide of activist media makers on the ground in Seattle and around the world, telling the real story behind the World Trade [Organization].","completion":"The site’s open-publishing architecture presaged the social media networks that would begin to emerge years later and eventually subsume how we communicate online.  Tech Taking a Backseat Although open publishing was key to the success of Indymedia, the technical aspects alone weren’t what attracted its user base. Just as important were the anti-capitalist and justice-centered values. I came to the Tennessee Indymedia Center’s website, tnimc.org, to write and read stories about how people in Nashville, my hometown, were dying because of cuts to state health care, about how coal extraction had decimated whole mountains and polluted local water supplies, about how police were increasing their presence in public schools.  Local corporate media at the time were either ignoring these issues or, if they were covering them, failed to consistently center the voices of the people and communities affected. Our thinking was that it would be awfully hard to change local policy if our neighbors didn’t know what was happening, and we couldn’t count on the mainstream media to make people understand enough to care. In this way, as grassroots journalists on Indymedia, our work was tactical. We were reporting with an agenda.  Other Indymedia organizers and activists I spoke to felt similarly. “Self-publishing is great. I’m into it,” an early organizer of Indybay told me, who asked to remain anonymous. “But I feel like the main strength of Indymedia was this idea about tactical media. There’s like a purpose to what you’re doing that’s not just about publishing your story.” If you hung around Indymedia types during the early 2000s, there’s a good chance you heard the term “tactical media” batted around. What differentiates tactical media from some imaginary idea of pure journalism is that tactical media is made in support of a political project."}
{"prompt":"The autonomy of each Indymedia site gave local activist-journalists the flexibility to support different political projects, and to respond to the informational needs of their community. In 2005, for example, the Houston IMC teamed up with the community radio advocacy non-profit Prometheus Radio Project to set up a low-power FM radio station at the Astrodome, where thousands of people displaced from Hurricane Katrina were relocated. As Tish Stringer, a founding member of the Houston IMC, told Democracy Now at the time, “There was a real difficulty getting information for basic things like when to eat, where to eat, how to get my child into school, how to look for jobs, transportation — really basic issues… Media activists in Houston talked about this and decided really radio would be the perfect medium to address this.”  Within days, the Indymedia activists were able to secure three emergency low-power FM licenses. They handed out small donated radios to people inside, set up a studio in an Airstream trailer in the parking lot, and began broadcasting by helping evacuees find missing friends and family members. The station provided critical information about how to apply for aid and aired firsthand accounts from survivors who made it from Louisiana to Texas. Media activists were helping to alleviate the information crisis by connecting families in the Astrodome — all the while producing boots-on-the-ground coverage that people could follow around the world.","completion":"The internet wasn’t in everyone’s pocket in the early 2000s and, as illustrated by the Houston activists who broadcast at the Astrodome, publishing online didn’t make sense for reaching people who don’t have the resources to get online. Sakura Sanders, an anti-mining activist who worked on Fault Lines, the printed newspaper of Indybay, explained why their Indymedia collective and so many others found it critical to run a print newspaper: “Online is great for reaching people who already know about you. But this was before social media, so unless you actually went to Indybay deliberately, it’s not like you were going to see these stories posted on someone’s Facebook. Fault Lines was essential to reach beyond the choir. We would leave it at various cafes and stuff.”  Beyond newspapers and radio stations, it was common for Indymedia websites to run their own physical space with a community computer lab, video editing stations, art supplies, and a meeting room for local organizing. Indymedia sites were networked online, but as primarily local projects, it was essential to exist offline too. This was in part because Indymedia was a creature of an earlier digital era, before social media and smartphones. But the benefits of the localism this strategy engendered shouldn’t be lost on us today: in order to serve their communities, organizers had to be present offline too.  Missing Links The last post on indymedia.org is dated September 2017. New Orleans’ Indymedia site, neworleans.indymedia.org, was last updated in October 2013. Others are still quite active, like the Indymedia site used across Argentina, argentina.indymedia.org, which is updated multiple times a week, sometimes multiple times a day. When I visited the Tennessee IMC’s website this spring, the domain had expired. I texted my friend who helped maintain the site. “Guess I forgot to pay the yearly fee,” they replied.  Indymedia sites around the US started to atrophy around 2008. The network’s decentralization had a double edge. Local outlets had the autonomy to directly serve their communities. But without strong, centralized accountability, it was often difficult to apply for funding or develop leadership that would help ensure sustainability. In 2002, for example, a Ford Foundation grant was disputed because of the foundation’s suspected ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which was pointed out in an emergency email to the global network by the Argentina IMC shortly before the money was slated to be accepted."}
{"prompt":"People also burned out. As a volunteer project, those who did have the time and resources to work for free tended come from some level of privilege. Stronger centralization might have provided the tools needed for leadership training, which would have helped to bring new volunteers in and diversify core organizers.  The anti-globalization movement that helped give Indymedia a pillar around which the network could coalesce also began to weaken as political concerns shifted over the years, and Indymedia organizers never landed on a new movement that could unite and guide the tactical work of the collective. IMCs always covered more than the anti-globalization and anti-war activism of the early 2000s, but the loose network benefited from having a broader social movement that it could embed itself within.  Anti-globalization activism provided a shared purpose around which to converge nationally. Activists met at protests around the country, and IMCs filled a need by providing media and tech services for the movement. By the time Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter hit the scene in the United States, Indymedia projects had been winding down for years.  Tomorrow, in Hindsight  Today, social movements depend on Facebook, Google, and Twitter. It’s been a tremendous boost in terms of organizing and lifting stories to reach new audiences. These platforms also connect otherwise disparate users who share a political critique to raise their voice together to force institutional change. Some may call this a “Twitter mob.” Others see it as an essential tool for accountability when there’s no other lever to pull, like creating an uproar that persuades the New York Times to dismiss an opinion columnist for her ties to an infamous Neo-Nazi, or that pushes Google to disband an AI “ethics board” because it included the transphobic head of the Heritage Foundation.  But many are also aware that reliance on corporations like Facebook and Google means giving up control over how we communicate. Someone may ascend to represent a movement online without actually taking part in grassroots advocacy to support it. Going viral gives the impression that an idea is gaining traction, but the constant flow of information required to fuel unending engagement on these sites means something else is bound to go viral soon. It’s difficult to hold anyone’s attention.","completion":"“Social media companies are making money off the hard work that we are doing, and it’s devalued the way we organize online,” Vanessa Butterworth, an environmental justice organizer, lamented to me in an interview. “Back in the day we had more in-person communication. And I feel like that showing up, whether it’s in the streets or organizing meetings or whatever — that’s slowly dying. It’s the personalized connection we’re losing.”  A revitalization of an Indymedia-like project today would never be a replacement for the platforms that are so intertwined with our lives. But it could provide a welcome retreat, a place online that is less tethered to corporate interests, where activists across movements locally and globally can share stories, calendars, and concerns without feeding Facebook and Google’s advertising empire.  When social movements share infrastructure that they own, it’s easier to support each other. When we share space, we can begin to build the type of world we’re striving towards. That may mean online communication channels that ban racism and forums that respect privacy from the start. It could mean building archives to store photos and videos of social movements in such a way that facial recognition is prohibited, the files can be deleted at any time, and nobody is profiting off of every view. If there’s ever a future where we can begin to reimagine the internet as a commons, rather than a shopping mall with a handful of big-box platforms that extract our data and our time, building our own network may be a good start.  But in order for anything to last, it has to be used. A resource is used when it’s serving a purpose and there are people at the center keeping it strong. If a new leftist network is built today, its nodes should strive to support a unifying concern on a global or national scale, like immigration, racial justice, or environmental destruction, while remaining deeply connected to local communities and their own particular informational needs. Now might be the perfect time to build something new. The corporations that form our digital sphere are facing a political crisis. They’ve become conduits for violent hate around the world and have made our elections awful. Indymedia shouldn’t be replicated — it was nowhere near perfect. But its example reminds us that a better internet is possible, if we are willing to build it."}
{"prompt":"It is human to resist even when our resistance is barely registered by those in power. In her memoir of working in an Amazon warehouse in Leipzig, Germany in 2010, Heike Geissler recalls these lines from Austrian playwright and novelist Elfriede Jelinek: “Anyone alive disrupts.” Speaking to herself or perhaps to the reader — the book is written almost entirely in the second person — she adds, “You ought to prove to your employer that you’re alive.” Geissler imagines various disruptive tactics for doing so. One could hide products to “remove them from the commodities cycle,” damage products and pretend they arrived that way, or damage them subtly “so that the damage is only revealed once they arrive at the customer.” Toward the end of the book, Geissler’s boyfriend receives a package that appears to have been sabotaged in just this way.","completion":"Inevitably, she writes, you’ll get caught. “Everything gets found out in this company, but up to that point you’d have lived a little more in your workplace and you’d have ordered your obedience to retreat.” These small acts of individual resistance — means of asserting one’s humanity against a system elaborately designed to blot it out — are versions of what sociologists and anthropologists call “weapons of the weak.” They tend to arise when relatively powerless groups contest the conditions of their subjugation by powerful subjugators. James C. Scott’s seminal 1985 study of Malaysian peasant resistance by the same name taxonomizes these quotidian acts of defiance, including foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, and sabotage.  Amazon has built a vast logistics empire by subjecting its workforce to extreme forms of technological discipline — designed to keep workers isolated, fearful, and maniacally productive. This piece sets out to surface the “weapons of the weak” wielded by workers to resist this regime. I talked to current and former Amazon employees, spoke with warehouse worker organizers, read exit interviews on Indeed and Glassdoor, and visited online forums where Amazon workers congregate to complain, commiserate, shoot the shit, and seek and offer advice. I learned a great deal about the regime of total surveillance and bodily control that Amazon has built to manage its growing logistics workforce. And I learned about the counter-strategies that workers deploy to resist the dehumanization, boredom, pain, and mental anguish that Amazon’s disciplinary apparatus exacts."}
{"prompt":"The warehouse workers I encountered play games, against themselves or their coworkers. They cheat to artificially boost their productivity numbers. They pass these tricks around in coded language. They use their scanners to find erroneously underpriced items and buy them in bulk. (Some steal outright.) They play (usually harmless) pranks on overbearing managers. And almost all of them skirt safety rules to move faster. Naturally, my sources were hesitant to disclose the specifics of some tactics, particularly those that openly defy Amazon’s rules or the law. In some cases, even when I learned them, I’ve left the details deliberately vague.  By far the most common form of resistance among Amazon employees, however, is to quit. A warehouse organizer in Illinois told me that employees who have been around for at least six months are considered “old guard.” For most workers, an Amazon warehouse job is exhausting, deadening, and unsafe. “They work themselves to the bone and wind up washing out,” said Charlie, a fulfillment center worker in Northampton County, Pennsylvania.  For those who stay, the draw is Amazon’s generous compensation and benefits package, relative to other low-wage workplaces. “The running joke is that the only benefit to working at Amazon is the benefits,” Charlie told me. For full-time employees, Amazon offers health insurance plans and a 401(k); in October 2018, CEO Jeff Bezos established a $15 minimum wage across its US warehouses. Even before then, Amazon tended to pay better than other employers in the logistics industry.","completion":"Amazon builds fulfillment centers in hollowed-out industrial areas and the exurban fringes of increasingly unlivable cities. Warehouse jobs are often the best (or only) game in town. Even so, workers say, it’s not always worth the trouble. According to Sam Nelson, an organizer with Jobs with Justice, a national coalition of unions and community groups, a frequent refrain among workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Shakopee, Minnesota is, “This is the best job I ever had, and I’m going to quit in two months.” In this context, daily acts of resistance serve as body and sanity-saving strategies. Small workarounds — tricks, games, minor sabotage — extend the time one can bear the relentless and deadening grind. A strategy that saves one’s calves an extra trip across the warehouse could make the difference between quitting this week and holding out for another paycheck.  These strategies are not only valuable, then, for privately registering one’s discontent but also for survival. At their limit, they may even be genuinely oppositional: functioning as forms of industrial sabotage or fostering solidarity among the workers. In Weapons of the Weak, Scott writes that everyday resistance enables those he observed to “nibble away” at onerous or unfair policies without risking “more quixotic action.” Even when the oppressed decline mass action, Scott argued, petty insubordinate gestures “create a political and economic barrier reef” on which the ship of state (or capital) might eventually run aground.  But there is a danger in over-valorizing the weapons of the weak. You risk conceding that the weak will always remain so — giving up the possibility of collective upheaval. Some acts of resistance actively inhibit mass action. Skirting safety rules and deploying labor-saving tricks may provide the feeling of having pulled one over on the boss, but they often benefit the company. Games displace competition horizontally, among coworkers, and insulate management from labor’s ire. And even those techniques which slow productivity may merely function as safety valves, preventing the buildup of more acute and collective rage."}
{"prompt":"On the other hand, small acts — especially those that involve some sort of coordinated deception — may awaken a willingness to defy that eventually enables larger, more decisive acts. Whether any of the acts of sabotage, subterfuge, or evasion committed by Amazon workers are accreting a hazardous reef remains to be seen. What is certain is that, one way or the other, we need to sink the ship.","completion":"The Rule of the Rate Amazon’s global distribution infrastructure — from fulfillment and sort centers, to cross-docks, delivery stations, and Prime Now Hubs — now covers almost 222 million square feet, an area roughly a third the size of Manhattan. In every province of this fiefdom, as one Amazon warehouse worker quipped on Reddit, “the almighty rate rules” — that is, the speed at which each worker does her job.  Amazon has risen to monopolistic dominance by shortening the critical time between the production and realization (i.e. sale) of commodities. Incorporating the lessons of “just-in-time” production innovated by Japanese car manufacturers, Amazon’s vast logistics network is designed to minimize the amount of time that products sit still. “The longer something sits and isn’t in motion, the less money Amazon makes,” said Charlie, the Pennsylvania fulfillment center worker. Whether stowing, picking, sorting, or delivering Amazon products, workers are expected to perform at a breakneck pace — while maintaining accuracy.  Since the advent of wage labor, time has been a key disciplinary tool for bosses. But Amazon has taken this technique to a new level, building a massive and intricate system of surveillance and control to accelerate the rate of productivity. “There is no privacy,” Charlie said. Many sort and fulfillment centers are vast, brightly lit affairs, with unforgiving concrete floors and high ceilings. Cameras are ubiquitous. “You should start thinking of it like a prison structure… We just presume we’re always being watched.”  When Amazon was granted a patent last year for a haptic wristband with a motion sensor designed to guide workers’ hands toward inventory items — or, as some darkly speculated, to buzz when they fall behind and need some haptic motivation to speed up — privacy advocates gasped. But such innovations, current and former workers tell me, would only augment existing tactics."}
{"prompt":"At a typical fulfillment center, certain workers unpack products arriving from manufacturers and suppliers; others stow them amid vast rows of shelves; and “pickers” fulfill orders by grabbing the correct items from the shelves and putting them in a tote, which is conveyed to “packers” who prepare the order for shipment. Workers log their interaction with each product and its location via a scanner, which almost every one of them carries.  If you’re a picker, your scanner tells you the location of the product to be picked and begins counting down the time it should take you to get there. If it takes you longer than the allotted time, the clock starts counting up, recording the amount of time you’ll have to make up later to stay “above rate.” When you arrive at your destination, you scan the shelf or bin, find the item, and place it in your tote. Then you get another location. This process continues until the products needed for the order — or some portion of an order or set of orders — is complete. You set the tote on a conveyor and the process starts again.","completion":"The scanner is a powerful surveillance tool. It records your productivity rate — displaying it on its interface — as well as the time between subsequent scans (aka Time Off Task or TOT). If your TOT exceeds fifteen minutes or your rate falls below the prescribed speed for the day, you’ll get a visit from a manager or a write-up. Too many write-ups and you’ll be cut loose. “Rates are used as Damocles’ sword,” Charlie said. “You can be king, but there’s a blade hanging above your head held by a thin hair.”  To encourage competition, managers publicly post a ranking of employee productivity at the end of each day. In some warehouses, there’s a whiteboard; in others, a printed piece of paper or an electronic display. Ashleigh Strange, who worked at a warehouse in Breinigsville, Pennsylvania between 2013 and 2015, said this practice was also a “method of group shaming.” “If you were the worst person in the warehouse,” Ashleigh said, “you’re going to know it. And so will everyone else.” In some warehouses, bottom performers are automatically enrolled in remedial training — or written up.  Management also runs what employees called “power hours,” during which workers are incentivized by raffle tickets or Amazon “swag” to work as fast as humanly possible. “You get an unimportant reward for working as fast as you can,” said Charlie. “Everyone competes. This becomes the new baseline.” Online Amazon worker forums are full of strategies for artificially boosting rates. One worker discovered that managers were basing his productivity numbers on how quickly he started work after a break. By leaving a count loaded in his scanner, he could trick the computer into thinking he had resumed work with a flurry of activity. Others boost their count by rapidly scanning several bins of small items.  These little tricks get shared obliquely, “like hobo symbols,” said Charlie. “A lot of, ‘I don’t do this, but I heard that… ’ or, ‘This is the way I don’t do it.’” These strategies circulate through departments until management catches on, which they usually do. In the meantime, shortcuts and hacks allow for brief reprieves from the relentless pace of the work — sometimes more than a brief reprieve. As one prodigious hustler put it on Reddit, “I get my production really high and fuck around for the rest of the week.”"}
{"prompt":"Resisting for the Boss In Manufacturing Consent, labor ethnographer Michael Buroway writes that productivity games often “arise from worker initiatives, from the search for means of enduring subordination to the labor process.” But these temporary escapes come at a cost. By “redistribut[ing] conflict from a hierarchical direction into a lateral direction,” games can blind workers to their shared adversaries.  Geissler, the German warehouse worker, observed this phenomenon among her colleagues in Leipzig. “You’re in a so-called flat hierarchy,” she writes, “in which all flat hierarchists are gagging for an opponent.” Seeing the corporation itself as too complex and distant a target, she and her coworkers directed their discontent and irritation toward whomever was closest — often each other.","completion":"On the other hand, some workers report deep camaraderie with their coworkers. While managers try to foster a culture of snitching, it doesn’t always work. Charlie’s job requires him to correct inventory errors, including those caused by his coworkers “creative” scanning. “Some of us try to fix it, but it’s not really a priority unless it deals with Loss Prevention” — that is, unless his coworkers are actually stealing products. “Associates try to watch each other, not report each other. We help each other.” In her forthcoming book Data Driven: Truckers and the New Workplace Surveillance, the sociologist Karen Levy observed comparable techniques deployed by truckers to evade onboard electronic monitoring. These ranged from brute-force sabotage (covering an onboard recorder “with a small bag of dry ice and tapping them with a rubber mallet” leaves “no outward sign of assault” while shattering the machine’s “solid-state innards”) to data editing, GPS jamming, and hacking (in one driver’s case, in order to play solitaire and Quake on the truck’s onboard computer)."}
{"prompt":"“There is value to resistance that doesn’t challenge the status quo,” Levy told me. “Things like identity formation and cultural preservation are also reasons to resist, whether or not you change the system.” Workplace games and tricks provide escapes from monotony, while sharing them among coworkers — either in the workplace or in online forums — can foster a sense of shared identity.  But, Levy says, resistive tactics don’t necessarily pose a threat to underlying (exploitive) paradigms; sometimes they even reinforce them. Many of the everyday evasions Levy observed among the truckers were aimed at skirting federal laws that prevent truckers from driving longer, more dangerous hours. Expressions of autonomy, perhaps, which nonetheless benefit the boss.  Similarly, some of the strategies deployed by Amazon workers — especially those that evade safety precautions — allow them to work faster. Rate-based games, even those that aren’t sanctioned by management, can have the effect of boosting Amazon’s overall productivity.","completion":"What’s more, Levy told me, “Certain types of resistance can become a release valve for people — like recycling.” Or like hating your boss and scribbling graffiti about him on the walls of the men’s room. “You feel like you’ve done something. You say, okay, that’s done.” In this way, resistance greases the gears of the system, enabling a daily negotiation over power and consent which forestalls any ultimate confrontation. In some cases, the weapons of the weak are not merely insufficient; they impede collective action.  Bad Robot One of the reasons that Amazon workers resort to resistive measures is to preserve their health in a workplace constantly trying to destroy it. Amazon is consistently rated among the most dangerous workplaces in America — and those numbers would be much higher if workers consistently reported their injuries."}
{"prompt":"“Workers must reach punishingly high rates, with each act measured for efficiency and quality,” writes Martin Harvey, an Amazon warehouse worker and graduate student. “The impacts of this process on human bodies and minds is horrific: joint pain, carpal tunnel, blown backs, anxiety, and depression are all common aspects of the work.”  “There is no way to do a job without being ‘creative’ with ‘Do your job safely, do it correctly, but make rate,’” reads a Reddit post on a thread about safety hazards at fulfillment centers. And because inaccuracy and inefficiency can cost you the job, workers are implicitly encouraged to skirt the safety rules.  Ashleigh told me she frequently ignored aches and pains and injuries while on the job. “You smash your finger in a crate, you’re going to hold your breath and keep going,” she said, “Because otherwise, A, they’re going to find a way to tell you it’s your fault or, B, if you stop and complain, go to the [medical] office, that will affect your rate.” Then it will be up to a manager’s discretion whether the note from AmCare, Amazon’s in-house medical office, is enough to give you a break on your numbers.  When they are severely injured on the job, a Guardian investigation found, employees have had to fight Amazon for worker’s comp. Michelle Quinones of Fort Worth, Texas was sent back to the warehouse floor from AmCare at least ten times after reporting carpal tunnel pain. When her wrist finally needed surgery, Amazon’s workers’ comp insurer fought her for over a year before paying for the procedure.  Anxiety and severe stress about meeting rate is also ubiquitous in the online forums and groups I visited. “Anybody else have nightmares and stress about not hitting rate?” reads a post with dozens of responses on an Amazon warehouse subreddit. “I constantly dread going to work… I hate stowing and I can’t get better no matter how hard I try… I drive home exhausted and lay in bed stressed about how I’m going to do the next day. I’ve been here 6 months almost, surprise I’m still even employed… I love amazon, but then I hate it. I just can’t do it and the stress is killing me.”","completion":"Some responses offer strategies for stowing quickly, while others debate productivity-enhancing substances. “Caffeine helped me. Red Bull, monster rockstar and now I’ve discovered 5 hour energy,” says one worker. “No the energy drinks just make you sweat a lot more and cause anxiety,” counters another. “CBD oil… might help (after work before bed) with stress and anxiety. It[’]s not illegal and won[’]t fail any drug tests it[’]s not like THC.” Public forums like these (and many private ones elsewhere on the internet) are collaborative spaces where agitation — shared expressions of anger and grievance — can congeal into solidarity. At a company that is notoriously parsimonious about Time Off Task, forums function as de facto break rooms where workers commiserate, complain, and perhaps even entertain collective action."}
{"prompt":"But sometimes these spaces also serve to rationalize the manifestly oppressive pressures of the workplace. Forum participants encourage each other to stick it out, to fight through pain. “It gets better” is a common refrain. They collaborate on techniques for pushing their bodies harder and for evading onerous safety regulations. Few tips are traded about how to flourish at Amazon; they are mostly about how to get by. Veterans advise newcomers to resign themselves to dehumanizing monotony or risk perpetual dissatisfaction: put your head down, get tunnel vision, give in to the flow. Sharing strategies for survival has the effect of normalizing the idea that “work” is something one can only aspire to (barely) survive.","completion":"In November 2018, Amazon workers organized demonstrations across Europe under the banner “we are not robots.” Responding to the protest, an Amazon employee wrote on Reddit, “No but I sometimes wish I were one. Life would be so much easier and I would be much more pleasant to work with if I had no emotions or pain.” Clotted Arteries Amazon has built the most advanced system in history for disciplining workers’ bodies. It pounds them, with fear and technology, into replaceable parts of a single machine. “All employees are essentially wetware attached to machinery,” says Charlie, the warehouse worker in Pennsylvania. The purpose of this machinery is to accelerate the rate of exploitation — allowing for an unprecedented quantity of wealth to be expropriated by a single man.  Amazon’s disciplinary apparatus isolates individual workers, encourages competition among them, and wears them down to the point of exhaustion and resignation — at which point, many of them quit. Temporary workers cycle in and out, and slack labor markets ensure a new workforce is always in waiting. Where resistance arises, it often only provides momentary solace — a break for the body, a fleeting feeling of defiance, or a way of letting off steam. Other times, as with safety regulations, the system relies on rule-breaking to function."}
{"prompt":"Yet Amazon’s approach to discipline also points to its greatest vulnerability: its need for speed. “In the idealised world-picture of logistics,” writes Jasper Bernes, “manufacture is merely one moment in a continuous, Heraclitean flux; the factory dissolves into planetary flows, chopped up into modular, component processes which, separated by thousands of miles, combine and recombine according to the changing whims of capital.” If this dream of frictionless flow has produced the dismal conditions within the Amazon warehouse, it also offers those same workers a potential source of leverage.  Whereas workers in a factory have the power to slow or halt production, workers in the logistics industry have the power to block circulation, to clot the channels through which capital flows and learns about itself. Longshoremen at major ports have wielded this power to great effect for a century, their strikes functioning as de facto blockades. And just-in-time logistics is potentially even more vulnerable to worker disruption, since it eschews the redundancies and backups that might have compensated for circulatory blockages in the past.  Logistics is both the circulatory and nervous system of contemporary capitalism. Amazon prefigures the worker as a seamless conduit — a neuron and a blood cell — in the free movement of information and commodities. Her behavior is minutely calibrated, at every moment, to serve the ever-fluctuating demands of a dynamic and hydraulic world system. If she and her coworkers refuse to play their role in this meticulously choreographed operation, however, the whole system seizes up.","completion":"Of course, such a project will rely on Amazon workers developing the sort of solidarity that is disincentivized by the disciplinary apparatus erected around them. It means reaching beyond forms of micro-resistance that may mitigate the most dehumanizing aspects of the work, but which are ultimately comfortably accommodated (if not actively encouraged) by the company structure.  Community Engagement To date, the only group of Amazon workers who have managed to collectively force a negotiation with management are those at the Shakopee, Minnesota fulfillment center outside Minneapolis. With the help of organizers from the Awood Center, a worker center funded by the Service Employees International Union, the predominantly Somali workforce has staged a series of protests against an ever-increasing pace of work which punishes devout Muslim employees for using break time to pray. On December 14, 2018, at the peak of the holiday rush, forty Shakopee warehouse workers walked off the job.  These actions have forced Amazon to come to the table. They’ve agreed to have Somali-speaking managers present for firings related to productivity and to hold quarterly meetings with the workers. An Amazon spokesperson told the New York Times that “the company did not see its work with the East African workers as a negotiation but rather as a form of community engagement similar to its outreach efforts with veterans and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees.”  But the Shakopee workers aren’t looking for “community engagement.” They’re fighting for changes in, and more control over, the conditions of their work. “Workers are using every avenue possible to try and win jobs that are safe and that invest in our families and our communities,” said Abdirahman Muse, director of the Awood Center.  During the night shift on March 7, 2019, around thirty stowers at Shakopee staged another walkout, returning to the warehouse after three hours with a list of demands. “In addition to calling for an ‘end [to] the unfair rates that force errors and end careers,’” Labor Notes reported, “they called on Amazon to stop the use of temporary employees, to ‘stop counting prayer and bathroom breaks against rate,’ and to better maintain the equipment that most often leads to injury.” [Eds.: On July 16, 2019, during the first day of the two-day Prime Day sale, organizers at Shakopee engaged in another work stoppage to protest working conditions.]"}
{"prompt":"To be sure, the workers at Shakopee have benefited from a tighter labor market. In Minnesota, Amazon can’t rely exclusively on washout and turnover to fix its labor problems. They’ve also benefited from preexisting cultural and communal ties which have provided fertile ground for building workplace solidarity. “One thing to know about our community — we talk a lot on the phone and chat over coffee,” Muse told the New York Times. “That makes organizing easier.” Most fundamentally, however, the workers have been successful because they’ve done large-scale actions together — actions that a pose a genuine threat to Amazon’s productivity goals, to the frictionless flow of goods, and therefore, to its bottom line.  The fact is that organizing beyond daily resistance is hard. So is overcoming fear inside a system designed to inspire it, and developing close bonds when the work demands callousness. Amazon has already begun to retaliate against workers who participate in small-scale protests. They will no doubt intensify their efforts if larger-scale unrest begins to stir. The experience in Shakopee suggests that mobilizing workers’ networks outside the warehouse is a necessary part of the strategy. Warehouses packed with thousands of workers can amplify impersonality and isolation; the neighborhood instead of the shopfloor may offer a more promising site for organizing.","completion":"And online forums, like those I consulted for this piece, may also be a place where solidarity and strategy is cultivated. “We’re not getting a raise unless we could organize something drastic,” wrote one worker in February 2018 on the Amazon warehouse subreddit, “like striking during Prime Week across the network. I’m talking representation in all shifts (days and nights), all departments.”  In response, another worker posted, “Funny enough, Someone wrote ‘Amazon needs a union!’ on the ‘voice of the associates board.’ Next day it was erased with no response.” The American criminal justice system has never been great for minorities. But in 2011, it got a lot worse. This was the year that the tech industry innovated its way into policing. It began with a group of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, who developed a system for predicting which areas of a city crimes were most likely to occur. Police could then flood these areas with officers in order to prevent offenses from being committed, or so the thinking went. In 2011, the Santa Cruz police department became the first law enforcement agency in the country to pilot the software. Time magazine promptly named “pre-emptive policing” one of the fifty best inventions of the year.  PredPol, as it would come to be called, became widely popular: more than sixty police departments across the country now use the software. Moreover, it would soon be accompanied by many other technologies that are currently transforming different aspects of the criminal justice system. These include everything from facial recognition software to algorithmic sentencing, which calculates “risk assessment” scores to inform criminal sentencing decisions."}
{"prompt":"Some of the ensuing coverage of these technologies wasn’t quite as flattering as Time’s. In recent years, journalists and academics like Julia Angwin at ProPublica and Joy Buolamwini at MIT have chronicled how predictive policing systems and algorithmic sentencing, as well as facial recognition software, are biased against black people. And, maybe even more importantly, researchers at Georgetown Law have detailed how facial recognition technology has been improperly used by law enforcement agencies.","completion":"These technologies, academics and journalists found, were directly exacerbating the hardships already faced by communities of color. Algorithmic sentencing was helping incarcerate minorities for even longer. Predictive policing was allowing law enforcement to justify their over-policing of minority communities. Facial recognition software was enabling the police to arrest people with little to no evidence."}
{"prompt":"The rising tide of tech criticism has focused attention on these injustices, and made the public conversation far more sophisticated than it was in 2011. Today, it might be harder to praise predictive policing as effusively as Time once did. More people realize that “AI” or “algorithms” aren’t neutral or objective, but rather rife with biases that are baked into their code. The social harms of these technologies is still a niche issue, but it’s no longer a fringe issue. Governments are already starting to engage more critically. In May 2019, San Francisco banned the use of facial recognition software by police and other public agencies, the first major American city to do so.","completion":"Even the tech companies themselves now feel compelled to join the conversation. IBM has made a “diverse” face database available for researchers studying facial recognition. Microsoft has called on the federal government to regulate AI. Google and the policing technology company Axon have created ethics boards — although Google dissolved its board after controversy erupted around the transphobia of one its members. Even companies like Amazon, generally not keen to engage on ethical questions around its business, are being forced to respond as researchers show the inherent bias in their facial recognition technology."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps the highest-profile response came in the form of IBM’s “Dear Tech” ad, which aired during the 2019 Oscars. A woman in a pink hijab asks, “Can we build AI without bias?” before pop star Janelle Monae appears, wondering if we can make “AI that fights bias.” For such an ad to appear during one of the most-watched broadcast events of the year illustrates just how mainstream the issue of technological injustice has become.","completion":"Inclusion or Abolition Yet as awareness of algorithmic bias has grown, a rift is emerging around the question of what to do about it. On one side are advocates of what might be called the “inclusion” approach. These are people who believe that criminal justice technologies can be made more benevolent by changing how they are built. Training facial recognition machine learning models on more diverse data sets, such as the one provided by IBM, can help software more accurately identify black faces. Ensuring that more people of color are involved in the design and development of these technologies may also mitigate bias."}
{"prompt":"If one camp sees inclusion as the path forward, the other camp prefers abolition. This involves dismantling and outlawing technologies like facial recognition rather than trying to make them “fairer.” The activists who promote this approach see technology as inextricable from who is using it. So long as communities of color face an oppressive system of policing, technology — no matter how inclusively it is built — will be put towards oppressive purposes.  Sarah Hamid of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an organization devoted to resisting police surveillance in Los Angeles, told me that she understands the tension between the two perspectives. “It’s really hard to think about because I understand the politics behind wanting to feel included and wanting to have things work for you but to completely ignore the fact that policing is a vector through this technology and intensifies it in a certain way — it feels like negligence to me.” [Eds.: As of August 13, 2019, Hamid is no longer affiliated with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.]  Stop LAPD Spying is one of the clearest examples of what the abolition approach looks like in practice. To them, the focus should be on curbing coercive relationships between law enforcement and the communities they police. So-called woke facial recognition is still intensifying policing, even if the software is better at identifying black faces and the tools are built by diverse teams, she explained.  Chris Gilliard, a professor at Macomb Community College in Michigan who studies privacy, surveillance and digital redlining, is similarly pessimistic that there is any function of policing technology that won’t harm marginalized groups. He sees the pro-inclusion position as driven by a sense that the current crop of technologies are inevitable.  “There’s sort of a ‘genie’s out of the bottle’ type attitude, which really disturbs me. Most of the stuff hasn’t been around that long to be ascribing to the level of inevitability that people do,” he explained. “It seems to be the prevailing idea is that the stuff is here and the way to deal with it is trying to make it less bad.” In other words, IBM’s products are coming whether we like it or not, so all we can do is make sure they’re inclusive and then get out of the way.","completion":"It’s Just Math! If one problem with the inclusion approach is its potential to reinforce oppressive practices, another problem is its potential to make the work of criminal justice reform even harder. As new criminal justice technologies take root, they present yet another obstacle to meaningful reform. Reforming policing practices and judicial policy is hard enough; now activists face the additional task of trying to tear down predictive policing, facial recognition software, algorithmic sentencing, and other related technologies.  They also face the task of demystifying those technologies. “Inclusive” criminal justice technologies can add a misleading facade of fairness to policing. They can reify oppressive practices into supposedly neutral technologies, making them harder to see and thus harder to organize against. Disproportionately higher arrest rates for minorities who commit nonviolent crimes are no longer the result of biased humans. Rather, they become the result of a “dispassionate” algorithm that doesn’t “see” race."}
{"prompt":"With eerie prescience, critical theorist Herbert Marcuse foresaw such a scenario in his 1964 book, One Dimensional Man. He described the dangers that would result as technology becomes “the great vehicle of reification.” For Marcuse, this meant that technology casts a deceptive veil over relationships between people and relationships between people and institutions, a veil that makes them seem as though they are “determined by objective qualities and laws.” Even though the underlying relationships remain the same, technology makes them “appear as calculable manifestations of (scientific) rationality.” Today, the underlying relationships between the criminal justice system and communities of color remain the same despite the introduction of new technologies. Making these tools less biased would likely produce better outcomes for those communities. But as Hamid, Gilliard, and many others have pointed out, “woke AI” doesn’t do much to address the context within which those technologies are deployed.  More accurate facial recognition cannot make policing better if policing models remain racially oppressive. Indeed, they can make things worse: software that is better at identifying black faces could easily facilitate even more aggressive policing of black people. And it’s unclear how algorithmic sentencing and predictive policing ever escape the underlying bias of the arrest data sets they’re based on.","completion":"Acknowledging these complexities, it becomes hard to see how reforming the technology alone, rather than limiting its use, is the best answer. The problem with the “woke AI” pushed by companies like IBM is that it asks us to see criminal justice in the same way that companies like Aetna want us to see healthcare: something that basically works fine, but which could use a few technological tweaks. Building AI to fix AI becomes the new version of an ill-contrived app that’s designed to “solve” healthcare. Nothing actually gets better — it might even get worse — but at least some people get paid."}
{"prompt":"In 2013, I was given a watch for Christmas. It was like one of those vintage Casio watches with the murky green LED screens. Except when you pressed one of the knobbly buttons on the side, it would announce the time. As we all do when we receive a gift that we aren’t too fond of, I grinned, feigned delight, and subsequently felt bad for not adoring the watch I was then strapping to my wrist. In retrospect, it was an exceptionally thoughtful present from an extended family who I saw, at most, once every four years. I was, after all, 6,572 miles away from my home in London, spending Christmas for the first time at my aunt’s house in the sweltering heat of Malaysia.","completion":"But that evening, as I sat indoors wallowing in the cool breeze of the air conditioner, with my eight and five-year-old second cousins clambering on me, eagerly pressing the button on my watch to make it screech “9:18 p.m.” in an obnoxiously loud female American voice, I couldn’t help but feel completely infantilized. It was like I’d just been handed a kid’s novelty Mickey Mouse watch at the age of nineteen. Worse still, I felt guilty for feeling this way about a device that would undoubtedly improve my life.  Earlier that summer, I had lost my central vision to a rare genetic disease called Leber’s Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON). Ever since, I’ve felt chained to the tendrils of technology.  A part of me says that I’m lucky — or as lucky as someone can be — to have lost my sight at a time of vast and relentless technological change, especially in the sphere of disability. But at the same time, I feel — still, six years on — suffocated by assistive technology. I was eighteen when I began losing my sight: the age when young adults are getting ready to leave the roost and take on the world. Instead, I was held back from becoming independent by my loss of vision, and forced to rely on nannying technology to do the most menial of tasks.  The thought that I’m going to be using assistive technology for the rest of my life still throws my stomach into freefall. I resent depending on technology to do all of the things we learn to do as children. I resent looking weak and vulnerable. I resent wearing hideous, eye-catching devices that tell the world I need help. I resent the loss of both my autonomy and my privacy."}
{"prompt":"Rear Window It wasn’t long ago when vision-impaired people had to rely on in-person support workers and independent-living care workers to help run basic errands. Today, technology is making it possible to get help remotely. Around the world, tens of thousands of vision-impaired people like me are welcoming strangers virtually into our homes — or bringing them along journeys outside our homes — to help complete tasks that require sight.  These disembodied guests enter our lives through the rear camera on our smartphones, via an app called Be My Eyes. If you need help doing something that requires the vision of a sighted person, all you have to do is open up the app, and within seconds you’re connected to a volunteer who can see whatever you point your rear camera at.  Last week, I connected to a volunteer and asked if they could tell me whether the frozen pizza I’d shoved into the oven and had already begun eating had expired or not. As I twisted the pizza box this way and that in the direction of my iPhone camera, I was acutely aware of how many things were in the shot. “Enjoy your pizza,” said a woman’s voice after she confirmed that I wasn’t about to die from food poisoning. “I love your pajamas, by the way!”  I melted into the ground from embarrassment as I pressed the “end” button on my iPhone, looking down at my reindeer-themed pajama bottoms. She had probably thought she was saying something completely innocuous. But it served as a painful reminder that my entire life was now on display. My dependency on strangers’ eyes means I’ll never escape these intrusions, no matter how vulnerable they make me feel.","completion":"There are startups going even further than Be My Eyes. Aira is a company that built a headset for people with low vision. For $124 a month, you can strap the device to your head and enjoy 120 minutes with a trained professional agent. The headset, which looks like a mix between Google Glass and steampunk-inspired specs, comes with a camera and an earpiece. The agent can see your surroundings through the camera and access your GPS location. With that, they can help talk a vision-impaired person through everyday sighted hurdles. It’s like a paid, hands-free version of Be My Eyes.  I would never wear Aira in public. Like my talking watch, I worry that it would draw attention, that it would single me out as someone who needs help. This is one of the reasons why I prefer to use Microsoft’s Seeing AI app: it’s the rare piece of assistive technology that helps you not have to ask for help from a stranger. As the name suggests, Seeing AI uses artificial intelligence and the smartphone’s rear camera to help people with low vision recognize text, scenes, and even faces. You can store pictures of your friends and family in the app so that it can identify them by name when the phone is pointed in their direction.  Like a lot of artificial intelligence, however, Seeing AI isn’t perfect. The other night, I was walking down London’s South Bank, desperately trying to find a pub using Seeing AI. At every venue, I stopped and pointed my phone up at the sign. Six pubs later, I realized that the app isn’t yet at the level where it can recognize ornately designed text or curly font that isn’t Times New Roman.  I considered asking a passerby for help. I even considered using BlindSquare, an app that could tell me how many meters away and in what direction the pub is from me. But I decided against it. Instead, I called up my friend sitting in the pub and asked them to come and get me.  From Bats to Apps The assistive technology boom for the blind arguably began in 1976, when New Zealand-based engineer Leslie Kay and his-then graduate student Russell Smith invented the Sonic Guide. Inspired by bats’ use of sonar for navigation, the Sonic Guide was a $2,000 piece of eyewear that transmitted auditory information to the wearer about their environment. The closer they came to an object in their path, the louder and more frenetic the noise became."}
{"prompt":"The Sonic Guide was revolutionary — except no one bought it. Kay and Smith went on to invent many other assistive devices, including the Viewscan, the first portable video magnifier; the first portable talking word processor; and the BrailleNote reader, all of which live on in different forms today. The company that Smith founded, today known as HumanWare, became the Apple of blind technology.  The field has been moving rapidly since the release of the Sonic Guide. Today we have digital magnification glasses like eSight; powerful video magnifiers from HumanWare; artificially intelligent headsets like OrCam, similar to Seeing AI; and Kay and Smith-inspired sonar-detecting bracelets like the Sunu Band. They’re all quite expensive, however, which is why the App Store’s endless stream of affordable and often free assistive apps are so important. With text recognition apps like KNFB Reader, money-identification apps like LookTel, GPS and location-orienting apps like BlindSquare or Microsoft’s Soundscape, costly physical devices are losing their monopoly on assistive technology.  Yet these apps aren’t always particularly sophisticated. Like Be My Eyes, they often involve a video link to a remote worker. They frequently rely on human rather than artificial intelligence. As such, they belong to a broader trend of on-demand labor apps like Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber. The support workers and personal assistants that vision-impaired people have always depended on are still there. But now they live on the other side of our phones, as gig workers performing platform-mediated labor.","completion":"Tethered, Together I’m with my friends in Old Spitalfields Market in East London. It’s trendy, sprawling, and filled with the scents of cross-continent street food. The market is bustling and we’re ravenous, but we can’t find the place we’re looking for. Finally I say, “Should I just use my phone?” “Let’s just use our eyes,” my friend says to me, before biting her tongue."}
{"prompt":"And then I get it: I’m not the only one who feels uncomfortable about my reliance on technology. I’m not the only one who hates knowing that I can’t live without my smartphone.  So I put my phone back in my pocket and let my friends keep looking for that Mexican place we can’t find. At least I know I’m not alone.","completion":"When entrepreneur and former dancer Brynn Putnam renovated her New York City exercise studio Refine Method back in 2016, the innovation that inspired the most effusive praise wasn’t the posh amenities or sophisticated tracking devices that often differentiate players in the elite and increasingly crowded boutique fitness space. It was the decidedly low-tech mirrors that Putnam had installed. Clients were thrilled with the “instant feedback” their reflections provided.  Putnam also happened to be pregnant at the time. Once her baby arrived, she became preoccupied with a problem long familiar to busy parents suddenly beholden to a newborn’s schedule: she struggled to find time to exercise, even at her own studio. She could only exercise at home."}
{"prompt":"Such were the initial sparks of inspiration for the Mirror, Putnam’s new at-home digital fitness product. Marketed as “nearly invisible,” it’s a far cry from the Thighmaster and the NordicTrack and the other clunky contraptions hawked on late-night infomercials and long synonymous with at-home exercise. The $1,495 (plus $39 per month subscription) carbon-steel Mirror looks like a full-length looking glass. But once switched on, connected to Wi-Fi, activated through its iPhone app, and synced with Spotify and an included heart-rate monitor, it transports the owner and her image to streaming and prerecorded group classes customized by fitness level, biometrics, and even playlist preference. While the current configuration only allows trainers to see the avatars and heart rates of class participants, a front-facing camera means the Mirror can function like a full-body Skype — a feature that will eventually allow the company to launch more interactive one-on-one training.  High-end fitness, from tracking apps to technical apparel, has exploded in recent years. It has boomed throughout the Great Recession and beyond, as Americans increasingly seek solace in the spaces where they sweat. The brands that have generated the most buzz over the past decade — SoulCycle, Barry’s Bootcamp, Orangetheory, to name a few — vary in aesthetic and ethos but are all built around a collective, in-person experience. Albeit an exclusive one: the price for a single class approaches $40 in some cities. A large part of what people are paying for is togetherness: the privilege to pulse or pedal or make pronouncements about self-care and spiritual enlightenment side-by-side with other initiates to the grapefruit-scented, syncopated world of luxe wellness.  MIRROR — the company that makes the Mirror — was born of this boom, but arguably signals a new direction in fitness tech. Along with the pioneering Peloton, the internet-connected exercise bike, MIRROR streamlines the boutique exercise experience to the point of individualizing it. What are the stakes of such a shift? If the gym is the new church, what happens when the church enters our homes? And when the altar at which we worship is our own image?","completion":"Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall Some critics have denounced MIRROR as yet another enabler of digitally mediated narcissism: “The Most Narcissistic Exercise Equipment Ever,” declared the New York Times. (That’s debatable: at Barry’s Bootcamp, the aggressively hashtagged #FaceYourself campaign invited exercisers to post workout selfies. Email reminders sported the winking subject line, “Don’t Forget to F Yourself.”)  But the Mirror need not symbolize a troubling slide toward self-absorption. More optimistically, it might expand access to a fitness culture that has long excluded those who feel out of place in, or find it hard to make time for, the gym. Like Jack Lalanne, who brought exercise to millions of homemakers on television in the 1950s, and Jane Fonda, who did so on an even larger scale with VHS thirty years later, MIRROR could harness the media technology of its own era to enable more people to exercise."}
{"prompt":"Kailee Combs, vice president of fitness at MIRROR, certainly sees it that way. When we spoke, Combs described how the company’s clientele spans fifty states and users aged nine to eighty. It includes “women who have never boxed and want a safe space try it and guys who want to do yoga” but might feel uncomfortable in overwhelmingly female yoga classes. Or, as Gerren Liles, one of MIRROR’s eight, New York City-based trainers put it, the Mirror allows you to “work out like you want, in your house, with no stigmas, and no one else seeing what you see except maybe the dog.” Liles connected me with Dori Gray, a self-described MIRROR devotee since “the beginning” (with an Instagram feed to prove it), who likes the device precisely for this reason. She works out in only a sports bra at home, a style that allows her a better look at her form, but one that many women eschew in more public workout spaces for precisely this reason.","completion":"The Mirror also has the potential to make high-end fitness more financially accessible. It might seem strange, given the sticker price and monthly subscription fee, but in the rarefied economy of elite fitness, the Mirror is relatively affordable. Consider that about the same amount of money gets you forty-five SoulCycle sessions in New York City (if you remember to log on in time to secure a spot): that’s less than one class per week, for a year, compared with unlimited classes for as long as you keep your Mirror subscription current. Combs points out that financing is also available and that more than one person in a household can use the Mirror, further driving down the cost.  Yet in a moment when working out is often understood as far more than a means to individual physical or aesthetic ends, MIRROR can feel out of step with the kumbaya language of “team,” “tribe,” and general transcendence through togetherness currently ubiquitous in high-end fitness. Perhaps the most revolutionary aspect of the Mirror is how powerfully it challenges this core tenet of luxe wellness: the collective experience. SoulCycle classes sell out because people buy into the inimitable energy of biking, in sync, on a beat. Y7 founder Sarah Levey Larson described “creating a sense of camaraderie” as the competitive advantage of her growing chain of hip-hop yoga studios; Inc. compared the vibe of the packed, dark rooms to a nightclub. People are scrimping on gas to buy classes at Orangetheory and meeting their “swolemates” at Crossfit. They — we — are spending large sums of money, and time, not just to work out, but to work out together."}
{"prompt":"The gym may just be the new town square — or at least the new country club — in an age when most IRL interactions are disappearing by the day. An ailing retail sector is invested in this interpretation, staking its hopes on gyms as anchor tenants in dying malls where department stores once stood, and holding fitness classes in clothing stores in an attempt to generate foot traffic. The operating assumption is that, in an online world, fitness is the last bastion where embodied engagement is imperative. This is a conviction so deeply held that I’ve seen workout classes in the unlikeliest places, like a prison-inspired bootcamp run by former inmates held amid designer ballgowns and handbags in Saks Fifth Avenue.  MIRROR is making a different bet. Boutique fitness created the market for Putnam’s product. But its success is staked on overturning that sector’s fundamental assumption: that sweating in person with a group of like-minded devotees who might become friends, in a space that is not your home, under the watchful gaze of an instructor who could come to know your name or at least compliment your leggings, is what makes high-end exercise worth its high-end price.  A Reflection of Its Time With $41 million in venture capital, an app, and a small army of celebrity Instagram influencers, MIRROR is a twenty-first-century company headquartered in offices at least superficially self-conscious about its history. Each room is named for a fitness icon, from Jack Lalanne to Jane Fonda to Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose name graces the main conference room. But that very history is ambivalent about the role of the mirror in exercise.  As early as 1899, the Los Angeles Times recommended that women using “home gymnasiums” obtain “a long mirror in which the gymnast can watch her own motions.” Yet resistance to the mirror has an equally storied past. Jazzercise, the fifty-year old dance-fitness phenomenon, was founded in part on the rejection of the reflection. Founder Judi Sheppard Missett, a trained dancer, realized that the women who attended her classes in 1960s Chicago were intimidated by the mirrors that reminded them, in real time, of their missteps. When she relocated to a basement without mirrors, the mood of the class changed — and grew into what would become one of the most successful franchise businesses of the 1980s.","completion":"“If there are mirrors, you tend to compare yourself to the instructor or other people in the class instead of being in the moment and enjoying yourself,” Missett’s daughter Shanna, who runs Jazzercise today, explained in a 2012 interview. Contemporary research in exercise psychology confirms this point, indicating that new exercisers regularly quit more quickly when required to workout in front of a mirror than those who are freed from their reflection.  But in the age of the ubiquitous selfie — essentially a mirror we all carry in our pockets, all the time — has the significance of working out before one’s reflection changed? Tara Well, an associate professor of psychology at Barnard College, describes the Mirror as “sort of like a dynamic exercise selfie” — perfect, perhaps, for our self-absorbed age. Yet selfies, as some feminists have pointed out, can also be an affirming form of self-fashioning in a culture that often imposes oppressive imagery on women.  The Mirror’s reflectiveness also serves a more pragmatic function, however: it helps you see what you are doing, especially without an instructor or a flawless front row to emulate. “It’s like having the best spot in the class with your favorite instructor any time you want and in the privacy of your own home,” says Well. Dori Gray, the Mirror user, agrees: “I use my core much more when I can actually see that I am not engaging my abs when I need to, and make that correction… It is a constant reminder to have good form.” This purpose of the mirror is as old as organized exercise itself: at the peak of the 1980s fitness boom, the Los Angeles Times offered an almost identical endorsement of mirrors nearly a century after first recommending them in 1899: “[W]atching yourself work out serves as a kind of reinforcement. So does watching yourself improve over time.” Not everything about the Mirror is as novel as its packaging."}
{"prompt":"Alone Together? Technology is often trashed for optimizing our interactions to the point of dehumanization. Grindr has elders longing for a lost cruising culture. Data-driven dating sites inspire nostalgia for an era when hookups happened after a chance encounter in a bar or elevator. ClassPass, the booking app that since 2013 has offered discount rates to exercise enthusiasts willing to bounce between studios for the best value, quickly sent devotees of particular studios bemoaning “the loss of community feel” in the New York Times. Might MIRROR inflict something similar? Is it just a matter of time before people drop out of collective fitness culture entirely? Will we one day long for the sweaty, if socially stratified, intimacy of SoulCycle?  Giving up IRL exercise experiences doesn’t seem to be on the agenda for Mirror users. Kristine Burke McDavid of South Boston, who also owns a Peloton bike, attends Orangetheory in her office park on the days she doesn’t use her Mirror, and “is always up for an outdoor activity.” She rides her bike in the summer and shovels snow in the winter. Mirror user Dori Gray still occasionally goes to in-person yoga or high-intensity interval training classes.  The Mirror, it seems, is best understood as a supplement to IRL fitness, not as its replacement. There is simply so much demand for fitness in our exercise-saturated moment, when Barbies come with yoga mats and colleagues compare steps on their corporate-issued Fitbits, that MIRROR doesn’t have to displace CorePower and Crossfit to be successful — the market might be big enough for all of them.  As MIRROR makes a dent in that market, however, its largest beneficiaries may be workers rather than consumers. This is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the Mirror: it may very well end up improving the economic lot of exercise instructors. The profession is growing faster than average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics — but, like adjunct professors, fitness professionals are a notoriously underpaid and unpredictably employed lot whose income is unscalable, since there are only so many hours one can teach (many of which are undesirably “off-peak”).","completion":"Platforms like the Mirror could allow instructors to scale their income by earning money more like recording artists, who profit when their songs are streamed or downloaded, not only from live performances. When I asked MIRROR instructor Alex Silver-Fagan the most surprising thing about the position, she answered, “Having a full-time job, haha! As a trainer this is rare.” This promise raises a new potential problem, however. A relatively small number of recording artists earn the vast majority of the revenue from streams and downloads. If MIRROR brought this same superstar model to the world of fitness, it could very well put a large number of midlist trainers out of business, since everyone would only be working out with a few big instructors."}
{"prompt":"Yet fitness is arguably already a superstar economy, where a handful of celebrity standouts land the clothing endorsements and media deals, while most others soldier along without basic workplace protections or a living wage. SoulCycle’s IPO filing acknowledged its reliance on the “star quality” of certain instructors, while, on the other side of the spectrum, the glut of yoga teachers can make it impossible for new instructors to recoup the cost of pricey trainings.","completion":"In this difficult landscape, MIRROR offers fitness professionals another way to earn a living — and, possibly, a better one. Whether it can fulfill this potential will ultimately come down to the actions of the workers themselves, and the power they wield by virtue of making our workouts possible. Then the Mirror may end up being a tool of transformation not only for the people in front of the mirror, but for those behind it."}
{"prompt":"An unusual cafe recently opened in central Tokyo. White plastic robots took orders from customers and brought them coffee. They glided slowly from table to table and spoke in a human voice.  Those voices belonged to actual humans, because actual humans were operating the robots remotely. The robots served as the eyes, ears, and hands of bedridden individuals with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), who piloted the machines from home using a tablet. The operators could move the robot around the room, manipulate its arms and head, and speak to customers through an on-board speaker.  While the cafe was only open for a few weeks on an experimental basis, the robots’ creator, Kentarō Yoshifuji, wants to launch a permanent “telerobot” cafe in time for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics and Paralympics. Yoshifuji aims to provide job opportunities for people with immobilizing disabilities who may not otherwise be able to work outside the home. He sees the model eventually migrating from the cafe setting into other service positions like airline check-in attendants.  More broadly, he envisions using the robots to revolutionize telework. Currently, most telework is disembodied: it involves workers in call centers or gig platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. But Yoshifuji is representative of a broader Japanese trend that aims to use telerobotics to facilitate embodied forms of remote labor. People could work a much wider range of jobs without leaving their home. In this new world, “working from home” could involve everything from serving customers in a cafe to checking in passengers for their flight.  While telerobotics is a global industry, this emphasis is unique to Japan. Most telerobotics companies in North America, China, and Europe are focused on highly skilled positions. They are building telerobots for the healthcare industry (“telemedicine”) and for various white-collar corporate contexts that let workers with specialized expertise be remotely present in a workplace. (Such experiments are not without controversy: a hospital in Fremont, California recently made headlines after a patient’s family objected to receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis via the video feed of a telerobot rather than by an in-person doctor.)","completion":"By contrast, Yoshifuji and other Japanese telerobotics innovators are focused on the opposite end of the labor market. They want to use telerobotics for the much larger field of lower-skilled service jobs. With telerobotics, the pool of people who could fill such jobs could grow to include individuals with illnesses like ALS, people with disabilities, the elderly, and those with childcare responsibilities that keep them at home. It could also include foreign workers prevented from entering the country by restrictive immigration laws."}
{"prompt":"The goal of Japanese telerobotics isn’t to provide better access to remote expertise in the form of higher-skilled workers, in other words, but to technologically recuperate lower-skilled workers who might otherwise be excluded from the workforce entirely. What is envisioned is nothing less than a digital platform for physical work, one that could utilize previously untapped labor reserves to power global networks of on-demand robot avatars.  This may open up potentially meaningful opportunities for those unable to physically travel to a work site. At the same time, it risks further isolating the already immobilized, enabling remote access to their physical labor while fixing barriers to their social mobility ever more firmly in place. While the stated promise of teleworker robots is one of freedom for those employed, in practice it is employers who are most liberated by the arrangement.  Working from Home Japan has been at the forefront of experiments with embodied telework since the 1980s, but it wasn’t the first in the field. Japanese researchers were building on initial teleoperator experiments in the United States that took place in the 1940s in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project, as military scientists tried to find a way to allow workers to physically manipulate radioactive materials while maintaining a safe physical distance. Subsequent American teleoperator research has continued to have a strong focus on operation in hostile environments, such as systems for military drone pilots to carry out missions remotely.  By contrast, teleoperator research in Japan took shape against the background of the country’s pacifist postwar constitution — itself a product of the American occupation —  which for a long time amounted to both a formal and informal taboo around research with direct military applications. As a result, Japanese researchers of the 1980s and 1990s worked on more everyday telerobotics uses, from caring for the elderly to housekeeping to helping the visually impaired navigate city streets.","completion":"In recent years, this emphasis on the everyday has come to center on a more pressing social challenge: the intensifying labor shortage triggered by the country’s aging population. As of December 2018, there were an average of 168 jobs for every 100 job seekers in Japan, with a shortage of 6.44 million workers expected by 2030. Some of the most acute shortages are in physical labor and service sector work. Convenience stores, for example, are increasingly struggling to find staff, even as much of the country has come to rely on them for access to basic goods and services."}
{"prompt":"One approach calls for putting bedridden seniors back to work using telerobotics. This is what Tokyo University professor Michitaka Hirose proposes in a 2016 book, arguing that VR-controlled telerobots could employ elderly Japanese well into their nineties and beyond. For seniors who no longer have the physical or mental resources to hold down a full-time telework position, he proposes a “senior cloud” job-share platform where several teleworking seniors could pool their skills to do the work of one younger adult. In recent talks, pioneering telerobotics and virtual reality researcher Susumu Tachi expands the potential labor pool even further, arguing that stay-at-home parents and overseas workers could also work as VR teleoperators.","completion":"The inclusion of overseas workers suggests that telerobotics offers a way to extract more labor power not only from those at home, but also from those abroad. This would extend the outsourcing trends that began in the 1980s and 1990s, when information technology made it possible to offshore certain kinds of service work. By the turn of the century, countries like India, Indonesia, and Mexico had large portions of their workforce telecommuting via computer on a regular basis, with nearly 10 percent of workers worldwide working from home every day according to a 2012 Ipsos/Reuters poll. Telerobotics has the potential to vastly accelerate this trend, because embodied remote workers can do many more kinds of jobs — including, potentially, those in manufacturing."}
{"prompt":"Tachi imagines using a global team of teleworkers to keep factories productive around the clock. He imagines three daily shifts split between workers in Nigeria, Japan, and Mexico, enabling a Japanese plant to stay in operation twenty-four hours a day. Along with reducing labor costs, telerobotics will also keep workers in their home countries. Tachi believes this would prevent the “problems” that an increase in physical immigration might cause.","completion":"This vague reference to “problems” echoes a recurring theme in Japanese robotics, as identified by the anthropologist Jennifer Robertson: a preference for technological solutions to the labor shortage as a less culturally threatening (and more politically palatable) alternative to increasing the number of foreign workers by relaxing Japan’s immigration laws. While the ruling Liberal Democratic Party recently pushed a controversial immigration reform bill through the Japanese legislature — set to increase the number of lower and medium-skilled work visas by 345,000 over the next five years — the changes still fall far short of fully addressing the labor crunch. Existing programs to provide foreign labor on a more short-term basis, such as the Technical Intern Training Program, have been notoriously vulnerable to employee abuse and exploitation.  Whereas autonomous robots would seek to replace these human workers entirely, telerobotics instead seeks to import only those aspects of human embodiment deemed economically useful. Somewhat ironically, Hirose, Tachi, and Yoshifuji each present their telerobot systems as a more human alternative to full-scale automation, even as they play up the technology’s advantage over on-site human labor and increased immigration."}
{"prompt":"Mask of the Robot  This brings us back to Yoshifuji’s cafe robots. Telework systems may offer meaningful opportunities to those who otherwise have limited options for traveling beyond their home or hospital room. Yet the power relationships inherent to these platforms ensure that remote workers remain highly dependent not only on those physically present at the worksite, but also on whoever controls the platform itself. The virtual mobility of the teleworker extends only as far as the labor market demands, and can be unilaterally revoked at any time.","completion":"For a preview of what this might look like, we can turn to existing digital “microwork” platforms like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The median hourly wage on Mechanical Turk is around $2 an hour. This comes with few opportunities for promotion or skill development, a risk of repetitive strain injuries and eye problems from long working hours, and limited recourse when it comes to conflict resolution or negotiating better working conditions. Many workers on these platforms come from the world’s poorest countries, while their labor helps sustain the economic productivity of the richest ones. Robot telework would extend these precarious and often neocolonial labor relations far beyond the screen, incorporating and exposing workers’ bodies more directly.  The selectively transmitted embodiment of telerobotics also risks the further erasure of already marginalized bodies. Unlike almost all teleworker robots produced outside of Japan, Yoshifuji’s robots do not show the operator’s face. Instead, they have a white plastic head with large mint-colored eyes that glow to signal a teleoperator is present. Standing a diminutive 120 centimeters tall, Yoshifuji’s robots are humanoid in shape but deliberately gender-neutral and vaguely alien in appearance. Yoshifuji argues that this abstracted appearance allows those who encounter the robots to more easily project emotions and personalities onto them as they see fit."}
{"prompt":"Yet these design decisions also foreclose the possibility of face-to-face human contact with the remote workers. The physical person of the worker is replaced with a cute, infantilized character designed according to the norms of Japanese avatar culture. Without discounting the potential appeal of swapping out one body for another, it will be the employer who decides how a teleworker will appear to the world, and what limits will be placed on their physical agency. While Yoshifuji claims that his goal is to eliminate the loneliness of the bedridden by enabling physical interaction outside the home, it seems likely that wearing the mask of the robot will intensify alienation rather than alleviate it.","completion":"Work Without Workers The telerobot proposals currently circulating in Japan rely on a tacit shift of social expectations surrounding workforce participation. The implicit message is that every last member of Japanese society (and beyond) must contribute their labor to the nation’s productivity over their entire lifetime, using whatever they have left to give.  Yoshifuji goes so far as to envision a day when telerobots could allow the bedridden to look after their own physical needs by controlling the bodies of their robot caretakers. This would address the already severe shortage of care workers by placing the care burden back onto those in need of care, extending neoliberal demands for self-reliance to even the most socially vulnerable. While telerobotics initially emerged as a way to shield workers from hostile environments, here the technology would serve to shield society from the need to take care of people who have ceased to be economically useful."}
{"prompt":"At the trans-national scale, embodied telework will intersect in complex ways with ongoing debates around the world over immigrant labor and cross-border migration. In parallel with the erasure of the elderly and people with disabilities, embodied telerobots risk the further effacement of the foreign workers keeping the service industries of countries like Japan and the United States afloat. Alex Rivera’s prescient 2008 science fiction film Sleep Dealer provides one dystopian vision for how embodied telework might interact with existing border politics. Rivera imagines a future where Tijuana factories use VR-enabled telework systems to allow Mexican workers to perform construction work and other physical labor in the US remotely. As one Mexican robot teleoperator in the film trenchantly puts it, “We give the United States what they always wanted: all the work, without the workers.” Yet even as embodied telework seeks to extend the outsourcing projects of earlier decades, it will likely operate in tandem with artificial intelligence and automation projects increasingly targeting these same positions. The most economically plausible scenario is a blend of the two approaches, relying on automated systems for some tasks while falling back on remote human labor for roles where a live human still has the advantage. This is already happening in existing online teleworker platforms, where piecemeal human labor often provides a kind of stopgap intelligence to make up for where full-scale automation falls short. For example, the Bangalore-based company Vernacular.ai provides chatbots to handle customer service calls, but switches over to live human operators when the AI is (as yet) unable to come up with a convincing response.","completion":"In a recent book, the economist Richard Baldwin predicts what he calls a “globotics upheaval” driven by this combination of globalized telework platforms and fully automated robots. But while Baldwin promises a richer and more “human” existence for those at the receiving end of these services, his book is conspicuously silent on the question of what it will be like for those already marginalized in the global economy to compete with AI systems for remote work. If prior eras of technologically enabled globalization are any guide, it will most likely widen the existing power divide between those operating the platforms and those with few options except to rely on them for employment."}
{"prompt":"The more embodied and perceptually immersive quality of the work means this power gap will be all the more viscerally felt by those whose bodies are put to work. As these physical telework platforms take shape, the critical question is how to ensure they do not simply strip the labor from the already vulnerable while shackling their bodies, extracting what is of economic value while leaving the rest behind.","completion":"1/ The narratologists, and screenwriters, say that there are only three stories: man against man, man against society, man against nature. But the geologists say there is just one: We have now entered an epoch when human activity is the main force shaping planet Earth. They can see it in the sediment. Even the rocks are not safe.  This means that nature, if by nature you mean somewhere out of human reach, no longer exists. To say that there is no nature outside of culture used to sound like a poststructuralist parlor game. Now it is common sense."}
{"prompt":"If human society has become a natural force, then nature is social. More and more struggles among men, otherwise known as politics, will concern it directly. Many struggles already do. Droughts and storms send refugees fleeing across borders. Countries race to stake out their slice of a melting Arctic.  \"Welcome to the Anthropocene!\" the cover of The Economist announced several years ago, as if Earth were an airport.  The internet may be the only place high enough to get a bird’s-eye view of the unfolding catastrophe. In one tab, the Amazon is burning. In another, Greenland is melting and burning. In the fall, the hurricanes hit. In the fall, when the fires start, the homeless come coughing into the emergency rooms. They will never be able to pay the bill. They are in good company: the richest men on the planet cannot pay for what they have taken.  Is it in \"our\" human nature to act this way?  We like to think not.","completion":"Meanwhile, a brave girl in a borrowed boat sets out across the Atlantic. 2/ We have been told two things about the relationship between technology and nature. The first is that technology has enabled humans to master nature. The second is that technology has caused humans to destroy nature. At the intersection of these two stories lies the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene contains a paradox: the term recognizes the immense power humans wield over the rest of creation, such that nothing on the planet is immune. Yet this same power poses a serious threat to humans. We’ve shaped the earth so intensively to suit our needs that it can no longer support them. (Some of us. Some needs.) In this issue, we try to tell a different story about the entanglements of nature and technology. No surprise that the end of the world looms large. Big Tech teams up with Big Oil to build systems for smarter drilling. The residents of a small town continue to fall ill long after the microchip plant shuts down.  But there are also reasons for optimism. There are movements demanding a more “correct relation with the non-human world,” to borrow one contributor’s phrase. This issue offers some materials for imagining what such a relation might look like."}
{"prompt":"3/ Technological mastery is a myth. Prometheus is not coming. In truth, everything is dirty, even the digital—especially the digital. Computers were supposed to be made of sunshine: “all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,” as another contributor to this issue famously wrote on her first computer, an HP-86, decades ago. As she already knew then, they are less pristine than promised. Their metaphors are ethereal but their footprints are filthy. They too are implicated in armageddon.","completion":"The renewable transition itself may involve new kinds of destruction. But recognizing that nature is human-entangled and vice versa opens up more options than conservation. Recognizing that there was never any Eden to return to lets you look ahead. Indeed, the most hopeful futures may come from the darkest histories, where the lessons of resistance have been well learned. The world has ended before; there have been many armageddons. But this also means: We have to learn how to mourn. To mourn without despair; to mourn towards a future."}
{"prompt":"I remember being nervous when I flew into Atyrau, Kazakhstan. Before boarding the flight, one of the business managers who organized the trip sent me a message with precise instructions on how to navigate the local airport: Once you land, get into the bus on the right side of the driver. This side opens to the terminal. Pass through immigration, pick up your luggage, and go through Customs. The flight crew will pass out white migration cards. Fill them out, and keep it with your passport. You will need to carry these documents on you at all times once you’ve landed.","completion":"Another coworker, who had flown in the night before, warned us not to worry if we found ourselves in jail. Don’t panic if you find yourself in jail. Give me a call and we’ll bail you out. Maybe she was joking. The flight itself was uncanny. I was flying in from Frankfurt, but it felt a lot like a local American flight to somewhere in the Midwest. The plane was filled with middle-aged American businessmen equipped with black Lenovo laptops and baseball caps. The man next to me wore a cowboy-esque leather jacket over a blue-collared business shirt."}
{"prompt":"After I landed in Atyrau’s single-gate airport, I located my driver, who was holding a card with my name on it. He swiftly led me into a seven-seater Mercedes van and drove me to my hotel, one of the only hotels in the city. Everyone from the flight also seemed to stay there. The drive was short. The city was overwhelmingly gray. Most of it was visibly poor. The hotel was an oasis of wealth.  Across from the hotel was another one of these oases: a gated community with beige bungalows. This was presumably where the expats who worked for Chevron lived. There was a Burger King and a KFC within walking distance. Everyone spoke a bit of English.","completion":"Security was taken extremely seriously. Each time we entered one of Chevron’s offices, our passports were checked, our bags were inspected, and our bodies were patted down. Video cameras were mounted on the ceilings of the hallways and conference rooms. We were instructed to travel only using Chevron’s fleet of taxis, which were wired up with cameras and mics."}
{"prompt":"All of this — Atyrau’s extreme security measures and the steady flow of American businesspeople — comes from the fact that the city is home to Kazakhstan’s biggest and most important oil extraction project. In 1993, shortly after the fall of the Soviet Union, the newly independent nation opened its borders to foreign investment. Kazakhstan’s state-owned energy company agreed to partner with Chevron in a joint venture to extract oil.  The project was named Tengizchevroil, or TCO for short, and it was granted an exclusive forty-year right to the Tengiz oil field near Atyrau. Tengiz carries roughly 26 billion barrels of oil, making it one of the largest fields in the world. Chevron has poured money into the joint venture with the goal of using new technology to increase oil production at the site. And I, a Microsoft engineer, was sent there to help.  Cloud Wars Despite the climate crisis that our planet faces, Big Oil is doubling down on fossil fuels. At over 30 billion barrels of crude oil a year, production has never been higher. Now, with the help of tech companies like Microsoft, oil companies are using cutting-edge technology to produce even more.  The collaboration between Big Tech and Big Oil might seem counterintuitive. Culturally, who could be further apart? Moreover, many tech companies portray themselves as leaders in corporate sustainability. They try to out-do each other in their support for green initiatives. But in reality, Big Tech and Big Oil are closely linked, and only getting closer.  The foundation of their partnership is the cloud. Cloud computing, like many of today’s online subscription services, is a way for companies to rent servers, as opposed to purchasing them. (This model is more specifically called the public cloud.) It’s like choosing to rent a movie on iTunes for $2.99 instead of buying the DVD for $14.99. In the old days, a company would have to run its website from a server that it bought and maintained itself. By using the cloud, that same company can outsource its infrastructure needs to a cloud provider.","completion":"The market is dominated by Amazon’s cloud computing wing, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which now makes up more than half of all of Amazon’s operating income. AWS has grown fast: in 2014, its revenue was $4.6 billion; in 2019, it is set to surpass $36 billion. So many companies run on AWS that when one of its most popular services went down briefly in 2017, it felt like the entire internet stopped working.  Joining the cloud business late, Google and Microsoft are now playing catch-up. As cloud computing becomes widely adopted, Amazon’s competitors are doing whatever they can to grab market share. Over the past several years, Microsoft has reorganized its internal operations to prioritize its cloud business. It is now spending tens of billions of dollars every year on constructing new data centers around the planet. Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that in 2019, the company is putting $13 billion into constructing new offices and data centers in the US alone, the majority of which will go to the latter."}
{"prompt":"Startups have long been the biggest early adopters of the public cloud. They are an obvious fit: they do not own their own data centers, so the opportunity cost of switching to the public cloud is low. By contrast, it is much harder for large companies that do run their own data centers to make the leap, since it would require selling or retiring those centers.  This helps explain why cloud providers have only captured about 30 percent of the total addressable market. While cloud technology has matured considerably over the past half-decade, big corporations that run their own data centers still dominate the majority of the world’s IT infrastructure. For Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as a few smaller cloud competitors like Oracle and IBM, winning the IT spend of the Fortune 500 is where most of the money in the public cloud market will be made. And among those large companies, Big Oil sits at the top. Out of the biggest ten companies in the world by revenue, six are in the business of oil production. In order words, the success of Big Oil, and the production of fossil fuels, are key to winning the cloud race.  Making Friends In 2017, Chevron signed a seven-year deal with Microsoft, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to establish Microsoft as its primary cloud provider. Oil companies like Chevron are the perfect customer for cloud providers. For years, they have been generating enormous amounts of data about their oil wells. Chevron alone has thousands of oil wells around the world, and each well is covered with sensors that generate more than a terabyte of data per day. (A terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes.)  At best, Chevron has only been able to use a fraction of that data. One problem is the scale of computation required. Many servers are needed to perform the complex workloads capable of analyzing all of this data. As a result, computational needs may skyrocket — but then abruptly subside when the analysis is complete. These sharp fluctuations can put significant pressure on a company like Chevron. During spikes, their data centers lack capacity. During troughs, they sit idly.","completion":"This is where the promise of the public cloud comes in. Oil companies can solve their computational woes by turning to the cloud’s renting model, which gives them as many servers as they need and allows them to pay only for what they use.  But Big Tech doesn’t just supply the infrastructure that enables oil companies to crunch their data. It also offers many of the analytical tools themselves. Cloud services provided by Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have the ability to process and analyze vast amounts of data. The tech giants are also leaders in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), a field focused on teaching computer systems to automatically perform complex tasks by “learning” from data. With AI/ML, oil companies can make better sense of all the data they are collecting, and can discover patterns that may help them make their operations more efficient and less costly.  AI/ML gives Big Oil yet another reason to depend on Big Tech: the level of sophistication often requires delving into the cutting edge of a field that the tech titans dominate. And if sharing their AI/ML expertise means getting a leg up on the competition in the cloud market, tech companies are more than willing to help.  In recent years, Big Tech has aggressively marketed the transformative potential of the public cloud and AI/ML to Big Oil, with great success. In 2017, Microsoft signed its seven-year contract with Chevron; in 2018, it announced major partnerships with oil giants BP and Equinor; and in 2019, it signed a deal with ExxonMobil that Exxon claims is “the industry’s largest [contract] in cloud computing.” Amazon recently opened an AWS office in Houston, the US oil and gas hub, and has been hiring AI/ML experts specifically to work on fossil fuel projects. Google has also developed deep relationships in the industry, partnering with Total, Anadarko Petroleum, and Nine Energy, and appointing Darryl Willis, an oil veteran, to lead Google Cloud’s newly formed Oil, Gas & Energy division. Whatever the tech giants are telling their friends in the fossil fuel industry, it’s working."}
{"prompt":"Drill Baby Drill The multi-million-dollar partnership between Microsoft and Chevron was the reason I went to Kazakhstan. Microsoft sent me to Atyrau for a week-long workshop to help the Tengiz oil field adopt our technology. I was there to talk about computer vision, a field of AI/ML that gives computers the ability to understand digital images, but the workshop covered a range of topics in both AI/ML and cloud computing. We held it for a team at TCO tasked with boosting daily oil production from 600,000 barrels to 1 million. They wanted to learn about how Microsoft technology could help them modernize their oil field and increase efficiency.","completion":"The workshop took place in a large conference room in one of the TCO office buildings. The building itself wasn’t particularly fancy. The exterior was run-down: it looked like it was last renovated in the 1980s. Aside from the security guards dressed in dark clothing, the interior was mostly white, with bright marble floors. The only bits of color came from the biscuits and pastries that were laid out on tables in front of the conference rooms.  At the workshop, I gave a short technical demonstration about running computer vision at scale on Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. There were about forty people in the audience, predominantly businesspeople. My presentation felt like a marketing technique: the point was to flex Microsoft’s engineering prowess to a technically illiterate business crowd. I made sure to include a lot of engineering jargon: “distributed training,” “offline scoring,” “Docker-compatible.” On the third day of the workshop, a small group of us convened at TCO headquarters in Atyrau to discuss specific AI/ML scenarios they wanted to implement. The meeting room was much nicer than where the workshop was held. It featured new videoconferencing equipment and plush ergonomic chairs. A half-dozen TCO managers were present. Yet, strangely, none of their technical staff attended. The TCO managers were mostly Americans and, with one exception, all white men. They wore monochrome suits and polished leather shoes. I felt out of place wearing sneakers and an oversized button-down. There was not a single Kazakhstani in the room.  To kick off the meeting, a Microsoft account manager gave a PowerPoint presentation that discussed common problems in the oil and gas industry that could be solved using AI/ML. One of the most complex use-cases involved using AI/ML to improve oil exploration. The traditional way to find a new oil or gas deposit is to perform a seismic survey. This is a technique that sends sound waves into the earth and then analyzes the time it takes for those waves to reflect off of different geological features. Because the data is volumetric and spans hundreds of kilometers at a minute granularity, the data collected from a single seismic survey can run over a petabyte. (A petabyte is a million gigabytes.) The output of this data is a 3D geological map, which geophysicists can study in order to recommend promising locations to build wells."}
{"prompt":"However, interpreting this map is a long and labor-intensive process. It can take months and involve many geophysicists. To make the process more efficient, computer vision technology can automatically segment different geological features to help geophysicists understand the 3D data and identify where best to drill. It seemed like a perfect example of the partnership I had been sent to Kazakhstan to help forge: a technically sophisticated and computationally intensive undertaking that played to the strengths of Big Tech while advancing a core priority of Big Oil, which was to dig more fossil fuels out of the ground while cutting costs.  Big Oil Is Watching But the TCO managers also wanted to talk about something else. “We have a lot of workers in the oil fields. It would be nice to know where they are and what they are doing,” one manager said. “If they are doing anything at all.” This is what our Chevron partners were most keen to discuss: how to better surveil their workers. TCO had thirty or forty thousand workers on site, nearly all local Kazakhstanis. They worked on rotating shifts — twelve-hour days for two weeks at a time — to keep the oil field running around the clock. And the managers wanted to use AI/ML to keep a closer eye on them.  They proposed using AI/ML to analyze the video streams from existing CCTV cameras to monitor workers throughout the oil field. In particular, they wanted to implement computer vision algorithms that could detect suspicious activity and then identify the worker engaging in that activity. (My Microsoft colleagues and I doubted the technical feasibility of this idea.) Enhancing workplace safety would be the reason for building this system, the managers claimed: more specifically, they hoped to see whether workers were drunk on site so that they could dispatch help and prevent them from hurting themselves. But in order to implement this safety measure, an “always-on” algorithmic monitoring system would have to be put in place — one that would also happen to give management a way to see whether workers were slacking off.","completion":"The TCO managers also talked about using the data from the GPS trackers that were installed on all of the trucks used to transport equipment to the oil sites. They told us that the workers were not trustworthy. Drivers would purportedly steal equipment to sell in the black market. Using GPS data, the managers wanted to build a machine learning model to identify suspicious driving activity. It’s not a coincidence that minor tweaks to the same model would also allow management to monitor drivers’ productivity: tracking how frequently they took bathroom breaks, for example, or whether they were sticking to the fastest possible routes."}
{"prompt":"The TCO managers were also interested in Microsoft products that could analyze large quantities of text. “Let’s say we have the ability to mine everyone’s emails,” one executive asked. “What information could we find?”  When I reflect back on this meeting, it was a surreal experience. Everyone present discussed the idea of building a workplace panopticon with complete normalcy. The TCO managers claimed that monitoring workers was necessary for keeping them safe, or to prevent them from stealing. But it wasn’t convincing in the slightest. We knew that they simply wanted a way to discipline their low-wage Kazakhstani workforce. We knew they wanted a way to squeeze as much work as they could from each worker.  I held my tongue and made sure to appear calm and collected. So did my colleagues. Collectively representing Microsoft, we turned a blind eye, and played along perfectly. We sympathized with TCO’s incriminating portrayal of their Kazakhstani workers and the need to uphold the rule of law. We accepted their explanation that increased surveillance would improve worker safety. But truth be told, we didn’t even need the excuses. Microsoft was hungry for their business. We were ready to concede.","completion":"Skip the Straw The topic of worker surveillance took me by surprise. I didn’t sign up for it. I did sign up for helping to accelerate the climate crisis, however — and it was something I had thought about a lot by the time I landed in Atyrau.  When I was first asked to present at the workshop, I was excited. It was good for my career, the technology was fascinating, and I had never been to Kazakhstan. But I hesitated. Did I really want to help Chevron destroy the planet? There were others on my team who could have easily gone in my place. Still, I decided to go. I wanted to learn about the oil industry and the kinds of investments that Big Tech was making. I wanted a front-row seat to the Microsoft-Chevron partnership. I wanted to know what we were up against.  During the workshop, I asked a coworker how she felt about Microsoft working with Big Oil. She responded sympathetically, understanding my concerns about climate change. But she also seemed to feel there was nothing we could do. For her and many other colleagues I’ve spoken to, change has to happen at the top. The problem, of course, is that the top has powerful incentives not to change. Microsoft executives aren’t going to give up on the billions of dollars to be made from Big Oil, especially if it helps them win more of the coveted cloud market."}
{"prompt":"They are happy to offer employees small ways to live more sustainable lives, however. The company runs various recycling programs, encourages employees to “skip the straw” to reduce plastic consumption, and funds sustainability hackathons. (One hackathon project involved using AI/ML to detect trash in the ocean.) More broadly, Microsoft works hard to present an environmentally friendly public face. Its most ambitious green initiative is its promise to power its energy-hungry data centers with renewable sources. In 2016, Microsoft announced its goal to transition its data centers to 50 percent renewable energy by 2018. Hitting that target one year early, president and chief legal officer Brad Smith announced that the next goal is to surpass 70 percent renewable by 2023. “Time is too short, resources too thin and the impact too large to wait for all the answers to act,” he said.  On the surface, then, Microsoft appears to be committed to fighting climate change. Google has constructed a similar reputation. But in reality, these companies are doing just enough to keep their critics distracted while teaming up with the industry that is at the root of the climate crisis. Why go through the effort of using clean energy to power your data centers when those same data centers are being used by companies like Chevron to produce more oil? After Empire At the workshop in Atyrau, a young Kazakhstani data scientist approached me to ask about a project that he was migrating to Microsoft’s cloud platform. He didn’t speak English fluently, but I could tell he was a good engineer. I wasn’t sure if he really needed my help. It seemed like he just wanted to chat with another engineer in a room filled with businesspeople.","completion":"Afterwards, he told me a bit about how he ended up working for TCO, and how he wasn’t able to find any other opportunities in the country that could match the offer. He had attended Purdue University to get an undergraduate degree in computer science. But since the Kazakhstan government paid for his tuition, he had to return to the country to work. “It means that I have to work in oil,” he said. “It’s basically the only industry that pays.”  Speaking with him made me realize the extent of oil’s dominance in Kazakhstan. Oil is by far the biggest economic sector, accounting for 63 percent of the country’s total exports. In 2013, TCO made $15 billion in direct payments to the government — an enormous figure, considering that the country’s entire tax revenue that year came to $21 billion. TCO is also a major source of wealth for the region. For years, the venture has invested millions of dollars into building schools, community centers, and fitness centers for the local people.  Kazakhstan’s dependence on oil has only grown over the past decade. In 2016, TCO announced a $36.8 billion expansion to the Tengiz project, tying the country’s economic future even more closely to fossil fuels. To make matters worse, the country’s ability to produce oil relies heavily on multinational oil companies. At the time of its founding, TCO was a fifty-fifty partnership between Chevron and the state-owned KazMunayGas. Since then, ExxonMobil and the Russian oil company LukArco have joined the venture, but only KazMunayGas’s share has been diluted."}
{"prompt":"While the country would struggle to take advantage of its oil-rich lands without the help of these foreign partners, the partnership is far from a win-win deal. Chevron keeps a tight grip on power, appointing most members of TCO’s upper ranks. The power dynamic was clear at the workshop: lower-level employees were Kazahkstanis while management was almost entirely American. The local economy has also completely aligned itself with the needs of the American-dominated TCO. TCO proudly announced in Q1 of 2019 that it spent over $1 billion on Kazakhstani goods and services, which includes hiring more than forty thousand local workers to work in the oil field. But this makes local businesses highly dependent on TCO. If American oil companies pulled out of the venture or slashed funding, TCO would crumble, and many businesses would lose their biggest (and often only) customer, leaving the economy in shambles.","completion":"Big Tech isn’t responsible for Kazakhstan’s reliance on oil. Nor can we blame it for the climate catastrophe that we’re facing. But it is certainly exacerbating both. While Kazahkstan’s economy may benefit in the short run, intensifying the climate disaster will ultimately hurt the country too. Research shows that the region will suffer from increased aridity and more frequent heat waves, which could decrease crop yields and challenge food security."}
{"prompt":"How can tech help, instead of hurt, the climate? How can tech companies make local economies more resilient rather than more vulnerable? How can we demand climate justice from Microsoft, a company that claims to be a leader in the fight against climate change? While I was in Atyrau, these very questions were being asked back home. Amazon employees in the US published an open letter calling on their company to reduce its carbon footprint and cancel its many contracts with Big Oil. Sitting in my hotel room not far from one of the largest oil fields in the world, I watched the letter blow up on my social media feeds. The number of Amazon signatures exploded: “3,500 employees challenge Bezos”, “4,200 Amazon workers push for climate action”, “6,000 employees sign an open letter to Bezos.” I was thrilled. Tech workers like me were taking a stand against our industry’s role in accelerating the climate crisis. They weren’t waiting for change at the top; they were demanding change from below.","completion":"Then I thought of the young Kazakhstani engineer. What happens to people like him after we decarbonize? If Chevron and other oil giants cease operations, it would decimate the economy of places like Kazakhstan — places whose dependency on oil has been actively encouraged by those companies, which have in turn profited handsomely from it. Resource extraction is an ancient imperial practice. As tech workers join the movement for climate justice, we must also find ways to undo the legacies of Big Oil’s imperialism, and bring countries like Kazakhstan fairly and safely into a carbon-free future."}
{"prompt":"But it won’t be easy. When I returned to the US, I learned that Bezos had effectively ignored the demands of over 8,000 of his employees. The open letter was an important first step, but more action will be needed for Amazon to drop its oil partnerships. We have a long fight ahead of us, and the stakes are high. We have, quite literally, a world to win.","completion":"For a long time, a certain set of assumptions dominated our digital imagination. These assumptions should be familiar enough. Information wants to be free. Anything that connects people is good. The government is bad. The internet is another world, where the old rules don’t apply. The internet is a place of individual freedom, which is above all the freedom to express oneself.  Such ideas were never 100 percent hegemonic, of course. They were always contested, with varying degrees of success. Governments, for one, found several ways to assert their sovereignty over online spaces. Scholars sounded the alarm on the rise of the white supremacist web — the notorious neo-Nazi site Stormfront launched in 1996 — and presciently observed that the internet’s connectivity could also make the world worse."}
{"prompt":"Even so, these assumptions and the intellectual traditions they emanated from — techno-utopianism, cyberlibertarianism, the Californian Ideology — largely kept their grip on the common sense. The long 1990s is said to have begun with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and ended with the attacks of September 11, 2001. But, when it came to our popular discourse about the internet, the long 1990s lasted a lot longer.  Then came Snowden. In 2013, the former NSA contractor revealed that the internet was a vast spy machine for the American security state. A tremor of tech pessimism crept into public consciousness. Then came Trump. The media’s failure to anticipate the possibility of his victory in 2016 led it to amplify the significance of Russian influence operations via social media — operations that clearly existed, but which, at a moment of supreme disorientation, metastasized into the deus ex machina that could explain an inexplicable result. Yet this coping mechanism had a silver lining: it provided the initial spark for what has come to be known as the “techlash.” Journalists and politicians began to pay closer, less credulous attention to the internet and the companies that control it. Disinformation remained a key concern, but far from the only one: a long series of tech scandals have fed the fire, too many to keep count. The right has also joined the fray: the (laughable) notion that the big platforms silence conservative voices has taken root in the reactionary mind, turning a range of right-wing figures into harsh critics of Silicon Valley.","completion":"The resulting shift is stark. A sharper tone prevails in the New York Times and on Fox News, in statehouses and on Capitol Hill. Criticisms once confined to scholarly circles, or to more oppositional outlets like The Baffler and Valleywag, have become conventional, even banal. One could be uncharitable about the heavy Kool-Aid drinkers who abruptly sobered up — there is no shortage of annoying figures among the late converts to tech critique — but the techlash has been a very good thing. We are at last having a more honest conversation about the internet. The long 1990s are over. The old gods are finally dead.  Who are the new gods? This is what makes our moment so interesting: the conventional wisdom is cracking up but its replacement hasn’t quite consolidated. As James Bridle says, something is wrong on the internet — and something is wrong with the way we have thought about the internet — but there is not yet a widely accepted set of answers to the all-important questions of why these things are wrong, or how to make them right.  Different camps are now competing to provide those answers. They are competing to tell a new story about the internet, one that can explain the origins of our present crisis and offer a roadmap for moving past it. Some talk about monopoly and antitrust. Others emphasize privacy and consent. Shoshana Zuboff proposes the term “surveillance capitalism” to describe the new kinds of for-profit monitoring and manipulation that the internet and associated technologies have made possible.  These analyses have important differences. But they tend to share a liberal understanding of capitalism as a basically beneficent system, if one that occasionally needs state intervention to mitigate its excesses. They also tend to equate capitalism with markets. Sometimes these markets become too consolidated and need to be made more competitive (the antitrust view); sometimes market actors violate the terms of fair exchange and need to be restrained (Zuboff’s view). But two articles of faith always remain. The first is that capitalism is more or less compatible with people’s desire for dignity and self-determination (or can be made so with proper regulation). The second is that capitalism is more or less the same thing as markets."}
{"prompt":"What if neither belief is true? This is the starting point for building a better story about the internet. The Archipelago and the Network If capitalism isn’t (only) markets, then what is it? There have always been markets. Capitalism, by contrast, is relatively new. Its laws of motion first emerged in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and reached escape velocity with industrialization in the eighteenth and nineteenth.","completion":"If capitalism didn’t invent markets, however, it did make markets much more important. The historian Robert Brenner observes that capitalism is defined above all by market dependence. Pre-capitalist peasants can trade and barter, but they don’t depend on the market for life’s necessities: they grow their own food. In capitalist societies, on the other hand, the market mediates your access to the means of subsistence. You must buy what you need to survive, and to have the money to do so, you must sell your labor power for a wage.  Market dependence doesn’t exist for its own sake. It serves an important function: to facilitate accumulation. Accumulation is the aim of any capitalist arrangement: to take a sum of value and make more value out of it. While markets are certainly central to capitalism, they aren’t what makes it tick. Accumulation is. To put it in a more Marxist idiom, capital is value in motion. As it moves, it expands. Capitalism, then, is a way to organize human societies for the purpose of making capital move.  There are a few different methods for making capital move. The principal one is for capitalists to purchase people’s labor power, use it to create new value in the form of commodities, and then realize that value as profit by selling those commodities. A portion of the proceeds are reinvested into expanding production, so even more commodities can be made at lower cost, thus enabling our capitalist to compete effectively with the other capitalists selling the same commodities.  This may seem entirely obvious, but it’s actually a very distinctive way of doing things. In other modes of social organization, the point of production is to directly fulfill people’s needs: think of subsistence farmers, growing food for their families to eat. Or the point is to make the rulers rich: think of the slaves of ancient Rome, doing the dirty work so that imperial elites could lead lives of luxury.  What makes capitalism so unusual is that production (and accumulation) isn’t for anything exactly, aside from making it possible to produce (and accumulate) more. This obsession gives capitalism its extraordinary dynamism, and its revolutionary force. It utterly transforms how humans live and, above all, how they produce. Capitalism forces people to produce together, in increasingly complex combinations of labor. Production is no longer solitary, but social."}
{"prompt":"This dynamic is most vividly illustrated by the factory. The modern factory was largely born in nineteenth-century Manchester, where Friedrich Engels’s father co-owned a cotton mill. This gave the young Engels the opportunity to observe the birth of the factory up close. He saw hundreds, even thousands of workers, crammed into vast buildings, arrayed around machines, and performing different roles within a complex division of labor in order to work as one. What they made, they made together.  In pre-capitalist Europe, one person or a few people could plausibly claim credit for producing something. This wasn’t the case in the capitalist factory, however. “The yarn, the cloth, the metal articles that now come out of the factory were the joint product of many workers, through whose hands they had successively to pass before they were ready,” Engels wrote. “No one person could say of them: ‘I made that; this is my product.’” Yet there was a contradiction lurking here. If no one worker could claim sole credit for a product, the owner of the factory could still claim sole ownership of everything the workers made together. Wealth was being created socially, on a new model — but still owned privately, on the old model.  The contradiction became even sharper when zooming out to consider the wider economy. As many workers as it took to run a Manchester mill, it took even more workers to make that work possible, from the machinists who manufactured and maintained the power looms and the other machines to the slaves in the American South who picked the cotton that kept those machines fed. The collective labor inside the mill was sustained by many concentric circles of collective labor outside of it.","completion":"The pre-capitalist economy looked like a cluster of islands — an archipelago. It involved a collection of small producers relatively isolated from one another and producing mostly for personal use. (Marx memorably compared the French peasantry to a sack of potatoes.) By contrast, the capitalist economy looked like a network. The network of capital concentrated masses of people into larger nodes of production and linked them through countless threads of interdependence. Yet the wealth that this network generated didn’t flow to the many workers who collectively created that wealth. It flowed to the few who owned the network: the capitalists."}
{"prompt":"Before capitalism, when production happened on a more personal basis, such an arrangement might’ve made sense. If the economy was a cluster of islands, it followed that each island would own what it made. But capitalism, by revolutionizing production, introduced a contradiction: wealth was now made as a network, but still owned as an archipelago. Capitalists like Engels’ father became rich. The workers of Manchester earned starvation wages, and lived in cholera-infested slums.","completion":"The New Manchester What does this have to do with the internet?  The internet, and the constellation of digital technologies that we call “tech” more broadly, intensifies the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between wealth being collectively produced and privately owned. It takes the Manchester model and elevates it to the nth degree. It makes the creation of wealth more collective than ever before, piling up vast new fortunes in the process — fortunes that, as they did in Engels’ day, accrue to a small handful of owners.  A worker in a Manchester mill couldn’t point to a finished piece of yarn and say, “I made that,” but a few thousand workers (and slaves) probably could. Tech’s wealth, on the other hand, is woven out of the contributions of billions of people, living and dead.  This helps explain why the tech industry is so ludicrously profitable. Take Facebook. In 2018, Facebook reported a net income of $22 billion with an operating margin of 45 percent. The company only has about 40,000 full-time employees, along with an undisclosed number of contractors. In other words, relative to its costs, Facebook makes an absurd amount of money. And Facebook’s power isn’t just about money: as the dominant media ecosystem in many countries around the world, it also embodies what Frank Pasquale calls “functional sovereignty.” It operates like a government — which is particularly evident in the case of Libra, its new global digital currency. And this government is quite explicitly autocratic given a shareholder structure that preserves Mark Zuckerberg’s personal control of the company.  It’s hard to imagine a more extreme form of the contradiction on display at Manchester than a social network of more than two billion people ruled by a single billionaire. The network of capital has become denser, and more literal, than Engels could’ve possibly imagined, while its control has become concentrated in even fewer hands."}
{"prompt":"To observe that Facebook has relatively few workers is not to suggest that the work they perform is not important. Without content moderators, data center technicians, site reliability engineers, and others, Facebook’s product would become unusable and its business would collapse. But their collective labor, like that of the workers within Engels’ father’s factory, depends on many concentric circles of collective labor outside of it. And, for Facebook and the other firms that fall under the umbrella of tech, the share of value supplied by these external layers is especially vast.","completion":"One source is the workers who invented the software, hardware, protocols, and programming languages that laid the basis for today’s tech industry. These were developed over the course of several decades, starting with the creation of the first modern electronic computers in the 1940s, and relied heavily, often exclusively, on US military funding. Another source is the workers who, in the present day, continue to make and maintain the stuff on which tech profits depend. While this work takes many forms, most of it is menial or dangerous. It includes manufacturing smartphones, mining rare earth elements, and labeling training data for machine learning models."}
{"prompt":"As varied as these jobs are, though, they still look like traditional labor. People work and get paid, whether they’re inventing the internet protocols or laying fiber-optic cable. Tech, however, also manages to draw value from activities that don’t look like traditional labor. To return to Facebook, those more than two billion users create value for the company by supplying the site with its posts, comments, and likes. This content, paired with the rest of their activity on the platform, also furnishes Facebook with the personal data it uses to sell targeted advertising, which makes up the vast majority of its revenue.  It’s a contested theoretical question whether all this posting and clicking should count as “labor” — and if so, what kind. In her canonical article on the subject, the theorist Tiziana Terranova uses the term “free labor” to describe the various unwaged activities that propped up profit-making in the early days of the commercial internet, from volunteer moderators on America Online to open-source software developers. But the scope of such activities has grown dramatically since Terranova published her piece in 2000, and they look less and less like labor. Increasingly, tech is able to harvest value from us simply for existing.  A good example comes in the form of a cafe in San Francisco called Brainwash. This cafe, since closed, had a camera inside of it that filmed customers. A group of researchers obtained the footage, and turned it into a dataset to train machine learning models for detecting heads and faces. Published in 2016, this dataset was then used by the Chinese firm Megvii, a global leader in facial recognition, to refine its own software. Megvii also happens to be implicated in the totalitarian surveillance state that the Chinese Communist Party is constructing in the western province of Xinjiang. In other words, by walking into a cafe one day in San Francisco, you may have helped a tech company make money by selling the Chinese government a product it uses to repress millions of its citizens some six thousand miles away. (Megvii is currently valued at $4 billion, and hopes to raise as much as $1 billion in an IPO expected for late 2019.)","completion":"These kinds of strange and tangled value chains will only become more common in the coming years. As small networked computers burrow ever more deeply into our homes, stores, streets, and workplaces, more data will be made. Meanwhile, advances in machine learning and the growth of cloud-based processing power will continue to make data more valuable, as the fuel that feeds automated systems for everything from recognizing faces to predicting consumer preferences.  The upshot is a world where the creation of wealth becomes more collective than ever before. In the nineteenth century, Engels reflected on how capitalism transformed production “from a series of individual into a series of social acts.” The total enclosure of our world by computing means that those social acts can now happen at the scale of entire societies. The industrial factory has become what Terranova and others, building on a term from Italian autonomism, call the “social factory.” The new Manchester is everywhere."}
{"prompt":"The Difference Engine Capitalism connects. In its perpetual push to accumulate, it draws people into new sites and circuits of collective wealth-making. But if capitalism is a connector, it is also a differentiator. If capitalism is a network for making wealth, it is also an engine for making difference.","completion":"To watch this differentiating dynamic at work, let’s return to Manchester for a moment. The people who collectively created the city’s wealth were not a single homogenous mass. Quite the opposite: they were divided into men and women, English and Irish, white and Black. And these divisions were constantly being reinforced, since they served a valuable purpose: they helped make exploitation seem justified, even natural."}
{"prompt":"Thus it was natural for the Irish to be paid less and live in appalling slums. It was natural for women to be paid less while also performing the unpaid work of raising children — children who went into the mills as young as five. It was natural to enslave human beings of African origin and put them to work harvesting the cotton that those mills turned into textiles. It was natural to dispossess and exterminate the Indigenous people who had formerly inhabited the land that became those cotton fields.  Capitalism doesn’t invent human difference, of course. Humans look different; they speak different languages; they come from different communities and cultures. But capitalism makes these differences make more of a difference to people’s lives. Differences become more differential. They become differences of capacity and value — differences in how much a human being is worth, or if they’re even considered human at all.  The political scientist Cedric J. Robinson argued that this difference-making has been a core feature of capitalism from the beginning — he called it racial capitalism for this reason. Feudal Europe was highly racialized, Robinson said. As Europeans conquered and colonized one another, they came up with ideas about racial difference in order to justify why, for instance, Slavs should be slaves. (In fact, Slavs were so frequently enslaved in the Middle Ages that they supplied the source of the word “slave,” in English and several other European languages.) If racial thinking saturated the societies where capitalism first emerged, capitalism subsequently picked up these concepts and extended them. It generated deeper and more varied ideas about racial difference in order to justify the new relationships of domination that the imperative of accumulation demanded — particularly as Europeans began carving up Asia, Africa, and the Americas. “The tendency of European civilization through capitalism,” Robinson wrote, “was thus not to homogenize but to differentiate — to exaggerate regional, subcultural, and dialectical differences into ‘racial’ ones.”","completion":"Robinson’s insight helps clarify another crucial aspect of how tech operates. If tech intensifies capitalism’s contradiction between wealth being collectively produced and privately owned, it also intensifies capitalism’s tendency to slice people into different groups and assign them different capacities and values. Indeed, the two operations are closely related. “Capital can only be capital when it is accumulating,” says the theorist Jodi Melamed, “and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups.” The network for making wealth, in other words, relies on the engine for making difference.  That engine is now made of software. Differentiation happens at an algorithmic level. The abundant data that flows from mass digitization, combined with the ability of machine learning algorithms to find patterns in that data, has given capitalism vastly more powerful tools for segmenting and sorting humanity."}
{"prompt":"Way back in 1993, the media scholar Oscar H. Gandy, Jr. offered an extremely prescient view of how this works. He called it “the panoptic sort,” in a book of the same name. “The panoptic sort is a difference machine that sorts individuals into categories and classes on the basis of routine measurements,” he wrote. “It is a discriminatory technology that allocates options and opportunities on the basis of those measures and the administrative models that they inform.” Gandy was looking at how corporations and governments collected and processed personal information at a time when computing was widespread, but fairly primitive by today’s standards — the commercial internet was still years away. Even so, Gandy discerned a logic that by now feels very familiar. Data was being drawn from many sources — thus the “panoptic” part — in order to sort people “according to their presumed economic or political value.” And this operation wasn’t peripheral or incidental to capitalism, but absolutely integral to it: the panoptic sort, Gandy argued, was “the all-seeing eye of the difference machine that guides the global capitalist system.” Today, this all-seeing eye sees much, much more. And the stakes of the sorting are even higher. Algorithmic differentiation helps determine who gets a loan, who gets a job, who goes to jail. Moreover, Gandy observed how the panoptic sort amplified existing disparities, racial and otherwise. This is far truer today, thanks to the mainstreaming of machine learning systems.","completion":"In recent years, scholars and journalists have called attention to the problem of “algorithmic bias.” Such bias is endemic to machine learning because it “learns” by training on data drawn from our social world — data that inevitably reflects centuries of capitalist difference-making. Thus “predictive policing” algorithms trained on data that shows that the police arrest a lot of Black people suggest arresting more Black people. Or an Amazon algorithm trained on the resumes of its mostly male workforce advises against hiring women."}
{"prompt":"The role of these systems is not just to reproduce inequalities, but to naturalize them. Capitalist difference-making has always required a substantial amount of ideological labor to sustain it. For hundreds of years, philosophers and priests and scientists and statesmen have had to keep saying, over and over, that some people really are less human than others — that some people deserve to have their land taken, or their freedom, or their bodies ruled over or used up, or their lives or labor devalued. These ideas do not sprout and spread spontaneously. They must be very deliberately transmitted over time and space, across generations and continents. They must be taught in schools and churches, embodied in laws and practices, enforced in the home and on the street.","completion":"It takes a lot of work. Machine learning systems help automate that work. They leverage the supposed authority and neutrality of computers to make the differences generated by capitalism look like differences generated by nature. Because a computer is saying that Black people commit more crime or that women can’t be software engineers, it must be true. To paraphrase one right-wing commentator, algorithms are just math, and math can’t be racist. Thus machine learning comes to automate not only the production of inequality but its rationalization."}
{"prompt":"The New Barcelona Anything that moves has an ideal medium for its motion. A fish moves best in water; a car moves best on pavement. Capital is value in motion, so it must always be moving. And it moves best through a particular kind of social fabric, one that is both webbed and fissured, linked and sliced, connected and differentiated.","completion":"This helps make sense of what we call tech. Tech is an agent and accelerant of these dynamics, of “densely connected social separateness,” to borrow a term from Melamed. This explains its tendency to generate immense imbalances of wealth and power, and to heighten the hierarchical sorting of human beings according to race, gender, and other categories."}
{"prompt":"For our analysis to be useful, though, it needs to have not only a descriptive but a prescriptive element. It needs to offer some answers to the question of what is to be done.  This is where things get murkier, as one might expect. But there is clarity on at least one point. If tech intensifies the contradiction between wealth being made by the many and owned by the few, then the obvious solution is to resolve the contradiction: to turn socially made wealth into socially owned wealth. Or, as Marx and Engels put it in The Communist Manifesto, to convert the “collective product” of capital into “common property, into the property of all members of society.”  The logic is appealingly simple: if the network makes the wealth, then let the network own the wealth. But how, precisely? What does it mean to transform the wealth that society makes in common into the common property of society? This is the most bitterly debated question in the whole history of the radical Left. For most of the actually existing socialisms of the twentieth century, the answer was full nationalization on the Soviet model. This answer hasn’t aged well.  Another approach, and one that is currently enjoying renewed popularity, draws from the tradition of worker self-management. This tradition comes in many flavors, but perhaps its most heroic moment occurred in revolutionary Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, when people seized factories, farms, even flower shops and, for a brief period, ran everything themselves. A young Marxist from Kentucky named Lois Orr would later remember the thrill of strolling through anarchist Barcelona and seeing its “cafés, restaurants, hotels, and theaters lit up red or red and black [with] banners saying Confiscated, Collectivized.”  Barcelona, then, is one alternative to Manchester. But what would self-management mean for tech? A number of different experiments offer preliminary materials towards an answer. There are small, cooperatively owned platforms for everything from ride-hailing to social media. There are municipally owned broadband networks governed by local communities. There is an initiative to create a socially owned smart city in, of all places, Barcelona. There are also more ambitious but less immediately feasible schemes for democratizing the big platforms, whether by converting them into cooperatives of some kind or socializing their data.","completion":"These projects and proposals have the virtue of being concrete. As working hypotheses, they are immensely valuable. But they remain necessarily incomplete and provisional, particularly when considered as possible directions for moving beyond capitalism. Cooperatives under capitalism often behave like normal firms, since they are subject to the same market imperatives as everyone else. There is no straight line, then, from experiments in self-management to the broader goal of breaking with the logic of infinite accumulation and rebuilding society on a radically different basis.  Neither is there a direct relationship between democratizing ownership and combating the various oppressions implicated in capitalist difference-making. A cooperatively owned platform wouldn’t put an end to algorithmic racism, for instance. This brings us to another important point: sometimes the most emancipatory option isn’t to transform how infrastructures are owned and organized, but to dismantle them entirely."}
{"prompt":"Thinking in Motion Consider the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, an alliance that has been organizing against police surveillance in Los Angeles for years. They have successfully pushed the LAPD to abandon two predictive policing programs — programs that led to increased police violence against working-class communities of color. The organizers did not want these programs reformed, but stopped. They were not demanding that the ownership of the algorithmic policing apparatus be “democratized,” whatever that might mean, but abolished.  Here is an organization that is taking on tech’s tendency to intensify capitalist difference-making, and using the framework of abolition to do so. One can see a similar approach in the emerging movement against facial recognition, as some city governments ban public agencies from using the software. Such campaigns are guided by the belief that certain technologies are too dangerous to exist. They suggest that one solution to what Gandy called the “panoptic sort” is to smash the tools that enable such sorting to take place.","completion":"We might call this the Luddite option, and it’s an essential component of any democratic future. The historian David F. Noble once wrote about the importance of perceiving technology “in the present tense.” He praised the Luddites for this reason: the Luddites destroyed textile machinery in nineteenth-century England because they recognized the threat that it posed to their livelihood. They didn’t buy into the gospel of technological progress that instructed them to patiently await a better future; rather, they saw what certain technologies were doing to them in the present tense, and took action to stop them. They weren’t against technology in the abstract. They were against the relationships of domination that particular technologies enacted. By dismantling those technologies, they also dismantled those relationships — and forced the creation of new ones, from below."}
{"prompt":"Machine-breaking is often a good idea; for more ideas, we can turn to other movements. Tech workers are taking collective action against contracts with the Pentagon and ICE, and demanding an end to gendered discrimination and harassment. Gig workers for platforms like Uber are organizing for better wages, benefits, and working conditions. Within these movements we can find more useful materials to think with, materials that might disclose the contours of a society organized along different lines.  The intellectual is not the only one who thinks. Masses of people in motion also think. And it is the thinking of these two together, in the creativity that results from their continuous interaction, that furnishes the form and content of anything worth calling socialism. This process is messy and circuitous, with many blind alleys and false starts. It involves more time spent moving contradictions around, and creating new ones, than resolving them. But it is the only path to a future where capital’s motion finally grinds to a halt, and a different set of considerations — human need, a habitable planet — comes to coordinate our common life. This is how the Left will answer the question of what is to be done, about tech and about everything else: by thinking en masse and thinking in motion, while traversing difficult terrain.","completion":"“It’s kinda like the Parthenon now, it’s a testament to something…” —Nick Bongiorno, former IBM temp worker and activist  The IBM country club on a hill overlooking Endicott, New York has been empty for thirteen years. Now beyond repair, it was once abuzz with the activity of some 14,000 IBMers and their families. There were basketball games, swimming pools, a bar, a stage, banquet halls, guest rooms, and a golf course, all open to the thousands of IBM employees in Endicott. This was the town where, in 1911, International Business Machines was born.  IBM’s Plant Number One manufactured punch-card tabulators in downtown Endicott. Then came typewriters, printers, and the System/360 computer, after which a parade of ever-newer models were made. For decades, IBM dominated the computer industry. It was not until 1996 that their market value was surpassed by Microsoft. They have since fallen far down the ladder: these days, IBM is only the ninth-largest tech company in the world. They have gotten out of the messy business of making things and are now, primarily, a software and services company. In 2002, after more than ninety years, IBM ceased manufacturing in Endicott."}
{"prompt":"Today, the IBM country club is utterly defaced. Defaced by the freeze and thaw of water, and the flooding of the Susquehanna River. Defaced by teenagers cycling through in the night, the keepers of no-man’s land. This is where they come to get high and destroy the memory of IBM, their father’s house. Graffiti on an unbroken window says Did You Ever Love Me? in searing pink paint.          Live         Die         Suck Me Softly, it says.","completion":"In the old brick rooming house, white columns have fallen against the floor. The fireplace is stuffed with saplings and branches; it looks wild and evil. Stiff palatial curtains remain. There are pellets of rat shit on the ground and moss grows across the maroon carpeting. The pink and green wallpaper peels and blooms like wild roses. On the floor is a crumpled up brochure from 1954. “IBM Family Day” for “Plant Employees,” it says, on a placard held up by a smiling clown. After pie-eating contests and a softball game, at 6 p.m. the IBM band would play.  The bathroom in the old IBM country club. Photo courtesy of the author."}
{"prompt":"In 2006, the Susquehanna River rose through the rooms, easily ripping at their seams and fixtures, a flowing push against the old giant. Named “Oyster River” by the Lenape people, the Susquehanna is one of the country’s most polluted. It came to know nuclear meltdown from Three Mile Island, and it knew coal and fertilizer and feces, before it came into the club. Then the teenagers charged against the broken surfaces.  In the locker room there are still four inches of green soap in the dispenser but the porcelain toilets are smashed or filled with shit. The mirrors have upside-down crosses and         666         PUSSY         SATAN  With language learned from horror movies, the trespassers hack away at Big Blue’s shadow. A fuck you, from the town to IBM. A mutual fuck you, from IBM to the town.","completion":"The Plume It started beneath a swath of train tracks and poured gravel beside Building 18, where circuit boards were made. It formed from repeated spills of volatile organic compounds used in the degreasing and cleaning of microchips. In 1978, 1.75 million gallons of wastewater were released. That same year, 4,100 gallons of liquid solvents, including trichloroethylene (TCE) and trichloroacetic acid (TCA), were released. In 1980, IBM contacted the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report that contaminants had begun to form a pool beneath Building 18. This is what became known as the plume.  It is hard for people to believe in invisible things, but the plume began to manifest. Its vapors started to travel underground. It spread to encompass 300 acres of the town: churches, movie theaters, grocery stores, and 480 homes. It was no longer invisible when people began to get sick."}
{"prompt":"The danger of TCE exposure is that it is carcinogenic and can impair fetal development. The chemical penetrated deep into the groundwater as a liquid and then began to evaporate, moving through air pockets in the soil. This migration continued through cracks in the foundations of homes and buildings, creating an indoor environment of prolonged exposure. People who both lived and worked in the plume were called “double dippers.”  When the initial spill occurred, IBM began digging wells. Twenty extraction wells pumped out contaminated groundwater. In 2002, the year IBM shuttered its factories, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) required the company to test the air quality. By 2004, they entered into a “formal consent order” to investigate and remediate the contamination. What IBM found led them to install vapor mitigation systems in homes and other buildings in the plume.  These systems are discernible by the white boxes attached to long pipes that reach up to roofs, rerouting the vapor from underground into the surrounding air outside. Now in homes, houses of worship, billiard bars, and barber shops, there is a constant whir of ninety-watt motors working against TCE. The contamination is continually announcing itself. It is ignorable as a low drone, forgotten and re-heard over and over again.  Endicott is important because it is not unique. It is a story that one can almost write without knowing the specifics. It is a story of the postindustrial long after the last shoe, car, or computer travels through the factory.  The old IBM complex in Endicott. Photo courtesy of the author.","completion":"Endicott proves that it is only through extraction, refinement, and manufacturing that computational feats of any kind are possible. The machine is made of materials from the earth: copper, gold, nickel, silicon. In order to purify, clean, and combine its pieces, intensive chemical baths are used. The computers and smartphones that result have an incredibly short working life, on average just two to three years. A shorter life than a car tire, a winter coat, a stereo, or a shovel.  Though compact when presented to consumers, these devices also have a huge material footprint. The inputs for a microchip are 630 times the mass of the final product. After the product is made, all of these excess inputs recombine into new chemical slurries, the unsaleable byproduct of the machine. These life-altering chemicals return to the earth in indigestible ways, and creep through our basements, waterways, genomes. There are 2.71 billion smartphone users in the world, and 1.5 billion personal computers in use. This means there are many towns like Endicott.  Inside the Clean Room I too am from an IBM town, one in northern Vermont, the only in the state. Like thousands of other Vermonters, I worked in the factory there. I didn’t get sick and neither did my immediate coworkers, but I began to hear troubling stories. I also began to read article after article imploring IBM to stay in Vermont. Eventually IBM did leave, but unlike in Endicott, the factory was taken over by a new company and kept running. In Vermont the pollution was quieter. The factory was not classified as a Superfund site, so it did not stick in the public conscience — only in the thoughts of those who worked there. The pollution also remained quieter because the factory is still in operation.  The work itself, twelve-hour shifts in a factory built to protect the product not the people, was dehumanizing. I performed one step in hundreds required to make microchips. The Vermont plant specializes in amplification chips that transmit signals to satellites and enhance the speakers nestled next to our ears on our phones. Twenty-four hours a day, white-clad employees walk up and down the fluorescent hallways of the factory: workers in hoods, gloves, veils, booties, and coveralls so that the eyes are all that is visible. This is to protect the delicate chip from human contaminate."}
{"prompt":"I worked in the “wets” department, applying chemical cleaners to microchips so that layers of circuitry can be built cleanly on top of one another. The chemical wash machines I operated look similar to a home washing machine. The workers used to man the chemical baths themselves, balancing the boxes of wafers on a hooked pole and removing them when a manual timer dinged. Some even used to volunteer for this job because they thought it could get you high. Now the process is more mechanized: I performed the simplified and repetitive function of loading and unloading the chemical wash machine, then putting the product onto an automated overhead track, so that there were always half-made microchips floating above, traveling to the next tool required to complete them.  The pay is a few dollars above minimum wage. I had to pass background and literacy tests and formally agree to chemical exposure in my job interview. I’m not sure whether it was the low pay, volatile hiring and firing, or the sensory deprivation inherent in working in a “clean room,” but the workers engaged in small rebellions. People had sex behind the robots, got loaded on their lunch breaks, defecated in trash cans, and hid six-packs in the floor tiles. One janitor, tasked with cleaning the factory, called in a bomb threat.  The Vermont factory, like the one in Endicott, spilled chemicals into the surrounding area. Five miles of underground piping leaked, delivery drivers spilled solvents, workers poured waste into drains that were not hooked up to pipes, the contents of unsealed wells and a “sludge landfill” seeped into the earth. The chemicals spread forty acres wide and travelled 300 acres deep into the bedrock of the town.  In 1979, the contamination came to light when IBM reported the spills to the EPA. TCE and PCE, another carcinogenic degreasing agent, were found in the nearby river and lake: in some areas, PCE levels were 19,000 times higher than the state standard allowed in drinking water. In cooperation with the EPA, IBM began a groundwater cleanup campaign. Contractors for the company in Vermont said the process, conducted across six sites, would take more than two hundred years. Scientists say it could take thousands.","completion":"In Endicott, the New York State DEC does not have a time estimate at all. In both cases, the contamination will cling to the land long past the lifespan of a factory, a product, or even an industry. Sacrifice Zone When IBM left Endicott there was no new company to take over the factory, like in Vermont. In the newly quiet town, IBM’s legacy began to ring louder. It was not simply the land that was changed, but the people too.  In Endicott, both teenagers and adults got cancer. One girl broke her leg walking through the halls of her high school. At the hospital she found out she had bone cancer. And there were children born with malformed hearts. The New York State Department of Health (DOH) reported fifteen cases of infants born with heart defects over seventeen years in one Endicott neighborhood. This number is more than twice that of the normal population.  When Kevin Every moved to a rental in Endicott from Philadelphia, his wife Tiah was pregnant with their youngest. If he had known that the house was in the plume he never would have rented it. “But nobody gave me that choice,” he said. Instead, he found out about the plume on the news. When his son Deron was born, he had six different heart defects. At thirteen days old, he had his first operation. At eight years old, he had a stroke.  “He prays,” Kevin told me. Deron prayed for a new heart, and got a transplant this summer. The family eventually bought a house outside the plume. Kevin doesn’t know if ventilation was ever installed on his rental or who lives there now. Renters, who don’t know the history of the area or can’t afford higher rents, are unfairly affected. They are often transient enough not to be accounted for when they get sick. At the Ronald McDonald House in Syracuse, when Deron was an infant recovering from his initial heart surgery, Kevin met seven families. They were his neighbors from Endicott. Their babies also had heart defects. When Kevin got back to Endicott, he called a lawyer."}
{"prompt":"Today, Kevin spends a lot of time traveling to doctors. He tells his four other kids, “If that was you, I’d be doing it for you.” I asked Kevin about IBM: if he thinks it’s an accident, if he thinks they’re sorry. “They can do whatever they want just so they can have a buck… families lose because now they have a loved one that’s sick. If I went out and changed the oil in my car and dumped it on the grass I would get in trouble,” he said. When a commercial for IBM comes on TV, he can’t bear to watch it. “This is happening all around America,” he said. No matter if they ever admit what they’ve done, “right is right and wrong is wrong.” James Little worked at IBM in Endicott for fifteen years as a senior operator making chip boards. He worried about leaky machines. Once, he shut down a machine that was spilling chemicals into an overflow tray. His manager chastised him and told him never to do that again. James heard rumors of chemicals dumped in holes in the concrete cellar, pipes with leaks, and train cars that spilled their deliveries of chemicals. Workers around him were getting sick. A girl who worked beside him got a brain tumor. A man in his department had his nostrils “eaten out” from the fumes. “The bottom line,” Little said “was they wanted to get the work out… I think people were sacrificed.” Little became an activist and workplace safety advocate. He talked to the press. His manager told him if his name appeared in the paper one more time he would be fired. He kept his job until the factory shut down.","completion":"Such stories aren’t limited to Endicott. There are similar stories wherever IBM manufactured chips. Michael Ruffing and Faye Carlton worked at IBM in East Fishkill, New York. They sued IBM after their son was born blind with facial deformities that prevented him from breathing normally. Candace Curtis, whose mother worked while pregnant with her in the same East Fishkill plant, was born without kneecaps. She is not physically capable of talking. Nancy LaCroix, of IBM Vermont, had a baby girl with bone defects, which caused her brain to protrude from her skull and left her with stunted fingers and no substantial toes. One unnamed child of an employee was born without a vagina."}
{"prompt":"Superfund Site, IBM on Trial Beginning in the 1990s, lawsuits began popping up all over the country where IBM made chips. A case from IBM San Jose that sought to establish a cancer link with chemical exposure in factories was dismissed when, after two days, the jury decided in favor of IBM. More than 200 workers in Vermont, New York, Minnesota, and California brought lawsuits against IBM for work and resultant environmental conditions that caused them or their children to become ill. All settled out of court.","completion":"In 2008, a group of around 1,000 Endicott residents sued IBM for $100 million over increased occurrence of kidney cancer, heart defects in children, and lowered property values. In proceedings, IBM was forced to disclose the contents of their “Corporate Mortality File,” a database dating back to 1969, a decade after the invention of the microchip. IBM claimed the file was created to track pensions and other lasting benefits to the families of deceased workers. It contained 33,730 former employees with basic identifiers like sex, age, work history, and, most importantly, cause of death. Increased rates of respiratory and breast cancer as well as cancer in the internal organs were found.  After seven years and no trial, IBM eventually settled the case out of court for an estimated $13 million. No wrongdoing was publicly admitted and no cancer link credibly established. “These are tragic cases, but there is no scientific evidence that there are increased rates of diseases of any kind among IBM employees,” an IBM spokesman stated in response to the rash of lawsuits. Kevin Every’s family was part of the $13 million settlement. He can’t go into detail but said, “We didn’t get what we shoulda got. They asked me how much I think we should get, I said everything. [Deron] can’t even go on the playground.”  Although IBM has denied responsibility for the health problems in Endicott, they have committed to helping clean up the town. (They have also tried to burnish their public image and defuse anger among residents with philanthropy: in 2002, on the day Endicott was classified as a class 2 Superfund site by the EPA, IBM gave Endicott a “gift” of $2 million.) The plume has shrunk considerably since remediation efforts began pumping out contaminated groundwater. A smaller plume means less toxic vapor intrusion into local homes and businesses. For now, the white vapor mitigation boxes on the outside of houses remain and the groundwater pumps continue to suck up polluted water.  Fortunately, IBM is a rich company with plenty of money for remediation. For IBM, spending $270 million on environmental clean-up projects across the nation in 2017 was easily absorbed in the following year’s revenue of $80 billion."}
{"prompt":"James Little, the former factory worker, hopes that new business will come to Endicott now that it is cleaner. He still loves his hometown. “I would consider this site pretty much safe,” Little told me, but he knows the spilled chemicals will be nearly impossible to totally eradicate. They will continue to use the vapor mitigation systems and the groundwater pumps.  So much polluted groundwater was pumped out (over 800,000 gallons), in fact, that sinkholes began to form in the dry soil. It is like rinsing and squeezing a sponge, Little told me. The same flood that partially destroyed the old IBM country club helped to flush out some of the contaminants from the ground. Still, the chemicals bind to the dirt, and it seems unlikely that they will ever be totally eliminated.  Beyond the borders of Endicott, there remain seventy-six microchip manufacturing facilities in the United States. There are many more around the world, from South Korea to Taiwan, Germany to Singapore. Toxic TCE is not just a problem for IBM neighborhoods, then, but for computer manufacturers all over. Of the Superfund site National Priorities list, TCE is in 1,045 of 1,699.  Around the same time that IBM pollution came to light in the United States, manufacturing was being shipped overseas, along with the pollution. Even as dangerous chemicals like TCE are replaced, or in rare cases outlawed, the sheer demand for the product is perhaps the biggest danger. Production is valued over safety and product is prized over resources. Until this equation changes, Endicott will have many sister cities.  Life Goes On It is 7 a.m. in Endicott, the time the morning shift at IBM would start if the factory was still running. The light outside is a familiar arctic blue which makes the trees and snow seem both flat and harsh. I’m hungover, sitting on a bed in the Endwell Motel.  The Endwell Motel. Photo courtesy of the author.","completion":"I spent last night at a bar called Close Quarters outside the reaches of the plume. My friend Sarah came here with me to take photographs, and she came to the bar too. Sarah drank mini bottles of white wine while I drank Labatt Blues. We shared a basket of tater tots, talked, and watched football on TV."}
{"prompt":"We met an Italian guy, “Tim,” from here (townies call it “End-y-cott”) with a triangular nose and a tattoo of a big cumulous cloud spilling over his right hand. He bought me a shot of Jameson and I told him about my research. He said he didn’t work at IBM but he knew people who did, real old timers. He’s too young to have worked at this IBM. Instead, he drives an 18-wheeler for CVS.  Tim used to be a drug addict like a lot of people I meet around here. They are frank about it: sick but better now. It’s not so much opioids that are the problem these days but meth. It seems the desire is not in wanting to slow down, but instead to speed things up. The town population has dipped to 13,000, smaller than the IBM workforce at its height. Instead of manufacturing, people now work in retail, healthcare, or the service industry. Nearly 20 percent of the town lives in poverty.  Tim showed me videos of his fish tank on his phone. I kept asking, “Is that a goldfish?” “No,” he’d say. They all had different species names, bright yellows and oranges swimming across the slick expanse of his phone. He showed me his truck delivery route for the next day. He’d be driving north to Vermont, right by the factory where I used to work.  We began to talk of violence. He likes to fight, he said, smiling, “but when I see a flower, I see a woman.” That’s why men need women, he told me and Sarah. We traded stories about killing pigs. Tim’s story was about a butcher crying and shooting a pig that wouldn’t die. He cried so much he was blinded by his tears. He cried so much he started praying. Sarah and I told him about the pig we shot that ran away into the woods, how it had to be tackled and shot again. The instinct in nature — a flower, a pig, a town — that does not want to die was there both times. We talk like this about life and death as a way to talk about the poison of the plume, and our hope for the future.","completion":"On September 26, 1991, surrounded by the cameras of the world media, eight people dressed in bright red jumpsuits sealed themselves inside a three-acre steel-and-glass dome in the Arizona desert filled with over three thousand species of animals and plants. They planned to remain inside for two full years, aiming to show that the structure — known as Biosphere 2 — was capable of sustaining life while completely sealed off from Biosphere 1, also known as Earth.  Amidst Biosphere 2’s seven biomes — desert, rainforest, savannah, marsh, ocean, city, farm — the Biospherians would grow their own food and conduct research on the workings of the closed system. They would rely on the plants and animals they lived alongside to produce oxygen, absorb carbon dioxide, fertilize the soil, and consume waste. Lessons from the experiment were expected to advance the prospects of human life in space and on other planets.  Biosphere 2 may seem to be little more than a bizarre episode in the annals of extravagant scientific undertakings. But we should take its history seriously as we think about the future of life on Biosphere 1, which today appears fairly dire.  In the summer of 2019, Greenland’s ice sheet lost nearly 200 billion tons of ice — three times the regular amount — while peat fires blazed across the Arctic. Two hundred reindeer starved to death in Norway while nearly two hundred gray whales have washed up dead on the western shores of North America since January. And that’s just in the past year in one part of the world. The UN warns that a million more species are threatened with extinction in the next few decades as a result not only of climate change but overfishing, deforestation, and unsustainable agricultural patterns.  You can understand why someone might want to build another world."}
{"prompt":"Everything You Can Do, I Can Do Better These incidents suggest that the ecological systems we usually take for granted — sometimes referred to as Earth’s “life-support systems” — are starting to break down. Healthy ecosystems are generally self-renewing. They operate without humans having to do much. They are, in a sense, already automated, at least from our perspective. But climate change and other ecological pressures are interrupting their normal function.  Climate change has caused more rain in the Arctic, which then freezes into ice, making it hard for reindeer and herbivores to find food. Melting Arctic sea ice, meanwhile, may have reduced the amount of algae in Arctic seas, which feeds the amphipods that feed the whales. The prospect of further disruption raises a question: Is there something we could do to fill in the gaps? Is there a substitute for the work of nature — the work on which all other work depends? The fear that we’re running down nature’s abundance has a long history, of course. For economics — which is, after all, the study of scarcity — it’s nothing to worry about. Conventional economic theory holds that natural resource scarcity can be solved through substitution. When resources become scarce, they become more expensive, which leads people to use them more efficiently or to use other, more plentiful materials in their stead.  As the growth economist Robert Solow once quipped, “The world has been exhausting its exhaustible resources since the first cave-man chipped a flint.” In the eighteenth century, Thomas Malthus had worried about the ability to produce enough food; in the nineteenth, William Jevons had worried that the world would run out of coal. But new techniques, technologies, and resources overcame existing limits: petroleum replaced whale oil; steam engines replaced horses.  In the twentieth century, our capacity to create substitutes grew immensely. Many synthetic products were invented to take the place of natural ones. Declining soil nutrients could be replaced with artificial fertilizer; aluminum could replace copper; plastic could replace just about everything — wood, stone, metal, glass. Nuclear power appeared poised to offer cheap, near-limitless energy supplies in place of fossil fuels extracted from the earth.","completion":"These advances gave rise to a way of thinking that we might call “substitution optimism”: the belief that humans can find substitutes for anything that nature does. But substitution optimists tend to neglect two problems. First, the development of substitutes assumes that the price of scarce goods will rise. What about scarce goods that don’t have a price? In particular, what about the services freely provided by nature? The services of atmospheric cycles and pollution-absorbing forests cost nothing — which mean that as they grow scarcer they do not get more expensive, and do not spur the development of technological replacements. Today, those resources — what we might think of as the earth’s reproductive rather than productive functions — are the ones most under threat. Like human reproductive work, they operate in the background of economic production, providing the basic functions necessary for life."}
{"prompt":"But it’s also an open question as to whether those kinds of resources actually have substitutes. Plastic chairs can substitute for wooden ones, or plastic bags for paper — but can you build a substitute for an entire forest? Can human technologies or human labor substitute for the nonhuman work done by other organisms? Or are there certain kinds of work that only nature can do?  Today’s substitution optimists remain bullish. A group called the Ecomodernists, whose members include famed cultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand, geoengineering researcher David Keith, and Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, has taken up Brand’s famous injunction from the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Despite the signs of destruction all around, they assure us that human powers can yet be channeled to produce a “good Anthropocene.”  In their view, resource scarcity isn’t a problem: the Ecomodernist Manifesto of 2015 declares that “substitutes for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those inputs become scarce or expensive.” There are no real limits to growth: the sun provides more energy than we can hope to use, and any other given physical resource can be replaced with something else. That implicitly includes nature’s reproductive functions. Carbon capture-and-storage technologies can replace a forest’s capacity to absorb carbon. Injecting aerosols into the sky to make clouds more reflective mimics volcanic eruptions that spew sulfur into the atmosphere, helping to cool the earth.  If Ecomodernists represent one extreme, the other end of the spectrum is occupied by those who spurn any kind of substitution. “Deep ecologists” see all of nature as intrinsically valuable: it’s simply impossible to substitute for the unique and irreplaceable value of any given organism. For other ecologically minded thinkers, including proponents of “degrowth,” the prospect of substituting technology for complex natural processes that we don’t even fully understand is a typical demonstration of human arrogance, one that’s certain to result in unintended consequences. In this view, technology is synonymous with the “techno-fix,” a futile attempt to avoid deeper social and economic change through innovation.","completion":"Neither of these positions is satisfying. It’s true that the Ecomodernists are wildly optimistic about human capacities and willfully obtuse about their limits. But it’s not enough to smugly tut-tut at human hubris while the planet burns. Given how quickly the effects of climate change are materializing, even drastic decarbonization is unlikely to stop more mass die-offs and other forms of ecosystem dysfunction. We should hope that at least some ecosystem activities have substitutes, even if they can’t be perfect ones.  In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, best known for advocating artificial wombs as a substitute for biological ones, the feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone also called for a revolutionary ecological program. Such a program should seek to seize “control of the new technology for human purposes, the establishment of a new equilibrium between man and the artificial environment he is creating, to replace the destroyed ‘natural’ balance,” she wrote.  Firestone, to be sure, had too much confidence in the possibility of liberation through technology, and too much fondness for the project of dominating nature. We have yet to automate human reproduction, and we’re similarly unlikely to exert total technological control over Earth’s reproductive functions. But we should nevertheless take seriously Firestone’s impulse to see technology as part of the project of making a liberatory and livable planet rather than aiming for an impossible return to a natural balance that’s everywhere in shambles and that in any case was never so harmonious as we imagine. We don’t have to build the equivalent of an artificial womb for the entire Earth. But we should think about how to use our technologies for purposes both human and nonhuman, in a world where nature and human artifice are now so thoroughly entangled as to be inseparable.  The story of Biosphere 2 offers a way of thinking through what that might look like — both its possibilities and limitations."}
{"prompt":"The Garden and the Aircraft Carrier The question posed by Biosphere 2 was whether the entire Earth was substitutable. The biosphere, a concept first developed by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, refers to the thin layer of the planet capable of supporting life. Biosphere 2 sought to replicate those life-support systems. The countercultural figure behind it, John Allen — an eccentric visionary with a degree in engineering, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and an enthusiasm for theater, poetry, and alternative living — saw the project as simultaneously an experiment with utopia and a backstop against dystopia.","completion":"“We poise ready now [sic] not only to cooperate consciously and creatively with the evolutionary potential of our present biosphere,” he proclaimed, “but also to assist in its mitosis into other biospheres freeing our earth-life to participate in the full destiny of the cosmos itself, both by giving the possibility to voyage and live throughout space.” Biosphere 2 would help bring about a new age of space exploration, Allen believed, by developing a way to sustain human life in hostile environments. It would also help protect human life against looming existential threats on Earth: Biosphere 2 would be a prototype of what Allen called “Refugia,” self-contained living spaces that could serve as “insurance” against the calamity of a nuclear winter.  Before Biosphere 2, Allen had managed an intentional community outside of Santa Fe organized along ecological principles. There he met Edward Bass, an eccentric child of the Bass oil dynasty who got into ecology in the 1970s. By the 1990s, Bass was the largest private sponsor of environmental research in the United States. He funded an Institute for Biospheric Studies at Yale and smaller research projects around the world. He also poured an estimated $150 million into Biosphere 2 through his company Space Biosphere Ventures.  Bass saw these contributions as investments in projects that would one day become profitable: in the early days of the biotech boom in the 1990s, it seemed eminently plausible that “ecotech” would take off too. The initial income from Biosphere 2 was to come from tourism — they charged people $12.95 to visit, and half a million people did — which would support the longer-term development of technologies that Bass expected “would have a very significant commercial application.” Biosphere 2 was, as one of its inhabitants called it, “the garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier.” Underneath the rainforest and desert landscapes was a massive technosphere, comprising three acres of electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems. The technology was intended, as a Biospherian put it, “to replicate many of Earth’s free services” — the reproductive functions. On Earth, various planetary processes keep air and water moving, and nutrients and waste along with them. In Biosphere 2, that work was mechanized."}
{"prompt":"Some machines treated wastewater and desalinated water from the miniature ocean to make rain. Others created breezes, mists, and ocean waves. Giant air handlers heated and cooled the air, running off generators powered by natural gas and diesel. To prevent the domes from exploding as the air inside warmed and expanded in the heat of the desert sun, a giant pair of rubber “lungs” acted as a safety valve.","completion":"These innovations drew on two decades of research on how to keep humans alive in space, most notably a proposal by the twentieth-century ecologists Eugene and Howard Odum to build “bioregenerative life support systems” in spacecraft. Most spaceships were all technosphere: everything humans needed to survive was provided by a machine. The Odums’ idea was to replace some of those technological functions with organisms that could perform the necessary functions of oxygen generation, waste removal, and food production. Bioregenerative systems would bring down the cost of space travel, reduce the need for astronauts’ labor, and make it possible for astronauts to live longer in space without continually receiving supplies from Earth."}
{"prompt":"Biosphere 2 would be the most ambitious embodiment of these ideas to date. When it opened, it was heralded by many in the press as a marvel of both technological and ecological engineering — Discover magazine called it “the most exciting scientific project” since the moonshot — even as many scientists looked on skeptically. The crew that entered Biosphere 2 in 1991 was to be the first of many: Allen imagined that new crews would enter every two years for an entire century, each building on the knowledge of those who had gone before. Cumulatively, they would inaugurate a new era in the understanding of life on Earth — and the possibilities of life beyond.  The Bubble Bursts Things didn’t go as planned. If the technology of the “aircraft carrier” was cutting-edge, what lay above wasn’t exactly the garden of Eden. Once the Biospherians were sealed inside, everything began to go drastically wrong. Though they had attempted to carefully calibrate the equilibrium of the internal ecosystem, an artificial balance was hard to strike.  Cramming seven biomes into just three acres led to some unexpected effects: the desert picked up condensation from the forest and became more like a shrubland. Nor had Biosphere 2 managed to replicate all of Earth’s services: many trees in the rainforest and the savannah that would usually grow “tension wood” in response to winds failed to do so in the calm Biosphere, leaving them weaker. Most troublingly, the Biosphere began to lose a huge amount of oxygen, while carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide levels rose dangerously. The Biospherians tried to sequester carbon by growing plants, and stopped tilling the soil to prevent carbon stored in the soil from being released into the air. But they couldn’t figure out how to actually stop carbon from accumulating.  It turned out that microbes in the soil were producing carbon dioxide faster than plants were producing oxygen, while the structure’s concrete foundations were absorbing a surprising amount of oxygen. Some speculated that the El Niño event of 1991–1992 also contributed to more cloud cover than usual, decreasing the amount of sunlight for plants to photosynthesize. Some of the vines that the Biospherians had planted to absorb carbon started to overtake food crops, requiring intensive weeding. Algae consumed the ocean, requiring Biospherians to clear it away by hand so the coral reefs below could receive sunlight.","completion":"The complications multiplied. An estimated 30 percent of the 3,800 enclosed species died off, including all pollinators. The Biosphere was overrun by ants and cockroaches, stowaways inside the sealed system that soon outcompeted and outlasted other insects. By the time oxygen levels had dropped from 20.9 percent to 14.2 percent — the equivalent of living at an elevation of 15,000 feet — it became difficult to breathe, at which point the Biospherians broke the closed system to pump in oxygen and keep the crew alive.  The first crew left Biosphere 2 in September 1993, on schedule and underweight. The second crew of eight entered in March 1994. But by then Biosphere 2 was looking more like a boondoggle than a breakthrough: it cost a great deal to maintain, and seemed unlikely to develop a commercially viable product anytime soon. Bass began feuding with Allen and then fired most of the Biosphere 2 staff while the second crew was still inside. He hired Steve Bannon, at the time an investment banker experienced with company takeovers, to manage Space Biosphere Ventures’s financial affairs. Amidst the turmoil, the second crew left the structure six months later. They would be the last people ever to live inside Biosphere 2.  Bannon brokered a deal with Columbia University, which agreed to take the facility over. (Columbia eventually gave it up, citing exorbitant expenses; in 2005, Bass gifted Biosphere 2 to the University of Arizona, which now runs it as a research facility.) Space Biosphere Ventures ended up facing multiple lawsuits. Though the irresistible spectacle of Biosphere 2 had made it a media darling at the outset, as the project faltered it was decried as a stunt, a hoax, a fraud. The Village Voice described Biosphere 2 as the product of “an authoritarian — and decidedly non-scientific — personality cult.” The fact that the closed system had been breached to restore oxygen levels rendered the scientific value of the grand experiment dubious. Academic scientists, vindicated by the downfall of a flashy for-profit interloper, set about diagnosing the causes of the disaster."}
{"prompt":"The most obvious lesson was that replicating the reproductive functions of Earth was much more complicated than anyone had imagined. As a pair of Columbia researchers wrote in an assessment shortly after Columbia took over the facility, “isolating small pieces of large biomes and juxtaposing them in an artificial enclosure changed their functioning and interactions rather than creating a small working Earth as originally intended.” You could not simply treat ecosystems as mechanical pieces to be assembled and slotted in and out. Ecologists didn’t even know what all the pieces of an ecosystem were, let alone how exactly they worked together. “At present there is no demonstrated alternative to maintaining the viability of Earth,” they concluded. “No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems provide for free.” Ecosystems did not appear to be very substitutable at all.  Jury-rigging Spaceship Earth The story of Biosphere 2 seems to prove the substitution skeptics right: we can’t replace ecosystems and we shouldn’t try. But I can’t muster much schadenfreude about the failures of Biosphere 2. After all, the misfortunes of the Biospherians look worrisomely like our own.  Even if we manage to stop climate change from reaching truly cataclysmic levels, rising temperatures will transform Earth’s systems in ways that will make it difficult for many species to survive. Under the circumstances, pious affirmations of ecological holism can quickly tilt into premonitions of doom: if ecosystems are beyond human understanding and entirely irreplaceable, collapse is only a matter of time.  The biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich once compared species to rivets on an airplane wing. If you were in a plane and looked out the window and saw a rivet fall off the wing, you might be a little concerned but not too worried — after all, the wing has thousands of rivets, enough to make any single one redundant. But if lots of rivets started popping off, you would probably start to freak out. Similarly, losing a species or two might be worrisome but not a sign of doomsday. Losing a lot of species, however, suggests that Spaceship Earth might be in trouble.","completion":"We are going to lose more rivets. I hope we can jury-rig something to keep the plane in the air. Our lack of control over the biosphere is genuinely terrifying. But if we’re going to do more than mourn or panic, we have to take the idea of substitution seriously.  Instead of treating substitution as the frictionless replacement of one kind of thing for another, as if matter were totally commensurable, however, we could recognize that substitutes might be rough around the edges but can nevertheless help prevent total breakdown. In some cases, substitution might mean using one kind of organism in place of another; in others, it might mean substituting human labor or technology for the work of nature.  The idea that one species could do the same work as another was one of Charles Darwin’s great insights. As the environmental historian Donald Worster relates, when Darwin went to the Galápagos, he noticed that giant tortoises did the grazing work that bison did in North America. Different creatures, that is, held “the same place in Nature”; they could fill the same “office” within an ecosystem — what ecologists would eventually come to call a niche. Different organisms would do the job differently, of course: a tortoise would have different predators and reproduction patterns than a bison, even if they both grazed. But ecosystems weren’t fixed, timeless orders wherein each organism performed its appointed role for eternity. They were struggles to stay ahead of the competition or be replaced by something else.  This principle animated the selection of species in Biosphere 2. The thousands of species sealed in the dome were chosen not to faithfully replicate the exact relationships of existing ecosystems, but to provide particular functions: to serve as pollinators, to supply food crops, to recycle air, to decompose waste. If a particular species didn’t fit the practical needs of the Biosphere, it was replaced with another."}
{"prompt":"Of course, human efforts to achieve particular ends by introducing new species don’t always go well. The genre of stories about “invasive species” is one of the most reliable sources of cautionary tales about unintended consequences of human meddling in nature. The East Asian vine kudzu, for example, was widely planted in Southern states to help address soil erosion in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl; it became the weed that ate the South.  But not every story of introduced species is a warning. Rewilding projects, for example, attempt to restore land domesticated and cultivated by humans into ecosystems operating without human presence. This usually means reintroducing species that have been driven out of their former habitats or killed off by human settlement. In some cases, species have gone fully extinct, yet some other kind of creature may be able to do the same work.  In the rewilded nature reserve of Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, for example, the roles of extinct aurochs and tarpans — wild ponies and cattle — are filled by physiologically similar breeds that eat the same grasses and have similar roaming patterns. In the American Great Plains, meanwhile, sustainable cattle raising practices have tried to replicate the grazing patterns of bison. Since cattle tend to roam less extensively, doing so requires more intensive human labor to direct herds.  This raises an important point: natural systems that now operate automatically may require more human labor to function as nonhuman species disappear. Life in Biosphere 2 was a lot of work. As one participant later recalled, “Farming took up 25 percent of our waking time, research and maintenance 20 percent, writing reports 19 percent, cooking 12 percent, biome management 11 percent, animal husbandry 9 percent.” As Biosphere 2’s nonhuman life support systems started to falter, its human inhabitants had to work harder to keep them functioning, from chasing pests that had no predators to pollinating plants when the bees died off. As scientists observed in the aftermath, “Biospherians, despite annual energy inputs costing about $1 million, had to make enormous, often heroic, personal efforts to maintain ecosystem services that most people take for granted.”","completion":"Of course, Biosphere 2 didn’t just rely on human labor to help nature function. Its vast technosphere was built expressly to fill in for Earth systems like ocean currents and water cycles. Biosphere 1 now has a rather substantial technosphere of its own, currently constituting 30 trillion tons of human artifacts, from computers to undersea cables to houses to lightbulbs. Most of it supports human life and pursuits. But some of it could also be put to use tending to the biosphere, as in Biosphere 2.  The garden of Eden and the aircraft carrier aren’t our only options. Most of our world is some combination of the two. Using technology to support ecological functions doesn’t have to involve building a giant array of machinery to replace Earth systems or trying to technologically manipulate the entire atmosphere, a la the Ecomodernists. But nor should it mean attempting to remove human activity and artifacts from ecosystems altogether. As Donna Haraway reminds us, “There is no Eden under glass.” Technology can play an important role in actively maintaining ecosystems rather than replacing them wholesale, in conjunction with human labor.  Some of this work is already happening. Drones are being used to reseed land for restorative purposes, effectively performing the work of birds while reducing human presence in remote areas. In the Great Barrier Reef, a robotic vessel protects indigenous coral species by killing the crown-of-thorns starfish that is suffocating the reef.  Paradoxically, these unmistakably human interventions often occur in the absence of actual humans. Robots can offer ways to preserve nonhuman ecosystems without more direct forms of human intrusion. They aren’t total replacements for organisms, of course. A drone can drop seeds but can’t lay eggs; a robot fish can kill starfish but can’t grow new coral. Indeed, none of the options available to us — nonhuman proxies, technological tools, human labor — is a perfect substitute for what they replace, and none ever will be. At best, they can provide rough approximations of certain functions. But these jury-rigged rivets might be our best hope for making a future on a damaged planet."}
{"prompt":"How Are You Going to Pay for It? Nature, Raymond Williams once said, is the most complex word in the English language. But I’ve come to think that “natural” mostly means “freely given.” Nature offers the “free services” on which human life depends. More generally, nature describes what we take for granted, what we expect to happen of its own accord. From “natural birth” to “natural beauty,” nature hides a lot of work done behind the scenes. As the scholar Merve Emre reminds us, “all reproduction, even reproduction that appears ‘natural,’ is assisted.” Emre is concerned with human reproduction, but it holds just as true for the reproduction of nature itself.  We can no longer take the reproduction of our world for granted, or assume that the work of nature will take place automatically. Reproducing life on Earth will require a great deal more assistance from us, in our simultaneously extraordinary and limited capacities as a single species on a planet of millions. It will also require a great deal more recognition of the assistance provided by all those other species. What the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis calls “full surrogacy” — a call to distribute labor more broadly, to cultivate reciprocal practices of kinship and care — is as applicable to our nonhuman relationships as to our human ones.  While we may be able to perform some work on nature’s behalf in order to stabilize our biosphere, however, the expense will be enormous. Indeed, the biggest barrier to developing substitutes for certain ecological services may turn out to be cost.  The ecologist John Avise observed that the true lesson of Biosphere 2 was an economic one. In the late twentieth century, economists had tried to estimate the value of Earth’s freely provided services, but had usually stumbled over the technical difficulties of doing so. Biosphere 2 made it possible to construct “a more explicit ledger,” Avise wrote. All told, it had cost over $150 million to keep eight humans alive for two years. As Avise pointed out, “if we were being charged, the total invoice for all Earthospherians would come to an astronomical three quintillion dollars for the current generation alone!” Replacing human labor with machines usually saves money. Replacing the work of nature with machines or human labor is the opposite: it makes what was free expensive.","completion":"This means that substitution is rarely economical. In China’s Hanyuan County, for example, where pesticides have wiped out many bee colonies, human workers have subbed in, using feather dusters to pollinate pear trees by hand. But human pollination is only viable in Hanyuan because it’s cheaper than renting beehives. In a system (capitalism) that aims to keep costs down above all else, the cost of human labor has to be approaching zero for it to compete with nature’s gifts.  So as we ask who, or what, will do the work of nature, we should also ask another question: Who will pay for it? Earthly survival will require new ways of organizing not only our social and technological relationships, but our economic ones. As Biosphere 2 demonstrates, filling in for the work of nature is unlikely to be a profitable enterprise. Capitalism is unlikely to pay the extra costs. The question of what can replace it may be the biggest substitution problem of all."}
{"prompt":"In 2019, Berlin celebrated Equal Pay Day by offering women discounts on public transit. It provided these discounts automatically, by analyzing the faces of people purchasing tickets. On the face of it, as it were, this approach might appear innocuous (or even beneficial — a small offset to gendered pay disparities!). But in actual fact, the technology in question is incredibly dangerous.","completion":"Automated Gender Recognition (AGR) isn’t something most people have heard of, but it’s remarkably common. A subsidiary technology to facial recognition, AGR attempts to infer the gender of the subject of a photo or video through machine learning. It’s integrated into the facial recognition services sold by big tech companies like Amazon and IBM, and has been used for academic research, access control to gendered facilities, and targeted advertising. It’s difficult to know all of the places where it’s currently deployed, but it’s a common feature of general facial recognition systems: anywhere you see facial recognition, AGR might well be present."}
{"prompt":"The growing pervasiveness of AGR is alarming because it has the potential to cause tremendous harm. When you integrate the assumptions embedded in this technology into our everyday infrastructure, you empower a system that has a very specific — and very exclusive — conception of what “gender” is. And this conception is profoundly damaging to trans and gender non-conforming people. AGR doesn’t merely “measure” gender. It reshapes, disastrously, what gender means.","completion":"The Algorithmic Bathroom Bill So what precisely is AGR, and where does it come from? The technology originated in academic research in the late 1980s (specifically in psychology — but that’s another story) and started off with a particularly dystopian vision of the future it was creating. One early paper, after noting AGR’s usefulness for classifying monkey faces, proposed that the same approach “could, at last, scientifically test the tenets of anthroposcopy (physiognomy), according to which personality traits can be divined from features of the face and head.” Malpractice and harm have never been far from these systems."}
{"prompt":"Image courtesy of Os Keyes. When you run into a system that uses AGR, it takes a photograph (or video) of you, and then looks at your bone structure, skin texture, and facial shape. It looks at where (and how prominent) your cheekbones are, or your jawline, or your eyebrows. It doesn’t need to notify you to do this: it’s a camera. You may not even be aware of it. But, as it works out the precise points of similarity and difference between the features of your face and those of a template, it classifies your face as “male” or “female.” This label is then fed to a system that logs your gender, tracks it, and uses it to inform the ads that an interactive billboard shows you or whether you can enter a particular gendered space (like a bathroom or a changing room).","completion":"“Automatic detection and aggregation of demographics and behavior of people,” a patent for a system that includes AGR. Google Patents. There’s only one small problem: inferring gender from facial features is complete bullshit. You can’t actually tell someone’s gender from their physical appearance. If you try, you’ll just end up hurting trans and gender non-conforming people when we invariably don’t stack up to your normative idea of what gender “looks like.” Researchers such as myself and Morgan Scheuerman have critiqued the technology for precisely this reason, and Morgan’s interviews with trans people about AGR reveal an entirely justified sense of foreboding about it. Whether you’re using cheekbone structure or forehead shape, taking a physiological view of gender is going to produce unfair outcomes for trans people — particularly when (as is the case with every system I’ve encountered) your models only produce binary labels of “male” and “female.” The consequences are pretty obvious, given the deployment contexts. If you have a system that is biased against trans people and you integrate it into bathrooms and changing rooms, you’ve produced an algorithmic bathroom bill. If you have a situation that simply cannot include non-binary people, and you integrate it into bathrooms and changing rooms, you’ve produced an algorithmic bathroom bill.  A True Transsexual So AGR clearly fails to measure gender. But why do I say that it reshapes gender? Because all technology that implicates gender, alters it; more generally, all technology that measures a thing alters it simply by measuring it. And while we can’t know all of the ramifications of a relatively new development like AGR yet, there are a ton of places where we can see the kind of thing I’m talking about. A prominent example can be found in the work of Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist who was one of the pioneers of trans medicine."}
{"prompt":"Working in the 1950s, Benjamin was one of the first doctors to take trans people even marginally seriously, and at a vital time — the moment when, through public awareness of people like Christine Jorgensen (one of the first trans people to come out in the United States), wider society was first becoming seriously aware of trans people. While media figures argued back and forth about Jorgensen, Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966, the first medical textbook about trans people ever written.","completion":"Containing case studies, life stories, diagnostic advice, and treatment approaches, The Transsexual Phenomenon became the standard medical work on trans subjects, establishing Benjamin as an authority on the matter. And it was, for its time, very advanced simply for treating trans medicine as a legitimate thing. It argued that trans people who wanted medical interventions would benefit from and deserved them, at a point when the default medical approach was “psychoanalyze them until they stop being trans.” Benjamin believed this was futile, and that for those patients for whom it was appropriate, interventions should be made available."}
{"prompt":"To identify whether someone was such a patient, and what treatments should be made available, Benjamin built his book around his Sex Orientation Scale, often known simply as the Benjamin Scale.  The Sexual Orientation Scale from Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). Courtesy of the Digital Transgender Archive.","completion":"A doctor using the Benjamin Scale would first work to understand the patient, their life, and their state of mind, and then classify them into one of the six “types.” Based on that classification, the doctor would determine what the appropriate treatment options might be. For Type V or Type VI patients, often grouped as “true transsexual,” the answer was hormones, surgical procedures, and social role changes that would enable them to live a “normal life.”  But this scale, as an instrument of measurement, came with particular assumptions baked into it about what it was measuring, and what a normal life was. A normal life was a heterosexual life: a normal woman, according to Benjamin, is attracted to men. A normal life meant two, and only two, genders and forms of embodiment. A normal life meant a husband (or wife) and a white picket fence, far away from any lingering trace of the trans person’s assigned sex at birth, far away from any possibility of regret.  Further, it meant that trans women who were too “manly” in bone structure, or trans men too feminine, should be turned away at the door. It meant delay after delay after delay to ensure the patient really wanted surgery, advocating “a thorough study of each case… together with a prolonged period of observation, up to a year” to prevent the possibility of regret. It meant expecting patients to live as their desired gender for an extended period of time to ensure they would “pass” as “normal” after medical intervention — something known as the “real life test.” Ultimately, Benjamin wrote, “the psychiatrist must have the last word.” So to Benjamin, a “true” trans person was heterosexual, deeply gender-stereotyped in their embodiment and desires, and willing to grit their teeth through a year (or more) of therapy to be sure they were really certain that they would prefer literally anything else to spending the rest of their life with gender dysphoria."}
{"prompt":"No More Ghosts On its own, Benjamin’s notion of a “normal life” would have been nothing but laughable — and laugh is what most of my friends do when I point them to the bit where he doesn’t think queer trans people exist. But because of how widely his instrument of measurement has worked its way into systems of power, it has been deeply influential.  Benjamin’s textbook and, more importantly, his scale, became standard in trans medicine, informing the design of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) definitions of gender dysphoria and the rules of the World Professional Association on Transgender Health (WPATH) — considered (by doctors) to be the gold standard in treatment approaches. Those rules still contain a “real life” test and psychiatric gatekeeping, and the DSM only began recognizing non-binary genders as real in 2013. More broadly, public narratives of transness still tell “the story” popularized and validated by Benjamin — the trans woman “born a girl, seeing herself in dresses,” the trans man who has “always known” — even when that story does not and has never represented many of us.","completion":"The consequences for people who do not conform have been dire. People are denied access to medical care for not meeting the formal medical definition of a “true transsexual”; people are denied legitimacy in trans spaces for not “really” being trans; people are convinced by these discourses that their misery must be fake — that because they don’t fit a particular normative idea of what a trans person is, they’re not really a trans person at all, and so should go back into the closet for years or decades or the rest of their lives. All because of a tool that claimed merely to measure gender. Inside and outside our communities and selves, Benjamin’s ghost continues to wreak unholy havoc."}
{"prompt":"So what is the point of this (admittedly fascinating) psychomedical history? The point is that there’s no such thing as a tool of measurement that merely “measures.” Any measurement system, once it becomes integrated into infrastructures of power, gatekeeping, and control, fundamentally changes the thing being measured. The system becomes both an opportunity (for those who succeed under it) and a source of harm (for those who fail). And these outcomes become naturalized: we begin to treat how the tool sees reality as reality itself.  When we look at AGR, we can observe this dynamic at work. AGR is a severely flawed instrument. But when we place it within the context of its current and proposed uses — when we place it within infrastructures — we begin to see how it not only measures gender but reshapes it. When a technology assumes that men have short hair, we call it a bug. But when that technology becomes normalized, pretty soon we start to call long-haired men a bug. And after awhile, whether strategically or genuinely, those men begin to believe it. Given that AGR developers are so normative that their research proposals include displaying “ads of cars when a male is detected, or dresses in the case of females,” it’s safe to say the technology won’t be reshaping gender into something more flexible.","completion":"AGR might not be as flashy or obviously power-laden as the Benjamin Scale, but it has the potential to become more ubiquitous: responsive advertising and public bathrooms are in many more places than a psychiatrist’s office. While the individual impact might be smaller, the cumulative impact of thousands of components of physical and technical reality misclassifying you, reclassifying you, punishing you when you fail to conform to rigid gender norms and rewarding you when you do, could be immense."}
{"prompt":"The good news is that the story of the Benjamin Scale shows us that resistance is possible. We did not go quietly into the psych; we fought, we lied, we hit back, and we continue to do so. But resistance is not enough. The norms that the Benjamin Scale worked into the world are still being perpetuated. Carving out space to breathe and live is good, but those battles are only necessary if you have already lost the war.","completion":"So rather than focus on reforming AGR — adding new categories or caveats or consent mechanisms, which are all moves that implicitly accept its deployment — we should push back more generally. We should focus on delegitimizing the technology altogether, ensuring it never gets integrated into society, and that facial recognition as a whole (with its many, many inherent problems) goes the same way. Do not just ask how we resist it — ask the people developing it why we need it. Demand that legislators ban it, organizations stop resourcing it, researchers stop designing it. Forty years after Benjamin’s death, we are still haunted by his ghost. We don’t need any more."}
{"prompt":"Climate action today is increasingly a question of exponents. Merely reducing greenhouse gases won’t cut it; according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions must be halved in ten years and halved again in subsequent decades if we are to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Similarly, renewable energy needs to do more than just increase its market share; it must spread exponentially, replacing fossil fuel energy sources within fifty years.  These mandates represent an unprecedentedly rapid transition in the nature of our energy grids, transportation, housing, and all of the related patterns and habits that make up our daily lives. Decarbonization, if it is adequate to the climate math, must be both incredibly ambitious and incredibly disruptive.","completion":"Changes on this scale are difficult to imagine. To complicate matters, history offers scant examples for reference. Accordingly, the task of charting a pathway through decarbonization is in large part also a question of stretching our metaphorical imagination to reframe the possible. This is difficult, creative, and necessary work. It is also fraught with hazards."}
{"prompt":"In the global orbit of Silicon Valley thought, where disruption is a word with more positive cachet, one analogy is gaining momentum: we should think about carbon like we think about computers. The story of the microprocessor, after all, is a story of exponential growth curves and adoption rates: per Moore’s Law, the density of semiconductors has doubled every two years, making computers cheaper, smaller, and more powerful — a win-win that fueled the digital revolution. Couldn’t renewable energy follow a similar path?  This idea is at the root of a sweeping policy proposal currently circulating in both UN climate conferences and Davos event halls: a global “Carbon Law,” styled after Moore’s Law, that sets a roadmap for exponential climate action. Unlike most views of climate change, this future is surprisingly optimistic. Carbon Law proponents point out that renewable energy, although currently representing only about 2 percent of global electricity generation, has already followed an exponential growth curve in its short history. They expect this trend to continue, given the proper incentives from governments and investment from industry. With the right social alignment, as they see it, the technology will simply take over.","completion":"The risk here, as with any framing comparison, is that the metaphor will not hold. Stories of digital disruption have long been sources of prediction, optimism, and analogy — as well as sites of dangerous fantasies. As a framework for energy transition, the Carbon Law can do more harm than good if it imparts the wrong lessons, provides false comfort, or seeks to mobilize the wrong people.  Metaphors matter: nothing less than the future of the planet is at stake. And interrogating the charisma of exponential thinking suggests that the Carbon Law is unlikely to help make that future a fair and habitable one. Insofar as silicon’s history helps us understand carbon’s future, its lessons are the opposite of those circulating at Davos. The story of silicon doesn’t teach us to sit back, relax, and let technology save us. On the contrary: its real lesson is the power of purposeful struggle within systems of constraint."}
{"prompt":"Legislating Moore’s Law Exponential growth is remarkable wherever you find it, and the steady gains in chip densities that began in the late 1960s remains a defining standard for rapid technological advancement. Moore’s Law, however, is not a law of physics. It took considerable social effort and material happenstance to make the growth curve hold.  In 1965, Gordon E. Moore was the director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneering firm that helped create Silicon Valley. In a magazine article, he observed that the number of components in integrated circuits had grown exponentially over the past seven years and would likely continue on this trajectory a decade hence. This prediction could have easily faltered. At the time, shrinking transistor sizes seemed to many engineers to invite disaster through unneeded complexity and melted components. Miniaturization, moreover, was an imperative unique to military contracts that needed chips small enough to fit onto rockets, while researchers were quite content to have room-sized computers.","completion":"It took considerable barn-raising by key figures in the industry, as well as hefty military spending, to make Moore’s prediction into a de facto law by changing industry R&D allocations and targets. The ensuing rates of growth were formally ratified in national and international industry roadmaps in the 1990s, essentially securing Moore’s Law as a group-fulfilling prophecy.  From the start, a combination of peer organizing and institutional mandates propelled Moore’s supposition into a standard. The technology did not simply take over.  Yet this is not to say that exponential doubling is a purely socially constructed outcome. The unique properties of silicon supported the otherwise unlikely win-win of densification and miniaturization. The price, size, and processing power of chips are tightly correlated; smaller silicon circuits require less energy to power, produce less heat, and can process at faster speeds.  Writ large as an industry-wide trend, this fact about silicon’s thermo-electric properties led to the massive popularization of cheaper, smaller, and more powerful digital devices. But this isn’t true of electrical grids, photovoltaics, or other forms of technology that don’t experience consistent density scaling across their components. If, for example, Moore’s Law applied to air travel, a New York City-to-Stockholm flight today would hold 120 million passengers and take eight minutes.  However, even within the scalar logics of silicon, the predictive success of Moore’s Law today is widely acknowledged to be over. Microchips are heating up, R&D costs threaten to outpace density gains, and, as engineers parse the design challenges of nanometer circuits, they may simply be running out of atoms. Future prospects for densification are multiple and uncertain. Rather than relying on exponential growth in processing capacities, software designers are increasingly depending on gains in efficiency first developed for mobile applications — seeking as an industry, if somewhat belatedly, to do more with less."}
{"prompt":"Surfing the Waves of the World Spirit  Techno-optimism is easy when exponential growth holds. Proponents of the Carbon Law largely see technology — both digital and electric — in this register. As a result, exponential decarbonization appears to them as little more than a technological coordination problem. It requires innovation and cooperation on the part of politicians and green tech companies, but asks very little from citizens. Its model of power is predicated on the agency of executives and devices, not political mobilization by large numbers of people.","completion":"Two men sit at the center of the Carbon Law’s development and distribution, and their backgrounds help explain some of its political character: Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center, and Johan Falk, the director of Intel’s Stockholm IoT Ignition Lab until he quit to work with Rockström. At Intel, Falk’s mandate was to promote the spread of smart networks to new industries — to spread narratives of exponential growth and scalar disruption. Rockström’s center, on the other hand, develops and disseminates “resilience thinking” across high-profile climate talks and a C-suite executive education program. Together, they have targeted political and corporate elites with a simple message: the climate crisis can’t be solved without exponential thinking, which requires elite “accelerators” to reenact the roadmap and feedback loops that propelled Moore’s Law forward.  Strip away the Silicon Valley language from this proposal and the details are themselves common enough to most mainstream climate governance plans: price carbon, make cuts across multiple sectors, increase energy efficiency, and fund renewable R&D. What’s unusual here is the emotional register of the plan and the apolitical certainty of its promise — factors that can’t be disentangled from tech industry tropes. For instance, Falk’s “Exponential Roadmap Report” argues that decarbonization “is nothing short of a global economic transformation. But transformation appears assured through revolutions driven by digitalisation. Harvesting this power will help drive unstoppable momentum.” Similarly, Rockström predicts that under the Carbon Law, “big masses [will] simply surf along a sustainable journey without knowing that they’re doing it.”  In short, the technology will do the work. Exponential growth curves will continue along an unchanging trajectory, as if by natural law. Existing social arrangements, fossil fuel interests, and the economic and environmental justice barriers to the energy transition will cede to the power of elite leadership and digital disruption. In turn, our carbon footprints, seemingly without effort, will just shrink and shrink."}
{"prompt":"Creativity Within Constraints This top-down, technologically determined future ignores all the ways in which energy transitions aren’t just a question of market shares, but of the social pressures and material constraints that cut across them. Decarbonization will demand more than just a different kind of technology curve, accelerating sharply into the horizon. It will very likely require abrasive changes to well-worn cultural norms, the structure of cities and trade, and perhaps even the valorization of economic growth in its broadest terms. It will be conflictual, classed, and expensive.","completion":"Technology alone proves to be a poor analytic for these kinds of social changes. Moreover, as demonstrated by recent waves of popular opposition to climate policy, market fixes without considerations for equity are politically disastrous. People, infrastructure, and culture don’t fit into industry roadmaps or silicon wafers. They contain differences and resistances that can’t be universally scaled."}
{"prompt":"If Moore’s Law is to be a useful story through which to approach this future, it will be for all the reasons its green proponents currently ignore. The history of the microprocessor revolution is ultimately about the immensity of effort that goes into maintaining the dream of exponential growth — and its inevitable collapse. Moore’s Law was neither a socially constructed prophecy nor a materially determined outcome. It was a period of coordinated action within specific material parameters that have now passed. It leaves us facing a technological future that will require creativity within new constraints.","completion":"Rockström and Falk are correct that time is short and the need to muster political and technological resources is great. Where they are wrong is the assumption that a better future will arrive on our desks without a fight. Instead, it will require a public that can stand up and push. Since 1992, volunteers have tagged more than 1.5 million monarch butterflies. Tagging a butterfly involves capturing it in a net, attaching a label to its wing, and releasing it back into its habitat. The identifying information on the tag goes into a database that tracks the monarch’s famous winter migrations from locales east of the Rockies to Mexico. Chip Taylor, founder and director of Monarch Watch, the nonprofit that organizes this vast volunteer effort, says the process is easier than it sounds and that the monarch butterfly is hardier than it appears. Even students can participate, and they often do so as part of their science classes, guided by teachers. Taylor noted that 2018 held the record for the largest number of butterfly tags distributed, with over 320,000 mailed to interested volunteers across North America.  Monarch butterflies are unique. Not only are they resilient to being captured and tagged by volunteers, they are also widely loved. In addition to Monarch Watch, there are numerous Facebook groups dedicated to the orange and black beauties, including Monarch Butterfly Garden with over 50,000 followers, and The Beautiful Monarch with over 25,000 members. Volunteers are eager to study and protect them."}
{"prompt":"What about species that aren’t as charming? Who will account for the creepy crawlies and the drab species? These are some of the questions underlying the scientific community’s increasing reliance on crowdsourced environmental data. Monarch Watch helped pioneer the crowdsourcing model, but its analog, low-tech approach has since been overtaken by a wave of apps and platforms that have made the process of collecting data much more accessible. The proliferation of smartphones and the rise of the mobile web has enabled more people to contribute more observations, on more species. And while this phenomenon has been growing for years, it has acquired a new urgency since the election of Donald Trump. Under Trump’s leadership, scientists have seen a decrease in funding for environmental research and an official denial of climate change despite mounting evidence. This means that research scientists need crowdsourced data more than ever before, incomplete as it may be.  “Community scientists” can help. In addition to not relying on government budgets, these nature-loving, albeit untrained and unpaid, members of the public have another advantage: they can use apps to collect data about more species, over a larger physical area, than the comparatively small number of professional environmental scientists can. But if community scientists completely drive scientific research agendas, society risks losing valuable information about critically important species. Community science efforts can only augment scientific research, not replace it.  Shrooms at Scale The aughts saw an explosion of community science apps and websites that let users collect photos, dates, times, and geo-coordinates for different plant and animal sightings. Love birds? Join the hundreds of thousands of users on eBird, a database started in 2002 that now has hundreds of millions of bird observations. More of a mushroom person? There’s Mushroom Observer, which has spawned hundreds of thousands of observations from thousands of participants since it started in 2006.","completion":"There are online spaces for generalists as well. One example is iNaturalist, an app, website, and online community that launched in 2008. A user on a hike can upload a photo of a plant or animal and have immediate access to the platform’s community of naturalists to help identify it. iNaturalist has amassed 25 million observations, over 10 million of which are research-grade. The platform is also a popular public engagement tool for museums and other institutions that use it as part of their programming."}
{"prompt":"The scale of data collection that’s possible with these platforms surpasses anything a team of scientists could ever hope to match over the course of a career, even with ample funding. Users of iNaturalist and eBird have collectively recorded observations of over 200,000 species. This data often makes its way into scientific research. Despite Mushroom Observer being dominated by amateurs, one of the site’s developers, Joe Cohen, says that trained researchers actively participate in forum discussions, track particular species, and share specimens with other users. iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, eBird, and Monarch Watch all submit user-collected data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a central repository that brings together data on species occurrences from tens of thousands of different data sources. Scientists can easily access the data filtered by their species of interest. Data collected by app users and accessed via GBIF has been cited hundreds of times in scientific research.  Burnt Out on Butterflies But the apps and websites that make this large-scale data collection possible are not designed for conducting scientific research. iNaturalist, for example, makes clear that its first priority is “to connect people to nature” — the breadth and volume of the environmental data collected is a fortuitous side effect of community-building. And since producing data specifically for scientific research is not what these platforms are for, sampling problems abound.","completion":"Data collection sites that are near users’ homes or are easy to get to become hotspots for observations, regardless of their value for scientific research. While scientists often travel to field sites to collect data, Mushroom Observers, for example, typically collect data near where they live.  When community scientists do travel, they may be more interested in going to places where they can expect to find a particular species, either because the species is more prevalent or because the place supports data collection in some way. Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch remarked that monarchs are better represented in Iowa because its county conservation boards facilitate tagging efforts. Volunteers also prefer to report species they find interesting. Rare species may be overreported because people are excited to see them and may even travel specifically to see them — a data collection pattern encouraged by some platforms’ design features, like eBird’s rare bird alerts. In 2018, the monarch butterfly was the most observed species in iNaturalist’s research-grade observations in ten of the forty-eight states in the continental US, though it’s unlikely that monarch butterflies are the most prevalent species in any of those states. Meanwhile, relatively little data was collected by users on the less charismatic Bridgeoporus nobilissimus mushroom."}
{"prompt":"Misidentifications can also be a problem, even though companion apps for community scientists generally require multiple identifications before an observation is confirmed, and some apps like iNaturalist use computer vision to suggest identifications. In an effort to ensure the quality of their dataset, scientists using crowdsourced observations for research may treat the number of contributions a user has made as a proxy for data quality, and filter out users with a weak contribution history.","completion":"Since the charisma, visibility, rareness, and location of a given species can all affect data collection in ways that don’t necessarily reflect the species’ actual distribution, it can be difficult to determine whether an absence of observations corresponds to a real decline of the species or something else. Some platforms try to account for this in different ways, but others, wary of user attrition, are hesitant to add barriers to submitting observations. After all, what matters most to the platforms is attracting and retaining users. Helping out scientists is a secondary concern."}
{"prompt":"Bridging the Gap Researchers do their best to account for the limitations of crowdsourced data. They add instructions to particular data collection efforts or work in tandem with volunteer data collectors on training initiatives about the need for high-quality data. “Data fusion” methods and integrated population models have also become popular tools to bring data together from different sources, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each dataset. Gaps in community science data can inform scientists’ future data collection, providing opportunities to improve sampling design and data collection efficiency.  Despite their limitations, then, platforms like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and eBird are still valuable for scientists. The scale of biodiversity is such that scientists alone cannot record everything, particularly in an era of slashed research budgets and anti-science public policy.  Still, defunding science has serious consequences and we can’t afford to narrow our focus at such a critical moment of ecological change. There are inevitable, irreparable gaps in data collected by community members. Going back in time to collect better data on a particular species or in a specific region is impossible. When scientists are more reliant on data collected by volunteers, the fluctuating interests of the public can destabilize research efforts. We still need data about boring species, and from faraway places. These gaps take infrastructure and resources to fill, and we ignore them at our peril.","completion":"Clean energy advocates envision an electrified home running on 100 percent renewable energy with a Tesla parked in its garage, solar shingles gleaming on its rooftop, and a smart meter dutifully collecting usage data and uploading it to the cloud. But swim upstream and eventually you arrive at the extractive frontiers of the renewable energy transition.  It was 8:45 am on the first day of the 11th Lithium Supply & Markets Conference in the basement level of the W Hotel in Santiago, Chile. There was no way for me to blend in. “Providence College” on my name tag rendered me a curiosity. Still, I was glad I remembered to wear lipstick and that my backpack had straps that converted it into a tote.  I found an empty seat in the sea of suits, almost all men but of different ages. They hailed variously from China, Australia, Chile, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Argentina. They were market analysts and prospectors; equipment salesmen and regulators; executives, consultants, and peddlers of information in the notoriously opaque world of lithium, a “space,” in Silicon Valley talk, not quite meriting the word “market.”  As I slid into my seat, the chairman of one of the largest lithium companies in the world, with a sordid past in a corrupt privatization process under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, took to the stage. “Mining is the spine of Chile; mining runs through our veins.” I might have been the only person in the room who immediately thought of Eduardo Galeano’s anti-colonial page-turner, Open Veins of Latin America — incidentally penned the same year Pinochet came to power, brutally crushing the dream of democratic socialism in Chile. But I don’t think the chairman meant to call to mind the vampiric iconography of global capital. The dead sapping the living; the blood and sweat and tortured landscapes of extraction, especially in its colonial variant.  Arm Wrestling in the Atacama Lithium is the third element in the periodic table. It is highly reactive and exists either in compounds with other minerals in rock formations, or in clay deposits, or dissolved as an ion in brine. It is also the active ingredient in the lightweight rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs) and store energy on renewable grids. This is why lithium is essential for the coming energy transition."}
{"prompt":"In the United States, transportation is the single largest source of carbon pollution, accounting for about 30 percent of emissions. Achieving anything like a safe climate means we have to swap internal combustion engine vehicles for EVs, and hook up those cars, trucks, and buses to an electric grid powered by wind or sun. (Transitioning from a model of individual cars to one of mass transit would facilitate this process, and have other positive environmental effects.) Lithium enters into this equation twice. First, it is a material input for EV batteries. Second, batteries are in effect an energy storage technology, and grids that operate on intermittent gusts of wind and rays of sun need a mechanism to smooth supply and match it to demand. (Dramatically reducing our overall energy consumption would also help.) The brines of Chile’s Salar de Atacama lie 7,500 feet above sea level on an Andean plateau and supply roughly 30 percent of the world’s lithium. These salty underground reservoirs are located beneath a closed basin ringed by the Andean mountain range. A perfect storm of climate, geology, and chemistry has concentrated lithium in the waters below the rugged surface of the vast Atacama salt flat, which in total measures about two-thirds of the surface area of my home state of Rhode Island.  But resource extraction throws this vulnerable desert wetland out of whack. Getting the lithium entails sucking up the brine at an astounding rate. SQM, the company whose chairman I heard at the conference, pumps out brine at a rate of 1,700 liters a second — 95 percent of which is then evaporated. In other words, extracting lithium involves drawing up a lot of water and throwing most of it into the air.  Almost any corporate representative will say that extracting and evaporating brine has no effect on freshwater. But talk to any scientist or regulator familiar with the Atacama basin and they will tell you that the two types of water interact — that removing the brine eventually lowers the water table, threatening supplies needed for drinking and irrigation.","completion":"You can think about it like an arm-wrestling match. The brine water is underneath the salt flat. The freshwater systems are located at the flat’s perimeter. The two kinds of water are separated by a dynamic interface: a surface tension generated by the fluid’s differing density levels. Brine is much denser than freshwater, weighed down by dissolved elements like lithium. But while brine has the force of mass on its side, freshwater — which originates from snowmelt high up in the Andean peaks and the aquifers they feed — has the force of gravity in its favor. They are locked in a contest: mass versus gravity. When brine is removed, the interface separating them shifts towards the center of the salt flat, dragging freshwater with it — and away from the Indigenous communities located on the flat’s perimeter."}
{"prompt":"Flamingos and Quince I first saw the Salar de Atacama after driving around the mountains on the border of Bolivia. The Licancabur volcano loomed over us. We drove through a sandstorm, my first — memorable for its force, noise, and the way the suspended sand revealed the dance of the air’s rapid movement — which was made stranger by being paired with a rainstorm. We drove through many microclimates. The vegetation completely changed with the elevation. Gaining in altitude, the cooler and wetter air supported denser life; scrubby patches gave way to lusher meadows.","completion":"A gate in Toconao. Photo by author. Descending again, we entered the desert. Oases dotted the landscape: trees and shrubs congregated around the streams that flowed through mountain ravines. These quebradas are the basis of the built environment and social life of the eighteen Indigenous communities that neighbor the salt flat. Traveling through stone canals and filters, the quebradas feed small farms. The plots are enclosed with rustic wood fences and strategically planted trees for shade. They produce an incredible variety of produce. On a visit to the community of Toconao, I spotted figs, pomegranates, and quince along with the usual maize."}
{"prompt":"Quince in Toconao. Photo by the author. Driving further east, we reached the Los Flamencos National Reserve: an immense sweep of white and grey, rimmed by mountains in all directions. To our left was pure salt crust; to our right was the same crust interspersed with lagoons, where flamingos fed on tiny brine shrimp. The lagoons were tinted red in places, from the interaction of algae, sun, and wind. It was expansive in a way I associate with the ocean. The ground was crunchy and knobby beneath my hiking boots.  An unusually rapid stream after a major rain storm. Photo by author.","completion":"Just out of view were the zones of extraction. Thirty kilometers away, swallowed by the horizon, stood the big lithium installations. During the conference in Santiago, I had heard executives say that environmental protection measures should be improved — but also that there was nothing to be worried about. The rich ecosystem of these desert wetlands — the cotton-candy-pink Andean flamingos, white tufted grebes, and regal vicuña — did not figure prominently in the discussion. Indigenous communities were briefly invoked, and workers got a mention or two. But for most of the conference, the human and ecological texture of the salar receded from view.  The Los Flamencos National Reserve. Photo by the author."}
{"prompt":"Yet communities like Toconao are already feeling the effects of extraction on their everyday lives. Abnormally arid conditions reduce the streams’ flow, constraining access to water for crops and drinking. And, due to global warming, the swings are getting more unpredictable: long dry spells are punctuated by mega-rains that destroy infrastructure and plants, and can’t easily be absorbed by the soil. These changes also threaten habitats for wild vegetation and animals: biologists have found reduced species counts for the Andean flamingos.  For the suits at the W Hotel, the Atacama was an extraction site, an operational landscape, the beginning of a long trail of logistics and profit. But what of the vicuña and the quince, and the communities rooted in the flow of the desert’s precious water? What would it look like to bring these into view?  Teeming, Crawling, Floating, and Flying The day after my first visit to the salt flat, I met Ramón. We spoke for three hours, neglecting other appointments, over coffee and medialunas de manjar de leche, which are croissants filled with caramel made from condensed milk.  In contrast to many of the petit-bourgeois transplants in San Pedro, the mushrooming tourist hub in the Atacama, Ramón is from a working-class family on the rural outskirts of Santiago. He is a cofounder of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats (el Observatorio Plurinacional De Salares Andinos), a transnational network of environmentalists, concerned scientists, activist lawyers, and residents of affected Indigenous and campesino communities from across the Andean plateau known as the “lithium triangle.” The lithium triangle encompasses parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, and contains more than half of the world’s known lithium reserves — although members of the Observatory dislike the term for reducing their world to the resource extracted from it. (Full disclosure: I am a member.) The Observatory pushes back against “green extractivism”: the subordination of human rights and ecosystems to endless extraction in the name of “solving” climate change. Its platform affirms the broader cultural, natural, and scientific value of the salt flats — not just the economic value of its lithium.","completion":"It’s challenging work. The Observatory is trying to weave together a novel organizational form, with ambitions at the transnational scale of extractive capital. But organizing across three national borders, in rural spaces crosscut by dirt roads and underserved by transit and WiFi, is hard. At the industry conference in Santiago, there were tensions between capitalists and the state, and between potential investors and mining firms. But on the whole, these elite alliances are relatively easy: lubricated by money and airplanes, smartphones and endless hors d’oeuvres. The obstacles facing international movement-building are much larger.  These obstacles were in evidence at an Observatory gathering at the University of Atacama in June 2019. The Argentinian delegation never made it: snow had rendered the border crossing impassable. The president of the association of eighteen Indigenous Atacameño communities, Sergio Cubillos, was likewise absent. The communities he represents, along with Indigenous groups throughout the country, were engaged in an all-out mobilization against Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, whose government was trying to further fragment and privatize Indigenous territory.  But those who made it to the gathering were able to help develop a different vision for the habitats and wetlands of the region — an alternative to the one being pursued by the suits in Santiago. This vision is vividly captured in the work of Portuguese artist Mafalda Paiva, which were displayed at the Observatory event. In her paintings, the salt flats hum with a preternatural vibrancy, an effect produced by the exaggerated density of species and radically foreshortened topography. This teeming, crawling, floating, and flying life was invisible at the Santiago conference but composed the emotional core of the Observatory gathering. Paiva offers a kind of eco-utopian hyperrealism — and orients us to a very different future than that imagined by lithium capitalists."}
{"prompt":"Mafalda Paiva, “Salar de Atacama”. Image courtesy of Mafalda Paiva, Parmenides Ltd., and the University of Atacama. Common Futures The Observatory opposes green extractivism because of the very real harm it inflicts on humans, animals, and ecosystems. But their position raises thorny questions about the renewable energy transition. As each dire climate science report makes clear, emissions from fossil fuels are rendering the planet increasingly unlivable. At the same time, building a low-carbon world carries its own environmental and social costs: every wind turbine, solar panel, and electric vehicle requires vast quantities of materials mined from the earth, transported in container ships over great distances, manufactured in factories likely still powered by coal, and transported again to consumers. This globally dispersed supply chain, like any other under capitalism, facilitates a race to the bottom, as capital perpetually seeks cheaper labor and cheaper nature.  Not all communities along this chain have a say in who bears the social and environmental costs, or how much effort should be expended to reduce them — unless they force the matter. The vaster and more complex the chain, the more challenging it is to mobilize across it. This global spread isn’t new: the Industrial Revolution was enabled by raw materials extracted and harvested far from industrial centers. But in recent decades, technologies that disperse production even further have proliferated, from container ships to new trade agreements, computer-enabled “just-in-time” manufacturing to Special Economic Zones, making global capitalism an infinitely more intricate and interdependent web than Adam Smith ever dreamed.","completion":"When it comes to the renewable energy transition, how this web works has especially high stakes. It is a question of who controls our future. A world buzzing with hundreds of millions of Teslas (or worse, e-Escalades), made with materials rapaciously extracted without the consent of local communities, manufactured under a repressive labor regime in polluting factories — in other words, a world not unlike our own, but powered by wind and sun — is not an inevitability.  Other futures are also possible. The already unfolding energy transition offers a historic opportunity to dismantle the American lifestyle of privatized and segregated suburban affluence and build something better in its place. This lifestyle has always been a nightmare, ecologically and politically. The less energy we consume, the fewer raw materials we will need. This is not a call for eco-austerity: currently, energy consumption is highly unequal and wasteful. We can construct a society that is both low-carbon and plentiful in the ways that matter for most of us."}
{"prompt":"Doing so will require acknowledging how the material substrate of our lives is intimately, and often violently, connected to ecosystems and people beyond our borders. Trade, production, and consumption could, in theory, be reorganized to prioritize climate safety, socio-economic equality, Indigenous rights, and the integrity of habitats.  Yet achieving such an outcome will take political power, strategically deployed. Amid the overwhelming complexity of contemporary capitalism, it’s easy to forget that supply chains are not the product of geographic destiny. Indeed, a key aspect of environmental injustice is that contaminating processes — mines, power plants, or factories — are sited where ecosystems and human lives are seen as disposable or deemed to lack political influence.  The corollary is that force from below can obstruct and even reshape global flows. This force is particularly effective when exercised at “chokepoints”: points of obligatory passage for people and goods. In addition to the factory floor itself, the infrastructure of logistics (ports, ships, warehouses) and the sites of extraction (mines, rigs, refineries) are potential bottlenecks, and thus nodes of vulnerability for the system as a whole. In other words, they are strategic sites for disruption.  I might not know the exact shape of the world I want. The present weighs heavily and makes imagination difficult. But I know it starts with relating to this planet’s bounty as mysterious, vital, and nourishing; envisioning abundance as shared flourishing; and broadening our solidarities to encompass people we may never meet and places we may never visit but whose futures are bound up with our own. The salar will thank us.","completion":"Let’s begin at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood?  I grew up in Denver, in the kind of white, middle-class neighborhood where people had gotten mortgages to build housing after the war. My father was a sportswriter. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I probably saw seventy baseball games a year. I learned to score as I learned to read."}
{"prompt":"My father never really wanted to do the editorials or the critical pieces exposing the industry’s financial corruption or what have you. He wanted to write game stories and he had a wonderful way with language. He was in no way a scholar — in fact he was in no way an intellectual — but he loved to tell stories and write them. I think I was interested in that as well — in words and the sensuality of words.","completion":"The other giant area of childhood storytelling was Catholicism. I was way too pious a little girl, completely inside of the colors and the rituals and the stories of saints and the rest of it. I ate and drank a sensual Catholicism that I think was rare in my generation. Very not Protestant. It was quirky then; it’s quirky now. And it shaped me.  How so?  One of the ways that it shaped me was through my love of biology as a materialist, sensual, fleshly being in the world as well as a knowledge-seeking apparatus. It shaped me in my sense that I saw biology simultaneously as a discourse and profoundly of the world. The Word and the flesh.  Many of my colleagues in the History of Consciousness department, which comes much later in the story, were deeply engaged with Roland Barthes and with that kind of semiotics. I was very unconvinced and alienated from those thinkers because they were so profoundly Protestant in their secularized versions. They were so profoundly committed to the disjunction between the signifier and signified — so committed to a doctrine of the sign that is anti-Catholic, not just non-Catholic. The secularized sacramentalism that just drips from my work is against the doctrine of the sign that I felt was the orthodoxy in History of Consciousness. So Catholicism offered an alternative structure of affect. It was both profoundly theoretical and really intimate."}
{"prompt":"Did you start studying biology as an undergraduate?  I got a scholarship that allowed me to go to Colorado College. It was a really good liberal arts school. I was there from 1962 to 1966 and I triple majored in philosophy and literature and zoology, which I regarded as branches of the same subject. They never cleanly separated. Then I got a Fulbright to go to Paris. Then I went to Yale to study cell, molecular, and developmental biology.","completion":"Did you get into politics at Yale? Or were you already political when you arrived?  The politics came before that — probably from my Colorado College days, which were influenced by the civil rights movement. But it was at Yale that several things converged. I arrived in the fall of 1967, and a lot was happening."}
{"prompt":"New Haven in those years was full of very active politics. There was the antiwar movement. There was anti-chemical and anti-biological warfare activism among both the faculty and the graduate students in the science departments. There was Science for the People [a left-wing science organization] and the arrival of that wave of the women’s movement. My lover, Jaye Miller, who became my first husband, was gay, and gay liberation was just then emerging. There were ongoing anti-racist struggles: the Black Panther Party was very active in New Haven.  Jaye and I were part of a commune where one of the members and her lover were Black Panthers. Gayle was a welfare rights activist and the mother of a young child, and her lover was named Sylvester. We had gotten the house for the commune from the university at a very low rent because we were officially an “experiment in Christian living.” It was a very interesting group of people! There was a five-year-old kid who lived in the commune, and he idolized Sylvester. He would clomp up the back stairs wearing these little combat boots yelling, “Power to the people! Power! Power!” It made our white downstairs neighbors nervous. They didn’t much like us anyway. It was very funny.  Did this political climate influence your doctoral research at Yale? I ended up writing on the ways that metaphors shape experimental practice in the laboratory. I was writing about the experience of the coming-into-being of organisms in the situated interactions of the laboratory. In a profound sense, such organisms are made but not made up. It’s not a relativist position at all; it’s a materialist position. It’s about what I later learned to call “situated knowledges.” It was in the doing of biology that this became more and more evident.  How did these ideas go over with your labmates and colleagues? It was never a friendly way of talking for my biology colleagues, who always felt that this verged way too far in the direction of relativism.  It’s not that the words I was using were hard. It’s that the ideas were received with great suspicion. And I think that goes back to our discussion a few minutes ago about semiotics: I was trying to insist that the gapping of the signifier and the signified does not really determine what’s going on.","completion":"But let’s face it: I was never very good in the lab! My lab work was appalling. Everything I ever touched died or got infected. I did not have good hands, and I didn’t have good passion. I was always more interested in the discourse, if you will.  But you found a supervisor who was open to that?  Yes, Evelyn Hutchinson. He was an ecologist and a man of letters and a man who had had a long history of making space for heterodox women. And I was only a tiny bit heterodox. Other women he had given space to were way more out there than me. Evelyn was also the one who got us our house for our “experiment in Christian living.”  God bless. What happened after Yale? Jaye got a job at the University of Hawaii teaching world history and I went as this funny thing called a “faculty wife.” I had an odd ontological status. I got a job there in the general science department. Jaye and I were also faculty advisers for something called New College, which was an experimental liberal-arts part of the university that lasted for several years.  It was a good experience. Jaye and I got a divorce in that period but never really quite separated because we couldn’t figure out who got the camera and who got the sewing machine. That was the full extent of our property in those days. We were both part of a commune in Honolulu.  Then one night, Jaye’s boss in the history department insisted that we go out drinking with him, at which point he attacked us both sexually and personally in a drunken, homophobic, and misogynist rant. And very shortly after that, Jaye was denied tenure. Both of us felt stunned and hurt. So I applied for a job in the History of Science department at Johns Hopkins, and Jaye applied for a job at the University of Texas in Houston.  Baltimore and the Thickness of Worlding How was Hopkins?  History of Science was not a field I knew anything about, and the people who hired me knew that perfectly well. Therefore they assigned me to teach the incoming graduate seminar: Introduction to the History of Science. It was a good way to learn it!"}
{"prompt":"Hopkins was also where I met my current partner, Rusten. He was a graduate student in the History of Science department, where I was a baby assistant professor. (Today I would be fired and sued for sexual harassment — but that’s a whole other conversation.)  Who were some of the other people who became important to you at Hopkins? [The feminist philosopher] Nancy Hartsock and I shaped each other quite a bit in those years. We were part of the Marxist feminist scene in Baltimore. We played squash a lot — squash was a really intense part of our friendship. Her lover was a Marxist lover of Lenin; he gave lectures in town.  In the mid-to-late 1970s, Nancy and I started the women’s studies program at Hopkins together. At the time, she was doing her article that became her book on feminist materialism, [Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism]. It was very formative for me.","completion":"Those were also the years that Nancy and Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Smith were inventing feminist standpoint theory. I think all of us were already reaching toward those ideas, which we then consolidated as theoretical proposals to a larger community. The process was both individual and collective. We were putting these ideas together out of our struggles with our own work. You write in a closed room while tearing your hair out of your head — it was individual in that sense. But then it clicks, and the words come, and you consolidate theoretical proposals that you bring to your community. In that sense, it was a profoundly collective way of thinking with each other, and within the intensities of the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s."}
{"prompt":"The ideas that you and other feminist philosophers were developing challenged many dominant assumptions about what truth is, where it comes from, and how it functions. More recently, in the era of Trump, we are often told we are living in a time of “post-truth” — and some critics have blamed philosophers like yourselves for creating the environment of “relativism” in which “post-truth” flourishes. How do you respond to that? Our view was never that truth is just a question of which perspective you see it from. “Truth is perspectival” was never our position. We were against that. Feminist standpoint theory was always anti-perspectival. So was the Cyborg Manifesto, situated knowledges, [the philosopher] Bruno Latour’s notions of actor-network theory, and so on.","completion":"“Post-truth” gives up on materialism. It gives up on what I’ve called semiotic materialism: the idea that materialism is always situated meaning-making and never simply representation. These are not questions of perspective. They are questions of worlding and all of the thickness of that. Discourse is not just ideas and language. Discourse is bodily. It’s not embodied, as if it were stuck in a body. It’s bodily and it’s bodying, it’s worlding. This is the opposite of post-truth. This is about getting a grip on how strong knowledge claims are not just possible but necessary — worth living and dying for.  When you, Latour, and others were criticized for “relativism,” particularly during the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s, was that how you responded? And could your critics understand your response? Bruno and I were at a conference together in Brazil once. Which reminds me: If people want to criticize us, it ought to be for the amount of jet fuel involved in making and spreading these ideas! Not for leading the way to post-truth. We’re guilty on the carbon footprint issue, and Skyping doesn’t help, because I know what the carbon footprint of the cloud is.  Anyhow. We were at this conference in Brazil. It was a bunch of primate field biologists, plus me and Bruno. And Stephen Glickman, a really cool biologist, a man we both love, who taught at UC Berkeley for years and studied hyenas, took us aside privately. He said, “Now, I don’t want to embarrass you. But do you believe in reality?”  We were both kind of shocked by the question. First, we were shocked that it was a question of belief, which is a Protestant question. A confessional question. The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holding-ness of things. Do things hold or not?  Take evolution. The notion that you would or would not “believe” in evolution already gives away the game. If you say, “Of course I believe in evolution,” you have lost, because you have entered the semiotics of representationalism — and post-truth, frankly. You have entered an arena where these are all just matters of internal conviction and have nothing to do with the world. You have left the domain of worlding."}
{"prompt":"The Science Warriors who attacked us during the Science Wars were determined to paint us as social constructionists — that all truth is purely socially constructed. And I think we walked into that. We invited those misreadings in a range of ways. We could have been more careful about listening and engaging more slowly. It was all too easy to read us in the way the Science Warriors did. Then the right wing took the Science Wars and ran with it, which eventually helped nourish the whole fake-news discourse.","completion":"Your opponents in the Science Wars championed “objectivity” over what they considered your “relativism.” Were you trying to stake out a position between those two terms? Or did you reject the idea that either of those terms even had a stable meaning? Both terms inhabit the same ontological and epistemological frame — a frame that my colleagues and I have tried to make hard to inhabit. Sandra Harding insisted on “strong objectivity,” and my idiom was “situated knowledges.” We have tried to deauthorize the kind of possessive individualism that sees the world as units plus relations. You take the units, you mix them up with relations, you come up with results. Units plus relations equal the world.  People like me say, “No thank you: it’s relationality all the way down.” You don’t have units plus relations. You just have relations. You have worlding. The whole story is about gerunds — worlding, bodying, everything-ing. The layers are inherited from other layers, temporalities, scales of time and space, which don’t nest neatly but have oddly configured geometries. Nothing starts from scratch. But the play — I think the concept of play is incredibly important in all of this — proposes something new, whether it’s the play of a couple of dogs or the play of scientists in the field.  This is not about the opposition between objectivity and relativism. It’s about the thickness of worlding. It’s also about being of and for some worlds and not others; it’s about materialist commitment in many senses."}
{"prompt":"To this day I know only one or two scientists who like talking this way. And there are good reasons why scientists remain very wary of this kind of language. I belong to the Defend Science movement and in most public circumstances I will speak softly about my own ontological and epistemological commitments. I will use representational language. I will defend less-than-strong objectivity because I think we have to, situationally.  Is that bad faith? Not exactly. It’s related to [what the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called] “strategic essentialism.” There is a strategic use to speaking the same idiom as the people that you are sharing the room with. You craft a good-enough idiom so you can work on something together. I won’t always insist on what I think might be a stronger apparatus. I go with what we can make happen in the room together. And then we go further tomorrow.","completion":"In the struggles around climate change, for example, you have to join with your allies to block the cynical, well-funded, exterminationist machine that is rampant on the earth. I think my colleagues and I are doing that. We have not shut up, or given up on the apparatus that we developed. But one can foreground and background what is most salient depending on the historical conjuncture."}
{"prompt":"Santa Cruz and Cyborgs To return to your own biography, tell us a bit about how and why you left Hopkins for Santa Cruz.  Nancy Hartsock and I applied for a feminist theory job in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz together. We wanted to share it. Everybody assumed we were lovers, which we weren’t, ever. We were told by the search committee that they couldn’t consider a joint application because they had just gotten this job okayed and it was the first tenured position in feminist theory in the country. They didn’t want to do anything further to jeopardize it. Nancy ended up deciding that she wanted to stay in Baltimore anyway, so I applied solo and got the job. And I was fired from Hopkins and hired by Santa Cruz in the same week — and for exactly the same papers.","completion":"What were the papers? The long one was called “Signs of Dominance.” It was from a Marxist feminist perspective, and it was regarded as too political. Even though it appeared in a major journal, the person in charge of my personnel case at Hopkins told me to white it out from my CV.  The other one was a short piece on [the poet and novelist] Marge Piercy and [feminist theorist] Shulamith Firestone in Women: a Journal of Liberation. And I was told to white that out, too. Those two papers embarrassed my colleagues and they were quite explicit about it, which was kind of amazing. Fortunately, the people at History of Consciousness loved those same papers, and the set of commitments that went with them.  You arrived in Santa Cruz in 1980, and it was there that you wrote the Cyborg Manifesto. Tell us a bit about its origins."}
{"prompt":"It had a very particular birth. There was a journal called the Socialist Review, which had formerly been called Socialist Revolution. Jeff Escoffier, one of the editors, asked five of us to write no more than five pages each on Marxist feminism, and what future we anticipated for it.  This was just after the election of Ronald Reagan. The future we anticipated was a hard right turn. It was the definitive end of the 1960s. Around the same time, Jeff asked me if I would represent Socialist Review at a conference of New and Old Lefts in Cavtat in Yugoslavia [now Croatia]. I said yes, and I wrote a little paper on reproductive biotechnology. A bunch of us descended on Cavtat, and there were relatively few women. So we rather quickly found one another and formed alliances with the women staff who were doing all of the reproductive labor, taking care of us. We ended up setting aside our papers and pronouncing on various feminist topics. It was really fun and quite exciting.  Out of that experience, I came back to Santa Cruz and wrote the Cyborg Manifesto. It turned out not to be five pages, but a whole coming to terms with what had happened to me in those years from 1980 to the time it came out in 1985.","completion":"The manifesto ended up focusing a lot on cybernetics and networking technologies. Did this reflect the influence of nearby Silicon Valley? Were you close with people working in those fields? It’s part of the air you breathe here. But the real tech alliances in my life come from my partner Rusten and his friends and colleagues, because he worked as a freelance software designer. He did contract work for Hewlett Packard for years. He had a long history in that world: when he was only fourteen, he got a job programming on punch cards for companies in Seattle.  The Cyborg Manifesto was the first paper I ever wrote on a computer screen. We had an old HP-86. And I printed it on one of those daisy-wheel printers. One I could never get rid of, and nobody ever wanted. It ended up in some dump, God help us all."}
{"prompt":"The Cyborg Manifesto had such a tremendous impact, and continues to. What did you make of its reception? People read it as they do. Sometimes I find it interesting. But sometimes I just want to jump into a foxhole and pull the cover over me.  In the manifesto, you distinguish yourself from two other socialist feminist positions. The first is the techno-optimist position that embraces aggressive technological interventions in order to modify human biology. This is often associated with Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex (1970), and in particular her proposal for “artificial wombs” that could reproduce humans outside of a woman’s body.","completion":"Yes, although Firestone gets slotted into a quite narrow, blissed-out techno-bunny role, as if all her work was about reproduction without wombs. She is remembered for one technological proposal, but her critique of the historical materialist conditions of mothering and reproduction was very deep and broad."}
{"prompt":"You also make some criticisms of the ideas associated with Italian autonomist feminists and the Wages for Housework campaign. You suggest that they overextend the category of “labor.” Wages for Housework was very important. And I’m always in favor of working by addition not subtraction. I’m always in favor of enlarging the litter. Let’s watch the attachments and detachments, the compositions and decompositions, as the litter proliferates. Labor is an important category with a strong history, and Wages for Housework enlarged it.","completion":"But in thinkers with Marxist roots, there’s also a tendency to make the category of labor do too much work. A great deal of what goes on needs to be thickly described with categories other than labor — or in interesting kinds of entanglement with labor.  What other categories would you want to add? Play is one. Labor is so tied to functionality, whereas play is a category of non-functionality.  Play captures a lot of what goes on in the world. There is a kind of raw opportunism in biology and chemistry, where things work stochastically to form emergent systematicities. It’s not a matter of direct functionality. We need to develop practices for thinking about those forms of activity that are not caught by functionality, those which propose the possible-but-not-yet, or that which is not-yet but still open.  It seems to me that our politics these days require us to give each other the heart to do just that. To figure out how, with each other, we can open up possibilities for what can still be. And we can’t do that in in a negative mood. We can’t do that if we do nothing but critique. We need critique; we absolutely need it. But it’s not going to open up the sense of what might yet be. It’s not going to open up the sense of that which is not yet possible but profoundly needed."}
{"prompt":"The established disorder of our present era is not necessary. It exists. But it’s not necessary.  Playing Against Double Death What might some of those practices for opening up new possibilities look like? Through playful engagement with each other, we get a hint about what can still be and learn how to make it stronger. We see that in all occupations. Historically, the Greenham Common women were fabulous at this. [Eds.: The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a series of protests against nuclear weapons at a Royal Air Force base in England, beginning in 1981.] More recently, you saw it with the Dakota Access Pipeline occupation.  The degree to which people in these occupations play is a crucial part of how they generate a new political imagination, which in turn points to the kind of work that needs to be done. They open up the imagination of something that is not what [the ethnographer] Deborah Bird Rose calls “double death” — extermination, extraction, genocide.  Now, we are facing a world with all three of those things. We are facing the production of systemic homelessness. The way that flowers aren’t blooming at the right time, and so insects can’t feed their babies and can’t travel because the timing is all screwed up, is a kind of forced homelessness. It’s a kind of forced migration, in time and space.  This is also happening in the human world in spades. In regions like the Middle East and Central America, we are seeing forced displacement, some of which is climate migration. The drought in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America — Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador — is driving people off their land.  So it’s not a humanist question. It’s a multi-kind and multi-species question.","completion":"In the Cyborg Manifesto, you use the ideas of “the homework economy” and the “integrated circuit” to explore the various ways that information technology was restructuring labor in the early 1980s to be more precarious, more global, and more feminized. Do climate change and the ecological catastrophes you’re describing change how you think about those forces?  Yes and no. The theories that I developed in that period emerged from a particular historical conjuncture. If I were mapping the integrated circuit today, it would have different parameters than the map that I made in the early 1980s. And surely the questions of immigration, exterminism, and extractivism would have to be deeply engaged. The problem of rebuilding place-based lives would have to get more attention."}
{"prompt":"The Cyborg Manifesto was written within the context of the hard-right turn of the 1980s. But the hard-right turn was one thing; the hard-fascist turn of the late 2010s is another. It’s not the same as Reagan. The presidents of Colombia, Hungary, Brazil, Egypt, India, the United States — we are looking at a new fascist capitalism, which requires reworking the ideas of the early 1980s for them to make sense.","completion":"So there are continuities between now and the map I made then, a lot of continuities. But there are also some pretty serious inflection points, particularly when it comes to developments in digital technologies that are playing into the new fascism. Could you say more about those developments? If the public-private dichotomy was old-fashioned in 1980, by 2019 I don’t even know what to call it. We have to try to rebuild some sense of a public. But how can you rebuild a public in the face of nearly total surveillance? And this surveillance doesn’t even have a single center. There is no eye in the sky."}
{"prompt":"Then we have the ongoing enclosure of the commons. Capitalism produces new forms of value and then encloses those forms of value — the digital is an especially good example of that. This involves the monetization of practically everything we do. And it’s not like we are ignorant of this dynamic. We know what’s going on. We just don’t have a clue how to get a grip on it.  One attempt to update the ideas of the Cyborg Manifesto has come from the “xenofeminists” of the international collective Laboria Cuboniks. I believe some of them have described themselves as your “disobedient daughters.” Overstating things, that’s not my feminism.","completion":"Why not? I’m not very interested in those discussions, frankly. It’s not what I’m doing. It’s not what makes me vital now. In a moment of ecological urgency, I’m more engaged in questions of multispecies environmental and reproductive justice. Those questions certainly involve issues of digital and robotic and machine cultures, but they aren’t at the center of my attention."}
{"prompt":"What is at the center of my attention are land and water sovereignty struggles, such as those over the Dakota Access Pipeline, over coal mining on the Black Mesa plateau, over extractionism everywhere. My attention is centered on the extermination and extinction crises happening at a worldwide level, on human and nonhuman displacement and homelessness. That’s where my energies are. My feminism is in these other places and corridors.","completion":"Do you still think the cyborg is still a useful figure? I think so. The cyborg has turned out to be rather deathless. Cyborgs keep reappearing in my life as well as other people’s lives.  The cyborg remains a wily trickster figure. And, you know, they’re also kind of old-fashioned. They’re hardly up-to-the‑minute. They’re rather klutzy, a bit like R2-D2 or a pacemaker. Maybe the embodied digitality of us now is not especially well captured by the cyborg. So I’m not sure. But, yeah, I think cyborgs are still in the litter. I just think we need a giant bumptious litter whelped by a whole lot of really badass bitches — some of whom are men! Mourning Without Despair You mentioned that your current work is more focused on environmental issues. How are you thinking about the role of technology in mitigating or adapting to climate change — or fighting extractivism and extermination? There is no homogeneous socialist position on this question. I’m very pro-technology, but I belong to a crowd that is quite skeptical of the projects of what we might call the “techno-fix,” in part because of their profound immersion in technocapitalism and their disengagement from communities of practice.  Those communities may need other kinds of technologies than those promised by the techno-fix: different kinds of mortgage instruments, say, or re-engineered water systems. I’m against the kind of techno-fixes that are abstracted from place and tied up with huge amounts of technocapital. This seems to include most geoengineering projects and imaginations.  So when I see massive solar fields and wind farms I feel conflicted, because on the one hand they may be better than fracking in Monterey County — but only maybe. Because I also know where the rare earth minerals required for renewable energy technologies come from and under what conditions. We still aren’t doing the whole supply-chain analysis of our technologies. So I think we have a long way to go in socialist understanding of these matters."}
{"prompt":"One tendency within socialist thought believes that socialists can simply seize capitalist technology and put it to different purposes — that you take the forces of production, build new relations around them, and you’re done. This approach is also associated with a Promethean, even utopian approach to technology. Socialist techno-utopianism has been around forever, but it has its own adherents today, such as those who advocate for “Fully Automated Luxury Communism.” I wonder how you see that particular lineage of socialist thinking about technology.","completion":"I think very few people are that simplistic, actually. In various moments we might make proclamations that come down that way. But for most people, our socialisms, and the approaches with which socialists can ally, are richer and more varied.  When you talk to the Indigenous activists of the Black Mesa Water Coalition, for example, they have a complex sense around solar arrays and coal plants and water engineering and art practices and community movements. They have very rich articulated alliances and separations around all of this.  Socialists aren’t the only ones who have been techno-utopian, of course. A far more prominent and more influential strand of techno-utopianism has come from the figures around the Bay Area counterculture associated with the Whole Earth Catalog, in particular Stewart Brand, who went on to play important intellectual and cultural roles in Silicon Valley."}
{"prompt":"They are not friends. They are not allies. I’m avoiding calling them enemies because I’m leaving open the possibility of their being able to learn or change, though I’m not optimistic. I think they occupy the position of the “god trick.” [Eds.: The “god trick” is an idea introduced by Haraway that refers to the traditional view of objectivity as a transcendent “gaze from nowhere.”] I think they are blissed out by their own privileged positions and have no idea what their own positionality in the world really is. And I think they cause a lot of harm, both ideologically and technically.","completion":"How so? They get a lot of publicity. They take up a lot of the air in the room.  It’s not that I think they’re horrible people. There should be space for people pushing new technologies. But I don’t see nearly enough attention given to what kinds of technological innovation are really needed to produce viable local and regional energy systems that don’t depend on species-destroying solar farms and wind farms that require giant land grabs in the desert."}
{"prompt":"The kinds of conversations around technology that I think we need are those among folks who know how to write law and policy, folks who know how to do material science, folks who are interested in architecture and park design, and folks who are involved in land struggles and solidarity movements. I want to see us do much savvier scientific, technological, and political thinking with each other, and I want to see it get press. The Stewart Brand types are never going there.  Do you see clear limitations in their worldviews and their politics? They remain remarkably humanist in their orientation, in their cognitive apparatus, and in their vision of the world. They also have an almost Peter Pan quality. They never quite grew up. They say, “If it’s broken, fix it.”  This comes from an incapacity to mourn and an incapacity to be finite. I mean that psychoanalytically: an incapacity to understand that there is no status quo ante, to understand that death and loss are real. Only within that understanding is it possible to open up to a kind of vitality that isn’t double death, that isn’t extermination, and which doesn’t yearn for transcendence, yearn for the fix.","completion":"There’s not much mourning with the Stewart Brand types. There’s not much felt loss of the already disappeared, the already dead — the disappeared of Argentina, the disappeared of the caravans, the disappeared of the species that will not come back. You can try to do as much resurrection biology as you want to. But any of the biologists who are actually involved in the work are very clear that there is no resurrection.  You have also been critical of the Anthropocene, as a proposed new geological epoch defined by human influence on the earth. Do you see the idea of the Anthropocene as having similar limitations? I think the Anthropocene framework has been a fertile container for quite a lot, actually. The Anthropocene has turned out to be a rather capacious territory for incorporating people in struggle. There are a lot of interesting collaborations with artists and scientists and activists going on."}
{"prompt":"The main thing that’s too bad about the term is that it perpetuates the misunderstanding that what has happened is a human species act, as if human beings as a species necessarily exterminate every planet we dare to live on. As if we can’t stop our productive and reproductive excesses.  Extractivism and exterminationism are not human species acts. They come from a situated historical conjuncture of about five hundred years in duration that begins with the invention of the plantation and the subsequent modeling of industrial capitalism. It is a situated historical conjuncture that has had devastating effects even while it has created astonishing wealth.  To define this as a human species act affects the way a lot of scientists think about the Anthropocene. My scientist colleagues and friends really do continue to think of it as something human beings can’t stop doing, even while they understand my historical critique and agree with a lot of it.  It’s a little bit like the relativism versus objectivity problem. The old languages have a deep grip. The situated historical way of thinking is not instinctual for Western science, whose offspring are numerous.  Are there alternatives that you think could work better than the Anthropocene? There are plenty of other ways of thinking. Take climate change. Now, climate change is a necessary and essential category. But if you go to the circumpolar North as a Southern scientist wanting to collaborate with Indigenous people on climate change — on questions of changes in the sea ice, for example, or changes in the hunting and subsistence base — the limitations of that category will be profound. That’s because it fails to engage with the Indigenous categories that are actually active on the ground.  There is an Inuktitut word, “sila.” In an Anglophone lexicon, “sila” will be translated as “weather.” But in fact, it’s much more complicated. In the circumpolar North, climate change is a concept that collects a lot of stuff that the Southern scientist won’t understand. So the Southern scientist who wants to collaborate on climate change finds it almost impossible to build a contact zone.","completion":"Anyway, there are plenty of other ways of thinking about shared contemporary problems. But they require building contact zones between cognitive apparatuses, out of which neither will leave the same as they were before. These are the kinds of encounters that need to be happening more. A final question. Have you been following the revival of socialism, and socialist feminism, over the past few years?  Yes."}
{"prompt":"What do you make of it? I mean, socialist feminism is becoming so mainstream that even Harper’s Bazaar is running essays on “emotional labor.” I’m really pleased! The old lady is happy. I like the resurgence of socialism. For all the horror of Trump, it has released us. A whole lot of things are now being seriously considered, including mass nonviolent social resistance. So I am not in a state of cynicism or despair.","completion":"Though you’re currently an artist and professor, you were originally trained as a water engineer. What does that mean? My first degree was in environmental engineering and I specialized in water, particularly stormwater. This is an area of engineering concerned with how cities, roads, and landscapes are designed to deal with runoff and water flows. It’s an area that overlaps with hydrology, which is the study of how water interacts with the environment — how we model and predict rainfall and what it’s going to do on the ground. It also overlaps with urban design, because obviously a road is not just a thing for cars to drive on, but also a mechanism to manage water flows in a storm.  Every gutter or drain or pipe is the materialization of a process of data collection, estimation, and modeling and is therefore a wager on environmental variability. How much water might fall? How often? And what is the biggest or smallest rain event the system must be able to deal with? I was involved in designing those sorts of systems.  Towards the end of my time working in that industry in Australia, I was in an area of environmental engineering called “water-sensitive urban design” where we were trying to design living systems to improve water quality. Specifically, we were working on improving the composition and quality of stormwater that flowed from housing developments to rivers or oceans downstream. Instead of designing a pollutant trap made out of concrete, we would try to imitate how a natural watershed would work and design a wetland so that stormwater would flow through it and hang out there for a few days before flowing into a creek. In this way, the water would both get filtered and support wildlife and plant growth along the way."}
{"prompt":"How did you go from doing that engineering work to making art? There’s license in the arts to question very normative assumptions. The engineering approach of designing infrastructures as living systems does still give me hope for how we might rethink human systems more broadly. But I continue to feel quite frustrated with the way that engineering as a discipline tends to frame problems as technical challenges. You’re supposed to scope out the political and social forces that are causing an environmental problem, and just slap a technical fix on the end of it. Even the work I was doing — that really nice, innovative, environmental work — was facilitating terrible housing developments full of huge McMansions. It seemed like my job was to make these wildly unsustainable projects just a little bit less bad.  So I started to get more and more interested in different kinds of questions. Like, who and what do we value? What do we think we need in order to have a good life? These weren’t questions we asked as engineers, but they were questions I could ask as an artist.  For example, as an engineer, your goal is to minimize risk to humans living in the environment, and to do this, you have to adhere to regulations such as human health standards. But the cost may be the capacity of other, nonhuman species to live and flourish. At some point, you have to think about how you weigh that cost. We urgently need to expand the definition of human health to also include the fates of other life forms. There was very little room in the space I was working in to explore these assumptions and the cost of designing from a solely human-centric perspective.","completion":"Unlearning Engineering “Coin-Operated Wetland” (2011). Image by Alex Davies. Decentering the human feels like a theme throughout your work. One of my earliest pieces was called “Coin-Operated Wetland.” It was an installation that recreated what I was doing as an engineer, but in a gallery space. I built a system where a washing machine was connected to a wetland. The whole installation was a closed system, where the water that was used to wash clothes ultimately ended up in the wetland and then circulated back to the washing machine. What if you show people that there is no downstream? What if you’re confronted with the life forms that are directly impacted by your actions? The night before that show opened, I was incredibly stressed because working with water is so hard! With software-based work, if you get a glitch, you edit the code and even use the mistake to inform the aesthetic of the work. But mistakes in a system involving water can result in, you know, flooding.  Also, in order for a living water treatment system to work, you can’t use disinfectants like chlorine because it will kill all the bacteria and plants. So from a human health perspective, that system didn’t actually comply with health standards and I kept thinking, “Oh my God, someone’s going to put their hand in it and put their hand in their mouth, and I’m going to get sued.” That was the engineer in me, thinking about risk minimization."}
{"prompt":"In the end, the system was actually pretty successful; the plants were happy and, even though the laundry water wasn’t treated to drinking water standards, the T-shirts we put in the laundromat came out looking clean. Of course, it required more maintenance and labor than a washing machine you’d have in your house, and it was less efficient by some measures; we could only do one load per day because that’s the pace at which the plants could consume the water. But if we’re going to shift away from seeing ecosystems strictly as service providers and towards a more negotiated, reciprocal relationship with them, our systems are going to need a little more give. That project was about seeking a balance, and exploring how to build infrastructures that are not optimized for humans alone.","completion":"I mean, you’d never be allowed to build something like that as an engineer. The client would sue you.  That balancing act reminds me of something engineer and professor Deb Chachra wrote in one of her newsletters. She wrote, “Sustainability always looks like underutilization when compared to resource extraction.” That’s beautiful. Deb also writes about infrastructure as being care at scale, which I think is a nice way to think about it. Could there be a model where infrastructures don’t just care for humans, but also care for the ecosystems where they’re acting? I’m obsessed with water leaks for that reason. If you look at a water pipe at the point where it’s leaking, you usually have these little gardens popping up, all these little ecosystems that are taking advantage of the water supply. There’s been fascinating research published on how leaks from water distribution systems in cities actually recharge groundwater aquifers because most of these systems leak 10 to 30 percent of their water.  Of course, there’s also research going on at MIT and all these engineering schools on how to to develop little autonomous robots that go into the pipes and find the leaks and plug them up. From the perspective of design and engineering, the system is not supposed to be porous; leaks are a problem, an inefficiency. But it actually takes more than just humans to make the city. What about the street trees that depend on those leaks? So then the question becomes: is there a way we can share resources with other species rather than completely monopolizing them? “Unfit Bits” (2015). Image courtesy of Tega Brain."}
{"prompt":"The shift from looking at unintended side effects, of leaks for example, to intentionally surfacing or creating side effects reminds me of your project “Unfit Bits.” You and your collaborator Surya Mattu demonstrate all these ways to “hack” a Fitbit by making it register steps when you’re not actually taking them, such as attaching the Fitbit to a dog’s collar or the wheel of a bicycle. That project is about deliberate subversion — side effects intended by the hacker, but not by the creator of the system being hacked.","completion":"I haven’t really thought about leaks and “Unfit Bits” together, but that project is also about the manipulation of infrastructure and the deliberate glitching of a dataset for a different political end. Whether you look at leaks in a water system or leaks in an information system like the Panama Papers or the Snowden leaks, both are about a redistribution of power.  In the context of fitness trackers and employer-provided health and life insurance, the pitch is that tracker data provides an accurate picture of a person’s health. That’s a very political claim, especially in the US where access to insurance is commodified and not universal. As a result, employers are handing over employee fitness data to private insurance companies as part of workplace wellness programs, and some of them even penalize their employees for refusing to wear these trackers. Life insurance companies are using Fitbit data to help determine premiums. You’ve got this very fraught situation where a dataset is playing a critical role in how people get access to essential services."}
{"prompt":"With “Unfit Bits,\" you author your own dataset and optimize it for what you want rather than being subject to what it says is the objective reality of your life. If you want to see how a system works, look at what the system deems inaccurate or inefficient. Pay attention to what’s called an error. In a water system, it’s a leak. With a Fitbit, it’s anything that doesn’t meet the narrow definition of a step. On the flip side, many gestures that aren’t steps get measured as steps. “Unfit Bits” exploits that.","completion":"With both leaks and glitches, you’re poking holes in the idea that systems are perfectly closed and objective. Yes, and it’s also me trying to unlearn an engineering worldview. When you’re trained as an engineer, you’re taught that you’re going to make a system that solves a problem. Very rarely do you get to the point of asking: is the problem we’re solving for the same for everyone? Who gets to decide what qualifies as a problem and what are the tradeoffs in how it is defined? There are these universal ideas of what’s efficient. Well, efficient for whom?  Not looking at the world as an engineer is also about embracing inefficiencies or using them to to tease out what we call success in a system.  Simulation Machines “Asunder” (2019). Image courtesy of Tega Brain."}
{"prompt":"Part of what makes “Unfit Bits” work is the absurdity of putting a Fitbit on a dog collar to convince the device that you ran five miles. Your project “Asunder” also uses absurdity, but to make a point about optimizing the environment. Tell me about that project. It’s basically a simulation machine. Julian Oliver, Bengt Sjölén, and I built a computing system to generate fictional geoengineering proposals. The work cycles through publicly available satellite imagery of the world — tiles taken from the Landsat 5, 7 and 8 satellites (6 got lost). From that dataset, we chose a series of sites that have gone through significant change over the last thirty to forty years and we show these places using the historic satellite tiles for that site.  From there, our computer generates preposterous scenarios for geoengineering that site, like rerouting a river or recombining the site with another site from across the world. It generates lots of scenarios using a GAN — a machine learning method that uses existing images to generate new images — to stitch the satellite tiles together. You end up with these surreal, dreamlike Landsat tiles that are made up of edited landscapes. Then the system chooses one possibility, analyzes the land use changes in it, and inputs that data into a climate model to estimate how the change would impact the environmental performance of the earth overall.","completion":"One of our sites is Silicon Valley. The system generated a geoengineering scenario where it took a lithium mining region in Chile and transplanted it into Silicon Valley. In another scenario, a region in Antarctica is recombined with an area of industrial agriculture in the US Midwest. Using the climate model, the simulation then gradually tries to estimate what that would mean, climate-wise.  The project takes the solutionism that you hear in geoengineering spaces to the most ridiculous extreme possible. These solutions are totally not viable.  I know it’s generating ridiculous scenarios, but I can also imagine the EPA or NASA wanting to do exactly this.  Yeah, and if you look at climate forecasts a hundred years out, there’s a lot of extremely bizarre land use changes that are predicted unless we can drastically change our systems of production. An ice-free Arctic. Agricultural areas shifting to higher latitudes as frozen areas in Russia and Canada thaw. The complete desertification of agricultural areas that are viable today. And if that’s not bad enough, all of the southern wine-growing regions in Europe are predicted to become too dry to support wine production anymore."}
{"prompt":"This is the information that’s coming from the scientific community today. So although the system we built with “Asunder” generates scenarios that feel preposterous, we live at a moment where scientists are predicting an even more catastrophic future.  We’re all trying to assimilate that view of our future. I think anybody who’s done even a little bit of reading on the subject must feel a deep sense of dislocation. The narratives we grew up with around modernity and technology and progress are really at odds with what the science is telling us.  How did you all decide on satellite imagery and machine learning as the mediums for this piece? They’re part of a long tradition. The history of weather prediction is entwined with the history of computation: the first electronic computer, the ENIAC, was a military technology developed in the 1940s, and then put to civilian use. One of the use cases was weather prediction; in the 1950s John von Neumann developed the first weather prediction techniques on the ENIAC. So this is a long-running historic project that has produced the knowledge of how we’ve changed the composition of the atmosphere and what that means. We wouldn’t be able to understand climate change if we didn’t have these technologies. They have given us a view of the world that would otherwise be impossible.  At the same time, these simulations of the world can make you forget that there are other ways to know. Computing is so seductive that way. It makes you forget that there’s always something the simulation can’t capture. And it turns out that all these decisions have to be made about how the simulation or the model is built, and those all impact the end result.","completion":"“Asunder” is also connected with work I’ve been doing in the past year or so around machinic perspectives of environmental systems and what looking at the environment as a computer does. How does it make us see the biosphere, and how does it produce and foreclose certain possibilities? These questions are really important, because we have some urgent environmental challenges to deal with. And this is happening at the exact moment where we also have a surplus of computation. Everyone’s like, “What can we do with all this computation? I know! We can solve climate change and extinction and whatever!” You’ve been making work about the environment, nonhumans, and environmental timescales for a decade. My sense is that the language of “climate crisis” and “extinction events” has recently become mainstream in a way that it wasn’t before. What has it been like to watch that happen? Has it changed how your work is received? It’s a huge relief to see these issues become more widely discussed and to see organizing and activist work happening in the mainstream. We need more of that, and we need our collective action to be more extreme because the political class has decided to leverage denial for their economic gain. There’s no question that we need to be doing everything we can to take power away from those people. It’s horrifying that denial and doubt are being used very strategically by powerful people not only in the US, but also in Australia where I’m from.  I’d love to see much more experimentation around how to reconfigure relations and trouble the human-centeredness of technologies and infrastructures. I’m excited to see more work that takes up what it means to attempt to optimize an environment. So often, we think about data in service of prediction and control as the primary way to encounter an environment. And yet there are so many other ways to know a place."}
{"prompt":"I wanted to start with your first day at camp at Standing Rock. In your book, you write about digging compost holes with an Ojibwe relative and building a kitchen shack with a Palestinian network admin. It seemed like an incredible logistical feat that brought together people from all over. Can you talk about the infrastructure you all built there and what made that convergence possible? My first day at camp was late August 2016, before the dog attacks. We arrived to bring supplies, and we set up camp for about a week. Some of us from our organization, The Red Nation, had to leave, but some of us stayed for a long time. One of our people stayed until the last day when camp was evicted in February 2017.  By and large, the infrastructure of the camp was organized around tribal nations. Our tribe, the Kul Wicasa, or Lower Brule Sioux Tribe, set up our own camp. Next to us was the Ihanktonwan, or Yankton, and next to them was the Oglalas. Then there was the Cheyenne River Sioux camp and then across the Cannonball River, there was the Rosebud Sioux camp. The camp structure took on an organic shape. Later on, other organizations and tribal nations filled in.  Because of the culture of Native people in general, our camping and outdoor life is really well organized. We have a depth of communal knowledge about those subjects. Even though we are colonized and confined to reservations and don’t live the life that we once lived, we still have a seasonal cycle of migration and gathering. Summers are very community-oriented and organized around a kind of camp life, whether it’s Powwows or fairs or Sun Dances or whatever. Then in the winter, we go back to our more settled homes. Camp life at Standing Rock reflected that.","completion":"Everything was organized around need, so the first thing that went up were the porta potties. Then came the kitchens, followed by the donation tents where people could get camp supplies they didn’t have. It reflected the traditions of Indigenous people: if you didn’t have enough, you were still taken care of. Many people see Indigenous generosity as a weakness, but it’s one of our strengths."}
{"prompt":"Over a longer period of time, people developed internal political processes, both formal and informal. Not everyone was Lakota or Indigenous, and with that many people sharing space, there had to be some kind of community agreements. There were community councils where non-Indigenous people had a say. The camp infrastructure wasn’t meant to be permanent, but it suited the purpose.","completion":"Was there power or Wi-Fi?  No. Or maybe there was for a moment. There was a place called Facebook Hill, which was the only place where you could get good cell phone reception. You would see people up there checking the internet, broadcasting to Facebook or checking email.  I ask because the conventional narrative about other large mobilizations like Occupy or Arab Spring tends to emphasize the role of social media. How do you think about technology, whether within the context of the encampment at Standing Rock or more broadly?  Technology is interesting because its value is socially constructed. For Native nations, technological progress is usually top-down. It’s usually something that’s forced on us. More generally, capitalism as a social process has devastated our communities. It has ensured that we don’t have self-determining authority over the means of production that are located on our land. Take the Navajo Nation: there are all these fracking rigs going up there. The road systems are created as infrastructure for fracking rigs. They’re not infrastructure for the people who live on the land.  My friend, the poet Mark Tilsen, made a joke when we were discussing what the future would look like. I said, “Indigenous peoples aren’t protesting the construction of wind turbines and solar panels on their land.” And he replied, “Yet.” It’s true: regardless of what the technology is, who has the power to decide how it will be implemented and managed? Who will shoulder the burden of the transition away from fossil fuels? Take those electric cars that run on batteries made from rare earth elements — those elements have to come from somewhere. Those wind turbines have to be built on someone’s land."}
{"prompt":"At the same time, I would say that Indigenous ontologies and ways of being are social systems that value different things than settler ontologies, so our technologies look different. Indigenous technology gets cast as primitive, like it may have been useful in the past but no longer has any relevance. But that’s not true. Assembling communal life is in itself a technology.  That dynamic, where technology by default means settler technology or capitalist technology as opposed to Indigenous technology, also operates with the law.","completion":"Your book shows that US law is not “the” law but is “settler law,” one of many possible legal frameworks. And one subtext of the book is that settler law is a technology for dispossessing Native nations of their land and replacing Indigenous people with settlers and infrastructure to support settler life. There’s a Lakota concept for this that you describe: Woope Wasicu, or “law of the colonizer.” Can you talk more about that? These are ways that we’re racialized: we’re constructed as not developing socially valuable technologies and we’re constructed as lawless — not having forms of order, or having forms of order that are not legible to the settler state. Erasure is a social technology that makes the taking of our land much easier. It’s done not just at the level of the imagination, but enacted through the law itself.  In my book, I mention this 1823 Supreme Court decision that said that Indigenous people only had occupancy rights to our land — not full title — so settlers who “discovered” our land could legally take it. That ruling was based on the “doctrine of discovery.” The Chief Justice in that case, John Marshall, cited a fifteenth-century papal bull called the “Doctrine of Christian Discovery” that was used to legally justify Portugal’s claims to land in West Africa. The reasoning was that, just like non-Christians in West Africa were considered “savages” who couldn’t own their own land, we couldn’t have full title to our land because we’re not full humans who exist at the level of civilization — a doctrine decided and standardized, of course, by the colonizing nation.  So settler law comes in to impose itself on ours. And what’s interesting about US settler law is that even though the United States claims to be a democratic republic, it has a very covenant-based government, meaning that it derives its authority from a constitution that hasn’t changed much since it was written. The United States is different from other liberal capitalist democracies in that it came into existence as a capitalist democracy from the get-go. It didn’t evolve from feudalism like democracies did in Europe; it supplanted itself on top of what already existed, in order to destroy what already existed."}
{"prompt":"Consequently, US settlers were one of the first nationalities to define themselves against the people whose labor and resources they depended on, whether it was African slaves or Indigenous land. There are core principles of American identity that revolve around white supremacy, land ownership, xenophobia, anti-Indigenousness, and anti-Blackness. Those principles are ingrained not just in the Constitution, but into the broader social fabric of the United States.  Those principles also helped compose a highly centralized national identity. In response, the multitude of disparate Native nations became centralized into fewer, more unified identities. Our Indianness as a universal identity that we share is always defined against what we are not, and what we are not is a colonizing nation.  Another thread that runs through your book is the extent to which feats of engineering and scientific “progress” literally come at the expense of Native life and land. You write about the Pick-Sloan Plan, which was sold to the non-Native public as an innovative hydroelectric power project. Can you talk more about that? In the name of providing cheap hydroelectricity to settlers and making the prairie bloom through irrigation, the Pick-Sloan Plan called for the construction of five dams along the Missouri River. So between 1946 and 1966, the US Army Corps of Engineers condemned and seized 550 square miles of Native land through eminent domain. The dams also flooded seven Lakota and Dakota reservations and forced thousands of people to relocate from land they had lived on for generations.","completion":"Those dams were imposed on us by the US military. Hydroelectric dams have a lot in common with nuclear power plants in terms of how they’re centrally and hierarchically managed, how they produce power, and how they’re ingrained within the military-industrial complex. Hydroelectricity and nuclear energy also both get lumped in as “green” technologies, but I would contrast the impact and management of those particular forms of technology with solar grids and wind turbines, which are very decentralized."}
{"prompt":"If you turn off the hydroelectric dam, the impact is catastrophic. The same goes for a nuclear power plant: if you’re not cooling your nuclear rods, there are disastrous downstream — literally, down the stream — consequences. You need hierarchical management built in, to keep people safe. But the existence of those threats is a manmade crisis that naturalizes and justifies that hierarchy once it’s been created.","completion":"On the flip side, solar power and wind power are decentralized. You knock a couple wind turbines off the grid and it doesn’t have any effect. Those are some of the things I think about. And even the fossil fuel industry is thinking about this. They want to recentralize those decentralized green technologies. It’s like the internet: everybody thought it was going to democratize everything, and now it’s been totally privatized and commodified. That’s something we have to fight in this energy transition."}
{"prompt":"Camp Tech It’s hard to talk about the internet without talking about centralization, and also without talking about surveillance. One of the metaphors we have for online surveillance is the panopticon. But the scholar Simone Browne makes the case in her book Dark Matters that the origins of surveillance also lie in the slave ship and the forms of racialized policing that emerged from the plantation. Would you add the reservation to this set of ways of thinking about surveillance? Yeah. I don’t think it’s a competing framework. I think it’s complementary. I’ve been thinking about camps as a technology of surveillance and control, and I would consider reservations to be a kind of camp. In the book, I talk about a few types of camps. There’s the resistance camp — the blockade — which has long been a tactic of Indigenous people. You saw it from the late 1960s through the early 1980s with the occupations of Alcatraz and Wounded Knee, and the Yellow Thunder camp in the Black Hills. You also saw it more recently with Standing Rock and the Unist’ot’en camp in British Columbia. Mauna Kea, where thousands of people are camping to protect a sacred Native site from a billion-dollar telescope, is becoming a resistance camp. We could go on and on.  But there’s also the concentration camp. The US concentration camp originated as a technology of control specifically for Indigenous people. Under Abraham Lincoln, thousands of Dakotas were put in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling. In the Southwest in the same period, Navajos were subject to forced marches and imprisonment in camps. And, of course, reservations were and are concentration camps. Russell Means of the American Indian Movement once said, “Pine Ridge is concentration camp #334.” On our tribal IDs, we each have an assigned number that corresponds to our reservation. I’m from Lower Brule so mine is 343. The concentration camp evolved into the apartheid Bantustan system in South Africa. The architects of that system were looking at the reservation system in Canada because they shared an affiliation with the British Crown. So these technologies are co-constitutive.","completion":"The last type of camp are what Indigenous activists have called “man camps.” These begin as transient settlements of extractive industry workers who set up in an area temporarily and then leave. They’re the shock troops of capitalism. But what starts as temporary extractive infrastructure eventually becomes permanent outposts.  Could you give an example? My hometown, Chamberlain, South Dakota, used to be called Fort Kiowa. And it was a trading fort, a militarized encampment of primarily men who were killing tons of animals to extract furs. Now, it’s a racist border town. Many people think of the US-Mexico border when they think of border towns, but here I’m talking about the white-dominated settlements bordering Indian reservations that were once man camps and have now become permanent fixtures.  The penetration of capitalism into non-capitalist economies is always accompanied by extreme violence, and it’s not just a process that starts and then ends — it’s ongoing. There was a time when US hunters and soldiers would go out and kill as many buffalo as they could. That was it; that was the whole goal. Miners did the same thing. And now you have man camps of oil workers who go into a region, run the oil extraction machinery, and then leave. These man camps obviously exist to extract resources — whether it’s animals or people or minerals — but they also perform a certain social function: they reorder societies toward the accumulation of capital.  You see this now in the West Bank. Israeli settlers occupy these outposts in order to reshape the landscape and disrupt the social world of the people who were already there. The state deploys the Israeli Defense Forces to protect the settlers and put down Palestinian resistance. Sometimes there are more soldiers than settlers: they’re just there to protect a small sliver of illegal settlement."}
{"prompt":"So those are three technologies of surveillance that we can think about: an Indigenous countersurveillance program of creating resistance camps, the state-sanctioned concentration camp, and the public-private partnership that is the man camp. When I asked the surveillance question, I thought you were going to talk about racist policing around reservations. But it sounds like the policing of Native people also happens in a more informal way through these man camps that pop up around extractive industries on or near Native land. So is the police and prison abolition work you do with The Red Nation also about fighting those extractive industries? The Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) issue is a perfect way to talk about carceral abolition work in that context. The activists who developed the MMIW framework were connecting it explicitly to the extractive industries. But there’s also a framing that says the problem is due to a lack of law enforcement as opposed to understanding police as part of the problem. If you read the reports on the MMIW epidemic, the perceptions and actions of law enforcement confirm that, as an institution, the police perpetuate the problem of violence against Indigenous women.","completion":"New Mexico has the highest number of MMIW cases in the US. What conditions contribute to that? New Mexico is undergoing an oil boom. Where are these women disappearing? They’re disappearing in border towns. Gallup, New Mexico was once a coal-mining community. Santa Fe was once a place where they bought and sold Native slaves. The same with Albuquerque, which is where I live. These are now permanent border towns where there are high rates of violence against Native women, as well as against LGBTQ and Two-Spirit people [Eds.: This is a Native term for gender-nonconforming people, distinct from the non-Native concept of LGBTQ identity.] In regions where oil and gas is taking off, you see this increased violence. Unfortunately, instead of throwing out the extractive industries, the solution so far has been to go to the police."}
{"prompt":"Let’s bring the surveillance conversation back to Standing Rock. In your book, you write about emails and other documents that came out after camp was evicted, where police and security contractors were discussing counterinsurgency tactics to use against Water Protectors. They were talking about “riot control agents,” aerial surveillance, and infiltrating camp. Did people at camp know this was happening? There’s a naive trust in Facebook, Twitter, our cell phones — all these things we’re socialized to use day-to-day and bring into our intimate lives. Even technologies that are supposed to be encrypted were hacked. We don’t know how they were hacked, but information was getting out.  I think that naive trust is partly because there’s a generational gap between movements today and those of the past that experienced the violence of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program that targeted the Black freedom movement, the American Indian Movement, and the antiwar movement in the 1960s and 1970s. We don’t believe we are under constant surveillance, even though there has never been a point in human history where we are under such constant surveillance.","completion":"So those documents weren’t surprising. What we can take from them is how police officers and private security firms like TigerSwan were and are connecting different struggles. We’re often taught to silo our struggles, to say, “This is a Black issue; that’s a Native issue; that’s a Palestinian issue.” But they see it all as one, and we should too. North Dakota state police shared a federal “Field Force Operations” manual that references Ferguson. They are drawing connections among many different issues: violence against migrants crossing the border; the policing, criminalization, and surveillance of Water Protectors at Standing Rock; the dehumanization of Black people in Ferguson and Baltimore. Our adversaries see themselves as participating in a global counterinsurgency war, and we can’t underestimate the power of that alliance. It’s not a secret that Facebook works hand-in-hand with law enforcement.  Our group, The Red Nation, dealt with this when we were planning a protest against the Entrada, a celebration of Spanish reconquest after the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that ultimately ended up being abolished by the city. We learned after the protest that the Sante Fe Police Department (SFPD) had issued a sealed warrant — so we never saw it at the time — and that Facebook had turned over all of our communications on Facebook Messenger. As a result, on the day of the action, the SFPD brought in twelve different law enforcement jurisdictions. There was a huge police presence with sniper nests and everything. Eight of our people got arrested. We didn’t find out until later that they had access to our Facebook messages. Most of what was on there was irreverent memes about the cops, but that was a wakeup call. We no longer write anything on our phones or social media that we’re not willing to share in public, no matter how private we think the conversation is."}
{"prompt":"The Red Deal I want to change gears to talk about the Red Deal, The Red Nation’s proposal for climate justice and decolonization. What would you say are the main pillars? Our program is influenced by the divest/reinvest strategies of Standing Rock and the Movement for Black Lives. At Standing Rock, Water Protectors called for divesting from fossil fuel industries. The Movement for Black Lives platform calls for divesting from carceral institutions and reinvesting in the things that people need to live — instead of the things that put us in jail.  The Red Deal focuses on the state itself as opposed to industry because it’s the state that keeps the extractive industries intact. Who else was at the pipeline protests? The police. What allows the criminalization of Native people? The carceral legal apparatus. What prevents colonized nations from throwing off the yoke of US dominance so they can develop? The US military. So demilitarization and carceral abolition are two main pillars of this program. We estimate that divesting from those state institutions would free up about a trillion dollars to reinvest in things like hospitals and healthcare and land that has been destroyed here, as well as in other countries that have been damaged by the US military.","completion":"We’re also using the idea of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey’s Green New Deal, which essentially argues in its legislative text that every social justice issue should become a climate justice issue. Indigenous people have long been the most confrontational arm of the environmental justice movement, but have received the least attention when it comes to actually making policy. The Red Deal says that if we’re going to imagine carbon-free economies and the end of fossil fuels, then we also have to talk about decolonization. How are we going to build wind turbines but not give the land back to Indigenous people? The Red Deal stands for a caretaking economy. If soldiers and the police are caretakers of violence, then we need to contrast those value systems with people who are caretakers of human and nonhuman life. That includes teachers, nurses, counselors, mental health experts. It also includes land defenders and Water Protectors.  We all need water and land and forests to live. But when you walk into a restaurant, who gets a discount? Military and police, who, by the way, tend to be men. That reflects a value system. Caretakers tend to be women, and caretakers of the land tend to be Indigenous. If we look at the anti-protest and anti-BDS laws [Eds.: the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction movement is a Palestinian-led campaign “to end international support for Israel’s oppression of Palestinians”] that have gone through state governments, they criminalize caretakers. So that’s what we mean when we talk about investing in a caretaking economy that seeks to live in a correct relation with each other as human beings and nations, as well as a correct relation with the nonhuman world."}
{"prompt":"On the topic of lip service, what do you think of land acknowledgements? I recently came across one on the website of Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet subsidiary that’s spending $900 million to build a “smart city” on the Toronto waterfront. Here’s what I think about land acknowledgements. I ride a bike to work. Imagine I wake up one day and my bike is gone. I’m late for work. Maybe I’m going to get fired and I won’t be able to feed my family, but I’m shit out of luck. And then some guy rolls by on my bike and is like, “Hey. I want to acknowledge that I’m riding your bike. I know it’s really bad that I stole it, but I hope we can work towards reconciliation.” And then he cruises away on my bike!  I guess it’s not that land acknowledgements shouldn’t happen, but they just make me think, “Uh, okay. Great.” But this kind of gesture isn’t limited to land acknowledgements. People often use the language of decolonization when they’re not actually talking about giving back our land. What they’re actually talking about is indigenization. That’s an inclusion framework: let’s include Indigenous people in their own dispossession. Let’s have more Indigenous clergy! Let’s have more Indigenous people in the police, in the military, in the forces that occupy our land! In the vein of concrete questions about Red Deal implementation, I want to ask you about tradeoffs that tribal governments have made over the years. In the 1960s, Fairchild Semiconductor, a microchip manufacturer that was one of the first major firms in Silicon Valley, built a factory on a Navajo reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico with the support of the Navajo Tribal Council.","completion":"The one where the workers went on strike for better working conditions and then Fairchild shut it down? Yes. Presumably, the Navajo Tribal Council wanted to bring jobs to the reservation. You’ve written about the tradeoffs that tribal governments navigate in deciding whether to participate in coal production or chip production or even solar power production on Native land. Do you think it’s fair to talk about that within the context of a Red Deal, or do you think the question is more about why tribal governments even have to think about those tradeoffs? There are a lot of examples of this. There’s a Raytheon facility right outside of Farmington, New Mexico on Navajo land, where the workforce is 90 percent Navajo. That facility makes the microchips for the Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. The Alaska Native Corporation employs a lot of the private security forces who work at the child and family detention centers on the US-Mexico border. They also have contracts building what are essentially military bases in the Pacific. The Cherokee Nation has contracts to build State Department facilities in the Green Zone in Baghdad. There’s also a federal law that gives preference to Native businesses for lucrative defense contracts. These are the opportunities we get, and we have to take them because our subsistence economies have been annihilated."}
{"prompt":"People say the Navajo Nation is dependent on coal and oil and gas, but I would actually say that the Southwest is dependent on the Navajo Nation producing coal and oil and gas because no one else wants to do it. No one else will have the generating station on their land because it’s one of the dirtiest coal-fired power plants in the country. So Navajo lands have been sacrificed — whether it’s been for coal, oil, and gas, or something like uranium. The same is true of Pueblo lands: the first atomic bomb was created on Pueblo land. And the nuclear waste that resulted was buried in Pueblo sacred sites because US government agencies knew Pueblo people would never tell anyone because they won’t say where their sacred sites are.  The reality is that Native nations have a longstanding intimacy with these kinds of economies, whether it’s nuclear economies or fossil fuel economies. Understanding the historical conditions that force Native nations to participate in these economies is important, but I don’t think it’s a conversation about tradeoffs. It’s about the fact that participating in these economies further entrenches us into the settler-colonial system — not just for our own dispossession, but also the dispossession of other people. The Red Deal presents an alternative: a shift away from the military-industrial complex and these extractive economies.","completion":"Does that entail a break from the Green New Deal that wants to see investment in green technologies that are also extractive? For example, you mentioned earlier that rare earth elements have to come from somewhere. How do technologies like lithium ion batteries that power electric vehicles fit into the Red Deal, given that lithium is mined on Indigenous land in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile? This idea that we’re just going to continue the same level of consumption in a different economy is absurd because it requires the ongoing dispossession and subordination of not just Indigenous nations here, but also Third World countries. There are proponents of the Green New Deal that agree with this. We simply have to lower our levels of consumption. As Grace Lee Boggs and James Boggs said in Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century, “The revolution to be made in the United States will be the first revolution in history to require the masses to make material sacrifices rather than to acquire more material things.” Many of the revolutions that erupted in the Third World increased consumption levels for the vast majority of those societies because they were under-consuming. To this day, there are many countries that are under-consuming. The United States is not one of those countries. Now, there are a lot of people in this country who are under-consuming, like Native people who live in dire poverty. But, by and large, the average North American middle-class and upper-middle-class person consumes way too much.  I don’t dwell too much on settlers and whether they will ever have an ethical relationship to land. Some of them will turn into fascists — many already have — and some of them will follow us. If we’re decentering whiteness, and we’re decentering settler ontologies, and we’re actually advocating for their abolition, what does that new world look like? What does ending the colonial relation look like?  Ultimately, we’re trying to center what good relations to the land means. Instead of talking about car batteries, I think the real conversation should be: why are we working more than twenty hours per week? Why are there jobs that require air travel? Why don’t we have a universal basic income across the globe so people don’t have to leave their hometowns to find work? How do we end border imperialism so capital doesn’t have an endless supply of cheap labor? Those are some of the things that I’m thinking about."}
{"prompt":"1/ As we close this issue, COVID-19 case numbers are surging across the European Union, and if they are not yet as high in North America, it seems to be mostly for a lack of tests. Oil prices are plunging, the Dow Jones is plunging, and Ted Cruz is in voluntary self-quarantine. New York State prisoners are making hand sanitizer for $0.65 per hour. Passengers are disembarking from the Diamond Princess into the Port of Oakland.","completion":"For months, prominent figures in the tech industry have been warning that it will get worse before it gets better. In February, Recode reported that the venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz was already on high alert, canceling employee travel to China and banning handshakes in the office. In early March, Sequoia Capital wrote a memo warning partners that coronavirus would be the “black swan” of 2020; they urged startups to prepare for leaner times."}
{"prompt":"On Twitter, one “founder coach and angel investor” surmised that “people in Silicon Valley were taking #COVID19 more seriously than other parts of the US including NYC” because “SV understands the power of network effects and exponential growth.” \"Congrats Silicon Valley you took a math class,\" a tech journalist turned venture capitalist swiped back.  Everyone was on edge.","completion":"The exponential growth in tweets about exponential growth was easy to make fun of, combining, as it did, several stereotypes. The prepper engineer stocking Soylent. The billionaire in his New Zealand bunker. The thought leader inclined to consider himself an expert and therefore obliged to opine on everything, since everything is, or can be made into a source of, data. And yet. There was something to what the Founder Coach and Angel Investor said.  To tell a good horror story, it is not enough to imagine some freak occurrence. You have to find what is frightening about what is ordinary—or, more precisely, ordinarily desired. A large home with a pool, backyard, and picture windows. A movie star husband. A beach vacation. A hot shower after a long drive. The very thing you wanted must turn deadly. Otherwise, you could just walk away.  The pacing of the unfolding pandemic has more in common with a conspiracy theory than with a slasher flick. Its mode is twitchy simultaneity rather than the drumbeat of a killer closing in. Now our victim is in Wuhan. Now in Bergamo. Now New York. The villain is invisible and everywhere.  But as the coronavirus spread all over the world, the tech industry watched the properties that it usually thinks of as strengths turn into vulnerabilities. Disruption was rampant. The same transportation networks, and supply chains, that had turned second-tier cities into “furnaces” fueling global just-in-time production suddenly became vectors for infection. The same networks that could be used to track cases, and disseminate information, were promoting dangerous lies. What we are watching, at time of writing, from home, is hockey-stick growth, but for sickness and death."}
{"prompt":"2/ Viral, we call content that spreads quickly by means of preexisting bodies and behaviors. A virus takes our tendencies to make new cells, or touch one another, or share a laugh, and turns them to its own sole purpose: self-propagation. What makes something catch on is a subject of much speculation. What is clear is that some dangers cannot be confronted without considering the ways that the entire system they imperil works.  This issue will explore forms of security and insecurity that arise as digital technologies enter new realms of existence—and how stubbornly these two terms intertwine.","completion":"In one sense, the dynamics that it explores are not new. The rise of capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries provided some insurance against the whims of, say, the weather. Labor markets promised to free workers from physical coercion: rather than toiling on the particular piece of land where you happened to have been born, or where some lord put a sword to your head and told you, Toil!, you could choose where to go work where you wanted, for a wage.  And yet, in order to get most people to work for wages at all, those in power had to produce widespread insecurity. By turning life’s necessities into commodities that had to be bought and sold on a market, they made it impossible for most people to survive any other way. Digital technologies have only intensified this dynamic. To access information—a matter of survival in a pandemic—we rely on the platforms. If you want to get information about what the pandemic means for your kid’s school, you will likely have to join Facebook.  The current crisis has brought us back to these founding facts of capitalism as a world system. The market mediates our every move, and binds us, through countless threads of interdependence, to everyone else. Nothing like shortages of toilet paper to highlight how few of us would be capable of single-handedly reproducing the conditions of our lives."}
{"prompt":"At the same time, technologies designed to make some people and property more secure create new vulnerabilities. Machine learning algorithms used to plant, water, and harvest miles of crops at the optimal times can be hacked; a software bug or glitch can now cause a famine. Wireless technologies allow the lender that has loaned you the money to buy the car you need to drive to work to remotely disable that car if you should fall behind on monthly payments.  Securing one man’s loan can endanger another man’s livelihood or life—or both, should the remote disabling, for instance, happen while you drive to work on the freeway. And so, when we talk about security, we always have to ask: Secure from what? Secure for whom? 3/ You can use a baseball bat to play a game or break a window; you can set a table, or kill your hostess, in the parlor, with a candlestick.  Any tool can be abused, and if we have learned anything in the years since Gamergate and the 2016 presidential election, it is that some systems are most dangerous when they are being used as they were designed to be. The same features that make it possible for social networks to produce “cognitive surplus” and new social movements also produce misinformation and harassment.","completion":"The authors in this issue explore how the very same products and design features that are supposed to make some secure make others less so. Code designed to let you prove that You are not a robot will not make you safer if you are vision impaired and need your phone to play the code aloud every time you log in. Privately owned surveillance cameras, whose footage is constantly scanned by proprietary facial recognition software, are unlikely to make all the residents of a city safer.  As one activist interviewed in these pages puts it: Feeling watched is not the same as feeling seen.  4/ It is taking too long to write this. We can hardly keep up with our push notifications.  As we close this issue, deaths in Italy surpassed deaths in China; the number of confirmed cases in the United States passed 30,000, still with a dearth of tests; California sheltered in place; at least hundreds of thousands of Americans are losing their jobs, applying en masse to a safety net that is not ready for the load, and at least two senators were found to have sold millions of dollars in stock after attending a closed door coronavirus briefing, and then lied to the public about the severity of the coming crisis. It is probably too much to hope that they do not sleep soundly. Their colleague Rand Paul became the first senator to test positive for coronavirus; he is not likely to be the last.Meanwhile, powerful tech firms are finding ways to play the situation to their advantage. The alerts continue: Amazon has announced that they will hire 100,000 more workers to meet skyrocketing demand for “contactless delivery,” as their competitor businesses stand empty or close down. Palantir and Clearview AI are making bids to sell software to surveil infected people and their networks to the state; Facebook and Google are offering to use the track-location function in their apps to do the same. In China, the pandemic has intensified, and legitimated, expansive government control. The tools that are making it possible for millions of Americans to learn and work remotely are also creating new opportunities for both public and private entities to do the same. School-issued computers come with spyware installed; Zoom video conferencing software allows the boss to track “attendee attention” or drop in at any time."}
{"prompt":"5/ What would it take to turn this emergency inside out?An emergency produces opportunities for solidarity as well as selfishness. A pandemic does this in particular. To the idiots buying five bottles of soap, one viral tweet admonished, it doesn’t matter how many times you wash your hands if your neighbors cannot wash theirs. Our present situation highlights, with particular starkness, that nobody can be secure alone.Ancient philosophers argued that care or worry, cura, was the defining feature of human life. The state of being sine cura—“without” or free from it—was, at best, fleeting. On the other hand, care or worry is also the origin of curiosity.  This issue proposes that the concept of security can still hold the same ambivalence and cautious hopefulness now as it did then. We must care for our neighbors not in spite of but because of our common vulnerabilities. (In Toledo, Ohio dozens of volunteers have begun sewing fabric masks for local doctors and nurses already running out of them.) As the social contagion of panic spreads, we hope this idea catches on, too: that the very same fears pushing millions of people into isolation can also draw us outward, binding us more firmly to the world and one another.","completion":"Long before COVID-19 swept the globe, insecurity was already everywhere. Countless people faced housing, health, and food insecurity. Environmental insecurity was rising as changing weather patterns put communities at risk of fires and flooding. Prior to the advent of “social distancing,” we hid behind doors, locks, gates, and border walls, afraid of public space and one another. Online, we fretted over information security, devising passwords to access passwords, fearful we might be hacked or exposed. We were insecure at our jobs, in our homes, in our relationships, and on social media. We felt insecure about our very selves."}
{"prompt":"Given the ubiquity of insecurity, it may seem surprising that, only a few centuries ago, the word didn’t even exist. A uniquely modern concept, insecurity first appeared in the seventeenth century. “Rather than being understood as an unalterable truth intrinsic to the human condition, ‘insecurity’ needs to be understood as the product of very specific historical circumstances,” the political theorist Mark Neocleous observes. Those particular historical circumstances were the rise of capitalism.","completion":"Consider the response to the coronavirus. In the United States, the devastation unleashed by this novel and dangerous pathogen has as much to do with economics as epidemiology. When whole sectors of the economy shut down to comply with orders to shelter in place, unemployment soared. Instead of paying workers to stay home to slow down the disease—a sensible, life-saving policy pursued in various ways by some wealthy countries, including Denmark—American officials handed trillions of dollars of public money to the world’s biggest corporations. For the CEOs of these companies, the outbreak is less a crisis than an opportunity. Not only will they receive a staggering no-strings-attached government handout, they’ll also get a more pliable and profitable workforce. Experts estimate that unemployment rates could hit 30 percent, higher than during the Great Depression. When this pandemic passes, millions of people will be even more insecure and exploitable than they were at the outset, and that will not be an accident."}
{"prompt":"Capitalism is an insecurity machine, though we rarely think of it as such. Alongside profits, commodities, and inequality, insecurity is a fundamental output of the system. Neither an incidental byproduct nor a secondary consequence of the concentration of wealth, it is one of capitalism’s essential and enabling creations. “The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society,” Marx and Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto, back when the most advanced machines were weaving cloth and harnessing steam. “Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” The beneficiaries of this arrangement dubbed it “creative destruction” before rebranding it as “disruption.”  Our economic apparatus, in other words, destabilizes by design: market forces capsize communities and disintegrate old ways of life. Too often, however, we emphasize dramatic shifts, underscoring “great transformations” and systemic crises over comparatively quotidian developments—a temptation we must resist as we face the dual calamity of a global pandemic and an economic downturn. Engineered in order to facilitate exploitation and undermine solidarity, the production of insecurity is a daily phenomenon, its operations so commonplace as to appear banal. It is both physical and psychological: people endure inadequate housing, wages, and healthcare while our culture encourages self-blame and shame for financial hardship, relentlessly exploiting our fears and vulnerabilities. (No advertisement will ever tell us we’re okay and that it is the world that needs changing.)  Of course, people have always lived precarious lives. Long before the industrial revolution, let alone the digital one, human existence was neither easy nor assured. (This partly explains why “security,” unlike “insecurity,” is an ancient concept and aspirational ideal: etymologically, security comes from the Latin securitas, meaning freedom from worry, sine cura, or without care.) In a similar fashion, commerce precedes capitalism; people have long engaged in the propensity to truck, barter, and trade. Capitalism emerges when the possibility of commerce becomes the necessity of competitive production. For that to happen—for market opportunities to become market imperatives—mass insecurity must be imposed and maintained.","completion":"Digital technologies provide new channels through which this process can unfold. Social media elevates paid advertising and sensational content, spreading misinformation and confusion, increasing epistemological insecurity. Data brokers create intimate profiles so that we might be better targeted—segmenting us into categories that include “rural and barely making it,” “probably bipolar,” and “gullible elderly”—while companies invest millions into “affect recognition” so they can figure out when we are most persuadable, increasing psychological insecurity. Opaque systems of information collection and predictive analytics facilitate new forms of discrimination and redlining, marking certain populations as criminal threats or directing them into subprime financial services, predatory mortgages, and exploitative rental markets, increasing housing insecurity. Employers monitor and control employees remotely, refusing to offer decent wages and benefits or provide consistent scheduling, increasing job insecurity."}
{"prompt":"Not everyone is made equally insecure by these tools, of course. That is precisely the point. The stability of ownership and investment for some necessarily depends on the destabilization and dispossession of others—and the struggle over housing and labor have always been the epicenters of this conflict. The spaces where we live and where we work are capitalism’s main battlegrounds, and the rise of networked digital technologies have given capital more powerful weapons with which to conquer them—weapons we can be assured will be put to use as we enter a phase of coronavirus-induced uncertainty and volatility.  Whose Streets?  In the summer of 2019, the residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a 718-unit apartment building in Brownsville, Brooklyn, got word that their landlord had plans to install a security system equipped with facial recognition. The devices would control entry to the twin high-rises and monitor all common areas.  The grounds were already covered in cameras. So who or what, exactly, would this new technology be making more secure, the tenants wondered. Contrary to the landlord’s insistence that the devices were a “cool upgrade” that would keep keys out of the hands of the “wrong people,” residents saw them as an unwelcome and unwanted intrusion—and one inextricably linked to a long and troubling history of racism, policing, and gentrification.  The mostly Black and female tenants were alarmed to learn of studies showing that facial recognition often perpetuates pre-existing bias, with software most accurately able to assess men with white skin. They also worried about the collection of sensitive biometric data. “I’m afraid of it being shared with third-party agencies. I’m afraid of it being shared with the police. I’m afraid of it being shared with anyone—advertising companies, just everyone. It’s just very sensitive information that I feel our landlord should not have,” a young woman named Tranae Moran told the Guardian. Another resident, who had called the complex home for fifty-one years, was more blunt: “We do not want to be tagged like animals. We are not animals. We should be able to freely come in and out of our development without you tracking every movement.”","completion":"One hundred thirty-four tenants filed a formal complaint. By banding together and partnering with lawyers, they thwarted the landlord’s plan and made national news. Their success, however, represents more than a victory for privacy rights or the growing backlash against a particularly problematic technology. (Thanks to the work of activists, the use of facial recognition software by government agencies has been banned in a handful of American cities.) On a deeper level, the tenants identified and resisted one of capitalism’s central dynamics: the fact that security for some is predicated on the insecurity of others."}
{"prompt":"While the landlord never said it directly, the protection of an investment, not the community, drove the adoption of the new camera system. Increased “security” was part of a bid to attract new, more affluent tenants, whose arrival would cause rents and property values to rise, threatening long-time residents with displacement. “He doesn’t want Spanish. He doesn’t want Black. He wants white people to come into the neighborhood,” one tenant put it.  What happened in Brownsville is a variation of an old story, albeit with a high-tech twist. Property investments always involve what geographer Brett Story calls “the coercive scaffolding of enclosure and securitization”—a scaffolding that harkens back to capitalism’s murky origins in the English countryside. During the long and varied period called the enclosure movement, beginning in the twelfth century, wealthy landlords uprooted the peasantry in order to privatize once communal fields and forests, denying them their customary rights to the commons. A contemporary version of this dynamic now plays out in America’s fast-gentrifying cities, where crime is redefined as a threat to the real estate industry’s bottom line. Homeless people are the initial target, cleared off the streets by ordinances that outlaw panhandling or simply sitting on the sidewalk. Casting the poor not as residents deserving of rights but as miscreants on the wrong side of the law justifies their exclusion.","completion":"Nowhere is this more apparent, Story argues, than modern-day Detroit, where a coalition of real estate investors, including the billionaire founder of Quicken Loans, Dan Gilbert, are pushing forward a “revitalization” effort. As was almost the case in Brownsville, electronic monitoring plays a key role. In Detroit’s downtown Chase Tower, a command center contains dozens of computer screens connected to approximately 1,000 different outdoor cameras surrounding Gilbert’s properties in seven states, which include over 300 in metro Detroit alone. “The camera program is a collaborative effort that includes most of the big downtown property owners, including General Motors, Ilitch Holdings, and Compuware,” Story writes, one that also coordinates closely with local law enforcement agencies. Dangling the prospect of economic growth, real estate moguls are able to redirect public power to private ends: the security guards that Gilbert employs can use force on civilians but are under no legal obligation to read detainees their Miranda rights.  In 1843, a young Marx described security—what he called “the concept of police”—as the “supreme concept” of bourgeois society. Fearful of those they have dispossessed, ruling elites have long utilized state violence to safeguard private assets, criminalizing both poverty and protest in the process. In 2016, Detroit’s public-private surveillance system was used to track Black Lives Matter protesters. That same year, business owners formed a consortium called Project Green Light, which enables them to stream their surveillance footage directly to city police facilities. \"Now we don't have just one billionaire (doing it), we have 500 businesses who pitch in and do their own areas,\" Detroit’s mayor Mike Duggan boasted last spring. Six months later, grassroots opposition successfully blocked the police department from using real-time facial recognition on Green Light’s feeds, though the police continue to use the controversial technology in other ways."}
{"prompt":"Coding the Invisible Hand Ever since Thomas Hobbes portrayed civilized man trading obedience for protection to escape a perilous “state of nature,” security has been central to the liberal political tradition. Government, Adam Smith proclaimed, exists “for the security of property.” Similarly, John Locke insisted that the reason men put “themselves under Government is the Preservation of their Property.” Yet in Locke’s view, not all property deserved to be preserved: he defended the British seizure of Indigenous territory in the Americas. The question, then as now, is who and what is being secured—and at whose expense.","completion":"Today, market logic so suffuses the concept of security that the term literally means property, like the security deposit you make before signing a lease or the “securities” owned by the affluent. It was these ironically-named securities that brought down the global economy in 2008. Traders, using algorithms that coded Black borrowers and homeowners as particularly exploitable, gambled with securitized mortgages boasting inflated ratings. At the same time, the multibillion-dollar “lead generation” industry, which uses digital tools to compile and sell lists of prospective online customers, enabled lenders to identify potential subprime borrowers. This process, experts say, “played a critical, but largely invisible, role” in the mortgage crisis. In the end, nine million families saw their homes foreclosed on, wiping out half the collective wealth of Black families nationwide, further devastating deindustrialized cities like Detroit. With a few strokes of a keyboard, modern bankers caused dispossession on a scale that put the landowners of the original enclosure movement to shame."}
{"prompt":"The havoc wrought by the mortgage crisis in turn opened space for new algorithmically enabled land grabs. Invitation Homes, a private equity-backed firm, broke new ground by adopting machine learning systems to assess rental acquisitions, buying up huge swaths of property foreclosed during the subprime crisis on the wager that Americans would be willing to rent suburban houses they could no longer afford to own. Today, one-fourth of single-family rentals belong to institutional investors, which have developed streamlined, smartphone-driven systems to manage them. Digital technology mediates all interactions between tenants and the company, from viewings to lease signings to repairs, inaugurating what scholar Desiree Fields calls the age of the “automated landlord.” (In March 2020, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo tasked William Mulrow, a senior director at the private equity giant Blackstone Group, with spearheading the state’s coronavirus economic recovery; Blackstone held a major stake in Invitation Homes until November 2019, when it sold its last shares for a total of around $7 billion.) As Fields has documented, the digital dimensions of this high-tech landgrab go much deeper than a shiny interface. An assemblage of platforms and data analytics drive what the National Rental Home Council, a trade association, describes as “property management at scale.” First, Invitation Home’s proprietary underwriting algorithm determines what properties the company should purchase by considering factors including “neighborhood desirability, proximity to employment centers, transportation corridors, community amenities, construction type, and required ongoing capital needs.” Then networked technology allows investors to oversee large portfolios of far-flung units, with information quickly conveyed to capital markets so that additional money can be raised to expand the enterprise, while regular people who want to purchase a place to live are forced to compete with distant cash-rich investors working at digital speed. Hedge funds are happy to let buildings sit empty, waiting for them to appreciate, while locals pay the price.","completion":"Meanwhile, old biases persist and compound even when the platform is cutting-edge. Invitation Homes, for example, targets people of color who lack other housing options while charging them sky-high rates to meet Wall Street’s outsized expectations. In other instances, opaque systems make discrimination difficult to prove. Automated decision-making enshrines socioeconomic disparities in an invisible, technical process, locking certain populations out or including them on predatory terms. One recent study from UC Berkeley found that, among ​online​ mortgage applicants, Black and Latinx borrowers paid over five basis points more in interest than white borrowers with similar financial backgrounds.  Racism is encoded in bad datasets and reinforced by the biases of disproportionately white, male, and privileged engineers—a process scholar Ruha Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code.” Recently, the Trump Administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed new rules that would effectively permit automated discrimination in the housing market, allowing algorithms to exclude and segregate on a landlord or mortgage lender’s behalf, effectively exempting digital technology from civil rights regulations. “It’s going to drive people toward these algorithmic tools, and I think we’ll end up in a marketplace where everyone is taking advantage of this loophole,” Paul Goodman, a housing justice advocate, told ​Dissent.​ The powerful may soon be allowed to have computers mark certain populations as “risky” in order to dispossess them, and to do so without risking a lawsuit."}
{"prompt":"All Watched Over by Machines at the Workplace New technologies aren’t just augmenting capitalism’s insecurity-generating tendencies in the spaces that we call home. They are also intensifying those tendencies in the other domain that defines most of our lives: the workplace.  The other night a friend regaled me with stories of working at a Brooklyn café. The place has a vintage and vaguely Parisian aesthetic—decidedly retro and low-tech. There are, of course, regulars, including a medievalist who likes to chat. A few months ago, on a slow day, another barista on duty was exchanging pleasantries with the medievalist when her phone rang: the owner was watching the security camera live-feed from his laptop, and told her to stop being so nice. When I asked my friend how many cameras are installed in the small space, she could identify at least eight, and said there might be more. The charming café is, in fact, a panopticon—the boss can tune in at any time from anywhere, and see from nearly every angle. The workers are always on edge, even when all they want to do is show a bit of kindness to a local eccentric.","completion":"As the scholar George Rigakos reminds us in his book Security/Capital, employers have been deploying cameras toward similar ends for decades. In the early 1990s, Rigakos worked at a bakery where the staff regularly took home broken and unsaleable loaves. Management had always looked the other way. But weeks before the business was scheduled to be closed, the owners installed security cameras to catch workers in the act. Lifelong employees were summarily fired, losing their retirement benefits. “The security cameras must have saved the company thousands upon thousands in severance and pension dollars,” Rigakos recounts.  Today, employees no longer need to labor in the same physical space to be surveilled, nor is a human being required to do the surveilling. Instead, isolated and geographically dispersed, workers can be tracked and controlled remotely, whether they are driving for UPS or making deliveries for DoorDash or transcribing material for Rev. By harnessing digital technology, companies are able to offload more risk onto individuals, whom they categorize as independent contractors to bypass minimum wage laws and other protections. A dwindling number of people are entitled to severance or pension dollars in the first place."}
{"prompt":"Work, we are often told, is becoming insecure. In reality, insecurity precedes work, or at least its waged variety. While some claim that insecurity is the inevitable consequence of innovation—the result of the fact that, as labor productivity rises, you need fewer workers to produce the same output—the fact is that people had to be made insecure, literally severed from their land and livelihoods, for capitalist working conditions to be foisted upon them.  Before the wage-earner could emerge as our society’s paradigmatic subject, the persona that we must all embody to survive, the condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wagelessness” had to be imposed via the process of enclosure, after which peasants could no longer provide for themselves. “Capitalism begins not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living,” Denning writes. Contrary to the myth of liberal laissez-faire, employment relations are anything but natural, spontaneous, or freely chosen.","completion":"It wasn’t until during the New Deal era that employment became secure, at least for a subset of white men. During the Great Depression, an unlikely assortment of social reformers, radical workers, and “welfare populists” pushed to redefine “security” as a social good guaranteed by the government. \"For a long time now people have been saying that perhaps the greatest evil of capitalist industrialism is not its unequal distribution of wealth but the insecurity it brings to the majority of the population,” The New Republic opined in 1935. If capitalism was the problem, the Roosevelt Administration’s solution was a robust welfare state. “Security” became FDR’s rallying cry."}
{"prompt":"In response, business went on the offense, embracing the concept of security in order to redefine it. As historian Jennifer Klein demonstrates in her 2003 book For All These Rights, corporate elites devised a “firm-centered definition” of security “in order to cultivate workers’ loyalty to the company and check the further growth of the welfare state” A full-time job became more than just a paycheck—it was a lifeline to unemployment benefits, retirement funds, and medical care. Inadequate public programs left a gap that employers stepped in to fill; security was offered on an occupational as opposed to universal basis.  The advent of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s marked the end of this arrangement. Corporate leaders launched a concerted counterattack, breaking unions, reneging on pensions, freezing wages, dodging taxes, and outsourcing jobs. Determined to erode what remains of the New Deal compact, companies today strategically deploy digital technology to shirk their end of the historic bargain. The development of AI-enabled labor-management systems undermine worker rights and safety through a combination of surveillance and predictive analytics, impacting everything from hiring to firing. Bots scan resumes and assess vocal intonation during job interviews, dictating who gets their foot in the door.  On the job, algorithms are harsh taskmasters, ranking and rating workers and automatically setting performance targets. Pickers in Amazon warehouses and shoppers for Instacart scramble to meet the demands of their digital overlords, enduring mental stress, chronic injuries, and even death. Unpredictable algorithmic wage cuts undermine economic stability, but only come after a worker has been lured to a platform with promises of a living wage and “flexible” hours. Meanwhile, workers are kept in the dark, unable to understand or contest the decisions that set the terms of their lives and livelihoods.","completion":"For years, wannabe prophets predicted that robots were “coming for our jobs.” That particular forecast, it turns out, has not come to pass. Instead, more and more people effectively have robots for bosses. Aggregating power in the hands of owners, managers, and developers, these digital systems secure profits by disregarding human beings’ need for predictable incomes, schedules, and benefits—for security, in other words. When your supervisor is an algorithm, expect no remorse.\t Shut Down the Machine The powerful have never wanted the masses to be secure, and the current crop of Silicon Valley overlords are hardly innovative in this respect. In the Middle Ages, Christian thinkers denounced security as a sin and an insult to God. “Perverse security,” they called it. Today, tech billionaires are busy devising new sophisticated tools to spread insecurity so that they might become tomorrow’s trillionaires."}
{"prompt":"Positioned to profit from mass precarity, they know that “disruption” is not a regrettable pitstop on the road to broadly shared prosperity, but a never-ending process that facilitates exploitation. Companies like Uber and Lyft benefit from the fact that millions of people can’t make ends meet with one job; from the fact that rising housing costs mean a growing number of drivers have no choice but to live in their cars (many rent their vehicles from Uber, essentially turning them into app-controlled sharecroppers); and from the fact that most drivers are ashamed of their predicament, which makes them less likely to stand up for themselves. It’s not a coincidence that homelessness tends to spike wherever the tech industry flourishes. The Bay Area’s tent cities are symbolic of a digital economy that thrives on new forms of enclosure and dispossession.   Looking at capitalism through the lens of insecurity, as opposed to focusing solely on inequality, reminds us that people need more than higher pay; we need peace of mind and an ability to plan ahead. Strong regulations and robust public services are essential in this regard. Newly popular proposals, including national rent control and a homes guarantee that makes affordable housing a universal right, would have a socially transformative effect. In terms of labor rights, AB5, a California law that would classify drivers as employees and not independent contractors, is an encouraging development. Clarifying the employment relationship would help stabilize people’s incomes and lives—which is why Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Postmates, and Instacart have committed $110 million to overturn it.  But even if AB5 became federal law, and “independent contractors” were finally recognized as what they are—workers—that wouldn’t be enough. The time has come to decouple security and employment, while also rethinking what security means in an age of ecological crisis and technological possibility. Indeed, the coronavirus outbreak has offered a distressing preview of the sort of upheaval climate change has in store. Overnight, millions of jobs evaporated and countless families were cut off from their medical coverage when they needed it most, laying bare the shortcomings of the New Deal settlement for all to see.","completion":"In contrast to the New Deal’s individualistic and firm-centered conception of security, we need to devise a truly socialized security system, one predicated on universality and sustainability and geared toward redistributing not just wealth but risk. The frame of a Green New Deal moves us in this direction by centering collective solutions such as public housing, Medicare For All, and a federal job guarantee. (The multi-trillion-dollar stimulus package passed by Congress in the wake of the pandemic proves we have the money to pay for such policies, if only we can muster the political will.)    Digital technology can and must be redirected to assist the cause—smart machines could help pair patients with physicians and improve their treatment, for instance, not target desperate customers with discriminatory insurance rates. But digital technology must also recede when appropriate. Leftists these days often say we need to decommodify, democratize, and decarbonize various realms of social life; we need to de-digitize many of them as well.  While some technologies—think of the internet service providers we depend on for connectivity and the social media platforms we use to communicate, which have become even more essential to survival as people seek to physically isolate themselves—should be socialized and managed as public utilities, there are other technologies that shouldn’t exist, and plenty of data that shouldn’t be collected. As tech critic Ben Tarnoff has argued, technology employed primarily for social control or to enforce austerity must be abolished, not democratized or socialized. The Atlantic Towers tenants were right—invasive facial recognition systems have no place in our communities—and they proved that popular mobilization can push back on harmful technology. Many more mobilizations will be needed to dismantle insecurity-generating algorithms in all of their forms, from biometric tracking in the workplace to behavioral targeting by advertisers."}
{"prompt":"Human beings will, of course, never be totally secure. The Stoic philosophers who first pondered the concept understood security as a psychological state, a kind of mental serenity that vulnerable, mortal, meaning-seeking creatures rarely feel. Two thousand years later, we live in a world where, though security on an existential level continues to elude us, economic security, or the fulfillment of everyone’s basic needs, is feasible. And yet we inhabit a paradox: a new digital arsenal is being developed to ensure we remain insecure despite the abundance in our midst. Denied the basic resources we need to live, we are forced to seek security through market means—investing in our brands, paying our insurance premiums, and praying that our retirement funds appreciate—while lining the pockets of those most responsible for making us insecure in the first place. Building a more secure world for everyone will be a challenge. But it’s a risk we can’t afford not to take.","completion":"In August 2019, Alex Stamos took the stage at the USENIX Security Symposium to deliver the event’s keynote presentation. “I’m a little nervous today,” he began. “This is not my normal crowd.”  Indeed, as a Silicon Valley insider, the former chief security officer of Facebook was not the sort of academic computer security expert who typically delivers the event’s opening talk. After cracking a couple of self-deprecating jokes, Stamos offered what he saw as the reason he was invited to speak: technical security specialists have not kept up with the changing nature of threats stemming from the imbrication of information technology with every aspect of our lives. “It turns out the vast, vast majority of the human harm—of the people who are actually suffering in their lives because of tech—are suffering because of what we term in the industry ‘abuse,’” he said. “Abuse is the technically correct use of the products we build, to cause harm.”  Stamos illustrated his point with a simple diagram. It consisted of a triangle, with a small portion at the top labeled “InfoSec”—short for “information security”—and a large base at the bottom labeled “Abuse.” “The top of the triangle is basically everything that all of us in the room have dedicated our lives to,” he explained. But the bottom of the triangle—“abuse,” in Stamos’s terminology—is a far more prevalent form of technological exploitation. Stamos suggested that traditional security experts, himself included, are ill-prepared to deal with this class of threats. The computer security industry occupies itself with identifying and fixing technical flaws, the kind that hackers might use to gain unauthorized access to the backend of a system. Such work is important, but it leaves aside whole categories of more common dangers to people online."}
{"prompt":"These dangers include child pornography, trolling, and vengeful ex-boyfriends who hound their former partners, just to name a few. Most recently, disinformation and Russian political meddling to fuel polarization have become prominent in our daily news. Often, the abusability of certain features stems from engineering decisions that optimize for profit. Ad-driven platforms are designed to maximize engagement metrics so they can sell more eyeballs to advertisers. This means the algorithm prioritizes clickable and shareable content—even if that content is harmful. But this sort of abuse can be harder to address than the vulnerabilities that come from technical flaws.","completion":"Consider, for example, the way online content spread in the wake of the white supremacist terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand. In March 2019, a gunman killed fifty-one people and injured fifty at the city’s Al Noor mosque. He livestreamed the first seventeen minutes of the attack on Facebook, sharing it on an 8chan imageboard favored by white supremacists. He also took steps to ensure his livestream would evade detection and removal. By inserting arbitrary spaces to break the link to his stream in his 8chan post, he forced people to manually reconstitute the URL rather than click through the link directly—a move that could alert Facebook to the source of the traffic. We can also speculate about other flaws he may have exploited, such as the way he talked for a period of time before initiating the attack, perhaps knowing that any content moderators reviewing the stream would then “snooze” it; or the way his head-mounted camera angle simulated the aesthetic of a first-person shooter video game, in a manner that may have been sufficient to trick a machine-learning analysis.  That the livestream went undetected for so long represented a colossal failure on the part of Facebook—and one that the traditional computer security industry would have little to say about. The problem wasn’t just technical, but social. It involved countless complex interactions within a stack of sociotechnical workings—“trust and safety” specialists, content moderators, machine learning algorithms, and so on. The result was disastrous: a white supremacist was able to broadcast a massacre around the world, his supporters were able to redistribute the video across the web, and the images he posted to various social media accounts—littered with Google-able keywords that would lead the curious to pro-white supremacist content—were amplified by subsequent media reports.  How can we begin to combat this sort of phenomenon? Stamos urged his audience to start tackling abusability with an interdisciplinary approach: to increase the representation of communities affected by abuse and to create more institutions—like the one he now heads at Stanford University—that enable technical security specialists to collaborate with social scientists."}
{"prompt":"These are good ideas. Bringing in outside voices and experts to revamp the field of computer security is important. But it’s also important to recognize the limitations of the field itself. It’s not enough to broaden the scope of what security experts work on, or who a security expert even is. We also need to recognize how outsiders can identify issues, put them on the public agenda, and in doing so reorient our notions of what security is.","completion":"The history of the computer security industry itself can help. To refocus security, we first need to revisit the story of how it came to be—how practices to address technical vulnerabilities originally emerged. Those practices sometimes provided valuable consumer protections, but they were also unsatisfactory to many. The computer security industry came to serve a narrow band of people and interests, creating norms about what kinds of security mattered, and for whom. Yet other possibilities were available, generated by quieter, countervailing strains that proposed different answers to the questions of whose security was worth taking seriously, and what it took to make them feel secure. By mapping out these alternative paths, we can better understand what a traditional technical security paradigm can usefully offer, and what must be discarded, modified, or challenged as we find new ways to face new threats."}
{"prompt":"An Industry is Born Today, the computer security industry and its associated institutions are firmly established. Along with dozens of high-profile companies dedicated to diagnosing, fixing, and preventing breaches, many corporations hire specialized professionals to deal with a host of technical security issues. All of this activity adds up to a lot of money: analysts estimate the security industry to be worth about $170 billion.","completion":"This industry hasn’t always existed, of course. It had to be built. And among the most important contributors were underground hackers who enjoyed breaking into systems and sharing what they found with their peers. In the early days of computing, security largely revolved around control of physical access to shared machines. Even the idea of passwords was, for a time, controversial. While engineers developed computationally secure systems like Multics in the 1960s and 1970s, they were eclipsed by the popularity of Unix. The advent of computer networking revealed the shortsightedness of some of the design decisions baked into Unix, as the choices made in a pre-networked era left critical vulnerabilities for later hackers to exploit.  Hackers gathered on dial-in electronic Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes) in the 1980s, swapping tips on how best to gain access to the different types of computers connecting to the nascent internet. Some joined underground secret societies, competing with each other for control of more computers. Others played cat-and-mouse games with systems administrators, who often lurked in the same BBSes, learning how to defend their users.  But in the mid-1990s, after a wave of high-profile arrests and the growing demonization of hackers in the media, some underground hackers began to shift their focus. Rather than hoarding their knowledge within select circles, they began to publicize it more widely. Upon discovering vulnerabilities, they would notify the company that made the software. Yet these vendors frequently reacted by dismissing the flaws as “theoretical,” while telling their users that the only threat to their security came from the hackers themselves.  In response, certain hackers set out to “make the theoretical practical,” as the tagline of the legendary hacker group the L0pht put it. Throughout the 1990s, they worked hard to force tech companies to take security seriously. Some put pressure on vendors by sharing the vulnerabilities on “full disclosure” mailing lists like Bugtraq and in hacker zines like Phrack. This move was risky—and controversial—since it potentially put exploits in the hands of malicious actors. But supporters of this approach hoped the risk would spur a rapid response from the vendor, while also empowering individual systems administrators to ensure their own organizations were adequately prepared."}
{"prompt":"Other hackers developed tools that made the security holes in popular software unignorable, by allowing even the non-technical to crack passwords or control users’ machines remotely. Emblematic of this approach was a tool called Back Orifice. Developed by the Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc), it facilitated the remote control of Microsoft Windows machines—with or without the users’ consent. Around the same time, the L0pht released a tool that gleaned passwords from Windows systems. The stated goal was to help systems administrators recover lost user passwords. But its demonstration of Microsoft’s lax approach to password management was unmissable.","completion":"Such strategies helped create media buzz about bad security. The tagline of cDc, “Global domination through media saturation,” made its mission clear: rather than simply hacking software systems, they were also hacking media narratives. “Was releasing Back Orifice to the public immoral? Microsoft would love for their customers to believe that we’re the bad guys and that they—as vendors of a digital sieve—bear no responsibility whatever,” wrote the cDc’s Deth Veggie in a 1998 “morality alert,” issued in response to a Microsoft press release. “We’ll frame our culture and actions against theirs, and let the public determine which one of us looks better in black.” At first, however, these efforts didn’t make much of a dent. Microsoft and other vendors responded by denying responsibility and vilifying the hackers. They insisted that their software would be secure if the hackers were held responsible—ignoring the obvious point that hackers didn’t create the weaknesses they revealed.  But the hackers didn’t only demonstrate insecurity from a distance. They began to remake themselves as trustworthy insiders as well. Some, like the L0pht frontman Peiter “Mudge” Zatko, started meeting with corporate executives and elected officials. They promoted a vision of ethical “grey-hat” and “white-hat” hackers who probed systems not for destructive purposes, but to gain insight into how best to secure them against malicious “black-hat” hackers.   Gradually, this message filtered into the mainstream. By the end of the 1990s, the dotcom boom was hitting its full stride. The Clinton Administration began heeding warnings of a future “cyber Pearl Harbor” that could cripple critical network-connected infrastructure. Between a booming tech sector and rising concerns about a new kind of national security threat, the stakes of computer security suddenly started to seem a lot higher.  By the early 2000s, many companies were chomping at the bit to hire hackers. Even Microsoft changed its tune, recruiting from the community it once antagonized. Throughout the tech industry, hackers joined in-house security teams, led “penetration tests” to probe systems for vulnerabilities, and conducted forensic investigations to ensure successful attacks couldn’t happen again. Hackers and vendors together crafted policies of “coordinated disclosure,” ensuring vulnerabilities would only be disclosed after they were fixed—or if vendors failed to take their responsibilities seriously."}
{"prompt":"Many hackers were happy to take the lucrative jobs on offer. They could make a good salary doing the puzzle-solving research they loved, without the prospect of prison hanging over their heads. In 2000, the L0pht merged with @stake, a newly minted security firm that proudly touted its payroll of hackers—and which would go on to create a new generation of professional security experts, including Alex Stamos himself. After 9/11, several hackers began consulting for the US government and military. Mudge from the L0pht devoted himself to researching national security threats, joining a government contractor before ultimately taking a position as DARPA’s cybersecurity research program manager. The barbarians at the gate were now inside the walls, helping to guard them.","completion":"Outside the Gates But not all hackers went pro. Others remained fiercely independent. They revolted against what they saw as co-optation, and instead laid the groundwork for a variety of oppositional currents, such as “hacktivism,” “anti-security,” and “digital security,” that challenged the notion that improving the security of machines, software, and networks is enough to really improve the security of those who use them—or whom they are used upon."}
{"prompt":"First coined in 1995, the hacktivism label soon came to refer to a range of politically motivated hackerish pursuits, from technical support for activists to digital direct actions. For instance, the collective Electronic Disturbance Theater orchestrated acts of “electronic civil disobedience” to draw attention to the plight of the Zapatistas in the 1990s. They built a tool called FloodNet that, when used by multiple users, would “flood” a targeted website with traffic. The resulting “denial-of-service” attacks against Mexican and American government websites were used to spread awareness of the Zapatista cause. Many members of the hacking group cDc also took the hacktivist path, lending support to Chinese dissidents.  Other hackers took a different route, doubling down on their underground status. In the early 2000s, they coalesced around the banner of “anti-security.” A heterogeneous movement, anti-security was full of conflicts and contradictions. But participants shared a basic skepticism about the notion that public awareness of vulnerabilities was necessarily a good thing. Embracing a technocratic, even aristocratic outlook, many in the anti-security movement argued that only underground hackers should possess knowledge of technical exploits. As anti-security failed to slow the security boom, however, some of its members adopted more drastic measures: they encouraged their peers to hack the white hats as part of “pr0j4kt m4yh3m.” (“Project Mayhem” was a reference to the movie Fight Club, which had just come out.) They were so successful that white-hat professionals began to see getting hacked as a rite of passage.","completion":"Then, around 2010, the philosophy of anti-security and the tactics of hacktivism began to combine. One offshoot of the hacktivist group Anonymous paid direct homage to the anti-security movement, adopting the name AntiSec. The new crews exploited technical vulnerabilities in order to exfiltrate documents in the public interest and shame governments and corporations for their lack of transparency. Crucially, they didn’t shame them for their failure to take security seriously. Rather, they targeted these entities because of how they deployed security technologies—namely, to extend the reach of corporate and state surveillance."}
{"prompt":"Important also was the work of groups like Citizen Lab. Created in 2001 by a University of Toronto researcher partly inspired by cDc, Citizen Lab enlisted computer security techniques such as auditing, threat modeling, and penetration testing in support of civil society—an approach sometimes called “digital security.” Its research put abuses of power by states and corporations on the security agenda. After the organization conjectured that private security companies were helping governments commit human rights abuses by selling them hacking tools, a hacktivist named Phineas Fisher hacked and leaked documents and source code from the offending companies, making the theoretical practical and focusing public outrage.","completion":"Unlike in the 1990s, it wasn’t enough for organizations to take technical security seriously. Security research was now being weaponized to promote forms of insecurity—helping governments crack down on dissidents, for example. Building on the earlier ideas of the anti-security movement, these watchdog hackers made clear that identifying vulnerabilities and passing the information along to the authorities was far from sufficient to improve everyone’s security—in fact, it could be actively harmful. Security for some could mean insecurity for others."}
{"prompt":"Together, these alternative hacking communities challenged the idea that security was best served through the corporate and state securitization of communities and computer systems. They presented a different vision, where security meant something more than only technical considerations, and all people, not just the powerful, had a right to it.","completion":"Security for All So what can this historical gloss teach us about how to confront the problem of abuse? To flesh out some thoughts along these lines, let’s return to the Christchurch shootings. In the aftermath of the attack, a debate emerged about the role of both Facebook and a company called Cloudflare in enabling the spread of the shooter’s message. 8chan, the site where he shared his livestream, used Cloudflare to provide network redundancy in order to ensure it could handle heavy traffic loads. Viewed another way, 8chan relied on this service to protect itself from the kind of denial-of-service attacks first pioneered by hacktivists in the 1990s, and since adopted as a standard weapon of cyberwarfare. More than a few hacktivists—and plenty of non-technical people as well—wanted 8chan off the web. But so long as the site used Cloudflare, it was protected against denial-of-service attacks. So a growing chorus of individuals and organizations began calling for Cloudflare to sever its ties.  Questions about the nature of Facebook and Cloudflare's services and business model—as well as broader debates about corporate responsibility, free speech, and regulation—ricocheted throughout the public sphere, including in the hacker community. Following the attack, Alex Stamos joined security researcher Patrick Gray on the popular security podcast Risky Business. Gray insisted that Facebook remove white supremacist supporters and that Cloudflare, as a private company, exercise its right to drop 8chan as a client.  Stamos was hesitant, pointing out that Cloudflare had previously removed ISIS content only after being legally compelled by the government. He wanted to see companies embrace standards for determining the intentionality behind content, barring clear legal guidance or capacity. But for Gray, the moral case from the court of public opinion was clear enough. Echoing the 1990s-era hacker philosophy of accountability, Gray said, \"I think we need to turn this to a discussion of brand protection, and if Facebook wants to be associated with stuff like that…”  Both Gray and Stamos may have wanted the same outcome, but they saw different means to achieve it."}
{"prompt":"The case of Cloudflare clarifies the stakes of choosing different paradigms for security. At some point, technical questions about how vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated collide with questions about how technical security relates to other forms of security. When is a site like 8chan benefiting from technical security that enables its members to make other communities less secure? Drawing on the insights of hacktivists, anti-security hackers, and digital security advocates, we always have to ask who security works for—a sociotechnical line of thinking that computer security professionals, often keen to avoid anything that might be seen as political, may find uncomfortable.  We also have to foreground the role of the profit motive in making platforms prone to abuse. Data mining, corporate ownership of user data, targeted advertisements, design and policy decisions to maximize user engagement—these can all create opportunities for bad actors to cause harm. Put simply, in many cases the business model itself might be the foundational vulnerability. But such fundamental product and business issues are generally outside the scope of what technical security researchers working for these organizations are paid to identify and remediate.","completion":"After two more 8chan-linked shootings, Cloudflare ultimately caved to public pressure and cut ties with the site. But a million similar issues are raised on a smaller scale every day, where the question isn’t whether to host a single site, but how to treat a particular piece of content, or a feature that allows that content to be promoted to a particular person. These issues can’t be adequately addressed simply by tweaking interaction algorithms, removing “like” buttons, or developing better content moderation protocols.  A reassessment of what is involved in “security” is required. And, as with the 1990s hackers, this notion of security must be built, at least in part, by people who aren’t afraid to pick a fight. What made an earlier generation of hackers so effective wasn’t just their technical expertise but their willingness to antagonize the big software vendors. It was through their efforts that we now enjoy a modicum of technical security. Standards and protocols that protect consumers and citizens from harms like infrastructural sabotage, identity theft, and commercial fraud exist because hackers aggressively drew attention to corporate incompetence and demanded accountability."}
{"prompt":"But, as many of these same individuals entered industry in the 2000s, they lost their oppositional edge. To ensure security serves more than just corporate or state interests, this sort of adversarial spirit must be expanded. Stamos’s call for the inclusion of sidelined expertise in computer security is important, but it needs to be accompanied by the adversarial work of activists, civil rights groups, and inquisitive tinkerers.","completion":"This work is currently being done by a range of groups, including Citizen Lab and other organizations engaging in digital security activism like Equality Labs and Access Now. This work can also take a variety of forms. In 2016, investigative journalism outfit ProPublica exposed how Facebook’s targeted advertising algorithm can be used in “digital redlining” practices to exclude certain demographics from ads for housing. In 2019, computer scientist Jeanna Matthews and her interdisciplinary collaborators reverse-engineered proprietary software for DNA testing that is used in criminal trials, demonstrating its worrying propensity to deliver false positives. In 2020, Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign deliberately lied in a Facebook ad in order to shame the company for refusing to fact-check political ads."}
{"prompt":"These are only a few examples. Taken together, however, they suggest the role that outsiders who “make the theoretical practical” can play in demanding a more people-centered definition of security—one that involves keeping everyone safe. After all, outsider pressure helped shape our ideas of technical security. Outsiders can reshape them.","completion":"In early 2012, San Francisco taxi drivers began to raise the alarm at organizing meetings and city hearings about “bandit tech cabs” pilfering their fares. “I’ll sit at a hotel line, and I see one of these guys in their own car come up, hailed by some guy’s app, and they’ll turn down my fare,” Dave, who had been driving a taxi for fourteen years, said at a meeting that April. “They steal it. It’s insulting.” Other cabbies said they were seeing the same thing, and that their income was suffering as a result. “I think I made 20 percent less last week than normal,” one driver lamented. He wanted city officials to know; surely, they would put an end to it."}
{"prompt":"These taxi workers were experiencing the very earliest stage of a global re-organization of private and public transportation, fueled by billions of dollars of financing from venture capitalists. Under the shadow of the Great Recession, in a period of high unemployment and slow job growth, Uber, Lyft, and their erstwhile competitor Sidecar used this technocapital to begin offering almost anyone with access to a car a way to make money by driving people around San Francisco. The companies aggressively marketed themselves as disruptors of the transportation industry; consumers and commentators, seduced by on-demand, technology-fueled mobility and the prosocial promise of what the companies called “collaborative consumption,” enthusiastically adopted their narrative.","completion":"Cabbies, however, saw Uber and Lyft as well-financed corporate continuations of the taxi companies that had long subjugated them. “This isn’t about technology,” Mark, a long-time taxi worker and advocate told me in 2013. He explained that, for the previous few years, San Francisco taxi drivers had already been using an app called Cabulous, which essentially did what Uber and Lyft were doing. “They claim they’re innovative and new, but we already have this technology,” he went on. What was different, Mark described, was that Uber and Lyft had “a new exploitative business model,” though it was just “one step removed from the leasing model that the taxi companies have been using for years.”  Since 2012, much of the positive discourse around Uber and Lyft has continued to regurgitate the notion that these are companies built on technological innovations that brought new forms of transportation to people and places who needed them. Meanwhile, critiques of these companies, and of the gig economy as a whole, have typically seen Uber and Lyft as breaking sharply from earlier modes of employment to create new forms of precarity for workers. In both cases, the public discussion tends to see these companies as creating major discontinuities, whether of technology or of labor models. What Mark pointed out, however, is that Uber and Lyft are in many ways not as different as we tend to think from the taxi companies that prevailed until 2012.  In 2020, almost a decade after the advent of Uber and Lyft, we seem to be at another turning point. The ride-hailing industry is facing a wave of militant self-organizing and claims to employment status by drivers. So far, the most significant mobilization has been the fight over AB5, a California assembly bill that was signed into law in September 2019, and which makes it much clearer that drivers should be treated as employees of Uber and Lyft. The companies have fought this reclassification in myriad ways, and some drivers fear that it may cause them to lose their flexibility. But those who have welcomed the passage of AB5 hope it will deliver them many of the benefits—from healthcare to a guaranteed minimum wage—that Uber and Lyft have so far denied them. On all sides of the issue, no one doubts that we are at a critical juncture in the history of labor and urban transportation."}
{"prompt":"But in order to sort through the arguments surrounding AB5 and grasp the significance of this moment, we must do something that the discourse around ride-hailing has failed to do: situate ourselves historically, tracing both the continuities and the discontinuities that the cabbie Mark pointed to. Our present moment is largely the product of two neoliberal shifts in the taxicab industry—and, in a certain sense, in US society as a whole—that occurred in the late 1970s and the 2010s. Understanding the reasons for these shifts can help us get beyond the easy assumptions made on different sides of the debate: that employee status is an unalloyed good or ill, that innovation made the rise of Uber and Lyft inevitable, or that the issues raised by the sector are matters of technology rather than politics.","completion":"Few people understand those reasons better than the drivers themselves—though, like other workers, they rarely have their voices centered in public discourse. By listening to drivers’ accounts of how their industry operates and has changed, we can come to understand how and why, despite some fears and ambivalence, they are using employee status to create a much-needed friction in the wheels of technocapital."}
{"prompt":"Leasing as Liberation Typically, mainstream observers see two defining features of the business model of Uber and Lyft. The first is that the people who drive “on” their platforms are treated not as employees of the companies, but rather as independent contractors using those platforms to run their own personal taxicab businesses. In the US, direct employment increases corporate costs by roughly one-third, so classifying workers as independent contractors significantly increases profitability. (This is essentially the labor arrangement underlying the entire gig economy, from people delivering food and groceries to those performing rote tasks for Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.) The second defining feature is the technology—the apps and the various pricing and dispatching algorithms behind them—that the corporations use to exert enough control over drivers in order to provide a more or less on-demand service. In both cases—the non-employment model and the technologies—Uber and Lyft share more in common with the previous generation of taxicab companies than many people understand.","completion":"The independent contractor model that underlies today’s gig economy first developed in the taxicab industry in the late 1970s, as the United States shifted towards a neoliberal conception of society in which almost everything was to be subjected to the forces of competition. Workers and households were reimagined as entrepreneurial concerns, sole proprietorships that should fend for themselves in the tumult of the great American marketplace. Embodying this logic, the taxicab industry was one of the first among US businesses to slough off the costs and liabilities—minimum wages, healthcare benefits, disability insurance, among other things—associated with direct employment.  Taking advantage of rank-and-file discontent with traditional unions, as well as an existing carve-out for independent contractors in labor laws, cab companies all over the US reorganized their business models in this period, claiming to “free” their drivers from the imagined restraints of employment. In San Francisco, taxi companies approached drivers in 1976 and asked if they would like to “lease” their taxis on a shift-by-shift basis, so that the companies could rid themselves of the expenses and risks associated with employing workers, including unemployment insurance, workers’ compensation, and a guaranteed commission that taxi drivers had previously been paid."}
{"prompt":"Although the Chauffeurs’ Union, which had represented drivers since before the New Deal, discouraged workers from accepting these contract terms, many drivers were interested in the leasing model, which emerged within a tightly-controlled regulatory regime won by the union. In the early twentieth century, the union had successfully fought for municipal regulation of fares and restrictions on the number of taxis operating in the city. This helped to more or less ensure that drivers earned a living wage, even absent formal income guarantees.  Cabbies who chose to lease rather than work as employees continued to benefit from these laws. Many believed they could use their knowledge of the city and business acumen to earn more than they had as employees. Many hoped to be liberated from the companies’ direction and control. Some had also grown distrustful of the Chauffers’ Union, which took a politically conservative and dues-driven approach to the workforce. “The union was even worse” than the taxi companies, recalled Markos, a driver who had emigrated from Africa and signed a lease contract in the late 1970s, when I spoke to him in 2010. “They take your money and they say, ‘Thank you and what can we do for you?’—and they didn’t do nothing.”  Markos and other drivers had also been frustrated by the union’s positions on any number of political issues. Those who had embraced the civil rights movement or protested the Vietnam War had been ignored. Drivers who protested US interventions abroad by refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance, which was recited at the beginning of union meetings, were ejected from the meetings. Dissident workers with long hair, whose left politics were in opposition to the union’s, were even punished: ostensibly for their appearance, but more likely, for their political positions and agitation for a more radical union.","completion":"Though not all drivers initially embraced this shift, the decision was eventually made for them. When Yellow Cab, the biggest taxi company in San Francisco, went bankrupt and re-opened in the late 1970s, the company utilized a leasing model to contract with a workforce who, as independent contractors, did not have the right to union representation. Drivers who hoped to stay employees, particularly those with families, were alarmed. For the first time since the early twentieth century, taxi drivers in San Francisco were operating without a union contract and the safety nets associated with employment. Employment was “the only course for the working man if you want to have any kind of security, in the taxi industry particularly,” Bill Williams, a thirty-nine-year-old driver with two young children told a local reporter at the time. “You can’t afford the benefits individually … Your income varies, so you have to have a group plan, which is the union.” In response to this heightened insecurity, many cabbies organized and became increasingly engaged in city politics. For the next three decades, working without a union contract, taxi workers and activists formed informal worker organizations to lobby local politicians to maintain a regulatory environment that enabled a stable income. Drivers began regularly attending municipal meetings, and won a number of important victories for the taxi workforce, including getting a cap on how much the taxi companies could charge them to lease a cab. When workers’ advocacy attempts were rebuffed—as in 2008, when drivers lobbied the city to institute a centralized dispatch system to improve service—they persisted. Many independently adopted the Cabulous ride-hailing app, which was strikingly similar to Uber and Lyft, so that riders could have access to the entire fleet (and not just the taxis at one company) when calling a cab."}
{"prompt":"Although drivers lacked any legal mechanism to collectively force companies to the bargaining table, workers continued to exert control over their income by opposing the issuance of new taxi medallions (thereby restricting competition) and lobbying for occasional fare increases. While some drivers, particularly the most vocal activists, wanted to fight for renewed employee status, the issue was contentious among driver groups. So, from the 1990s to 2010s, they avoided it.  As Ruach, a taxi worker and activist, complained to me about drivers’ mobilization in this period: “We have to negotiate every fucking thing in our universe in public with the politicians and in the ballot box because we can’t have a union because we can’t have a contract because we are so-called ‘independent contractors.’ ” Remote Control When Uber and Lyft began to eat into their income in the spring of 2012, San Francisco taxi drivers were relatively certain that they could rein in the “bandit tech cabs.” Uber and Lyft were unequivocally violating both state and city laws. So, through organizing and advocacy, cabbies thought they could force the city government to enforce the laws and protect their interests, as they had done in previous eras.  And without even a fraction of the resources of technocapital, collectives of cab drivers put up an impressive fight. Between 2012 and 2014, in addition to organizing a number of demonstrations to protest the bandit tech cab companies, and writing and submitting sophisticated legal memos to regulators, taxi drivers also created a crowdsourced database of license-plate images of personal cars engaged in illegal ride-hailing. “We have tracked thousands of these cars,” Barry, a key organizer in this endeavor, explained to me at the time. “We’ll share this with the SFMTA”—the local taxi regulator— “and insurance companies, because you know these guys are operating in violation of their personal insurance contracts.”  But these worker efforts were no match for the neoliberal political evolutions emerging in the US at the time. In the throes of the Great Recession, the individualizing, entrepreneurial logic that had emerged in the late 1970s intensified. For example, while the federal minimum wage remained unchanged, the Obama administration poured money into small business loans, with the hope that individuals taking on personal risk would reignite the economy. Rather than finding well-paying jobs, US workers were implicitly told to create them. Following this reasoning, in the taxi industry, state officials and politicians embraced the narrative that Uber and Lyft, in the name of micro-entrepreneurship, “freed” workers—not just from employment, but also from the taxi industry regulations (namely, vehicle caps and fare regulations) that had long kept their incomes stable.","completion":"But Uber and Lyft were taxi companies, just on venture capital steroids. The startups quickly created a loyal rider base by offering investor-subsidized prices and deceptively marketing themselves as a safer and more community-oriented service than regulated taxis. Though the companies were operating their ride-hailing services illegally, city regulators refused to intervene, citing the promise of technological innovation and a much-needed supply of jobs during the Great Recession’s slow recovery.  Although less widely acknowledged, the regulatory pressure that Uber and Lyft exert—and the laws they flagrantly flaunt—is also a defining feature of their business model. In the early 2010s, by pouring money into California political campaigns (particularly that of Ed Lee, then the mayor of San Francisco) and hiring nearly every lobbyist in the state—including at least one who was later charged with illegal lobbying—the companies weaseled their way out of century-old regulations on fares, vehicle caps, and licenses in just a few months. They convinced state regulators to allow them to operate and then to carve them out of existing regulations by creating a new regulatory category, Transportation Network Companies (TNC).  Scandalously, the first TNC rules, adopted in September 2013, closely resembled those written by the companies themselves. “They got exactly what they wanted,” Brad, a taxi driver said to me about the companies on the day the TNC regulations were released. “They wrote the laws themselves.” Indeed, the state regulations, which preempted local municipal regulations, seemed to inscribe the companies’ preferred business model into law. For example, even consumer safety regulations tied to professional licenses and state-monitored vehicles were conspicuously absent; instead, these safety oversights were outsourced to the companies themselves. Most critically for drivers, the new regulations lacked both any restraints on driver competition—in the form of vehicle caps—and state control over fares. The regulations were also explicitly silent on all labor issues, including work flexibility, a wage floor, the amount of time drivers could spend working per day, and most centrally, employment status."}
{"prompt":"Wanting to avoid treating drivers as direct employees, Uber and Lyft nonetheless had to find ways to subtly exert control over them. Rather than just tell drivers what to do and how to do it, which would trigger employment status, Uber and Lyft use “psychological inducements” derived from social science and deployed remotely through algorithms to influence when, where, and how long their drivers work. Instead of directly employing the millions of drivers whose work produces the company’s primary value, Uber hired hundreds of social and data scientists to shape driver behavior. (For example, using findings from social psychology and video game technologies, Uber notoriously tricks drivers into working at undesirable hours and locations.) The success of Uber and Lyft in restructuring the taxi market and securing a legal environment that suited their interests emboldened venture capital to pour more money into the tech cab companies and to other on-demand labor platform start-ups, such as DoorDash and UberEats. As the technocapitalists celebrated these victories, a seemingly unlimited supply of drivers and declining commissions quickly devastated driver incomes across the entire taxi and ride-hailing economy. Almost overnight, full-time drivers made roughly 65 to 80 percent of what taxi drivers had made in 2012.  And that was only part of the wreckage. Over the next few years, hundreds of taxi drivers who had taken out large “balloon loans”—which typically have low interest rates but involve one large payment due upon maturity—to purchase medallions went bankrupt or teetered on the edge. A few died of the intense stress caused by loss of income and long hours. Others continued driving, but lost their housing, spending the night in their taxi or on the couches of friends. Some, desperate for work, began driving for Uber and Lyft, even as the companies were quickly slashing wages. These drivers, especially those for whom driving had been a lifetime profession or who owed money on a vehicle they had purchased for work, felt trapped. In one of the most expensive places in the world, drivers in San Francisco worked long hours with no control over their earnings. And within months, this legalized system of low pay, debt, and devastation was replicated the world over.","completion":"Beginning in 2016, without access to municipal regulators, fare controls, or vehicle caps, Uber and Lyft drivers turned to the only places left: the courts and each other. Like cabbies before them, ride-hailing drivers began to self-organize and form drivers groups. Some even worked with plaintiff-side employment attorneys to sue Uber and Lyft for millions in back wages and vehicle reimbursements. Uber alone faced dozens, and eventually hundreds, of lawsuits and complaints alleging that they were misclassifying their drivers as independent contractors.  But Uber and Lyft, even though they were unprofitable, had unprecedented sums of venture capital funding with which they could aggressively litigate such cases and confidentially settle them, sometimes for more than what the plaintiff would have received had they won at trial. The companies used these ungodly streams of capital along with legal acrobatics—both settlements and arbitration clauses—to avert a conclusive finding on the central issue: were drivers employees or independent contractors? By avoiding a legal decision at either the district or appellate level, the companies continued to get away with treating their workers as independent contractors."}
{"prompt":"Samy, an Iranian refugee who emigrated to California in the 2000s, described the terrible conditions that he and many of these “independent contractors” face. Unable to afford the Bay Area, he lives a hundred miles away from San Francisco, and rather than commute to the city daily, he sleeps in his car between shifts, sometimes not returning home for several days in a row. “We have no freedom,” he told me. “I sleep in my car. I eat in my car. I work in my car. That is not freedom. That is not flexibility.” Because he has to make a certain amount each day to make ends meet, Samy hypothesizes that Uber has used the data they have on him to systematically lower his wages, forcing him to work harder and longer to earn that same amount.","completion":"Back in Iran, Samy, who is a highly skilled carpenter, ran a small construction business. “In Iran, I had some guys, they were working for me… I took care of them,” he said. “I was giving them breakfast, lunch, and I even paid for their dinner. In America, it’s something different than all over the world.” He said he hadn’t heard of another country where workers were required to have their own tools to work for a company, and then not considered employees on that basis. “It makes no sense.” Finding Friction  In the post-union, post-employment decades leading up to the appearance of Uber and Lyft in 2012, taxi driver advocates in San Francisco had largely avoided organizing around employment status. Because the issue was contentious among drivers, San Francisco taxi worker activists had relied mostly on policy advocacy to improve their working conditions, lobbying regulators to ensure the economic security of taxi drivers and their families. With the legalization of the Uber and Lyft business models in the mid-2010s, an industry of workers who had long understood themselves to be “independent” began to build and leverage collective labor power, not just policy advocacy, to demand changes to both the industry business model and the regulatory environment. Drivers of all kinds—full-time and part-time, Uber and Lyft and taxi—took to collective activity, including direct actions, which came to a head in 2019."}
{"prompt":"As Uber and Lyft approached their IPOs early that year, the companies noted in their public SEC filings that the classification of their drivers as independent contractors remained key to their future profitability. Uber and Lyft drivers quickly ascertained that their status was the companies’ most painful pressure point. Moreover, the fact that the companies—whose executives made millions—were relying on avoiding paying minimum wage and overtime to the drivers for the companies’ profitability enraged drivers. As one driver explained to me in the summer of 2019: Four years ago, there is no way anyone would have [supported] employment. People were getting what they needed, and they felt loyalty to the company. But now we can’t survive. And did you see that [Uber co-founder] Garrett Camp bought a seventy-one-million-dollar home in Beverly Hills? That is our money. That is some bullshit. I know people living in their cars. And he bought a seventy-one-million-dollar home. We made him every dollar he has.","completion":"Until this moment, driver organizers had avoided the potentially divisive issue of employment status. But in response to the IPO, a changing legal landscape, and fury rooted in their extreme economic vulnerabilities, drivers adjusted their tactics to direct their energies at technocapital’s Achilles’ heel.  On May 8, 2019, a coalition of Uber, Lyft, and taxi drivers, led by the New York Taxi Workers Alliance and the California-based Rideshare Drivers United (RDU)—whose members had been self-organizing and protesting for better regulatory oversight of the industry for over two years—called the first ever global strike against Uber. In the weeks leading up to the strike, the demands focused on fair pay and an appeals process to deal with terminations, yet they conspicuously lacked the word “employment.” But during the strike action in front of Uber’s headquarters on Market Street in San Francisco, drivers were beginning to talk about AB5."}
{"prompt":"The bill, which had been introduced in the California State Assembly just a few months earlier, drew upon a recent state Supreme Court decision to change the test for employment status. Rather than examining how much control a putative employer exerted over workers, the decision called for the presumption of employment status. If a company wanted to use independent contractor labor, they had to pass an exacting “ABC test” which asked, among other things, if the workers were occupied in a line of work that differed from the company’s core business. AB5 constituted a striking revision in California employment law and strongly favored extending basic protections like minimum wage, overtime compensation, workers’ compensation, and unemployment insurance to gig economy workers.  Two days after the strike, Uber went public, and driver organizers with Rideshare Drivers United began to talk more publicly about AB5 and the possibility of employment status. If it passed, it would be the first time since Uber and Lyft’s founding that drivers had a law on the books that could support their struggle against the companies. They decided, in spite of some fears, to throw their support behind the bill’s passage.","completion":"Still, in private, drivers were ambivalent about formally becoming employees. “We get behind this law because we have to show the companies we have power,” Soleiman, a full-time Lyft driver, told me privately, after an organizing meeting. “But what does it mean for me and other drivers?” Though worried about the consequences, he and other Uber and Lyft drivers had advocated loudly for AB5, putting their fears to one side and leveraging collective action to fight for the one thing that companies most wanted to avoid.  In a truly unexpected turn of political events, AB5 passed. The California legislature, which had previously shown great deference and affection for technology companies, sided with the workers on the issue of employment status. The Assembly’s speaker, Anthony Rendon, went so far as to call the so-called gig economy “fucking feudalism” in announcing his own support of the law. Upon its passage, AB5 was celebrated by driver advocates the world over and signed into law by Governor Newsom in September 2019. It was the first sign in over eight years that, perhaps, worker power could fracture technocapital’s tight grip over lawmakers.  But like Soleiman, many drivers did not fully understand the implications of the new law—not because they were ignorant of the statute, but because so much was left in the company’s hands. What would it mean to be an “employee”? Most centrally, would the companies take away whatever degree of flexibility the drivers had? Could Uber and Lyft cap their potential earnings or push them off the app? Or would the law facilitate exactly what precarious workers in the economy needed: a wage floor, access to the safety net, and a pathway to unionization? While debates about the impact and efficacy of AB5 and the ABC test roiled over social media and in courtrooms—Uber and the food delivery service Postmates sought and lost a preliminary injunction against the law, while simultaneously arguing that the law did not apply to them—workers privately debated what to do. The law was supposed to go into effect on January 1, 2020. The day came and went and, conspicuously, nothing changed. When it became clear to workers that neither the city attorneys nor the state attorney general was going to force Uber to end its practice of misclassification, drivers decided to take matters into their own hands."}
{"prompt":"“We cannot wait for the city or state to enforce this law,” Nicole, a Lyft driver and organizer in California, said to me over the phone, weeks after the law had gone into effect. “We have to do it ourselves.” On February 5, 2020, members and supporters of RDU marched together to the Labor Commission’s offices all over California, collectively submitting individual claims for back wages and vehicle reimbursements against the companies. The roughly 150 drivers who filed claims against Uber and Lyft that day calculated that together they were owed up to $4 million dollars for the last three years of underpayment. AB5 was not an end in itself, RDU organizers explained to the press and to their fellow workers, but a route to collectively achieve much-needed security, a law they could use to stabilize income and aid driver organizing efforts.  “Look, the companies can threaten us all they want,” Chris, a Bay Area Lyft driver and RDU organizer told his fellow workers at an organizing meeting. “They can keep sending us emails and these in-app messages. But what employment status means is we can organize together. We can build power. We can build a union. And then we can force them to bargain over our working conditions. And then they can’t take away our flexibility if we won’t let them take it away.” For Chris and others, employment status created a path through which workers could organize and maybe even get a federally-recognized union. Talk of a union, which had been stymied for three decades in the taxi industry by the reality that taxi workers without a union contract could still use the municipal regulatory regime to eke out a living under the leasing apparatus, has become a live issue once again.  While taxi companies had pioneered independent contracting in an earlier moment, technocapital’s flamboyant forms of neoliberal risk-shifting have catalyzed a powerful resistance to both the corporate practice of eschewing direct employment and worker reliance on state structures for security. The second neoliberal turn brought on by Uber and Lyft eradicated both municipal regulations and the limited sense of agency that workers had over their livelihoods. Ironically, this purge of state structures in the 2010s that drivers could leverage stirred new—but old—forms of collective activity. For the first time since the early 1980s, employment status—and more importantly, shared worker power built through the threat of employment status—has become a way for ride-hailing drivers to resist extreme economic insecurity and to collectively imagine better futures.","completion":"Workers are turning to one another to build power and effect change. Through protests, strikes, and other direct actions that have emerged through the fight for employment in California, drivers have found a much-needed source of friction that can stop, or at least slow, technocapital’s assault on their lives: solidarity."}
{"prompt":"T. Candice Smith was driving to work in the express lane of a Las Vegas freeway in 2012 when her car suddenly malfunctioned. Her steering wheel froze and the car shut off. When it rolled to a stop, she and her friend got out and pushed the car to the shoulder. Once she was out of the way of traffic, she noticed a chirping sound coming from inside her dashboard. It was coming from a machine installed by her auto lender: a “starter interrupt device” (SID) that was programmed to make that sound before it disabled her car as punishment for missing a payment. It was then that she realized why she had almost died in a car crash: her lender must have tried to remotely disable her car. So she sat in the immobilized, chirping vehicle on the side of the freeway and called him.","completion":"Having her car break down on the freeway was terrifying. Having to wait on the phone with her lender to get her car operable again made her feel even more helpless. When she told him what had happened, the lender insisted that the device wasn’t meant to stop a moving vehicle, only to prevent it from starting, and refused to admit any responsibility. Her lender went on to disable her car at least four more times, including once again while she was driving, and then took her to court for not making payments—which later investigations showed the company had actually received but had failed to put in her account. In reality, Smith was never more than a couple of days late on her payments, and never even close to defaulting, which Nevada state law defines as being thirty days past due. And even though it’s illegal for creditors in Nevada to repossess a car before the borrower defaults, disabling a car via SID didn’t clearly count as a repossession because it doesn’t technically “seize” the collateral."}
{"prompt":"A year after her near-crash on the freeway, Smith testified about her experience to the Nevada Assembly Committee on Commerce and Labor. Her testimony sparked a wave of national media coverage on SIDs. Calling them “kill switches” and invoking “Big Brother,” reporters from the New York Times and Mother Jones highlighted the cruelty of lenders who would disable a car after just a day without payment. Even the Daily Mirror proclaimed, “Heartless creditors LOCKED T. Candice Smith's steering wheel and stopped her engine as she drove down a busy Las Vegas highway.”  Smith’s testimony was crucial for exposing SIDs to people outside of the auto finance industry, which had already been using them for more than a decade. But her experience was somewhat unique: she was fortunate enough to be able to make the majority of her payments on time, and she experienced an absolutely indefensible near-death collision because of her SID. For these reasons, the media was particularly sympathetic to her.    But there are over two million drivers with SIDs in their cars today, and most of them are not in Smith’s situation. They can’t always afford to keep up with their payments, and their experience with SIDs aren’t nearly as dramatic. Their stories rarely make the headlines, yet these are the people we need to focus on to understand how SIDs really work, and the insidious problem they represent.  SIDs are not just a potential safety hazard—they are also ruthless tools of financial extraction. Lenders prey upon an increasing number of vulnerable borrowers who can’t pay back a loan, but who can be squeezed for irregular payments under the coercion of a device that can shut off their car. Lenders see themselves as providing a utility like a phone company, but if anything they’re more like the mob. As one dealer remarked, “It’s amazing how people manage to pay when they know their car won’t start.” There’s an App for That SIDs debuted in the world of auto lending in the late 1990s under the name On Time, offered by a company called Payment Protection Systems. Mel Farr, a running back for the Detroit Lions who became a well-known businessman, helped make On Time devices famous, using them in thousands of his business’s auto loans. At its peak, his group of fourteen car dealerships grossed nearly $600 million annually. Farr’s business was divisive: he was praised by then-president Bill Clinton for building the nation’s largest Black-owned business and “[bringing cars] to every community in this country,” but also criticized by others, like consumer protection activist Ralph Nader, for charging incredibly high interest rates—even on cars with the On Time devices.","completion":"At the time, the devices followed a simple schematic. There was a small computer, about the size of a billfold wallet, connected to a switch between the ignition and the starter motor, with a voltage monitor on the engine, and small keypad. The computer was preprogrammed with a schedule and a list of numeric codes, which borrowers would receive from the lender when they made their weekly or bi-weekly payments. If they didn’t enter an acceptable code, either a light would flash or a sound would play, signalling that the car would soon be disabled. The voltage monitor on the engine was supposed to ensure that the car wasn’t in motion before the computer switched off the starter. In August 1999, On Time’s creator, Frank Simon, estimated there were about 15,000 to 20,000 of these devices on the road."}
{"prompt":"The next generation of SIDs arrived in the mid-2000s, which is when the technology really took off. In 2006, Stanley Schwartz, cofounder of a competing SID company PassTime, filed a patent for a combined SID-GPS device. It took advantage of newly robust GPS infrastructure following the launch of the first modernized GPS satellite in 2005. The updated SIDs also utilized a wireless modem, which meant that lenders could communicate with the device in real time through an online portal—and later, on a dedicated smartphone app. Lenders could now disable cars outside of the set schedule, and could even set up geographic boundaries outside of which the car would automatically have its ignition disabled. By 2013, PassTime had sold 1.5 million of these devices—a hundred times as many as the old model.   The new SIDs made disabling a car incredibly easy, both logistically and emotionally. One collections agent told the New York Times that he could monitor the location of 880 borrowers’ cars from his computer or phone, and that he once casually disabled someone’s car from his phone while he was shopping at Walmart.","completion":"What about the claim from borrowers like Smith that the SID stopped their car while they were driving? There is no simple answer. But car engines can stall, and if the starter motor is off, then the engine can’t restart. Considering the low quality of cars usually offered by no-credit-check used car dealers, it’s not hard to believe that the SID could trigger latent engine issues. Or the SID itself could be faulty or improperly installed. Of course, there’s a huge legal incentive for lenders to deny these possibilities so they can continue using the devices, because electronically disabling equipment is only legal when it doesn’t cause physical harm."}
{"prompt":"Target Acquisition  Ever since Mel Farr helped popularize the first generation of SIDs, lenders have stood by the claim that SIDs allow them to fill the crucial role of extending credit to people who would otherwise not qualify for the cars they desperately need to get to work—the so-called “subprime” market. According to Mother Jones, in 2016 about 70 percent of these loans used “payment assurance” devices, which includes SIDs in their early and later forms, as well as GPS trackers without SIDs.","completion":"This is a multi-billion-dollar market. Auto dealers target these millions of borrowers with low or non-existent credit scores for loans even without SIDs because, despite the potential for default, they can still make money both by inflating car prices and by charging high interest rates. And the market is growing: In 2019, a record seven million Americans were over three months late on their auto payments, largely due to the increasing number of subprime borrowers.  Theoretically, SIDs could benefit borrowers by helping reduce these interest rates, which should be based on the risk for lenders. But in reality, interest rates are “not [reduced by] installation of the [SID],” according to testimony by Sophia Romero of Legal Aid of Southern Nevada. Instead, SIDs encourage lenders to offer larger loans on higher value vehicles, with the highest possible interest rates. In a 2012 survey of 1,300 dealers, “nearly 70% of respondents indicated that they believed the use of devices allowed them to sell higher value… vehicles with less risk.” This belief comes from the fact that lenders can continually threaten to remotely disable the vehicle while keeping drivers in their cars, paying for as long as possible until they default—at which point, the lender can quickly repossess the car and sell it to someone else. And in the background, lenders package and sell these predatory loans as asset-backed securities to banks. This should sound familiar—in housing, it’s what caused the 2008 financial crisis. And just like in 2008, it’s the borrowers, not the banks, who suffer.  So, it’s true that SIDs reduce risk so lenders can extend credit to borrowers who otherwise wouldn’t get it. But SIDs have nothing to do with someone’s actual ability to pay, which means borrowers’ pockets are drained while lenders jump indiscriminately from one borrower to the next. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor describes a similar dynamic in the housing market as “predatory inclusion,” where mortgage lenders in the 1960s targeted previously excluded, mostly Black borrowers, with home loans that were federally insured to reduce lender risk. Instead of actually supporting these borrowers, they raked in as much money as possible until borrowers—who were portrayed as unintelligent and irresponsible—foreclosed."}
{"prompt":"Privacy-Respecting Predators So what should we do about SIDs? To date, the legislative responses have been woefully inadequate. They have failed to address the deeper issues of economic justice, and have largely accepted the lenders’ basic argument that expanding access to credit is necessary even as it becomes predatory.","completion":"For example, in 2017, the FTC started investigating a number of finance companies on their use of SID-GPS tracking devices in the name of consumer privacy. The same year, Nevada passed SB 350, which is one of the strongest state bills regulating SIDs in the country to date. Initially written as a complete ban on SIDs as “deceptive trade practices,” the bill was amended to allow SIDs as long as lenders follow certain rules. These rules include requiring written consent from borrowers and certifying proper installation, banning vehicle disablement until thirty days of overdue payment or of operating vehicles, supplying emergency restarts for consumers, and deleting GPS data once it’s 180 days old.  These regulations mainly address security, safety, and privacy—which all must be addressed if SIDs are on the road. But they’re not nearly enough to prevent lenders from using SIDs to scale their operations beyond people who can reasonably pay.  One solution would be to force more risk back onto the lenders. For example, states could require lowering interest rates in conjunction with the SIDs. Another would be to restrict their usage overall. States could ban SIDs as a condition for granting a loan—which California actually did, but only for GPS devices, not SIDs. There’s also the model of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Payday Lending Rule, which has been indefinitely stalled after its introduction in 2017, but would have required lenders to determine whether a borrower is reasonably able to pay back a loan before granting it.  The path forward is not simple or obvious. Ultimately, the problem with SIDs is that they broaden and intensify a predatory system, so even with laws like SB 350, vulnerable borrowers will still end up trapped in cycles of debt or declaring bankruptcy. As one woman interviewed by CBS News about her experience with SIDs explained her reason for taking out an auto loan at a predatory dealership: “I had to get to dialysis. I have to get there or I don’t live.” We can imagine a world without SIDs, but it’s harder to imagine a world without the system they belong to. Even if we banned the devices, people would still depend on credit for access to life’s necessities—and that dependency will always attract lenders trying to make quick money."}
{"prompt":"Introducing better privacy protections for the data they gather, or ensuring they are safely installed, will do nothing to prevent that. Perhaps we need to “rethink credit as social provision” as the scholar Abbye Atkinson argues, and develop more direct ways of fulfilling people’s needs. Perhaps we need to reduce our dependence on cars by providing better public transportation services that make mobility a social right. The fact that people need cars to get to work or the doctor shouldn’t be an argument for letting lenders rip them off. It should be a sign that we need a renewed program of investment in our social and physical infrastructure, one that supplies kinder and more creative solutions.","completion":"Technologists try to make digital experiences frictionless. Mirroring the mythical efficiency of a perpetual motion machine, the goal is to advance users from screen to screen with ease. As a result, standard design practices call for masking complex technical systems beneath simple interactions.  Yet this becomes difficult to do within the context of online security. Security requires friction, such as “strong” but difficult-to-remember passwords. Complexity becomes a feature, not a bug. And this complexity tends to increase over time, thanks to the cat-and-mouse nature of security: bad actors develop new tactics that result in high-profile hacks, which in turn demand ever more elaborate countermeasures."}
{"prompt":"These countermeasures create friction for everyone—but especially for people with disabilities. Indeed, online security can be a nightmare for disabled people. Take the common security practice of converting letters to asterisks (*) in password fields. The screen readers used by visually impaired people try to mirror this practice by replacing every occluded password letter with the word \"star” or calling the entire field “concealed text.” Imagine for a moment typing in your password, and hearing either “star” repeatedly or complete silence. This makes it difficult to review what letters have been typed, leading to mistakes and frustration.  Another example is facial recognition for devices, like Apple Face ID and Windows Hello. In addition to performing inconsistently for underrepresented groups, facial recognition creates new challenges for blind users. “Ninety-five percent of the time the camera can’t see me,” says Lucy Greco, the web accessibility evangelist at UC Berkeley. “I know where to touch the fingerprint sensor because it’s the same spot every time. But I don’t know why it’s not seeing my face.”  These kinds of difficulties cause many disabled users to opt out of security measures entirely. “I have noticed that many people who are emerging technology users—who are blind, visually impaired, or have other disabilities—they'll get a lot of assistance to set up their phone,” says Chancey Fleet, assistive technology coordinator at the New York Public Library. “Often they decide, or have the decision made for them, to skip the passcode,” she continues. “Because when you're new and everything’s hard, entering the passcode is hard. And that lack of passcode will linger for months, or even years, and become habitual.” The result is a crisis. We are creating a digital world where the most desirable path for disabled people is to leave themselves unprotected. This means that as the level of security rises among the nondisabled, disabled people are becoming more vulnerable to digital threats, deepening disparities. And these disparities affect an immense share of the world’s population—over a billion people have some form of disability, according to the World Health Organization. Furthermore, this number is constantly growing: disabilities are correlated with age, and lifespans are increasing. We will all be disabled in one form or another during the course of our lives. It's just a matter of time. So when those of us who are (currently) nondisabled contemplate accessibility, we aren’t just serving our fellow humans with disabilities in the present—we’re also serving our disabled selves in the future.","completion":"Fortunately, there’s nothing inevitable about a digital world that fails to protect disabled people. Academic researchers are proving that it's possible to rethink authentication for disability, synthesizing perspectives from the realms of both security and accessibility. Their efforts offer a glimpse of what our technology could look like if it aspired to keep everyone safe."}
{"prompt":"Open Sesame To help disabled people remain secure online, academics are exploring solutions involving gestures, haptics, and even “mind reading.” Consider the “passthought,” proposed in 2005 by computer scientists at Carleton University. Passthoughts involve thinking a silent and inherently unobservable thought. In lab studies, researchers provide instructions to subjects such as, “Imagine that you are singing a song or reciting a passage for ten seconds without making any noise.” Detected by sensors, the brainwave signals emitted from this thought can log users into services or devices.  How does this work? Prior to authentication, users are asked to think the passthought repeatedly. Their digitized brainwave signals—the “training data”—are then processed to extract a set of features that best encode a user profile and remain consistent over time. Finally, this set of features is used to build a \"lock\" that only opens for the specified user performing the specified passthought.  Passthoughts hold promise because they provide two factors of authentication in a single step. Knowledge, or the secret thought, is one factor; the user’s brain is the other. Given that each of our brains is uniquely differentiated by genetics and environmental conditions, our brain waves have a kind of biometric signature. But unlike fingerprints or faces, passthoughts can be changed if they are compromised. And even if the attacker knows the content of the passthought, it can’t open the lock without the user’s brain. This makes passthoughts relatively robust against impersonation and better protected from social engineering attacks, where the user is tricked into revealing their password.  Despite these advantages, passthoughts still have practical limitations for real-world use. In an exploratory study with blind people, researchers found that authenticating via brain-computer interface was less accurate and took longer than entering a PIN. Moreover, the sensor-embedded headsets that are required for brainwave authentication can be awkward, uncomfortable, and stigmatizing to wear. Researchers have explored discrete, in-ear alternatives, but many involve bands that wrap around the neck and place electrodes along the scalp, while more robust models resemble a swim cap. These headsets can also cost hundreds of dollars and so may be out of financial reach for many people.","completion":"Another creative approach is PassChords, developed in 2012 by Cornell professor Shiri Azenkot and her colleagues. “These researchers recognized that if you're using a screen reader in public on your smartphone, people might be able to hear you enter your password,” explains Cynthia Bennett, a researcher at the University of Washington. “So they came up with a gesture-based system that was silent.” Entering a PassChord involves tapping several times on a touch surface with one or more fingers, reminiscent of playing a musical sequence. A study with sixteen blind participants found that using PassChords was as accurate and significantly faster than entering an iPhone passcode with a screen reader, taking about a third of the time."}
{"prompt":"While passthoughts and PassChords have the potential to improve the lives of millions of disabled users, it will be hard to make them mainstream. Academic researchers are constrained by limited resources. They can build novel prototypes, but they often don’t have the capacity to bring those prototypes to a mass audience. “PassChords is heavily cited, it’s well known in the community, and in user testing, people say great things about it,” says Yang Wang, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. “I don’t think it’s widely deployed though.”  Without an expensive marketing campaign, how can a product find users? And without a business model, how can operating costs be sustained? Maintainability is another challenge: projects like PassChords need to be continually updated as browsers and operating systems change. This is hard to do, especially as the students who write the software for these academic projects graduate. Furthermore, in the absence of a revenue stream, projects can’t hire people to maintain the software on an ongoing basis.  Academia’s distance from industry is thus a double-edged sword: while academics have the freedom to prototype projects that are insulated from market forces, this also limits the scale of their impact. Solutions like passthoughts and PassChords are only available to a select group of users, often for a limited amount of time. They remain in beta indefinitely and are rarely released to the wider public.","completion":"Hack the Planet Unfettered by the resource constraints of academia, tech companies could pick up these projects and deploy them at scale. So why don’t they? Because the industry largely considers people with disabilities to be anomalies—a niche and “non-normal” subgroup of users. By this logic, it seems unprofitable to develop specialized features that appear to benefit only a select few. When businesses do prioritize accessibility, they often do so for two reasons: to avoid discrimination lawsuits and to generate positive publicity. The benefits of either are difficult to measure, however, while the costs of building features for disabled users are concrete and non-trivial.  But there is another urgent reason that industry should care about accessibility: security. When companies create bad accessibility features, it can result in more than just bad user experiences. It can also introduce new security risks, impacting systems and individuals alike. And these risks can lead to breaches that inflict real damage to the company’s bottom line."}
{"prompt":"A good example is CAPTCHA, or the Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Designed as a challenge to prevent bots from spamming a system, CAPTCHAs were first introduced as images of distorted character strings. Typing the contents of this image into a text field would effectively prove one’s humanity and allow a user to proceed onto the next webpage.  However, the original CAPTCHA was soon revealed to exclude people with visual impairments, effectively deeming only those who could see images as “human.” Including descriptive “alt” text in the source code of the website could solve this problem by making CAPTCHAs accessible to screen readers—but at the cost of also making CAPTCHAs legible to bots, which could then pass for human. Enter the audio CAPTCHA, which was introduced as an “accessible” alternative—though it still excludes people that are deafblind. It reads the contents of a visual CAPTCHA aloud without relying on alt text, and it adds background noise or distortion that makes it harder for bots to understand.  While visual CAPTCHAs have evolved to more robust cognitive tasks—like selecting all the traffic lights in a given image—accessible CAPTCHAs haven’t progressed nearly as far. Meanwhile, advancements in speech recognition technology are approaching human performance, giving hackers enhanced capabilities to decipher audio CAPTCHAs even with significant noise or distortion. After obtaining and preprocessing the audio, attackers can now automate the submission of these recordings to speech recognition services, and then plug the transcriptions into the web form. The result is new system-level security risks: in a 2017 study, researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that off-the-shelf speech recognition services could be used to hack the most common audio CAPTCHAs, breaking Google’s reCAPTCHA with a 98% success rate.  Accessibility done badly can make the internet less safe for everyone. If companies can’t be convinced to protect disabled users because of ethical and legal reasons, perhaps they can be motivated by the security risks that result from serving disabled users poorly. Moreover, the potential impact of these risks is growing as accessibility permissions are used in unexpected ways: to deliver new features, rather than expanding access. Even the nondisabled may therefore be unwittingly using accessibility features—and bearing the associated risks.","completion":"For instance, Dropbox users are asked to turn on accessibility during setup on Mac computers. Yet how this helps people with disabilities is currently not discussed in the documentation; the explanation emphasizes that turning on accessibility will enable added functionality. “Mac shoehorns a million different things into accessibility permissions,” says an anonymous commenter on r/MacOS. “You might grant a window manager accessibility permission to move windows around, but then the window manager could, if it wanted to, read your keystrokes.”  Moving Targets So what is the way forward? Ideally, we could foster partnerships between academia and industry that combine the interdisciplinary prototyping of the former with the funding of the latter. Even under the best arrangement, however, a deeper difficulty will remain: both security and disability are moving targets. What one needs to be secure online is constantly changing—and so is what defines one as disabled. As a report from the AI Now Institute notes, “the boundaries of disability… have continuously shifted in relation to unstable and culturally specific notions of ‘ability.’”  Security and disability are fluid, and this will always create challenges for technologists trying to design for either—let alone both. Much creative experimentation will be needed, but the goal should always be the same: to keep as many people as possible safe, even if it means overhauling our technologies. As Bennett, one of the authors of the AI Now report, explains, “Disabled folks are not vulnerable because of our inherent bodyminds, but because systems are not set up to protect all people equally. That's what creates the vulnerability.” In 2017, when a National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower wanted to extract classified government documents from her work computer, she sought refuge in the printed page. Maybe she thought physical paper would be safer from digital surveillance than an email. So she printed the documents at her office and then mailed them to The Intercept, which broke the news with the headline, “Top-Secret NSA Report Details Russian Hacking Effort Days Before 2016 Election” on June 5th, 2017 at 3:44 p.m. eastern time. A few hours later, the US Department of Justice officially announced their arrest of Reality Winner, a former US Air Force officer and NSA contractor."}
{"prompt":"What happened? The Intercept contacted the NSA on May 30th asking them to verify the documents. But by sending the scanned images that included each page’s wrinkles and folds, as opposed to retyping the information, the journalists shared more than they intended to: they sent the NSA the pale yellow tracking dots that are embedded in every piece of paper that is printed by a color laser printer. The dots form rectangular grids of rows and columns, with each dot’s position corresponding to the value of a date, time, or printer model. Together, the rows and columns constitute a machine-readable bitmap known as a machine identification code (MIC). MIC grids repeat across the page so that even if only a shred of a page is recovered, the MIC on that shred can still be decoded and traced. While neither the Justice Department’s nor the FBI’s statements about Winner’s arrest mentioned MICs, security experts strongly suggested that they played a role in helping the agencies identify her and, at the very least, corroborated other evidence linking Winner to the leak.  Winner’s case spurred a renewed interest in laser printer tracking dots and other techniques for embedding hidden messages in plain sight, also known as steganography. The development and deployment of these techniques comes out of a long-running secret relationship between governments and printer manufacturers in multiple countries. It sounds impossibly paranoid: every piece of paper that's printed by a color laser printer anywhere in the world is marked with invisible grids that make it possible for governments to trace when that exact page was printed and by what printer model. But in 2004, a Dutch journalist revealed the existence of the dots. In doing so, he sparked an ongoing arms race between privacy activists on the one hand and printer companies and intelligence agencies on the other.","completion":"Printing Money For as long as commercial printers and copiers have existed, their manufacturers have been enlisted by US intelligence agencies to help track down whistleblowers. In 1971, the grassroots direct action group, Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, raided a small FBI field office in Media, Pennsylvania and sent copies of the documents they found there—which first exposed the existence of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s notorious program for sabotaging leftist organizing in the US—to news outlets across the country.  At the FBI’s request, Xerox helped the FBI determine that the Xerox 660 was the specific make and model of the copier used to disseminate the leak. Xerox also provided the FBI with a list of customers who leased the 660, but ultimately “decided at the very highest level” to not cooperate further with the bureau, according to Xerox PR manager Gerald A. Mulligan. Xerox’s noncooperation stonewalled the FBI’s investigation. Even with over 200 agents on the case, the FBI never prosecuted anyone for the raid. Xerox’s stand against intelligence agencies would be the last of its kind."}
{"prompt":"As personal computers, printers, and copiers became more readily available, intelligence agencies sought deeper inroads with printer technology companies in order to combat what they saw as a growing threat of currency counterfeiting. Japan was the first government to require traceable codes embedded in laser printouts and Fuji-Xerox, the joint Japanese-American printing venture, developed the first iteration of tracking technology—the yellow dots—in the mid-1980s. Other countries, including the US, quickly followed suit. Although there was no law in the US mandating that printer manufacturers incorporate MICs into their machines, industry insiders reported that the US government and intelligence agencies made clear to printer manufacturers that the lack of traceable markings could make it difficult to sell their products in the country. Soon, every major manufacturer implemented their own tracking codes. Not a single one revealed this “feature” to its customers.  By the 1990s, the desktop publishing revolution was well underway and central banks around the world took notice. In January 1993, central bankers and banknote printers from the G-10 countries convened a steering committee called the Special Study Group 2 (SSG-2) to assess the threat of laser printers to currency integrity. A 1995 SSG-2 memo describes a system for tracing counterfeit banknotes back to a specific copier. The SSG-2’s next steps were to research “whether the technologies developed for copiers could also be used for scanner and computer systems”—with the goal being complete traceability for any given sheet of paper from any commercially available copier, scanner, or printer. A 1998 SSG-2 report remarks on the success of the tracing system and notes that “manufacturers will continue to provide assistance in identifying specific copiers at no additional cost.”  Still, the details remained secret until 2004, when the Dutch journalist Wilbert de Vries broke the story of the tracking dots. In a brief article originally for the online IT publication Webwereld, de Vries cites anonymous sources with the Dutch Railway Police who confirm that they are using tracking dots to identify members of a counterfeit ticket printing gang. Privacy activists were appalled by the disclosure since the same technology that makes counterfeiting harder also subjects every single person who prints a piece of paper with a color printer—the vast majority of whom are not printing fake money or railway tickets—to non-consensual tracking. In the aftermath of de Vries’s discovery, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned the practice of using tracking dots and began collecting data on which manufacturers implemented them, including submitting FOIA requests to the US government regarding its involvement. Much of what we know about the history of printer steganography is due to their work.","completion":"EFF researchers were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer scale of the operation. They concluded that all major printer companies were implementing MICs in laser printers in some fashion. With the help of volunteers, they were able to decipher portions of the yellow dot tracking codes in use by a popular laser printer, the Xerox DocuColor. Each row of the grid was given a numerical value of a power of two—so the value of the bottom-most row would be one, the value of the next row up would be two, the next row up would be four, and so on up to sixty-four. Each column of the grid represented part of the printout’s date or time or the printer’s serial number. Specifically, columns 11 through 15 designated the printer’s serial number. So if column 11 had a dot in row 32, plus a dot in row 16, the first digit of the serial would be 32 plus 16, or 48. The dot matrices produced by other printers looked completely different. Canon, for instance, arranges their dots in a spiral. Ultimately, Xerox abandoned their original grid pattern, making the EFF researchers’ decoding tools obsolete. Newer printers presumably use a different system to encode metadata in the dots.  Following the Dutch revelations, printer manufacturers scrambled to justify their invasive and secretive technology. Xerox, for the first time, publicly admitted to using tracking codes and spun them as a positive, consumer-friendly feature to enhance the security of their printouts. As a result, they found themselves under the scrutiny of the EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security, who stated in a 2008 official memo that such tracking \"may give rise to the violation of fundamental human rights, namely the right to privacy and private life.” Disrupting the Dots I run an independent press based in New York City. After learning of the pale yellow dots, I wanted to know if I could find them in the books, magazines, and chapbooks I had made over the years. When I scanned the pages into the computer and inverted the colors of the scans, I found that nearly all of them had the simple arrangement of dots that bound me up within a global surveillance apparatus. One of our recent publications—Salty Wet, a visual essay on political resistance in Hong Kong—was covered in Xerox tracking codes. I wondered if there was any way to remove them, or if being trackable was simply the cost of printing in color."}
{"prompt":"In 2018, a group of researchers at the Technical University of Dresden made a breakthrough to that end when they released DEDA: the Dot Extraction, Decoding, and Anonymization toolkit. Analyzing over a thousand printouts from over a hundred printers, they developed an algorithm to detect and decode the tracking dots of four grid patterns that were used across eighteen manufacturers. Finally, there was a way for regular people to pry the dots out of the hands of corporations and intelligence agencies, and commandeer them for ourselves. The DEDA toolkit allows anyone to anonymize documents by removing the tracking dots at the software level, actively inhibiting the process and giving non-governmental entities the ability to disrupt their printer’s surveillance mechanisms. It also enables users to hijack the MICs for their own purposes by creating user-defined secret patterns. Seemingly innocuous blank sheets of paper could now be used to convey information between any parties—not just central bankers, printer manufacturers, and intelligence agencies—so long as each party had access to the decoding key.  When I set up the toolkit on my laptop, I found that the anonymization and user-defined pattern tools worked right out of the box. It was thrilling to be able to manipulate the corporate tracking systems I had never consented to and create my own MIC. But when I attempted to decode the yellow dots on a piece of paper printed commercially from a Xerox PrimeLink C9065, DEDA came up empty. I tried another piece of paper from a smaller Xerox DocuColor printer and, again, DEDA found nothing, even after I had manually confirmed with a UV light that the page was marked with tracking codes.   Perhaps the toolkit is a victim of its own success. At the time, DEDA was a revelation. But security is not a steady state. The fanfare from the cybersecurity press that accompanied the toolkit’s release may have caught the eye of printer companies and intelligence agencies, and maybe they tweaked the encoding schemes they were using. It is also possible that the printers I tested use a MIC that hasn’t yet been catalogued by DEDA. According to the EFF, engineers employed by major manufacturers have hinted at the existence of a new generation of tracking mechanisms. It's been posited by researchers that tiny discrepancies in the spacing between words or even the kerning of letters could be used to encode information. But little is known about these alternative tracking measures aside from vague warnings by industry insiders.","completion":"The rationale behind building surveillance mechanisms into laser printers laid the foundation for more far-reaching forms of surveillance that we encounter in our devices today. The modern internet is full of invisible tracking mechanisms that, like MICs, are marketed as beneficial at best and harmless at worst—as long as you have nothing to hide. Compared with the sprawling digital behemoth of the web, yellow tracking dots may seem trivial. But the efforts by intelligence agencies to keep tabs on printed documents are a grave, if obscure, threat to our privacy. And the history of those efforts reminds us that what might at first sound like a conspiracy theory is actually true: that in the name of preventing crime, government and industry collude in secret to track us all."}
{"prompt":"In late July 2017, a twenty-five-year-old hacker named Luigi Gubello emailed the staff of Rousseau to tell them that he had found a security vulnerability in their software. Rousseau is the online platform that one of Italy’s most popular political parties, the Movimento 5 Stelle, or Five Star Movement, uses to engage its supporters. Five Star claims to be at the forefront of digital democracy, allowing its members to vote online for everything from its policies to its political leaders. If Rousseau were compromised, Five Star’s candidates for the Italian parliament could theoretically be selected by rogue actors, from lone hackers to foreign governments.  Gubello is a “white-hat” hacker, breaking into IT systems to highlight their vulnerabilities, not to exploit them. Gubello explained in his email to Rosseau staff that he had infiltrated the platform using SQL injection, a well-known type of vulnerability in which a data input field—username, say—is used to send commands to a database program, allowing a hacker to change or delete data entries, or download an entire database. It was the same sort of attack that played a major role in the famous hacking of Heartland Payment Systems in 2009, which caused hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to companies around the world, but it’s also the sort of attack that a precocious high schooler might have launched in the early 2000s to boost her grades.","completion":"In his email to Rousseau, Gubello explained why the vulnerability was dangerous and how to resolve it. Shortly afterwards Gubello received a reply from Rousseau’s staff thanking him, and claiming to have fixed the problem. The following month, in August 2017, Gubello, concerned about the continued vulnerability of Rousseau, went public with his findings in a blog post and urged the platform’s users to change their passwords. “Hacker reveals: M5S’s Rousseau site is not secure,” declared La Stampa, the Italian newspaper.  At the time, Five Star was approaching one of its most consequential votes ever, to determine who would be the leader of the party and its de facto candidate for prime minister going into the following year’s Italian general election. If the party triumphed then, this person could become the leader of the entire country.  On September 21, 2017, shortly after Five Star opened voting for its leadership election, the Rousseau servers stalled. Scores of members were unable to cast a ballot, and the party was forced to extend the voting until noon the following day. The party claimed this was due to the sheer numbers of people taking part, but of Five Star’s 140,000 members, little more than 37,000 voted."}
{"prompt":"More than 80 percent of those voters selected a thirty-two-year-old politician named Luigi di Maio. It was a “world record,” claimed a euphoric post on the party’s blog: “the first leader of a political force chosen and voted for entirely on the Net.” But then, just after voting finished, a malicious “black-hat” hacker named rogue0 began tweeting that they had compromised the election.","completion":"“Think of it like a house with many open windows,” Gubello said of Rousseau when we spoke recently. “I saw only one open window”—the vulnerability he used to deploy his SQL injection attack—“and they closed it. But rogue0 found another one.”  Open Windows Among the tweets that rogue0 sent that night were screenshots of multiple votes he had generated for Luigi Di Maio, the winner of Five Star’s leadership contest. The party claimed that every vote had been authenticated using text message confirmations, but rogue0 poured scorn on this. “Rest assured, Luigi Di Maio has already won, dozens of my certified votes assure you,” the hacker tweeted. Even after the warning of Gubello, Rousseau—and Five Star’s purported digital direct democracy—had been left exposed."}
{"prompt":"Another series of screenshots rogue0 posted appear to show the hacker signing into the accounts of various senior members of Five Star. In the subsequent hours and days, rogue0 also published some of the login details he had scraped from the Rousseau database; several of Five Star’s leaders and digital operations staff had laughably basic passwords, such as their birthdays. “Seriously I can continue all night long this way,” rogue0 tweeted at one point. Eventually, the hacker dumped the entire database into a publicly accessible pastebin.","completion":"Gubello suspects that rogue0 accessed the login details using another SQL injection attack that swiped an admin password from the database. Fabrizio Carimati, an Italian internet security expert, agreed. “In reality, Rousseau's website was simply badly written, so everyone suspects that rogue0 used basic techniques,” Carimati told me. He added that the chances of the hack being a SQL injection attack were “99 percent.” Rousseau was vulnerable in part because it was built using a proprietary content management system based on a version of the Movable Type software released in 2008. The upshot was that Rousseau had to be maintained in-house, and was only as secure as its best programmers could make it.  Other digital parties use more robust systems. Spain’s left-wing Podemos utilizes an open source and blockchain-based system for its online voting which claims to be tamper-proof; it also allows for external verification, which Five Star didn’t have in place until 2018. The Pirate parties of Northern Europe, which, broadly speaking, advocate direct democracy and internet freedom, use open-source software such as LiquidFeedback and Loomio, which can be security-tested and improved by almost anyone; similarly, organizations such as Occupy Wall Street and city governments in Reykjavik, Barcelona, Madrid, and Paris have adopted open-source voting tools."}
{"prompt":"It’s difficult to say exactly why Five Star relied on old, self-maintained software. Perhaps it was simply a legacy system with high switching costs. But its proprietary nature also fit with the general culture of the people running the party. Though Five Star has presented itself as a populist movement empowered by digital tools, the reality is that Rousseau is controlled by a private firm, Casaleggio Associates, which operates with a great deal of secrecy and has exerted a significant amount of control over the movement.  A Sense of Community The Five Star Movement was founded by Beppe Grillo, a comedian famous across Italy for his pugnacious humour, and an internet entrepreneur named Gianroberto Casaleggio—the founder of Casaleggio Associates. For more than a decade, Grillo has been the movement’s figurehead. But until his death from brain cancer in 2016, Casaleggio, who was relatively unknown among most Italians, was the movement’s most powerful figure.","completion":"Casaleggio had some intensely bizarre political beliefs that seemed to verge at once on the paranoid and the utopian. He was a fan of Genghis Khan’s horseback couriers and Benito Mussolini’s radio broadcasts, and foresaw a future a few generations hence in which a total war would annihilate billions of people, leaving the remnant to govern itself by means of a worldwide internet democracy."}
{"prompt":"But Casaleggio also had a more calculated side. Since the 1990s, he had sold businesses digital tools for managing employee sentiment. These included web-based forums in which workers could float new ideas and air grievances, all while being monitored by their bosses. Casaleggio would then help employers intervene strategically in the online discussion, promoting certain ideas while tamping down dissent. It was this approach—offering users a sense of community and self-determination while quietly shaping the discourse from above—that Casaleggio later instituted in the realm of electoral politics, first through a wildly popular blog he built for Grillo in the 2000s and later with Rousseau, which launched shortly after his death in 2016.","completion":"The 2017 leadership election that rogue0 hacked was a representative instance of Casaleggio’s approach. Five Star initially appeared to many observers to be a left-leaning populist movement—its first policy positions included advocating renewable energy, revitalized public transport, and a universal basic income—that railed against the real and perceived corruptions of Italy’s political establishment. But at heart both Grillo and Casaleggio had more right-wing sympathies. Casaleggio’s son Davide, who took over Casaleggio Associates after his father’s death, shares these sympathies. His and Grillo’s preferred candidate in the 2017 election was Luigi Di Maio, the son of an Italian neo-fascist.  Di Maio was already well known in the movement but, in the weeks leading up to the vote, Casaleggio Associates used Five Star’s blog to praise Di Maio repeatedly. The result was more like a confirmatory ballot than a plebiscite: members were essentially rubber-stamping the decision of the party bosses. “The election of Di Maio can be described as a ‘show election’ in the sense that there was not real competition,” the scholar Paolo Gerbaudo, whose book The Digital Party examines digital democracies around the world, told me. “All the candidates that could have stood a chance did not participate in the election, and the results were widely anticipated.” Far from making the vote more democratic, digital tools helped the party’s leaders engineer their preferred outcome."}
{"prompt":"Business as Usual In the wake of Five Star’s 2017 leadership election, and the hacks by Luigi Gubello and rogue0, the Italian Data Protection Authority conducted an investigation into Casaleggio Associates for breaking data privacy laws. The hacks had revealed that the company was collecting an extraordinary amount of members’ personal data, along with their voting records, and combining this with data gleaned from members’ social media accounts. It’s the sort of information that could potentially be used to create highly targeted messaging for every member of the Five Star party, thus deepening Casaleggio Associates’ centralized control over the ostensibly popular movement.","completion":"Around the same time as that investigation was underway, Five Star took legal action against Gubello, whom party leaders now accused of being rogue0. In January 2018, Italian police tracked down Gubello at his girlfriend’s house in Trieste and examined his phone and computer. Meanwhile, Five Star claimed Rousseau’s vulnerabilities had been addressed, and described the platform as a “fortress.” But in February, just a month before the 2018 Italian general election, rogue0 struck again, showing that they could still access the Rousseau database and take control of administrator accounts. In March, Five Star won a plurality of votes in the general election, and formed a coalition government with a nativist right-wing party called Lega, or the League. Di Maio was made the Minister of Labor and Social Policies, the Minister of Economic Development, and the Deputy Prime Minister. (He now serves as the government’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.) Rogue0’s identity has not been revealed, though the journalist Jacopo Iacoboni has perhaps come closest to discovering it. He has had a handful of conversations with the hacker via direct messages on Twitter. Iacoboni says it was rogue0 who reached out to him. “I never knew his real identity,” Iacoboni told me, assuming the hacker was one person, and a man. “But he seemed to me someone who knew people at Casaleggio Associates very well—this was my impression after our Q&A.” Today, Rousseau’s Movable Type content management system is gone. User passwords are now allowed to be longer than the previous requirement of just eight characters. “In fact, following orders by our [Data] Protection Authority, the Rousseau website was practically rewritten from scratch,” noted security expert Fabrizio Carimati. But it’s not clear exactly what’s replaced Five Star’s old systems. “Casaleggio now claims that the platform has been completely redone,” Iacoboni said, before noting that this is impossible to verify.   But the vulnerabilities go deeper than software. Luigi Gubello believes that for voters to put their faith in digital democracy, the systems being used need to be transparent. Yet algorithms, coding, cryptography—the building blocks behind a digital democracy—require expertise to fully grasp. “People must be able to trust the election process,” Gubello insists. “Can you trust it if you cannot understand and really check it?”"}
{"prompt":"This is part of the paradox that seems to be at the core of all digital democracy movements: the same technologies that are supposedly meant to empower members can instead provide vectors of control for party elites. Even Podemos in Spain, with its populist politics and sophisticated digital transparency measures, mainly holds confirmatory ballots approving decisions already made by the leadership, as Paulo Gerbaudo notes.  Both Five Star and its Rousseau platform are less celebrated than they once were. The party has crumbled in opinion polls and in January 2020, Luigi Di Maio resigned as leader amid infighting and defections. For the time being, he has been replaced by a caretaker leader. Di Maio’s resignation raises the possibility of another leadership contest conducted on Rousseau in the coming months. But the shine has gone from the party’s digital democracy ambitions. “We hear little of Rousseau now, it’s no longer really news,” Carimati said. “That’s because Five Star is one big crisis. And Rousseau is seen as increasingly irrelevant.” On a rectangle of land the size of a baseball field three hours northwest of London, a project called Hands Free Hectare plants and harvests wheat with almost no human intervention. For the last three seasons, an autonomous tractor has worked its way up and down the plot, sowing the wheat and spraying it with liquid fertilizer, herbicides, and fungicides. A small robot collects soil samples and a drone takes thermal photos of the crop from above to monitor for inconsistencies. When researchers determine that the time is right, they send an unmanned combine harvester to mow the wheat and shoot it into the back of a grain tractor that drives itself alongside the combine.","completion":"Hands Free Hectare is just one of many examples of model farm projects that aim to demonstrate the promise of automated, autonomous agriculture on a large scale. In the US, the Microsoft-backed Grand Farm outside of Fargo, North Dakota is building a farm complex to experiment with robotic planting and irrigation; the University of California, Davis’ Smart Farm initiative is building “an Agricultural Innovation Hub to develop smart machines with industry collaborators.” Fully autonomous agricultural machinery is not yet commonly used, or even functional outside of very constrained environments. But the GPS-controlled machinery and drones that make that vision possible to imagine and fund today have already been widely adopted by agricultural operations all over the world.  The adoption of technologies to automate and generate data about farming operations is known in the industry and in academia as “precision agriculture.” The cheerleaders of this approach frame it as the optimization we need—“each plant gets just the right amount of water and fertiliser for maximum yield,” as the Financial Times put it in 2017—to feed the world’s billions of mouths and conserve resources in the face of climate change. Precision agriculture is heralded by development agencies and funders as a solution to food insecurity. Under the banner of “feeding the world” the digitization and datafication of agriculture have gathered so much momentum that their continued development and adoption seems inevitable."}
{"prompt":"But the most promising takes on precision agriculture rarely mention the numerous threats that accompany it. All of that efficiency often requires not just sensors, but coordination among the sensors, routing of the data that those sensors collect back to a central data store, and ongoing monitoring to ensure that batteries haven’t died and connections haven’t dropped along the way. The proliferation in agriculture of systems that are supposed to run themselves has created a massive surface area of weak links, delicately strung together.","completion":"Threats to food supplies have always come in many shapes and forms: famine, war, and sabotage have wreaked havoc on societies throughout human history. Now, those of us whose access to food is mediated by digitized agricultural production systems face a double threat: the rapidly expanding mesh of insecure devices that control how our food is planted, watered, monitored, harvested, and transported; and, at the same time, the shifting balance of power away from farmers, towards the governments, corporations, and investors that wield massive amounts of capital."}
{"prompt":"Making Hay In its purest form, the goal of precision agriculture is to guide or control every part of the food production system: what type of seed to use, how much fertilizer to apply, when to plant and harvest. The approach has its origins in the Geographic Information Systems (GIS) that was introduced on farms in the 1960s and 1970s to plot the locations of soil samples on a map, and in GPS receivers and mobile tools to monitor yields and soil composition, introduced in the 1990s. More recently, the rise of precision agriculture has been enabled by the explosion in internet connectivity that the world has experienced over the past ten years.","completion":"Farmers historically have been early adopters of sophisticated agricultural technologies, driven as much by incentive as by need. Governments often provide subsidies to digitize agricultural equipment and methods. Today, almost every piece of agricultural machinery sold by international corporations like Kinze, Deere, and Case IH has navigation systems and a variety of sensors pre-installed on it by the equipment manufacturers. Farmers can supplement these preinstalled systems with additional receivers on equipment like sprayers and combines, as well as ground sensors and drones that collect data points on moisture levels, mineral levels, and crop growth. Even smallholders—those farming on less than ten hectares, or a 1/25th of a square mile—are using these technologies in places like Nigeria, Colombia, and Indonesia."}
{"prompt":"McKinsey & Company considers agriculture to be a “massive opportunity” and an area “ripe for disruption.” Goldman Sachs expects the market to soon be worth $240 billion. Despite questionable returns, agriculture has become a darling of VC; according to the VC fund AgFunder, agricultural technology startups secured nearly $17 billion in funding in 2018, up 43 percent from 2017.  Academic institutions, too, have turned their prowess towards fostering the development of new agricultural technology through startup accelerators and enhancing technologies of established corporations. Indeed, according to food systems expert Kevin Walker, academics in the US are becoming subcontractors of large multinational corporations, driven by the need to find funding for research that has “immediate and marketable benefits.” The US government and military are also invested in the research and development of precision agriculture tools. The US Navy has invested in agricultural robotic swarm technology. Many of the startups developing drones for commercial agriculture are run by military veterans or former defense contractors. Even economic development sector initiatives rely upon defense contractors.","completion":"These types of funding streams yield specific results. The demand by VCs and universities for exponential returns in a short time frame means that security is, as with many non-agricultural venture-backed software startups, an afterthought. Hardware is adapted from other sectors and software outsourced, with no plan for service, repair, or maintenance, leaving pieces of equipment perpetually vulnerable to exploitation when it reaches end-of-life. And, even if they wanted to, private companies trying to translate government research and development into consumer agricultural products don’t have the billion-dollar budgets to prioritize security in the same way that DARPA might.  Breach Party Many of the same security vulnerabilities that plague battery-powered, cloud-connected devices in general affect farmers adopting precision agriculture. In an interview with precision agriculture expert Marc Window, a professor associated with Hands Free Hectare said of the project’s approach to security, “As with most of our ag robot developments we use technology that has been developed outside the ag area and migrate it over as and when needed. Security has not been a hot topic at all recently as we are still getting the fundamental systems working. Mostly we just use Wi-Fi.” This approach to (not) securing connected agricultural machinery is the norm, and it means that, in the same way that corporations can remotely brick a piece of machinery, malicious actors could hypothetically do the same, bringing a fleet of tractors down at once. One can imagine a scenario in which a piece of code is deployed to disrupt the harvest of entire nations. Or a scenario in which chicken farmers who use web-based software to remotely control the temperature of their hatcheries find their cooling systems manipulated, killing their animals.  These are not purely hypothetical. China’s environmental efforts are being thwarted by companies doctoring surveillance camera footage and remotely altering or deleting undesirable information in automatic monitoring systems in order to appear more environmentally friendly than they are. A smart irrigation system in Israel has reportedly been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army, a hacker group. Smart irrigation systems in general can be manipulated to empty entire water reservoirs or apply the wrong amounts of fertilizer and chemicals."}
{"prompt":"Drones are being heralded as revolutionary in agriculture, but they have many known vulnerabilities since their security is essentially unregulated. They can be hijacked, remotely tampered with to return false data, or piloted to infiltrate remote Wi-Fi networks. The US Department of the Interior also sees espionage risks in the fact that its own drone fleets are manufactured by a Chinese company.","completion":"The tools of precision agriculture generate valuable datasets, and the value of those datasets corresponds to their size. To give a sense: the largest dairy farm in the world occupies more than 22 million acres and the largest field operation sits on more than 500,000 acres. Data from these operations can move markets. The US Department of Homeland Security has reported that at least one company has been approached by commodity brokers with an offer to buy the company’s data. But insider trading threats aside, the integrity of large operations’ data can be undermined by weaknesses in any number of factors that make precision agriculture work—IoT devices, software, or physical hardware. Although such market sabotage doesn’t appear to have happened yet, agricultural data breaches have: the security industry’s annual data breach compilation identified eleven data breaches among agricultural companies in 2019."}
{"prompt":"Even as US government agencies propel the adoption of precision agriculture, they recognize the new security threats that it poses. In 2016, the FBI released a joint memo with the USDA warning farmers that they were increasingly at risk of having their data held for ransom or of bulk data theft. In 2017, the US Navy conducted war games designed to train servicemen to protect key sectors, including food and agriculture, against malicious state and extremist actors. Soldiers were trained to mitigate attacks like remote tampering of temperature readings at a vegetable canning facility and ransomware targeting an agricultural company’s financial data.  Roll Your Own Milk Sensor Backup But war games won’t help farmers whom precision agriculture has made increasingly dependent on complex systems beyond their control: on the software that runs farming equipment, which can require paid subscriptions and constant updates; on the creditors who own the equipment, often worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and to whom farmers must make regular payments; on manufacturers who have access to the data the equipment generates; and on the guarded knowledge of licensed repair technicians who are the only ones able to diagnose problems with proprietary systems.  Take the relationship between farmers and John Deere, the largest manufacturer of agricultural machinery in the world. For years, John Deere has put proprietary software and hardware in its tractors, but now those tractors are increasingly connected to John Deere’s servers as well. According to an executive with the company’s innovation arm, “Our large equipment now has 4G LTE modems, with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and that does two-way communication so it collects data off your farm and sends it to the cloud.” As a result, the company can see all the data collected by the machinery they manufactured and can also remotely lock down, or “brick,” equipment if they suspect that farmers are trying to repair the equipment in unsanctioned ways. Farmers have responded with the Right to Repair movement on the basis that they shouldn’t have to fear having their own tractors remotely bricked for any reason, much less formaking repairs.","completion":"Or consider Emiel Stam, a Dutch dairy farmer who used AgroVision robotics to milk his cows. He claimed in Dutch court that one of the robot’s sensors malfunctioned, infecting his cows and forcing him to cull his cattle. To make his case, Stam needed a historical record of the offending sensor’s readings—in this case, the milk flow sensor."}
{"prompt":"Stam had backups of those sensor readings through the machinery’s software interface, but they had been remotely wiped by the robotics company, which had access to the readings through a maintenance contract. Luckily, and very unusually, Stam had additional independent backups. He used his own data to correlate the milk sensor readings with the onset of his cows’ illness, prove the robotics company’s liability, and win damages for his losses. But he is the exception that proves the rule.","completion":"Beyond 2FA Now that food systems globally are increasingly vulnerable to digital manipulation, farmers need to protect themselves. The FBI’s 2016 joint memo with the USDA encourages both small and large-scale agriculture operations to implement standard digital security measures: using secure passwords, setting up two-factor authentication, accessing networks via VPNs, and having company-specific email accounts for employees.  But perhaps adding more technology to the technology problem is not the solution. One issue that extends well beyond agriculture is that there is no clear line of liability for the security of equipment and devices. To help demarcate where the responsibility lies, venture funds, development agencies, and government procurers could implement something like the US Department of Justice’s new policy on drone use. It requires partners and grantees to conduct a mandatory cybersecurity risk assessment and honor a data retention policy. Imposing such requirements on small organizations would be a financial burden, but perhaps such a cost is worth paying to protect farmers and food supplies.  While these steps are necessary, they are not sufficient. We have a globally connected food system, and ameliorating harm requires systems thinking. Hacks are inevitable when we use connected technologies; the more we become reliant upon them to bring in our harvests, the more we can be assured that these systems will be exploited."}
{"prompt":"To start us off, could you tell us about yourself, your background, and how you came to work with the Detroit Community Technology Project? I'm Tawana Petty, also known as Honeycomb. I’m a poet, a mom, a social justice organizer, and a water rights advocate. I direct the Data Justice program for Detroit Community Technology Project (DCTP), and through DCTP I convene the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition.","completion":"Right now, one of the Data Justice Program's main initiatives is slowing down the rapid expansion of Project Green Light, which is a public-private partnership around facial recognition technology spearheaded by the Detroit Police Department (DPD). We're also creating educational resources about technology, surveillance, and equitable participation in the Census. During the time that Project Green Light was ramping up, DCTP was involved in a research project called Our Data Bodies, which I can tell you more about later."}
{"prompt":"When Project Green Light got started, we had no concept of the scope of surveillance it  would take on. The project gets its name from flashing green lights that are connected to video surveillance cameras inside and outside of different businesses. The cameras are monitored twenty-four hours per day, seven days per week, at DPD’s real-time crime centers and mobile devices.","completion":"It started off with cameras at eight gas stations—ones that stayed open during late night hours. The police wanted to use these cameras to signal to community members that the gas stations were now safe to enter at any time, because police were constantly going to be watching them. They partnered with two private companies on this project: Guardian Alarm and Comcast."}
{"prompt":"Fast forward a couple of years. We now have close to six hundred cameras all over Detroit, and the Mayor would like to push that number to 4,000. Project Green Light locations pay a monthly rate so that if something happens at that location, they get priority from police over non–Green Light locations. So they pay for policing. And then, of course, the DPD leadership signed a contract to use facial recognition on everything from drones, traffic lights, mobile devices—pretty much anything they could attach a surveillance camera to. They were using that facial recognition technology on footage from their Green Lights for about two years before social justice activists and technologists in the city really got wind of it, when DPD tried to push through a directive that would solidify their use of it. Before that proposal, there was no policy governing its use.","completion":"What did the rollout of Project Green Light look like within the community, and how did you start to organize folks against it? The police really tapped into this negative narrative that has hovered over Detroit for decades. They were touting Project Green Light as the salvation of the city, like, “Hey, we have the answer. We know you are all afraid of each other, so we're going to give you all these security cameras, and you’re going to feel safe because we're always going to be watching you.” The police department’s campaign targeted senior citizens mostly—the ones who are retired or sitting at home, inundated with media images. They didn't hide the idea of putting cameras everywhere like they later hid their adoption of facial recognition. In fact, they were trying to separate the two ideas, saying that Project Green Light was different than facial recognition. But the two systems needed each other; the city needed to overhaul itself with all these surveillance cameras in order to make facial recognition a viable system. The DPD just kept saying, “Facial recognition is not embedded within the cameras,” and, “We'll only use the facial recognition if we absolutely have to.” Meanwhile, they were proposing policy directives that were asking for real-time live tracking on mobile devices, drones, traffic lights, and more."}
{"prompt":"Initially, when we were showing up to meetings at the Board of Police Commissioners, there were a lot of residents, mostly senior citizens, who were really angry with us. They felt that we were getting in the way of a system that would make them safe, and that we were attacking police because we just wanted to cause trouble. In reality, we were just trying to educate residents, law enforcement, and the Board of Police Commissioners on the harms of mass surveillance and facial recognition. Over time, we were able to argue that facial recognition and Project Green Light needed each other to work the way that DPD leadership and city government wanted them to work, and you couldn’t have one without the other. We were also able to make the case that safety and surveillance were not synonymous.","completion":"Was your resistance mainly organized around police commission meetings? How else did you all create pressure? We spoke at police commission meetings and town halls. We collaborated on a special surveillance issue of a magazine called Riverwise, where we brought together information about Project Green Light, the problems with facial recognition, and alternatives that would create actual safety. We also created a report, “A Critical Summary of Detroit’s Project Green Light and its Greater Context.” “Green Chairs, Not Green Lights” is our counter-campaign. We’re encouraging community members to come back to their front porches and look out for each other. We’re raising consciousness and building real safety, and we’re saying that a system set up to prioritize profits and institutions over people is wrong."}
{"prompt":"I imagine you all are working in coalition with many different groups in this campaign. What are those different groups? Also, there’s a long history of activism and in particular Black-led activism in Detroit. How do you and the rest of the coalition situate yourselves within that history? Yeah, absolutely. In addition to serving as director of the Data Justice Program here at DCTP, I'm also on the board of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership. James and Grace Lee Boggs are now ancestors, and a long legacy countering these sorts of things was created under their expert tutelage. [Eds.: James and Grace Lee Boggs were revolutionaries who worked to dismantle capitalism and racist oppression nationally and through fostering community-based, grassroots activism within their adopted home city of Detroit.] Our former Boggs Center board member Ron Scott, who is also now an ancestor, co-founded the Detroit Coalition Against Police Brutality, which still exists. I'm part of the Black Out Green Light Coalition and Green Light Black Futures coalition, which is organized by Black Youth Project 100 (BYP100). I also collaborate with the Detroit Justice Center, Media Justice, Color of Change, and Fight for the Future. Finally, I'm part of a lot of coalition work with the ACLU that collaborates with dozens of organizations that have been consistently resisting mass surveillance in the city.","completion":"Ultimately, we were unsuccessful in getting DPD to stop using facial recognition, but we did have some wins within the policy that the Board of Police Commissioners ultimately passed. We're definitely tuned in, which is why I think we were able to achieve any policy changes at all, even if what we wanted was a ban. Honestly, getting any of those changes in a city with this many Black people took a tremendous amount of work and was an uphill battle. All the other cities that were successful with bans were predominately white. Folks aren't as eager to take the ever-watching eye off of a predominately Black city."}
{"prompt":"Could you tell me about those changes and what the policy looks like now?  Under the new policy, the police are prohibited from using facial recognition on any live feeds. Even though still photos are also very problematic, the thought that DPD would have been able to track people's faces as they walk the streets was very unnerving. So they're not able to do that. DPD can only use facial recognition to investigate violent crimes. They're barred from using it for immigration enforcement. They're barred from predictive analysis—using the technology for pre-crime, essentially. They're barred from mobile use, so they're not able to use their mobile devices to walk through crowds and track people using facial recognition, which is something that happened in Baltimore during the Freddie Gray protests. They're barred from violating the First, Fourth, and Fourteenth Amendments—freedom of religion, prohibition against unreasonable search and seizure, and due process under the law. Now, I'll tell you that I don't believe that's even possible—I think if you mass surveill a city, there's no way you're not going to violate those amendments.","completion":"The Board of Police Commissioners receives a weekly report on how the police are using facial recognition. Unfortunately, the Board of Police Commissioners, which is supposed to be a civilian oversight body, hasn't been very transparent with those reports. None of them have been made accessible to the public. They don’t even question the contents of the reports when they are handed them in meetings, at least not any of the Board of Police Commissioners meetings I have been present at. It's discouraging."}
{"prompt":"Most significantly in the policy, Detroit police officers are supposed to be criminally investigated if they misuse the technology. Their misuse is supposed to be reported to the mayor, the Board of Police Commissioners, and the city council within twenty-four hours of discovery, which would lead to dismissal and further legal action.","completion":"But I would say that our greatest accomplishment was raising the consciousness of the city residents. Many, many residents were engaged in a process that, at first, they were just going along with. How did you do that?  For several months, we gave testimony at every Board of Police Commissioner meeting that involved the topic. Unfortunately, residents are only afforded two minutes to speak, even on topics as dire as this one. We leveraged our minutes to push forward a vision of people sitting on their front porches, the community having good schools, affordable water that doesn't contain lead, neighbors not getting evicted, neighborhood block clubs. We pushed for senior citizens to think about the times when they felt safe, and whether or not being held up in their homes under surveillance cameras actually made them safe."}
{"prompt":"That understanding of safety was the scaffolding. And once we had that, we could build on it. We could say: what the police department is talking about is security; it’s not what you’re thinking of when you’re thinking about safety.  It really was a slow educational process, to be honest with you—constantly bringing materials and giving testimony. We’d bring examples of conversations we’d had with children, where we'd ask them a question like, “Say you lived on a street. On side A of that street, there were metal gates and cameras and drones and police. And on side B, there were a bunch of neighbors who knew each other, who looked out for each other, who knew that if John didn't come home at 7:00 p.m., then they should probably find out where John is. On which side of the street would you feel safest?” Kids almost always said, “How could I feel safe if I don't know the people who live next to me, you know?” That same type of teaching works with adults when they started to think it through.","completion":"We also began bringing in the data around how facial recognition technology misidentifies darker skin tones in women and children, and how Detroit is 80 percent Black. We started reflecting back what DPD leadership themselves were actually saying. For example, DPD leadership indicated that of the 500 times over two years that they used facial recognition, they only moved forward with 150 cases, because the other 350 were misidentifications by the system."}
{"prompt":"We highlighted the fact that they were telling us the system was wrong at least 350 times and that they were relying on the naked eye of two analysts to catch the errors of the algorithm. This caused great concern about the potential of false arrests. So, we dissect what's being said and present that back to people consistently.","completion":"You’ve mentioned how Detroit is 80 percent Black, a stark contrast to other, primarily white cities that have banned facial recognition. How does your fight in Detroit look different from the fight in whiter cities like San Francisco or Boston? We've built relationships with organizers in pretty much all the other places that have successfully banned facial recognition, including Portland, where folks are pushing for the most comprehensive ban. We've consistently told them: we need to synthesize what you all have done, but also apply a racial lens to it because it's going to be much harder to convince not just Detroiters but the world that a Black city doesn't need to be surveilled. It's a deeper, larger conversation and it requires a kind of organizing around anti-Black racism that often isn’t comfortable to do even in social justice or liberal spaces."}
{"prompt":"That’s why I value the consciousness-raising piece so much. I really want to win this, but I also have to find some value in the fact that we've been able to raise the consciousness of people all across the US who now consider themselves invested in our struggle. So I take pieces from all the places that I've been able to visit and all the people that we've been able to talk to. But I also understand that there is a very real dynamic here that does not exist in cities that only have a 5 percent Black population.","completion":"One of the things that I've consistently said is that Detroit is the last remaining Black mecca in the United States. If we don't succeed in resisting some of this violent system, there is no hope for Black residents across the rest of the country, period. Police departments have already tried to model this system in other cities—calling them Project Blue Light in Wisconsin, for example. They're just packaging up what city government is pushing through in Detroit. On any given day here, you can see drones flying through the sky like kites.  Wow, that's an apocalyptic vision. In past talks, you’ve talked about the rise of surveillance and how that ties in with the “resurgence” of the city, as money floods into gentrified areas like downtown and Corktown. Could you give a little bit of that historical context in Detroit?  There are areas of Detroit like Black Bottom and Paradise Valley that had Black hospitals, Black grocery stores and schools, and African-centered education—all these viable institutions—that were leveled for freeways. One of our challenges is getting folks to think about a time in the city when there was an abundance of thriving neighborhoods that were predominantly Black-owned, -led, and -invested."}
{"prompt":"I’m always trying to point out the inaccuracy of the narrative that Detroiters just don't want to care for where they live, they don't want safe neighborhoods, they don't want viable institutions—that the system that we exist under is a choice. We're in a city with five hundred thousand Black people and the median household income here is $29,000 a year—which means that half the households in the city make less than that. Predominantly Black women-led households. Lots of children in extreme poverty. One hundred thousand people without water in their homes over the last ten years. Schools closed by the hundreds. I work to get people to see crystal clear that this isn't an accidental situation. It’s easy to convince anybody in the state of Michigan and the world that if something bad is happening to Detroit, we brought it on ourselves. There isn't a dissecting of how we got here, or the history of racism and the disinvestment that has happened for generations, you know? Watched, Not Seen At the beginning of our conversation, you mentioned the Our Data Bodies project. I understand the project is led by a five-person team that includes three organizers from different groups: the Center for Community Transitions in Charlotte, which focuses on folks who have recently reentered the community from incarceration; the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which organizes against police surveillance in Los Angeles; and you all at DCTP. How did those three organizations come together?  Our Data Bodies was initially a two-year research project between Detroit, Charlotte, and Los Angeles. We were thinking about the digital streams we all produce and the impacts that our information has on our interactions with government and police, on how we get resources, and on how our cities are developed. Within those two years, we learned that we wanted to move beyond a research project and expand on our organizing within our communities to increase self-determination around these systems.","completion":"The three organizers—Mariella Saba, Tamika Lewis, and I—all originally applied for our positions on the project. The interview committee was very intentional in picking social justice organizers for these roles as researchers because the type of analysis that comes from organizing on the ground in the neighborhood was going to be important in making sure that we were prioritizing community members. That won’t happen if you just focus on having a good researcher. Research is something that can be taught; care and compassion for the people connected to the research is a longer process."}
{"prompt":"So we all play to our strengths. I consider Stop LAPD Spying a mentor in this work, especially in resisting police and surveillance systems. For this project, Stop LAPD Spying and Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN) put a lot of emphasis on unhoused populations and how Skid Row is a heavily targeted community that the LAPD uses to innovate new surveillance systems.  In Charlotte, Tamika does work around citizens returning from incarceration. Folks returning from incarceration constantly have to report back to the system. It's like the system is constantly waiting for you to fail. Tamika also brings an important perspective as a gender-nonconforming organizer: they understand how resistance to being defined under the dominate gender binary makes people targets for intensified surveillance.  How have you been able to make use of that experience and research? We’ve collectively produced materials like our Digital Defense Playbook, which is an educational resource and activity guide about data, surveillance, and safety that we created last year based on our three years of community research. We’ve taken that work to different neighborhood institutions, as well as academia. We’ve worked with data scientists, who are often disconnected from the real people represented by the statistics they analyze.","completion":"We're all learning from each other and staying in constant communication about what's happening in our different cities, and hearing the same themes. Things like, “The one mistake that I've made in my life is now the thing that's limiting how I'm able to survive.” Or, “I'm feeling heavily surveilled because I'm trans,” or “I'm feeling super targeted because my credit isn't good,” or “I've just reentered society from incarceration and I feel like every move that I make is being scrutinized and monitored.” Across all the cities, community members wanted to be seen for something more than a mistake they made, or something more than their data. And they didn't want to be pursued and tracked and monitored."}
{"prompt":"What exactly is a “data body”? Recently, we’ve seen the rise of various tools that let you see the data that companies have about you. But your approach seems more holistic. It’s not just, does Facebook have this data about me, but what are all of the different pieces of data that the government or private companies might have—and what am I able to do about it?  We try to get community members to think not just about the impact that their data has on them, but the impact that their data has on the decisions that affect their family, their neighborhood, and their city.  One of our exercises is called “What’s in Your Wallet?” As part of that exercise, we often use the example of a person who uses their EBT card at the liquor store up the street and purchases foods that aren't considered healthy. Those activities create a data trail. Maybe a bank will look at those data trails and decide not to invest in a grocery store in that neighborhood. It's difficult to know exactly how some decisions are made, but what we do know is that data is leveraged to make most of those decisions.","completion":"That’s what we mean by data bodies. It’s not just the individual; it's the information that's been generated about this individual and the systems that interact to make decisions about this individual, this individual's family, this individual's neighborhood—all the data’s tentacles. In the Digital Defense Playbook, you cite a conversation with a community member who says about interacting with government agencies, \"For their benefit they do communicate. But for my benefit, no.\" And I see this a lot in government work—if agencies want to communicate to surveil and penalize, then they can and will. But if you want them to share information to, say, verify that you’ve lost your job so that you can get food stamps, they often can’t or won’t."}
{"prompt":"It seems like so much of your work with Our Data Bodies is trying to build data agency within a system where power is skewed heavily towards other organizations or towards the state. How do you help people build data agency to overcome that power imbalance? One of the things that we truly, clearly recognize within our work is that the power is going to come from the respiriting of community members. A lot of folks have been really dehumanized. There’s a quote that says, “Friendship begins at the moment when one person says to another, ‘What, you too? I thought I was the only one.’” And so it’s been this weaving together of stories to let community members know that they're not alone.  It’s saying: did you know that there is an open data portal in your city and that you can push for that to become a useful source of information? Or: did you know that you can request to have some of your information deleted from a government database? It’s letting people know: here's how these systems connect and interact with one another. It’s an ongoing process of learning how different people are experiencing these systems, but also tying them together with the stories of others so that they understand they aren’t isolated, that there are many people across the world resisting these systems.  We intentionally did not publish everything in the Digital Defense Playbook. There are stories that community members shared with us that emphasize how they're resisting systems that we did not share, which contradicts everything that a capitalist system would ask you to do. It's like, why not put it all out there? Well, because we actually want people to keep surviving.  The Digital Defense Playbook serves as a community organizing mechanism where we get to talk to people, we get to share stories, we get to respirit, we get to raise digital and media literacy. We don't think that it solves all the things. But we do think that when you build the confidence of community members, and you let them know that they're not alone, and that there are folks that are resisting these things all over, it does something for the spirit. So that's how we use it.","completion":"In Person, In Print Like Our Data Bodies, the Data DiscoTechs organized by the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition seem like they aim to raise consciousness and agency around data within communities. Could you paint a picture of one for me? The “discovering technology” fairs, which we refer to as DiscoTechs, are kind of like a science fair at school—you know, with informational stations on different topics. To start one, we either respond to folks who have reached out to us or pick a neighborhood where we want to do one. We connect with an organizer or resident who lives in that neighborhood, who has the pulse of what's happening, and we support them in finding out what stations they think might most benefit their neighborhood."}
{"prompt":"We start with a few stations that we definitely want to have. Recently, we’ve had stations where we’re telling community members what to expect with the census. What kinds of things get funded based on census data? What are some of the concerns that have been raised about the census? How has it been used in the past? How long is census data kept? We did research to empower community members with that information.","completion":"But then the rest of the eight or nine stations are designed around what the community says they need. So they might say, well, in this neighborhood, it's a lot of senior citizens. They don't understand Twitter, they don't understand how to set up an email account, they just want to learn how to use a Mac—things like that. So then those are the stations that we will have. Community members are able to come in for free. We have music. We call it a DiscoTech, but it also has music and dance. At the last two, we gave away low-cost computers: the Raspberry Pi full kit, with the keyboard and everything. We gave those to residents who don't have that technology at home.  Who shows up to those DiscoTechs? Mostly young folks? Is it a mix of ages, of races?  It definitely depends where we have them. Some neighborhoods are predominantly senior citizens, so we'll have a lot of seniors show up. When we did one in southwest Detroit, it was a predominately Spanish-speaking undocumented community, so we had interpreters onsite, including youth interpreters. It was great. Those stations had mostly young and middle-age participants."}
{"prompt":"I’m curious about the print magazine that you help produce, Riverwise. How are you involved? How did it come to be? I think it's the poet in me, but I don't remember a point in my life where I didn't feel obligated to push back against the dominant narrative of Detroit. I'm pretty sure there was a time, but I don't remember it.","completion":"There was a newspaper in the city, the Michigan Citizen, that was trying to lift up community stories of resilience and resistance, countering the dominant narrative in the city. It was around for three decades, but then it ended. The Boggs Center felt that we had a responsibility to fill that void, or at least try to fill that void. And so we convened community members over a one-year period to see whether there was interest in trying to create consistent literature that would amplify community stories of resilience and resistance that would counter the narratives that were coming out of the city. Through those meetings, Riverwise was born. I am now part of the Riverwise Magazine Collective, and I serve on the editorial board. Eric Campbell, a former contributor to the Michigan Citizen is the managing editor. We put it out quarterly, and then we do some special editions, depending on what the situation is. That's how the special surveillance edition in collaboration with DCTP came about."}
{"prompt":"We convene weekly and go through stories that we've heard ourselves, or we've pursued folks who we want to write for us, or we have people who send in submissions. Then we determine whether we want to theme the magazine based on something that’s happening in the city, or if this is one where we're just going to lift up various stories. And then we have these community discussions around what's written in the magazine. If a person did an article or something for the magazine, then we'll ask them if they want to host a community discussion and we will support them in that. We also host writing workshops to support residents who want to improve their writing skills or learn how to contribute content to the magazine. It’s not our coalition that does most of the writing workshops. We tap people in the community—poets, writers, you know, organizers—who want to host those workshops and then we just support them.  Calling All Co-liberators How can people support the fight against facial recognition? They can support organizations like Fight for the Future which are pushing for a federal ban on the government use of facial recognition. They could call or email their Congressperson. They can help us amplify our struggles.  In Michigan there are a few current bills that could use some support. There’s a bill in the State Senate, 2019 SB 0342, that's likely going to be passed. It was initially a ban on all police use of facial recognition, but now it's a ban on police use of real-time facial recognition. There was House Bill 4810, a five-year moratorium on the police use of facial recognition on everything—drones, body cameras, any surveillance technology—that’s still kind of lingering out there. And then there is the Community Input Over Government Surveillance ordinance that's before the Detroit City Council, which creates guidelines for council oversight and public input for surveillance technology. That one is currently being passed back and forth for amendments.  On the federal level, there's a Congressional bill called the No Biometric Barriers Housing Act of 2019 that bans the use of biometrics in public housing. There's also a bill out there called the Ethical Use of Facial Recognition Act that would prevent federal funding from being used for facial recognition technologies, including police and other government use. I’m not really sure what's going to stick beyond the Detroit city ordinance, though, and maybe the Michigan State Senate bill.","completion":"But wherever you are, you can support the fight by continuing to try to politicize your community, push for alternatives to surveillance, and minimize the conflation between surveillance and safety. And in Detroit, we'll just continue the work by showing how invasive and insidious this technology is—hopefully before we see a slew of false arrests. We don't want to be living in a social credit system, where our every move is dictated by algorithms and surveillance cameras."}
{"prompt":"Or at least more than what we have already. Exactly, yeah. It’s already a social credit system in Detroit, but we don't want to add more and more technologies to that and exacerbate the violence and marginalization that residents are already feeling. And we don't want this rolled out all across the globe as a way to contain and control Black and brown people and Indigenous people and poor white people. Surveillance is not safety.","completion":"The hardest part for us is that law enforcement, government institutions, and too many people don't seem to see an alternative, especially in areas that have been deemed dangerous. But everyone needs to understand that most crime in our neighborhoods is rooted in poverty and disinvestment and racial violence. We need co-liberators; we don't need any more allies. We need folks to really feel their liberation is tied up in our liberation, you know? You founded the Library Freedom Project and you're also a core contributor to the Tor Project. Which came first for you? Library Freedom Project (LFP) came first. I was working at a library outside of Boston in Watertown, Massachusetts. Through a confluence of forces, including living through the Boston Marathon bombing and the police militarization around that, plus the Snowden revelations just a couple of months later, plus the nascent but growing Black Lives Matter movement... all of it made me think about technology and policing and privacy in a way that I never had before.  I started LFP in the summer of 2014. At first it just involved teaching people about privacy in my library, doing some introductory community events. When there turned out to be a lot of interest, I cold emailed the people at Tor saying, “Hey, I'm a librarian working on privacy, and I'm teaching people about Tor. Can I be in touch with your outreach people?” And they responded, “We don't have any outreach people. Do you want to be our outreach people?” That’s how the Tor connection happened."}
{"prompt":"I read that the Library Freedom Project's pilot project was setting up a Tor relay in a public library. What is a Tor relay? The Tor network is made up of nodes run by volunteers. When someone uses the Tor Browser from their own computer, their web traffic gets bounced to all those different volunteer nodes so that someone looking from outside can’t trace that person’s web traffic back to their computer at their house. A Tor relay is one of those nodes; it’s a computer that’s configured to just forward traffic all day to other nodes of the Tor network.  We did set up a Tor relay in a library in New Hampshire around the summer of 2015. It wasn’t quite LFP’s pilot; I had already been running LFP for about a year at that point. But a lot of people first learned about us because the relay got the attention of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and that whole situation got some press coverage.","completion":"How did the Tor relay project come about? And what was your pitch to that library? I had been traveling around the country doing these direct trainings, building relationships with librarians and helping them understand the surveillance problem from justice-focused angles. I was focusing on strategies that they could employ, both in their direct work with patrons, and then also in a bigger, advocacy sense—macro-level stuff they could do out in their communities.  The Tor relay project came about because I started thinking about how libraries are in a strong position to run privacy infrastructure. And Tor relays were the perfect example. In order to run one of these things, all you need is a little bit of bandwidth. It also helps if you are an institution rather than an individual, because law enforcement might be more likely to hassle an individual, especially if they run one of the exit relays, which is identifiable on the network."}
{"prompt":"I thought, “Libraries are ideal for this.” Fortunately, because I had built all these relationships, I knew who the other hardcore privacy-minded librarians were. One of them was my friend Chuck McAndrew at this library in New Hampshire. He was already a Linux guy and he was as evangelical about privacy as I was. He was 100 percent on board with being the first library to set up a Tor relay. The conversation asking him to do it was quite simple. I was like, \"Maybe you want to do this?\" And he was like, \"Yeah.\" So it was easy.","completion":"The Tor Project has its critics. Did you get any pushback?  We set the relay up and promoted it. A cute little story ran in Ars Technica. And then the library contacted me a few weeks later and said, \"We've gotten this email from our local police department who've been contacted by the DHS. They said that we’re not allowed to have the relay and that we have to turn it off.\" The library was understandably frightened.  I remember being pretty taken aback when I first read the email. But then I thought, “Well, this is the best thing that's ever happened to us.” At that time, people weren't thinking about DHS in the way that they are now—I mean, certainly immigration activists were, but the general public was not. You might recall that before Trump, DHS was seen as the ugly stepchild of the intelligence community. They're a Bush-era construction. People were like, “What do they even do?” And the \"homeland\" thing in their name is just creepy. So of all the federal law enforcement agencies that could have gone after us, they were the best because they're total yahoos.  We rallied around the library and got a lot of support from the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the local community. The libertarian separatist community that lives in New Hampshire even showed up. It was a great demonstration of support for the library and privacy, but also a broader rejection of that kind of law enforcement interference."}
{"prompt":"We had a big public hearing, and you can imagine what a library board meeting on a Tuesday night in rural New Hampshire is normally like. But that night, it was standing room only. A bunch of press came. Meanwhile, no one from DHS showed up. They knew they had no legal grounds to ask the library to remove the Tor relay.  So anyway, the relay got turned back on and it was a lovely story. That was the first big thing that happened for LFP.  That's wild. How did DHS find out about the relay? Were they monitoring the library's internet traffic or social media or what? I guess they read Cyrus Farivar? He was the journalist who wrote the article about us for Ars Technica. Someone later did a FOIA request for the DHS emails and found that an agent linked that article and then said something funny about me. That was basically it.  Privacy School When did the Library Freedom Institute (LFI) happen?  People were super into the LFP trainings. I was getting invited to speak to a lot of librarians. It became apparent to me pretty quickly that I couldn't scale the project in the way that I needed to without bringing other people in somehow.  It was also clear to me from the beginning that we needed to have a community response to surveillance. I really wanted to build a community of practice that could meet that challenge, so I started thinking about what that could look like. I developed a blueprint for a six-month-long train-the-trainers workshop where librarians located in different places could get together online every week and learn about this stuff. I got grant funding, and our first LFI cohort of thirteen librarians started in June 2018.","completion":"We're currently experimenting with different timeframes, but LFI workshops currently run for four to six months. Librarians apply to get into it. It's totally funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), so it's free to attend. We spend each week online together thinking about a different aspect of the surveillance problem. To date, there are forty-three librarians that have finished the program, and another twenty librarians will begin the course in March 2020.  Where are these librarians joining from? We have librarians in twenty-one states. In this last LFI cohort, we had three people in Georgia, somebody in West Virginia, a couple of New Yorkers, a few in the Bay Area, one at Los Angeles Public Library, Boston Public Library, Hennepin County Public Library in Minneapolis. All over the US. For now, we’re restricted to the US since our funding is through IMLS, a US federal agency.  I make sure there are a lot of folks from rural libraries and Southern libraries since those libraries tend to be under-resourced and far from in-person training opportunities. We also prioritize public librarians because they tend to interact with the public more than academic librarians, and also because public librarians generally don’t have the professional development funding to make something like LFI happen on their own.  Do they come representing their patrons or are they also curious for themselves? A little of both. In order to be accepted into the program, there's a short application and it's basically a free-form questionnaire about what they see in their communities and what their personal experiences are that make them a fit for LFI. Sometimes their community is representative of who they are.  One of our librarians from the last cohort is Anishinaabekwe of the Sault Tribe of Chippewa Indians. They work in a non-Native community now, but their whole objective was to think about how surveillance affects Indigenous people. How, for example, Indigenous women are more subject to certain kinds of both domestic violence and state violence, and how surveillance intersects with that."}
{"prompt":"To talk about surveillance online, you have to talk about how the internet works, and it seems like a fine line between being too high-level and too technically nitty-gritty. How do you teach about the internet?  Most of the time, what we're teaching is fairly 101-level. In terms of getting into the structure of the internet, we try to avoid getting in the weeds just because most people, whether they’re the librarians who we’re training for the first time or the patrons who our graduates go on to train, come into a privacy-focused educational setting feeling hopelessness and resignation. Often, they're dealing with a problem that is happening to them right now, like stalkerware or having had their identity stolen. They're already freaked out. Most people think they don't have a good sense of how technology works. They already feel stupid asking questions about it.  In LFI, we work with a trainer named Mallory Hanora, who comes from the world of  prison abolition and teaches us how to create transformative workshops. Their framework is about incorporating the experiences of the people in the room, being as nonhierarchical as possible, meeting people where they are—all these sorts of things to create an environment that people can actually learn in.  Then, LFI graduates are able to bring that kind of framework forward in their workshops with their own patrons. Usually when they teach, no matter what the focus of the lesson is, people will say during the question and answer period at the end things like, \"I started using this password manager. Is this good?\" Or, \"My nephew told me about this thing I can download to block ads. What do you think about it?\" That is fascinating to me because it confirms to me that people do care about their privacy. They are already taking steps to mitigate or manage what is revealed about them on the internet. They haven't developed a nuanced threat model for their own unique situation, but most people are already doing something. In those moments, LFI librarians have the information and facilitation tools to help patrons build on what they already know.","completion":"User Testing in Uganda I want to make sure we also talk about Tor. What does your work on the community team look like?  I was the community team lead for two years and I'm still a contributor, though not at the level I used to be as Library Freedom Project has taken up more of my time. The community team works on outreach—teaching people about Tor and getting more of an understanding of who it's for and what it does. LFP really fits into that work. But beyond LFP, Tor is a global community, so our outreach is global.  The interesting thing about Tor software development and usability research is that we don't do the surveillance stuff that some software does to make sure that it's usable for you. We don't track your clicks or how your mouse moves around the page; we're not doing A/B testing and getting analytics back. So how are we supposed to know how well Tor is working for you? For years, we got that feedback directly from the most technical people because that was who was using Tor. But the problem with that method was that it meant we were designing for the most technical people, and if only the most technical people are using Tor, then Tor doesn't actually work.  A couple of years ago, we started focusing on making the Tor Browser usable for people doing social justice movement work—water rights, reproductive justice, queer and trans issues—around the world. We wanted to focus on members of these movements in the Global South for a few reasons. One is that we didn't want to have the kind of free software project that was all white dudes in the US and Western Europe, which is what most of those projects are and, to be honest, what ours kind of was. We also thought it was important to understand the context of using Tor in places where the internet is much slower and more expensive—places where there are all kinds of environmental factors that make using it harder, even if you know how to use it technically.  Our teams started traveling to meet with community organizers who were part of political movements in different parts of the world. We spent a lot of time learning about their contexts, what kinds of work they do, and who their adversaries are. Then, we showed them the Tor Browser, conducted some user tests, and asked for feedback. That's how Tor usability work has been happening for some time now."}
{"prompt":"Can you give an example?  In 2018 I traveled to Uganda with Antonela Debiasi, the head of Tor’s usability team. We visited two cities: Kampala, the capital, and a smaller city called Hoima. Hoima is in what's known as the Albertine region of Uganda, after Lake Albert. They discovered a lot of oil in the Albertine region around fifteen years ago, and US, Chinese, and Israeli companies have been scrambling to extract the oil in that region since then.  Antonela and I met with a number of people in Hoima, mainly environmental activists. They were mostly doing journalism, writing and publishing anonymously to try to bring international attention to the environmental effects of large-scale oil extraction that they were experiencing. We asked them who their adversaries were and what they knew about the companies operating there. They had some anecdotes about people being followed and weird things happening with their phones.","completion":"In that situation, we were able to bring knowledge about the surveillance capabilities of these big companies. We talked about different kinds of monitoring that may have been happening, like Stingrays for intercepting phone calls. Of course, Tor can only solve a piece of those issues, but it can really help with anonymous research and publishing, especially if you teach people about what its limitations are. And it's like that with every different group: we learn about their context, we think about what Tor can do in that specific context, and we share information about other ways people can protect themselves. The process was similar when we went to Kampala, although the activists we met were focused on different issues. There are a lot of refugees there from Sudan and South Sudan, so people were working with them. And we met with reproductive and gay rights activists.  In both cities, we were meeting with a combination of different people who knew each other through their own networks. I think that is fairly typical. In some cases, we try to go back again and meet with people a second time. But, in general, we learn all these things and then we take that information back to the developers and incorporate what we learn into the Tor Browser.  What were the meetings like? In general, our workshops with activists are fairly straightforward. We get together in a classroom and learn about their threat models—what kind of work they’re doing, who their adversaries are, what kind of work they would be doing if they felt less threatened by those adversaries. Since we work with people who are all familiar with each other through social and political networks, they tend to feel comfortable sharing these details in a group. After we get a better sense of their work, we give them a hands-on training on using Tor. We have them use their own phones and laptops, and we walk them through the download process while explaining what Tor does and doesn’t do. If it’s not safe for them to download the files directly—because evidence of the download would be visible to their ISP—then we can sideload them using a USB stick. We troubleshoot any issues that come up, and we learn about unique local challenges like data limitations, slow internet, or electrical outages. We think about the specific adversaries that these activists are facing and what kinds of capabilities those adversaries are likely to have."}
{"prompt":"For example, from what we know about the companies operating in the oil market in Uganda, we can reasonably assume that they’re employing some security firm like NSO Group to spy on the activists. [Eds. NSO Group is an Israeli spyware company that sells surveillance software to governments.] And we know that the Ugandan government is monitoring them. Knowing those specifics helps us explain to activists how Tor can help. We also spend time conducting user tests, asking activists to complete a series of tasks using Tor Browser, and documenting what was difficult.  Beyond the fairly unique threat models that people are working with, it's helpful to know how internet infrastructure impacts Tor use and performance in different places. For example, using Tor in San Francisco is slower than using Chrome in San Francisco because, in order to anonymize your traffic, Tor bounces your web requests to relays all over the world before it returns the website you want. So we figured that a slower internet connection would make Tor even slower. How much slower? In Uganda, it turns out: not much! The electricity goes in and out, so you get disconnected, but that impacts every browser the same way. It's also helpful to know how much data Tor is using and how much mobile data plans cost; a lot of the people we met there are primarily browsing on their phones and we don’t want people to have to use up their whole data plans. We learned about censorship by internet service providers there and which anti-censorship mechanisms that are built into Tor will work in those contexts. There’s all sorts of feedback that's coming to us in those meetings. We take all this information and write up a report for the developers and the user experience team so that they can address any challenges that arose.  Socially Necessary Library Time You’ve said that the discussion about privacy is really a discussion about power. The fact that Tor solves a similar privacy problem for environmental activists in Uganda and also for librarians in the US seems to highlight that.","completion":"Absolutely. That's the common thread in all of this, and that's my approach with Library Freedom Project. To me, privacy is the Trojan horse. Then when I get in the building, I'm like, “Alright, let's actually talk about capitalism.” Privacy is important, but what we're really talking about is the newest frontier of exploitation by capital.  With both Tor and the Library Freedom Project, you're making libraries places that are anti-capitalist not just because they're free, but also because data harvesting won't work in there. You're making a Faraday cage around libraries."}
{"prompt":"I love that. I do think of libraries as one of the most socialist institutions that we have in the US in 2020: they are funded with public money. They are not means-tested. They're everywhere. You talk to the average librarian about why they got into the profession and there is a real love for the public. You can go into a library and you don't even have to use it for its explicit purpose of looking at books or magazines or computers. You can just go there and be, even if you’re the kind of person that late capitalism has decided is not worthwhile. To the library, you are. And this is a radical idea. Libraries’ doors are still open, even as their budgets get cut. They’re special spaces and I want to help them expand what they're capable of doing.","completion":"At the same time, right now, seven of the top ten companies by market capitalization are tech companies. Seven out of ten are using data that they take from us, without our consent, to create their products. That is part of our labor power: those products are made with our emotional labor, our mental labor. Privacy is a way to reclaim our labor power. I want people to think about those relationships.  And, yeah, I also want people to not get their identities stolen. All of the more concrete problems are still important to me, especially when you think about who is subject to them—it's poor people and elderly people and people who don't have power. But with all of this work, I'm really trying to force a conversation about who controls the internet and what that means for our lives."}
{"prompt":"1/ When the pandemic first struck the United States, it was not uncommon to hear people compare its virality to the other, online, kind. The numbers climbed impossibly—then inevitably—high. In a nightmare inversion of network effects, the more people who got it, the more deadly it became. In New York City ICUs, patients were dying in the hallways.","completion":"Then, as the weeks passed, a different technological metaphor started to seem more apt: the X-ray. The novel coronavirus itself remained, in many ways, inscrutable. But it revealed the brokenness of our systems for providing care. Nursing homes and prisons became deadly zones of infection. Food production plants followed. Doctors and nurses were going to work in garbage bags, while governors, who had been told to compete with one another, bid up the price of PPE that never materialized.  Cities could not dispose of their dead fast enough. They closed schools and daycares indefinitely, without explaining what exactly the working parents who were now also full-time caregivers were supposed to do—and the working parents were the lucky ones. Every Thursday, the Labor Department reported that millions of Americans had applied for unemployment the previous week. That did not count all of the people who could not apply for unemployment because the state websites were crashing and the hold times on their hotlines lasted all day."}
{"prompt":"Did it even make sense to call what you were feeling “anxiety” or “depression,” when there were so many real reasons to worry? Amid so much loss and suffering, what feeling person would not grieve? Nonetheless, social media revealed a steady stream of people who could not be persuaded to care enough for their fellow citizens, or themselves, to wear masks on the bus or to the grocery store. Armed protesters showed up at government buildings to demand a return to business as usual.  2/ The pandemic put technologists, and technology firms, in an ambiguous place. On the one hand, their products have become more essential than ever. Internet traffic is up; cloud services are in high demand. Countless Americans have turned to Amazon and Instacart to shop (or work), and Zoom to take classes or attend religious services (or work). Tech stocks are soaring, even as the real economy falls, and the fights that at least some prominent figures in the industry have picked with journalists and lawmakers reflect a new sense of invulnerability.  At the same time, COVID-19 has exposed points of fragility in the system. If the biggest tech companies are essentially vast engines for making predictions, the pandemic was unforeseen: you could see the breakdown of the machine learning machine. Moreover, this was a crisis of care, and care is precisely what software cannot provide: it is designed to coordinate, and sometimes eliminate, human work. The tech firms could offer gig and warehouse jobs, but they could hardly make up for plummeting employment. They could apply their expertise in digital surveillance to contact tracing, but the populations most at risk—Black and Latinx communities—had the most reason to fear being tracked.   Then the Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, just two months after the Louisville police murdered Breonna Taylor. Cities across the country erupted. A government that couldn’t be bothered to do the bare minimum to contain the pandemic quickly moved to mobilize battalions of militarized cops. There was no money for PPE, but no shortage of resources available for repression.","completion":"Again, the role of technology was ambivalent. On the one hand, smartphones produced the videos of police violence that sparked and spread the mobilizations. Technologists soon found other strategic uses for digital tools—for instance, mapping police movements by listening to scanners. On the other hand, tech posed a constant danger. Drones developed for wars in the Middle East hovered above protests. Your own social media could be used against you—and so could other people’s, as a woman in Philadelphia learned the hard way, arrested after a stranger posted a photo of her with her face covered on Instagram. The networks used to organize and amplify collective action were all too easily weaponized by the state. If you go to a protest, leave your phone at home.  3/ We made this issue in the midst of these intertwined and rapidly unfolding crises. The pieces were written in the midst of the grief and rage of the past months, but also the moments of possibility and hope, which have so often taken the form of people taking care of one another, from street medics washing out pepper-sprayed eyes to militant nurses and teachers organizing for better conditions for patients and students. There was a reason so-called “Momtifa” captured the public eye.  Some of the pieces in these pages deal directly with the most current and urgent aspects of the crises. What they find is that technology is often part of the solution—but only a part. Smartphones can help, but only in tandem with functioning healthcare and state institutions. The clean lines of the tech-laden megahospital suggest a future of frictionless care. But in their shadow, essential workers are saving lives in tents.  Technology alone can’t save us. Often, in fact, it can hurt us. The harms it inflicts aren’t new. The software might have been made recently, but the social relations that software embodies and enacts were made a long time ago. Contemporary digital surveillance emerged from older practices, and obeys old carceral logics. As Sarah T. Hamid explains in these pages, today’s facial-recognition and predictive-policing algorithms belong to a centuries-long lineage of tools for “the control, coercion, capture, and exile of entire categories of people.”"}
{"prompt":"Taking care of one another will require dismantling these tools, whether in the form of a laser pointer that scrambles a facial-recognition camera or a legislative ban that outlaws facial-recognition technology. It will also mean constructing alternatives. Moments of social mobilization enliven and expand our political imagination. Among the things that sorely need reimagining is our technology.  4/ The poet Richard Brautigan once imagined “a cybernetic forest,” filled with pines and electronicswhere deer stroll peacefullypast computersas if they were flowerswith spinning blossoms.","completion":"This issue explores what a more habitable digital world might look like. There are recovered histories and preliminary experiments, sketches of past and possible schemes for organizing networks differently, and for redressing networked harms.  The issue also asks, Who cares? In one sense, this means: Whose lives are touched by particular technologies, and who participates in their development and design and deployment? But it also means: Who performs the work of looking after and tending to people, and the machines that are integral to the systems that people need? The unglamorous work of maintenance and custodianship, of remembering abandoned knowledge—and programming languages—is what makes it possible for the millions of Americans who have lost their jobs in recent months to receive an unemployment check.  Computers cannot care for us as completely as venture capitalists might like. But we hold out the hope that, with some deep social and technical reconstruction, they can be put into service of creating a more caring world."}
{"prompt":"What is the Carceral Tech Resistance Network? The Carceral Tech Resistance Network (CTRN) is a coalition of organizers who are campaigning against the design and experimentation of technologies by police, prisons, border enforcement, and commercial partnerships. We work to abolish the carceral state and its attendant technologies by building community knowledge and community defense. Our group is made up primarily of femme, Black, immigrant, POC organizers. My own work is embedded in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Portland, Oregon, but CTRN has organizers in most West Coast US states.","completion":"The network was created out of two primary needs: first, we started to realize that these technologies, often rolled out at a local scale, have afterlives—they travel to other contexts, where communities may have less familiarity with them, or no organized base prepared to confront and dismantle them. So there was a need to knowledge-share and foster mentorship between community organizations. And second, we felt an urgent need to build a different relationship to the cataloging, databasing, and archiving practices that are widely deployed in movement spaces—but which also share a troubled history with the exact same surveillance technologies we are working to dismantle.  How did you first come to work on these issues? I started thinking about these policing techniques during the Ferguson uprisings. I became fascinated by predictive policing, an object that has captured popular and scholarly attention since its inception. Originally, I had aspirations to be an academic; I took the project of techno-criticism seriously. I described this recently as an impulse to “speak these technologies into illegitimacy.”  Things changed once I started to realize that academic research has a long history of being co-opted—even used against itself—by the particular systems that I was studying. Similar to prison industrial complex abolitionists in the 1980s and 1990s, I started to recognize that criticism was not going to be an effective tactic to enact change. So I started to look for other pathways. A couple of years ago, I came out to Los Angeles and began organizing here. And I realized that once you position yourself as an organizer, change becomes possible in a very different way."}
{"prompt":"As an organizer, you’re focused on resisting and dismantling “carceral technologies.” What is a carceral technology? The rebellions in the wake of George Floyd’s murder have largely focused on the physical aspects of police repression, like killings by police officers and brutality towards protesters. But there are also various technologies of police repression that are less physical, and indeed sometimes invisible. Could you give us a sense of what some of those technologies are? Carceral technologies are those that are bound up in the control, coercion, capture, and exile of entire categories of people. CTRN organizers campaign against CCTV, face printing, DNA and biometric databases, acoustic gunshot detection, drones, electronic monitoring, AI and risk profiling algorithms—all of which function as weapons in the hands of law enforcement or prison administration.  When we talk about carceral technology, it’s important to note that we are not just talking about digital technology. We are working with an inheritance that predates digital technology. We are talking about the long history of carceral technologies—lanterns (which Black, mixed-race, and Indigenous folks in the eighteenth century were required to carry if not in the company of a white person), rowdy sheets (colonial crime intelligence and profiling ledgers), sentry boxes (telegraph boxes that gave white, \"reputable\" citizens a direct line to police power in the early twentieth century), rogue galleries (image galleries of individuals criminalized by police bureaus), calipers (to catalogue biometric data from those in police custody), pin maps (analog \"hot spot\" mapping techniques used to criminalize entire neighborhoods and communities). And we are talking about a long history of carceral practices, like forced sterilization, medical experimentation in prisons, work homes, and security landscaping (architectural techniques popularized in the service of police surveillance, such as stripping entire neighborhoods of greenery). As abolitionists, we want to dismantle the system that makes those practices possible. And we are organizing in communities that have a long history of fighting those practices, communities that have acquired knowledge about how to fight and build safety against the rollout of experimental carceral programming—whether analog or digital.","completion":"Sometimes, the argument against carceral technologies like predictive policing or facial recognition is framed as a privacy issue. I get the sense that you and your fellow organizers in CTRN don’t share that analysis. When these technologies first captured popular attention, the anxiety over surveillance started to take up a lot of space in the room. There was an intentional move by white scholars to push back on these technologies by presenting surveillance as a generalized harm; that is, as something that affected everybody. Because surveillance violated people’s privacy, everybody should care about it—not just racialized populations or communities targeted by the state.  This was a well-intentioned move. But it muted much of what directly impacted communities needed to talk about, what they wanted to build awareness about, and what they wanted to fight against. The privacy framing made it so that the harm enacted by carceral surveillance systems were fixed to a spectrum of intrusion, the one end of which is Target being creepy by spying on its customers, the other end of which is facial recognition–enabled immigration detention.  CTRN is very intentional in how we position our work. We organize against carceral institutions, actors, and systems—not surveillance. The focus on \"surveillance\" has a depoliticizing effect on the work we do. Organizers campaigning against carceral technologies are not organizing against \"intense creepiness.\" They are organizing against a category of violence—legally sanctioned violence by the carceral state—that has a long history of racialized surveillance, and a short history of digital surveillance. These technologies aren’t just creepy. These technologies don’t just make the subject feel watched, or like they can’t express themselves. These are violent technologies—carceral technologies. So the goal can’t just be to make them a little less intrusive."}
{"prompt":"Who profits from these technologies? How do you see the role of industry in structuring or shaping these kinds of instruments and the social relations they embody? Does it make sense to speak of a “carceral technology industrial complex”? Speaking in terms of industrial complexes is very helpful. After the Ferguson uprisings, there was this particular way in which reform and technology acted together to incentivize certain modes of innovation, like body-worn cameras, that were linked to measures that were supposed to help improve police accountability. Not only did these technologies expand police investigatory and surveillance power, they fundamentally failed to improve the rate of violent encounters between over-policed communities and law enforcement. But this problem space of police reform was incredibly profitable—it was profitable then, and it's profitable now.","completion":"I’m reminded of a line from Foucault that Angela Davis uses in her book Are Prisons Obsolete?: “Prison ‘reform’ is virtually contemporary with the prison itself: it constitutes, as it were, its program.” The history of the prison, in other words, is the history of reform. We have to recognize that technological innovation, and the reformism that animates it, is a carceral tactic. It's a means by which these systems have expanded over time. Police have been experimenting with different kinds of technology for hundreds of years. It has offered them a strategy to divert focus from the extreme conditions of violence that they enact on communities, all while amassing vast amounts of resources and connections. Technology is one way that police have historically mobilized academia to work in their favor. It has also helped police forge links with industry."}
{"prompt":"For instance, one early innovation in police technology was adding radios to squad cars. Who built those radios? Motorola. From the 1930s onwards, Motorola radios were installed in police vehicles. That turned out to be a lucrative line of business for Motorola, and it’s no surprise that the company continues to maintain a large communications infrastructure for law enforcement. They have made a lot of money from decades of these public-private partnerships, and so many of the technologies that we enjoy as private consumer goods now were seeded through public funds intended to “fix” policing.","completion":"It isn't just that these investments are system-sustaining—it's the very fact that these innovation ventures have never achieved the accountability or reconciliation they promised. They've just made policing deadlier and less accountable. Presumably companies can then market the products they develop to police overseas as well. Can you speak to the international dimension here? Yeah, absolutely. Because American policing and prisons have these entanglements with industry, companies have been able to set up different parts of the United States as test sites for new technologies. Certain cities have become spaces of experimentation. It’s no accident that ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system, exists in Chicago but is also marketed to Johannesburg—two cities that also share a common history of racial segregation by city planning. Companies start to see and profile these places, these cities, as similar. These markets begin to resemble one another. So a product that's beta-tested in the United States gets sold elsewhere."}
{"prompt":"In fact, many of the technologies that are developed here are being developed with an eye to a global market. I’d go as far as to say predictive policing wasn't even really for the United States, which has a high threshold for things like accountability and transparency. When predictive policing first came to American police departments, the marketing line from industry was that the departments were resource-scarce. Predictive policing, the story went, could help law enforcement agencies save money. That argument is absurd. American police departments are far from resource-scarce. But that argument wasn't for us. That argument was for police departments that really are resource-scarce. It was a sales pitch for police departments in Karachi.","completion":"But it’s not just about global markets. It’s also about global contexts. American policing functions as a research site for military innovation—the “green to blue” pipeline is bidirectional. For instance, the National Institute of Justice’s 2009 predictive policing innovation grants (which funded Chicago’s now-deprecated Strategic Subjects List, or “heat list”) seeded the development of risk assessment technologies that served as templates for military detention algorithms in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that helped support counterinsurgency operations. Similarly, social media flagging systems designed for gang policing in urban contexts were studied by DARPA for monitoring ISIS recruitment. The racially hostile relationship that American police have with vulnerablized communities—what are commonly referred to as “low-information environments”—means that those communities can function as isomorphic innovation domains for US imperial contexts. So they test policing tech domestically, in places where the police have a hostile relationship with racialized communities, in order to design war tools for similar communities overseas."}
{"prompt":"This is why building transnational coalitions is so important, especially in this moment in American political history when we’re seeing so much momentum behind diminishing police power. Cities like Portland, Oregon, are enacting prohibitions on the kind of crowd-control armaments their law enforcement are able to use. But the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) has adopted Dhaka, Bangladesh, as a city that it wants to teach how to police effectively. That's where my family's from. Is that where PPB’s tear gas canisters are going to be shipped?  And how are other cities around the world going to get American policing out of their cities? I want to figure out how we can start collaborating with people in Dhaka to organize against the same systems. Confronting a transnational empire will require transnational networks. The US carceral state, through war, development initiatives, and arms and technologies exports, is a transnational phenomenon.","completion":"Beyond Bias To return to the question of reform, I wonder if you could speak to the importance of taking an abolitionist framework when organizing against carceral technologies. For example, there are some people who argue that you can reform systems like predictive policing by “debiasing” them, so that they produce fewer racially biased results."}
{"prompt":"Carceral technologies are racist because the institutions that develop and use them are intended to manage populations in a country that has a white supremacist inheritance. These technologies are not incidentally racist. They are racist because they're doing the work of policing—which, in this country, is a racist job. There has been a lot of work devoted to proving that particular algorithms are racially biased. And that's well and good. But there was no question that these algorithms were ever not going to be racist.  What would a not-racist predictive policing program look like? You would have to reimagine prediction. You would have to reimagine policing. You would have to reimagine the history of computation. You would have to reimagine the racial configuration of neighborhoods. You would have to reimagine a lot of things in order to arrive at even the slightest possibility of a not-racist predictive policing system, or a not-racist facial recognition system. So yes, they're racist. There's no question that they're racist. But the reason that they’re racist is because they're used to enact modes of racialized violence.","completion":"In recent years, scholarly communities have focused more attention on issues of fairness, accountability, and transparency in machine learning. We’ve also seen a broader conversation emerge around “AI ethics.” What’s your view of these discourses? A lot of these research communities begin with methodologies from STS (Science and Technology Studies) and adjacent fields, where the emphasis is on trying to understand sociotechnical systems. But they often have an inability to apply that analysis to themselves—to interrogate the role that academia and techno-criticism play in the vast sociotechnical assemblage that buttresses the conception, design, and implementation of carceral technologies.  It’s not due to a lack of imagination that these scholarly communities have continuously circled the drain on questions such as the presence of racial bias in particular systems—this is a political arrangement. It’s a structural condition of how the grants that fund their work are allocated, and the relationships they have to industry and to government institutions. For decades, research questions have been staged to these scholarly communities in very particular ways by carceral institutions. There is a given-ness to the problems that these researchers are failing to interrogate. For instance, it's no accident that for years everyone was like, “We need explainable AI,” and then DARPA started handing out millions of dollars worth of grants to develop explainable AI.  Historically, certain academic disciplines have had moments when they decided to reexamine their relationship with the military and police industrial complex. Consider anthropologists refusing to participate in the US military’s human terrain systems in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance. But the ethics-in-technology communities haven’t had that kind of reckoning yet, where they start to deeply interrogate why they're asking the questions that they're asking. Because these technologies are moving so quickly, I think people in these research communities haven't had a chance to reflect on why they keep asking the questions that they're asking. Where do the questions come from? And why is it that they’re asking the exact same questions that DARPA is asking? And why isn't that entanglement ethically complicated for them?"}
{"prompt":"You’re no longer an academic but you’re still very much a researcher. You’re constantly doing research into how particular police programs function, how they were funded, and so on. How does the kind of research that you do now differ from academic research?  Recently, one of the actions that I helped coordinate involved standing in front of City Hall and giving seven hours of testimony on police violence. Scholars might dismiss this sort of thing as being spectacle-driven. And that's fine. But it's also rooted in a desire to create alternative epistemologies. It’s rooted in the recognition that you can't just offer another data visualization, because doing so reinforces a particular way of knowing and a particular entanglement with knowing institutions. So we ask: how do you diversify your ways of knowing? That’s the question. How do you make interruptions into what is broadly accepted as valid knowledge—and make something new? How do you make interventions in the breadth and depth conditions of knowledge? How we know, the way we know, our epistemic practices, are a political decision. They enroll us in technological and research traditions and transform our relationship to both the object of inquiry and the intention behind it. I remember this one moment when CTRN was archiving different policing program grants. We were working in a spreadsheet. There were blank cells in the spreadsheet, and we became obsessed with filling them in. And then after a week we were like, “Why are we doing this? Why are we so obsessed with having a complete spreadsheet?” We started to realize that our way of knowing and our mode of inquiry were being influenced by the nature of the spreadsheet. It wasn't curiosity, or any real need to find the information. It was the structure of the technology.  Knowledge takes a particular shape when you start to use particular mediums. So it’s important to continuously reassess how your knowledge is being shaped because, at the end of the day, if you give into what the technology wants, then your work just becomes police work. Your organizing work just turns into a project to surveil the police, you cultivate a need to satisfy each blank cell, you strive for total information. You start to take on the state’s paranoid affect. You can lose yourself in that.","completion":"Beyond trying to build a different relationship to knowledge, another thing that we do that is fundamentally different from academic communities is that we always start with first commitments. That's always the longest conversation of any new organizing formation. What are you committed to? What are you refusing to compromise on? What are you building towards? These are long conversations. When we first created CTRN, it took us more than six months to resolve and find agreement on our commitments."}
{"prompt":"It also sounds like you’re trying to develop a model of militant research; that is, research that is rooted in a set of political commitments and organizing practices. It’s a model of research where the ideas emerge through struggle, through practice, through social movement. That’s a different approach than the standard scholarly one.","completion":"The scholarly model also operates at a different scale. It’s more interested in creating concepts that govern because they speak to multiple communities at once. But our work has to happen at a different scale because our inquiry is accountable to specific people. It’s inquiry that’s conducted through caring about particular individuals. Someone comes to you and says, \"I don't understand what's going on. I don't understand why I got fired, why my husband didn’t get the job, why my brother's parole was denied.\" And you start to begin to answer those questions, which are very personal.  Our work happens at this scale. The scale of friends, family, and loved ones. And yes, the answers often point to the role of giant sociotechnical systems. But we’re answering individual questions. And we’re doing it because we care about the people we are in community with, not because we’re trying to develop the best idea to sell a book. Our intervention is effective when we’re able to find the knowledge that allows people to enact meaningful change in their lives."}
{"prompt":"Abolitionist Futures You mentioned earlier that your goal is to abolish these systems, not reform them. What does an abolitionist campaign against a carceral technology look like? I’m working on a campaign right now in Portland to ban both the private and public use of facial recognition technology. A handful of cities have banned the use of facial recognition by local government entities like police departments, but private businesses have been unaffected. The Portland ban would extend to the private sector too.","completion":"It's been controversial because a lot of people who are civil rights oriented have been worried that you're infringing on an individual's ability to use this technology if they want to. But if you're organizing from an abolitionist perspective, you recognize that the private rollout of this technology is still a carceral technology. These technologies never exist without their carceral counterpart. Take the introduction of face-scanning software to unlock people’s phones. Industry rolls out these artifacts of private consumption that normalize the existence of these technologies—technologies that have always been entangled in carceral systems.  We recognize facial recognition technology, a weapon used by law enforcement to identify, profile, and enact violence against categories of people. So individuals opting in to unlock their phones with facial recognition serves to improve a technology that has necessarily violent implications—individuals opting in, in other words, are participating in the creation and refinement of this weapon. So when we organize to abolish these technologies, we organize against their conditions of possibility as much as their immediate manifestation. We organize against the logics, relationships, and systems that scaffold their existence."}
{"prompt":"You’re also one of the creators of the #8toAbolition campaign, which was launched by a handful of prominent police and prison abolitionists during the George Floyd protests. Among the demands listed on the campaign website are “Invest in Community Self-Governance” and “Invest in Care, Not Cops.” What might these demands look like within the context of technology?  There are groups, like May First or Color Coded LA, that are working to create movement technology, technology with a different kind of political configuration. Their experiments don’t always scale easily, because they too are working from first commitments. But investing in care and community self-governance when it comes to technology would mean supporting these kinds of experiments, helping them grow, and making them replicable all throughout the world.","completion":"We need technological alternatives, particularly now. In a world where people have to talk more over video chat, for instance, it’s hard for organizations like us that are very privacy and safety focused. We don’t want people on Zoom. We need to make sure that the tools we are using are safe for our communities. So we can’t move too fast. We have to be slow, and difficult, and deliberately endure the drag because there are things that we're not going to compromise on.  Honestly, so much of our work is just mailing each other thumb drives. That’s how we do our knowledge sharing. It's not high-tech and it’s not glamorous. But that's the work that's effective in building these campaigns. It's easy to want to innovate our way to abolition. But you can't do that. You have to live in the friction. You have to be slow. You have to be methodical. You have to prioritize safety. You have to make sure folks aren’t left behind because of your sense of urgency. That’s just how it has to be done."}
{"prompt":"During the protests, a few big tech companies also announced that they would halt or pause their work on facial recognition. IBM said that it would shelve its general purpose facial recognition product, Microsoft reported that it would stop selling facial recognition to law enforcement until there is a federal law that regulates its use, and Amazon declared it would implement a one-year moratorium on the sale of facial recognition technology to the police. How should we view such moves? I’m suspicious. These companies profit from expropriative relationships with communities that are hyper-surveilled by the state. They're not just going to give up their bread and butter.  On the other hand, in recent years, we’ve seen that there is clearly something happening within these companies. Workers are taking action. And I think these moves on facial recognition partly reflect the pressure of tech worker organizing.  To be honest, my work often has to take an adversarial posture towards the tech industry, including this kind of organizing, which is often informed by a drive to representation more than a drive to abolition. In many ways, saying that you need a more diverse, minority-sensitive tech company is like saying you need more diverse prison guards.  But as we saw with the successful campaign against the Project Maven contract at Google, this kind of organizing can make real gains. So I think their work is necessary. We need tech workers to organize so that contracts like Project Maven get cancelled. But I also think it’s necessary for organizers like myself to remain antagonistic to the very existence of companies like Google and Amazon. In my political imagination, there's room for both.  I will always say: don't join a big tech company. I will always say, you're making war machines, don't get your paycheck from them. But I also know that our work needs to be coalitional. We need solidarity between different groups that are working at different chokepoints. For instance, there are academics whose scholarship and concepts may be woefully inadequate to the work of abolition—but they’re also the ones who are teaching students before they enter the tech industry pipeline. Building a regulatory culture among technologists relies on their efforts.","completion":"It’s my hope that these different communities, that are sometimes ideologically at odds with one another, can all contribute to the project of defanging, dismantling, and interrupting these systems. How do we continue to create spaces of relief and spaces of emancipation? Because at the end of the day, that may be the best we’re ever going to do."}
{"prompt":"But isn’t the goal to abolish these systems? That's the aspiration. That's what we work towards. But what we celebrate as wins are the pauses and the breaks. We celebrate those moments where power recedes and people are able to live and to thrive. And we fight towards abolition because it’s an effective strategy to achieve those pauses and breaks.","completion":"The systems we’re fighting have been around for a long time. A very long time. But if you can introduce a bit of friction, you can open up some breathing room. What is Amazon Workers International and how did it come about?  I’ll start at the very beginning just to give you the big tour.  The Poznań warehouse was Amazon’s first warehouse in Poland, and it opened in 2014. I’ve been working in that warehouse since then. When it opened, we thought that it was going to be part of a larger shift, where Amazon was going to move warehouses from Germany to Poland. There were a lot of strikes in Germany at that time, and we’ve also seen that shift before with other factories and warehouses because we are much cheaper labor than Germans. We earn about four dollars per hour, so three to four times less than they do."}
{"prompt":"At the same time, German workers were also afraid that the warehouses were going to close and that they would lose work. We connected with some of them through social movement organizing and met in person for the first time in 2015. We quickly realized that Amazon was building power by exploiting the differences between countries. Over time, it’s become clear that the company is not closing German warehouses; they just want to use us as a cheaper, more flexible workforce to limit the bargaining power of workers in Germany. We decided back then that we needed to stay in touch with each other. The Polish-German connection was very important to the beginning of Amazon Workers International.","completion":"We’ve met every year since then, twice a year, and we’ve also expanded to become a larger network that includes French and Spanish warehouse workers. Workers from a few US warehouses have also joined. The Amazon Workers International name and logo are new, but it’s not a new organization. We met in Madrid in March this year and decided to go more public.  The network relies on the organic connection between the warehouse workers from different countries—we don’t have union officials talking in the name of workers—and the fact that we share many of the same problems. Our warehouses look exactly the same inside, and Amazon uses the same disciplinary tools against all of us. We update each other about the struggles in our warehouses and think about how they’re connected. We share an understanding that because Amazon is a global company, we need to have a global movement.   To give you an example, we have very different labor laws in Poland than they do in other parts of Europe. It’s much easier to strike in France and Spain and Germany. So part of what we do together is look for ways of struggling beyond those legal differences. In Polish warehouses it is nearly impossible to organize a legal strike, but we are connected with other workers who can. That gives us power; we don’t have to sit down and cry. We can support strikes in Germany with petitions, rallies, stickers, leaflets, press conferences, actions that share their slogans—and then the German workers strike for the common cause. That’s how we fight together against something like rate increases."}
{"prompt":"What does it look like for you all to organize in an environment where you can’t legally strike?  There was an action in 2015, a year after the warehouse opened, that gave us momentum early on in our organizing.  I was there on the night shift that night. As I mentioned earlier, we’d connected with German warehouse workers at the beginning of 2015, and we knew when they were going on strike. We’d been distributing leaflets in the warehouse and on the company buses saying the Germans would be going on strike and what their demands were.","completion":"Around the same time, Amazon had announced that we’d be required to work obligatory overtime. Eleven-hour shifts instead of ten. People understood what was happening: that the Germans were going on strike and Amazon wanted us to work longer to make up for them not working. That made us really angry."}
{"prompt":"The night of the action, everyone on the shift was talking on the company buses on the way to work. The idea was to do something in the last hour, during our obligatory overtime, but it ended up starting much earlier. The slowdown took place mostly in the Pick department. The pickers picked one item from the shelves for each tote instead of the usual twelve or fifteen. Sending the boxes to the Pack department like that made a mess of  the conveyor belts; thousands of these mostly empty Amazon totes were falling from the belt, which then brought the Pack and the Ship departments to a standstill.  It didn’t take hundreds of people. It was really clever to recognize that the Pick department is a choke point. Some people say that the Dock or Ship departments are the choke points in the warehouse since, when you do a labor action in the Ship department, you block trucks from leaving. But this was in Pick.  Pick is where they send people who join Amazon on short-term contracts from temp agencies because they can train a picker in a few hours. That’s what was unique in this action, that these workers who don’t have special training—they weren’t, you know, forklift drivers—understood how to shut down a warehouse. So it was amazing, this popular wisdom. It showed us that we don’t need a labor sociologist to tell us “do it this way” and that we don’t have to limit ourselves to the restrictive legal frames of labor and union law.","completion":"What happened after that?  Retaliation. Amazon interviewed about ten workers and some of them, under pressure, signed a statement saying they took part in the action and regretted it. Amazon only stopped when we made their interrogations public. We defended a woman in court who was fired afterwards—or, she was not technically fired, but her contract was not renewed. One permanent worker was also fired and we’ve been fighting that in court for the last four years.  After the action, our union entered into a formal “labor dispute” procedure where we brought our demands to negotiations with Amazon management. It was not very useful. Our union believes that actions, not negotiations, are the best way of talking to Amazon.  In the years of organizing since then, we’ve had ups and downs. There have been other important actions, and one of them happened last summer. Five thousand workers took part in a strike vote. That’s still not enough to win the right to a legal strike because you need 50 percent of the whole company. To give you a sense, there are about 8,000 workers including temps in our warehouse, and there are nine warehouses in Poland. So while we didn’t get enough votes this time, there’s an army of people in Poland who did vote to strike. That’s what we think about work conditions in the warehouses.  Still, it’s difficult because of the permanent turnover—people joining the warehouse and then leaving, and more people on short-term contracts who don’t have labor protections, so their contracts are not prolonged if they’re going on sick leave, not meeting rate, or are open union members.  That seems like difficult terrain on which to build long-term organizing relationships. How does your union adapt to Amazon strategies like short-term contracts or their “employee forum,” which sounds kind of like an internal company union?  You have these employee forums all over Europe. Amazon uses theirs to advertise that they have “very good contact with the workforce” and “eight ways of communicating with employees.” One is the employee forum, another is a board at the company that any worker can send questions to and the board will answer. They have opinion polls every day! They’re really proud of this."}
{"prompt":"We call it a yellow union, which is a union that was started by the boss to use against a proper worker’s union at the negotiating table. They do this so they can always bring their own union and say, “We listen to the workers, but you all are just troublemakers who promote your own interests.”  Amazon is, of course, quite clever, so they advertise this body as a form of worker representation, and there are some people who are interested in representing workers. But the critical point is that it’s not covered by labor law in any way, while the union is. If you’re not meeting rate, or if you get any form of punishment or write-up, it doesn’t matter that you’re part of that body; the employee forum doesn’t protect you. It’s fully controlled by Amazon, and they can kick you out and fire you. It’s a clever management trick.","completion":"There is a general election for that body every four years. We vote on who is going to be a rep. Amazon organizes the whole process of elections, and they use the employee forum in certain formal situations. For example, by law, if there is a work accident involving a union member, the union member has the right to ask that a union representative be present. Amazon always tries to say that employee forum members should be there instead. This is a site of constant struggle for us.  It sounds like the HR department within companies, where theoretically you can report harassment to HR and they’ll help you. But that’s often not what happens because part of the HR department’s job is to protect the company from lawsuits."}
{"prompt":"Is there a general consensus among you and your coworkers that that’s what the employee forum is for? Or are there some people who see it more positively?  Some workers find that the employee forum can be useful for solving individual problems, like if someone has an issue with their manager. But this body is legally not allowed to participate in negotiations over our essential issues: wage and rate, how much we get paid and how fast we work. They mostly just talk with Amazon about, like, where to position the fan in the canteen.","completion":"Wildcat Since Way Back You talked about the importance of the fact that your union is worker-to-worker. Can you talk more about that and the organizing tradition you are coming out of? In Europe, you have many different union traditions, from business unions to more grassroots unions. And there are a lot of different union networks and organizations working on Amazon labor issues. In Amazon Workers International, we are convinced that the way we build power is in the workplace, in our local warehouses, and with warehouse workers in other countries. Our only criteria for joining is that you have to be a worker who’s organizing with others in your warehouse. That one rule reflects how we think labor movements should grow. We do not think that consumer boycotts or politicians making a spectacle of our situation will help us. That is not how we build power.  We are also different from many big unions in that we don’t have professional organizers with full-time union jobs; we all work in the warehouse. We meet directly with other workers and don’t have union bosses above us who tell us what to do. Despite language differences—because sometimes we speak seven languages in our meetings, it’s really crazy—it has been easy to find a common language with Amazon workers from different countries. If you’ve ever worked a full shift scanning items or packing boxes, you just understand how it is, how they exploit you. There is a desire to talk to each other and hear how others are fighting against things like quotas and disciplinary actions.  We are invited to demonstrations and debates with groups and networks that come from other traditions. And we do attend and cooperate. But in Amazon Workers International, we have a shared recognition of where our power comes from."}
{"prompt":"On the organizing tradition question, I have to ask: have you read the Wikipedia article on Poznań?  No.  I was reading it ahead of our conversation and it links to an article about these protests in 1956.  Oh, yeah.  The government raised the work quota so that it wouldn’t have to pay workers at the Cegielski metal factory their full compensation. Workers responded by walking out one morning in what turned into a march of 100,000 people. Raising an arbitrary quota in order to lower pay sounds like something Amazon would do, so I was curious if that history impacts organizing in your city today.  It’s interesting that you mention this. Our union is just one section of a larger union called Workers’ Initiative. Workers’ Initiative was started in the early 2000s by workers at the Cegielski factory. What happened in that factory in 1956 was a massive moment in the history of organizing against the Communist state, and it was also connected to the Hungarian Uprising later that year. Those workers faced harsh retaliation and eighty protesters were killed. What we’ve done doesn’t compare, but we are inspired by that history.","completion":"To give you a bit more of the historical context, there was a transformation in Poland when the old regime collapsed. The new regime that came into power in the 1990s was basically shock therapy for working-class people, and all the unions supported it, including Solidarność leaders who used that period to get into politics. In the 2000s, young workers at the Cegielski factory had had enough and decided that they wanted a new form of labor organizing. Workers’ Initiative came out of that. We are inspired by that tradition and the rejection of the big unions that supported company “restructuring,” which always meant dismissals.  So we are connected to that factory emotionally, but there’s another connection as well. The factory had 20,000 workers in 1956. Now it has something like 800. The old working class that made up the heavy industry sector—that factory makes engines—was destroyed in Poland in the 1990s and 2000s. Our union had a lot of discussions about what the new field of working-class formation would be. As Poland has become a big warehouse for Western Europe, we’ve come to think that logistics will be the crucial sector for the future of the labor movement.  So yes, we know the story of 1956 and we’ve tried to learn from it."}
{"prompt":"Shifting gears, I want to ask you about the role of tech workers. Amazon recently fired two tech workers in Seattle for organizing. Shortly after that, a VP “quit in dismay” after watching the event that you spoke at, partly because he was so moved by hearing from warehouse workers. How do you see the role of tech workers in your struggle against Amazon? In Poland, we don’t really have... Well, we do have a tech arm of Amazon in Poland. We know there are a few hundred tech workers in Gdańsk working on Alexa, but we’ve never been in touch with them. Amazon doesn’t have many of these upper-level workers in our country. For the most part, Amazon in Poland is just warehousing for the West. So we don’t have an organic connection.  We do appreciate our discussions over the last few months with tech workers from Seattle. I think what they did was brave, and we need their support. We don’t have the symbolic position they have, so it’s powerful when they can give us access to the space they get. But the challenge for our work together will be whether tech workers are able to see themselves as workers who are dependent on their wages. If they are able to organize on those grounds, then we’ll have a foundation to build on together. What we would rather avoid is a situation where they only see us as pitiful, helpless people. If the only thing they do is talk about how scandalous our conditions are, that’s not useful. We need to recognize our power, and increase it together so we can make real change. The balance of power is so unequal now. We’re past the point of calling on Amazon management to make a little change here and there.","completion":"Another challenge is that as warehouse workers we build our movement on our own anger; we know exactly why we’re angry with Amazon. But if you are a tech worker and you design all these tools to discipline us, your experience is very different. You have to be aware of what you’re doing. The tools they’re creating are not neutral. They’re designed to spy on us every second of our ten-hour shift, constantly increase our productivity, and literally work us to death. Last week, a worker in our warehouse died on the shop floor. The tech workers don’t see that."}
{"prompt":"How do you explain on-call to people who don’t know what it is? I usually go broad and say something like: when something goes wrong with the product my company sells, someone has to fix it. For stuff that I work on, my team has to fix it, no matter when it breaks. There has to be someone available 24/7 to respond. The availability piece is the thing that’s hard to explain to people.  I remember there was a time when I was at the gym and my coach was asking everybody how we were doing and I was like, “I’m so tired because I was on call this week and I didn’t get any sleep last night.” And she was like, “Oh, are you a doctor?” Which is a very common response. And then I have to say no, I’m not a doctor. I’m on call for computers. And then people are usually pretty puzzled and ask if there’s really something so important that it would warrant waking people up in the middle of the night. The answer is yes, but it’s hard to explain why.  For every hour of every day, there is a person assigned to respond if something goes down.","completion":"When something in a system breaks, you need a 24/7 ability to respond. There’s a lot more detail you could get into, like, how do you decide what’s worth paging about? But that’s the high-level summary. So how do you decide what’s worth paging about? I’m an engineer and I work on a team that builds products that other engineering teams at my company use. The first question that we ask is, “How do we know when our products are working?” That’s more complicated to figure out than it might seem.  We set up monitoring systems to examine different metrics. For an API, you might look at latency, which is how long it takes for a web request to be fulfilled. Or you might look at the error rate: in a perfect world, there would be zero errors when somebody tries to make a correct request to an API. But if there are errors, that could be because of a code change, or because other pieces of infrastructure aren’t working.  It’s not just about figuring out if something is broken, however. It’s also about figuring out if it’s broken enough to warrant human intervention. There’s a general philosophy that human intervention should not be the first thing that happens. If an application tries to make an API request to an external API that has nothing to do with us or our infrastructure, and that API happens to be down—it could be GitHub, npm, or any number of services—our products should be able to retry the request. If it’s the kind of thing where the request didn’t work at first because GitHub was down, but the retry worked because GitHub is back up, that is something that our system should be able to just do on its own.  But if the system can’t fix itself, then we need somebody to intervene to assess how serious the problem is, and to see if there’s anything we can do to mitigate the impact that it’s having—the fact that this thing is broken and our customers can’t use it—and then fix the thing itself."}
{"prompt":"What are the kinds of things you personally get paged for? Broadly, they fall into two categories. One, we made a change, it didn’t go as planned, and it’s breaking things; or, two, something external to our team is broken or unexpected, so our system doesn’t work. Those are both tricky in different ways, but both of those potential failure situations inform how we build our systems and how we handle on-call.","completion":"What do you mean that it would affect how you build systems? We’re on call for systems we’ve built, which is a very particular on-call philosophy. There are some places where these people over here create the thing, and those people over there are on call for when the thing breaks, and those are totally different teams. But we’re on call for systems that we’ve built ourselves, so we have to expect that components of our systems will fail, and we have to integrate that anticipation of failure into what we promise our customers. And we have to think about how we architect and monitor for failure.  Do you have a sense of how many people are impacted by an outage that you’d get paged for? Is there a way to measure impact? Absolutely. One of the first things we measure is customer impact, and that determines the severity of the incident we’re dealing with. On one end of the spectrum, the least impactful end, our team will have a conversation about whether we should even be getting paged for something like this. Maybe the answer is no and we change how we’re alerted, or we make the system more robust so it doesn’t experience that failure anymore.  On the other end, I’ve responded to pages for downtime, which means that external customers cannot use our product. That’s typically measured as a percentage. So we’ll say, “This outage impacted 5 percent of our customers globally” or, “10 percent of our customers in this particular region couldn’t use our product for fifteen minutes.”  The scariest failure I can think of that my team would be on call for is if our content delivery network (CDN) went down. That is the point of entry for customers who use our service and it handles billions of requests every day. So even if everything behind the CDN is working correctly, if there’s an outage at the point of entry, that would impact a lot of people. Like, potentially all of our customers."}
{"prompt":"I have this image of one person being woken up in the middle of the night because a million people can’t access the app. It sounds like that’s not how this works, though. If a million of our users are affected and only one person is waking up to deal with it, that’s wrong. A company with a million users has hopefully put enough thought into how they do on-call that an outage of that size wouldn’t happen that way. All of that said, if something like that did happen, the one person that gets paged would then page a bunch of other people once they realized that something was very broken. When there’s an incident of that scale, whole teams are brought in to help and someone is the “incident commander” who coordinates the response.","completion":"Still, this doesn’t happen that often. A lot of people think of outages as all or nothing. But it’s not usually the case that a huge number of our customers can’t use any of our services all at once. The more likely scenario is that one of our services goes down and it’s part of another company’s checkout system, so their customers can’t pay. Or maybe their app doesn’t load properly on their customers’ phones if one of our services is broken because of how the two are tied together with code. That company’s customer has no idea that the problem lies with us. But they get impacted by our outage nonetheless.  Even with those smaller incidents, however, a lot of money can presumably be at stake."}
{"prompt":"Yes, and if it’s our fault, the companies that rely on our services can come to us and say, “We signed a legal contract where you promised 99.999 percent availability,” or whatever percentage we promised them. There’s this concept of the number of nines of availability a service has. This indicates how available you expect a service to be, because it can never be 100 percent. For instance, a service that is 99.99 percent available has four nines, while a service that is 99.9999999 percent has nine nines. You build your expectations around how close or far from 100 percent availability a service is. The more available a service is, the more other companies rely on it in building their own products.  So if we breach our obligation around availability, a company might ask us for a refund or make a decision to not use our product anymore. We might do the same thing if another product causes us downtime. When there’s an outage of something we rely on, we’ll go to the company and say, “We want a root cause analysis, we want to know what the fix was, and we want a refund.” They can’t just respond and say, “I dunno, something broke but it’s good now!”  It gets trickier when you’re locked into a specific vendor. In some cases, we’ve decided to be locked in, in part, because they promise a lot of nines and we pay a ton of money, so that when their failure affects our failure, we get details as soon as possible, we get information under NDA to understand what happened, and we can ask for more help in how our relationship works.","completion":"Waking Up is Hard To Do If you’re on call outside of a workday, what does that mean for your personal life? How does it affect your evenings and weekends? Well, that’s definitely when I notice on-call the most. I may try to go to sleep earlier on nights when I’m on call because I can’t guarantee that I’m going to sleep through the night. I can’t make spontaneous plans when I’m on call unless I carry my laptop around with me. So those weeks require a lot more planning."}
{"prompt":"Because being on call means you literally have to open your laptop and debug as soon as you get paged. We’ve been talking conceptually about what it is and the philosophy behind it, but that’s what it literally looks like. Right. Let’s say I get paged when I don’t have my laptop or I’m out without my charger. I would escalate immediately to make sure that somebody else responds. But typically, we respond within a few minutes. We respond as if everything is urgent. If I get woken up in the middle of the night, my sleepy brain is like, “You can look at it later,” but I’ve trained myself to not look later, to look now because it could be really bad. But yeah, it can really impact my life, my ability to do errands, my sleep. Bad weeks are bad.","completion":"What do you do when you get paged? Almost everyone I know who’s on call, regardless of the company, uses the same app to configure pager alerts. And you can configure the app to send different kinds of information each time it pages someone. We have a link to whatever metric is passing the threshold that’s causing the page. Those metrics are also things that we configure."}
{"prompt":"Throughout your code?  Right. All the services that make up what looks to customers like one cohesive product are owned by different teams and the teams set up the thresholds they want, and people get paged based on those thresholds. A threshold might be: “If this function fails five times in an hour, page someone.” There must be dozens of those? Thousands? A lot. That’s why it’s important to be thoughtful about what you want to be alerted to and what the threshold for an alert is.  So coming back to your question about what I do: I first look at the metric that has passed the threshold. Then, I look for documentation about that alarm. When we create an alarm, we try to write documentation on what it is and what it’s measuring. If the docs are good, they also include context about why this piece of code or infrastructure exists and its various potential failure states.  But you don’t want to get into too much detail on each failure state. Sometimes, when people deal with failure, their instinct is to say, “If I document every single piece of information about this situation, I will know exactly how to respond when this happens again.” But if you have something that fails regularly, for a very predictable reason, you should fix the problem in the product and stop paging everyone all the time. Although sometimes that’s easier said than done. It is pretty easy to document all the ways in which something can break—it is usually much harder to build something that breaks less often.","completion":"Sometimes, I get paged for something I’ve never worked on before. That’s when I really lean on this process. I see a metric. I see some docs. Something is broken that’s potentially impacting people. How do I use these pieces to get to an understanding of what happened and how to fix it?  Does everybody really wake up and deal with a page they get at two in the morning? Surely, people sleep through alarms. What happens then? Yes, everybody really wakes up. There may be some rare case where, you know, someone got a new phone and didn’t set up their notifications correctly. Or, people accidentally sleep through middle-of-the-night alarms. I certainly have. But if someone were to repeatedly refuse to respond at night, they just wouldn’t last in that job. What happens when someone misses a page is that the next person gets paged. The app is configured to page a certain number of times in a certain number of ways—it’ll text you, then call you, then email you—but if you don’t acknowledge the page, it tries the next person."}
{"prompt":"In the same way that computers are automated to fail over to the next system, the app will fail over to the next human if one of them is down. Yeah. If I sleep through an alarm, our escalation is set up to try my team members first. Then my boss, then my boss’s boss, all the way up to the executives. If all of us sleep through all the alarms, the CEO would get paged. I’ve never seen that happen before, though.","completion":"What has happened is that I’ve been paged for something, didn’t know how to deal with it, and then paged someone else to wake them up to help. How does it feel to do that? I mean, I wish I never had to do that. It sucks, because I know how garbage I feel after I’ve been woken up at that time. But this is actually a place where team culture is important. If someone else wakes me up, I try to respond without resentment and without making somebody feel bad for needing help. We don’t page each other frivolously, but if someone doesn’t know what to do and I’m second in line, it is my job to respond and help that person out. It can create a really toxic culture if you’re like, “Ugh, why did you wake me up for this?” And if somebody stops asking for help, that is a big potential failure scenario. That’s why, when we onboard someone, we really play up the “It’s totally super fine! Don’t worry about it, page me anytime!” They won’t actually page me anytime, but it’s important for them to know that they can if they’re in trouble."}
{"prompt":"The company probably benefits from people being kind and showing up for each other in cases like that. Definitely. I mean, on-call can go lots of ways. What I’m describing, even if I don’t love on-call, is being on a team with people I trust, knowing that I won’t get yelled at or fired for unintentionally doing something that causes damage, and knowing that there’s a genuine spirit of reflection around how to fail better. The thing that motivates me during on-call, much more than fixing the tech, is my teammates. There are things that are beyond our control: there’s a lot of failure on the internet and we don’t pick the days when a critical service goes down. If everyone is always exhausted and grumpy when they show up, that sucks for them and it sucks for me. So, almost always, if someone gets woken up in the middle of the night, another person on the team will offer to take over their shift the next night so they can get a full night’s sleep. Because waking up one night sucks, but waking up two nights in a row? You’re toast.  We also encourage one another to ask for help and to offer help. If we’ve identified something that is really disruptive to each other’s day-to-day lives, we take that seriously and make changes so that that thing doesn’t happen anymore. That matters when you think about the fact that we are on call for holidays and weekends. There’s a lot of motivation for us to make on-call not terrible. So we are caring for infrastructure, but ultimately we’re taking care of each other.","completion":"“Taiwan is a paradise bubble,” my dad told me in March, during my first few days back at my parents’ home. “This is probably one of the safest places in the world right now,” he said. Seeing the rush hour crush on the Taipei metro and children in school uniforms clustering at bus stops after school, all without exhibiting signs of fear or anxiety, I couldn’t agree more."}
{"prompt":"When the pandemic began, I had been in New York. Throughout February and early March, I checked in frequently with my parents in Taiwan. Things are fine here, they said. Meanwhile, the situation in New York was worsening. Cases were beginning to appear, but the government response was hesitant and nebulous. The virus is coming, warned the media. It may already be here.  If it’s already here, I wondered, why aren’t we doing anything about it? Why is everything continuing as normal? The situation felt out of control from the start. My parents urged me to come to Taiwan. On March 14th, 2020, I flew to Taipei on a direct flight.  My parents were right. From what I can tell, apart from masks on every face, life in Taiwan is uninterrupted by the pandemic. Schools, pharmacies, post offices, convenience stores, and parks are all open. Coffee shops, in abundance in Taipei, are full of people. Even the shopping malls are operating at regular capacity. Aside from a handful of attendants stationed at the front entrances, armed with temperature readers and hand sanitizer spray, every store remains open.","completion":"Early on, experts predicted that Taiwan, due to its close proximity to mainland China, would have the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases outside of the mainland. But the predicted wave of infections never materialized. As of late June 2020, Taiwan had reported only 447 known cases and 7 deaths. Compared with worldwide figures, these numbers are shockingly low; by comparison, more than 22,000 have died in New York City alone.  As countries around the world struggle to contain the virus, many observers are looking with great interest at Taiwan’s success. Rarely making international news and typically only in connection with mainland China, Taiwan has lately been held up by journalists and academics as a model for how to manage the pandemic. How did Taiwan, with a population of twenty-three million, eighty-one miles away from mainland China, with over 800,000 citizens working there and frequently traveling back and forth, manage to avoid the public health crisis that is now destabilizing the rest of the world? One part of the answer, I discovered, is a unique mix of technological interventions—some led by the government, others coming from the grassroots—that have helped coordinate the massive mobilization of people and resources required to fight the virus.  Fenced In When I arrived in Taipei, I sailed through the airport. “Where are you coming from?” a health official asked. “New York,” I said. She took a health self-assessment form that I had completed, handed me a slip of paper with instructions for how to monitor my wellbeing, and waved me on. I had expected a more rigorous interrogation.  It turns out I had returned to Taiwan just in time. Had I landed two or three days later, when the authorities raised the United States’s travel advisory from Level 1 to Level 3, my experience would have been radically different. My friend Ting wasn’t so lucky. She arrived later than I did, also traveling from New York. And it was through her experiences that I first began to learn about the role of technology in Taiwan’s pandemic response."}
{"prompt":"By the time Ting left New York, the city had become a viral hot zone. Before she departed, Taiwanese authorities required that she fill out an online health screening form, providing her medical information and, most importantly, an address where she could quarantine in Taiwan. Upon landing, all passengers underwent testing, the results of which were given two days later. There was also a changing area where passengers could change out of their plane clothes. Alcohol was provided for full-body sterilization. Ting passed through immigration and was escorted to a special quarantine taxi, to take her and other travelers to their quarantine locations. She was required to spray herself down with alcohol again before entering the cab.  When she arrived at her apartment, she was called by a local healthcare official (衛生所) assigned to her. They exchanged contacts on LINE, a popular messaging app in Taiwan similar to WhatsApp, to stay in touch. She also had to join a special LINE group, where she was expected to report her temperature and wellbeing twice daily, at 9 a.m. and again at 3 p.m. Soon after, on that same day, a government worker arrived at her door with a bag of supplies. This included garbage bags, extra masks, and some food. She signed some paperwork that stated she would commit to the entire fourteen-day quarantine process without leaving her apartment. If she had not owned a cell phone, the government would have provided one for her.  How would the government know whether Ting kept her quarantine? The authorities use mobile phone location data and cell tower triangulation to draw a “digital fence” boundary around an individual’s home. If you step outside of this zone, or if you turn off your phone, an alert is sent to the police and local health officials. Ting tells me a story of a friend whose phone shut down suddenly while in quarantine. Within a minute, the police knocked on his door.  When I asked Audrey Tang, a former computer programmer and tech entrepreneur who now serves as Taiwan’s first Digital Minister, about the privacy concerns raised by the digital fence, she was quick to point out the ways in which the program differed from surveillance tools used in other countries, such as smartphone apps or physical bracelets. Tang believes the Taiwanese approach is far less harmful. “First, it’s not GPS,” she says. “We are not asking you to install an app that reports GPS.” The level of location specificity provided by such information would be unnecessary for enforcing home quarantines, she explained.","completion":"Moreover, telecommunication companies are already collecting the data being used to construct the digital fence. “This is not new information being collected,” Tang emphasized. The emergency warning broadcasting system, which sends texts about flash floods or earthquakes, relies on the same data. “Instead of collecting new data or requiring you to install a new app,” Tang said, “we repurpose existing data and existing notification mechanisms.” Most importantly, the program is sharply circumscribed: the data is only used to implement the home quarantines, Tang insisted, and nothing else.  Fork the Government Technological solutions have not only come from the top down, however. They have also come from the bottom up. This is due in large part to Taiwan’s uniquely robust civic technology community, known locally as g0v (pronounced “gov zero”). In its current form, g0v grew out of the Sunflower Movement in 2014, a student-led protest sparked by concerns that a trade pact with mainland China would give Beijing more influence over Taiwan. But protesters also demanded more transparency and accountability from the Taiwanese government—demands that were taken up by the g0v movement."}
{"prompt":"Using the language of open-source programming communities, g0v claims that its goal is to “fork the government.” Digital Minister Audrey Tang, who is herself a veteran of the Sunflower Movement and a longtime contributor to g0v, explained the concept to me. Essentially, it means that g0v hackers produce alternative versions of government websites. “For each government website—which always ends in ‘gov.tw’—that they don’t like, they just change the ‘O’ to a ‘0’” in the domain name and create their own, Tang said. In the process, the g0v community has implemented a wide range of digital tools designed to increase popular participation in policymaking, from online platforms for circulating petitions to data visualization dashboards that help citizens understand how budgets are allocated.","completion":"When the pandemic began, g0v responded creatively, using its “fork the government” model to help the authorities contain the virus. Perhaps the best known example is the collection of digital tools—apps, maps, chatbots—that g0v hackers created to make it easier for the public to buy masks through the government’s mask-distribution system."}
{"prompt":"Due to its previous experience with SARS, also a coronavirus, the Taiwanese government recognized early on the importance of mask-wearing to reduce the spread of COVID-19. The speed with which the government reacted most likely prevented a more serious outbreak in Taiwan. Taiwan reported its first case on January 21st: a woman traveling back to Taiwan from Wuhan. The next day, the government banned all Wuhan residents from entering Taiwan, the day before Wuhan went into lockdown.  Although the government made assurances to the public later that week about a sufficient supply of surgical masks, fear of future shortages led the government to halt exports of masks on January 24th. To control the mask supply, the government also decided to implement a mask distribution system, while working with local mask manufacturers to ramp up production.  Masks were initially sold in convenience stores. With over 10,000 convenience stores on the island, Taiwan has one of the world’s highest ratio of convenience stores to population. Convenience stores in Taiwan provide services beyond what American convenience stores offer. You can pay your phone, electric, and utility bills; your taxes; and even your parking tickets there. You can buy everything from disposable underwear to towels to books to train and concert tickets. It even functions as a post office. Similar to Amazon Lockers, online packages can be delivered to any 7-Eleven or FamilyMart for pickup.","completion":"Convenience stores, then, were an obvious choice to serve as mask distribution hubs. However, it soon became apparent that the stores did not have a means of verifying people’s identity via their National Health Insurance (NHI) card to approve mask purchases, without violating personal privacy by collecting this data themselves. Eventually, a card scanning system was introduced to bypass data collection. But these challenges pushed the government to switch to selling masks from pharmacies, which are already connected to the NHI database. This allowed people to maintain their privacy and gave the government the ability to monitor the rationing of masks."}
{"prompt":"Mask rationing had been put into place on February 6th, within a week of the government launching the mask distribution system. To prevent hoarding, every Taiwanese adult with a NHI card was limited to purchasing two masks per week. To reduce congestion and long lines, the ability to purchase masks was also systematized. The last digit of your NHI card ID number indicated on which days you could purchase your masks. ID numbers ending with an odd number could purchase them on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; even numbers on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Sundays were open to everyone.  The government also worked to keep prices low, threatening to fine sellers that were inflating prices up to $50 million TWD (a little over $1.5 million USD). These moves were designed to ensure that every citizen would have the opportunity to purchase a sufficient number of masks for daily use at an affordable rate.","completion":"Despite these measures, however, the early days of the mask distribution system were plagued with problems. In February, when the system was still in its infancy, masks were selling out fast and the public was having a hard time finding them. There were frequent stories of people waiting in long lines to purchase masks, only to have the pharmacy run out when they got to the front. There was no immediate way of verifying whether the pharmacy you went to had enough masks until you physically arrived on location."}
{"prompt":"In response, g0v hackers came up with a solution. The idea first originated in the g0v Slack channel: a digital map that would visualize the quantities of masks available in different pharmacies. Howard Wu, a programmer and member of g0v, noticed that many of his family and friends were sharing information in LINE groups about which convenience stores still had masks in stock, back when convenience stores were the primary places to buy masks. He built a real-time “Mask Map” which relied on crowdsourced data to display mask stock levels in different stores. Users’ geolocation data would help them find nearby stores. Since there weren’t any existing comprehensive GIS datasets of convenience stores in Taiwan, Wu used Google Maps to obtain this data. Wu’s site had roughly 550,000 visits within the first six hours.  But relying on crowdsourced data wasn’t accurate enough. Digital Minister Audrey Tang showed Wu’s work to Taiwan’s Prime Minister, who immediately understood its usefulness. The government recognized that it could improve the accuracy of such civic digital tools by providing more up-to-date data. On February 4th, two days after Wu released his digital map, the government announced the switch to selling masks from pharmacies. In a coordinated effort with Tang, the Ministry of Health and Welfare released mask inventory data at pharmacies nationwide that was updated every thirty seconds.  Wu created another version of his site with the new data—and received 830,000 hits on the first day. Soon after, using the API that Wu had built for his map, g0v hackers created dozens more digital tools to help track mask availability, from more maps to smartphone apps to LINE chatbots. A government website now lists over 130 digital products for tracking mask inventories in Taiwan, all built by civic technologists.","completion":"The maps and apps have not only served as useful tools for people trying to purchase masks, however. The government has also relied on these tools to improve its own distribution supply chain. Officials have been able to track the fluctuating numbers in different cities and provinces, which they can use to adjust mask shipments in real time. This reciprocity between the government and the grassroots technologist community has greatly benefited both parties, and Taiwan as a whole. It also stands in sharp contrast to the top-down approach of mainland China, where technological interventions to contain the virus have taken a far more authoritarian form.  Care Works There is no doubt that initiatives like the digital fence program and the g0v mask maps have contributed to Taiwan’s effective management of the pandemic. As mechanisms to help coordinate the allocation of people and resources, these digital tools have proven invaluable. But the more I read, observed, and talked to the people around me, the more persuaded I became that technology had more of a supporting role in Taiwan’s success."}
{"prompt":"When I ask my friends and family what Taiwan did right, they rarely mention technology. Instead, they talk about the soothing ritual of tuning in every afternoon to the Taiwanese CDC’s daily press conferences, which are led by doctors, epidemiologists, academics, and public health experts rather than politicians. They talk about the government’s decision to give journalists unlimited time to ask questions, and how this has resulted in more accurate media coverage, less disinformation, and greater public trust in the information being conveyed by the authorities. They also talk about the CDC’s toll-free hotline, where you can call and talk with a person about anything related to the virus. One friend of mine, worried she had contracted COVID-19, called the hotline multiple times. She described to me how comforted she felt being able to talk to someone who could ease her fears.","completion":"In part, the Taiwanese government’s multi-faceted communications strategy reflects an attempt to make up for past mistakes. The government’s mishandling of the SARS epidemic in 2003, which had a lower case count but a higher death rate than COVID-19, severely undermined public trust at the time. Unaware of the highly infectious nature of SARS, one woman’s visit to an emergency room set off a chain of transmission that spiraled out of control. In a desperate attempt to contain the virus, the government sealed off Hoping Hospital, with more than 1,000 people, infected and uninfected, locked inside. The inhumaneness of the approach shocked Taiwanese citizens. Twu Shiing-jer, Taiwan’s Minister of the Department of Health, resigned in the aftermath.  Post-SARS, Taiwan immediately began planning for the next health crisis. It could not afford to be caught off-guard again—especially since it had been clear during the SARS epidemic that Taiwan would have little to no direct communication with the World Health Organization, because it is not a member. Taiwan is isolated, and on its own. This realization may have proven decisive in its pandemic response, as Taiwan was one of the earliest countries to sound the alarm on COVID-19 and begin monitoring the virus."}
{"prompt":"Above all, when I talk to Taiwanese people about what Taiwan did right, they talk about healthcare. In particular, they praise Taiwan’s single-payer healthcare system. Almost 99 percent of Taiwanese citizens and residents are covered by Taiwan’s national health insurance program. (The 1 percent, the government believes, consists of Taiwanese citizens residing outside the country.) When coverage hovered around 96 percent, the government made a concerted effort to track down the remaining 4 percent—composed primarily of Indigenous Taiwanese, the unemployed, the homeless, and orphaned children—to get them enrolled. Households below the poverty line receive free coverage. Essentially, no one is denied healthcare in Taiwan.","completion":"With 99 percent of the population insured under one system, a centralized medical database made it possible for the government to rapidly implement its mask-rationing system. It also made performing contact tracing easier, as well as tracking community-based transmission. More importantly, universal health coverage means people aren’t afraid of being denied medical treatment or going bankrupt from medical bills. The government encourages citizens to report even mild symptoms, which enables the authorities to detect infection earlier.  Ultimately, Taiwan’s success in containing COVID-19 has less to do with technology than with well-functioning state institutions that acted quickly and collectively. As a Taiwanese friend described it, the government’s approach has resembled crossing a river. You inch forward step by step, feeling your way across and making decisions as you go. Along with this experimental, adaptable spirit, the government’s focus on transparency and building public trust, paired with an excellent universal healthcare system, are the real strengths of the Taiwan model. Technology, while useful, cannot make up for the absence of strong public structures of care. In the United States, where the fight for universal healthcare is still an uphill battle, care is a luxury good with multiple prerequisites—employment, wealth, geography. In Taiwan, care is a basic human right that everyone receives equally."}
{"prompt":"In early 2017, an investigative journalist uncovered a private Facebook group called Marines United, where hundreds of veterans and active-duty marines were circulating nude or invasive photos of military servicewomen without their knowledge. “Dozens of now-deleted Google Drive folders linked from the Facebook page included dossiers of women containing their names, military branches, nude photographs, screenshots of their social media accounts and images of sexual acts,” the journalist, Thomas Brennan, later wrote for the news site Reveal.  The Marines United scandal stood out for the coordinated nature and scale of the abuse, but it was only one egregious example of how toxic social media platforms have become. According to a study by the Pew Research Center in 2017, 41 percent of Americans have personally been subject to abusive behavior online, and one in five have been the targets of particularly severe forms such as sexual harassment, stalking, revenge porn, physical threats, and sustained harassment over time. Those who experience online harassment suffer from mental or emotional stress or even fear for their personal safety, and the stakes are particularly high for young internet users: other studies have found a significant association between cyberbullying and depression, self-harm, and suicidal ideation in people aged 12–18.  Following the Marines United revelations, Facebook quickly shut down the private group, but similar ones immediately began cropping up on the platform. Most major social media platforms ban sexually explicit photos, particularly those flagged as non-consensual, so if a victim sees the content they can report it. But this doesn’t keep the images from being shared on private groups where they are less likely to be reported. As a result of mounting pressure from advocacy groups for victims of sexual assault, Facebook promised to take a more active role in addressing such harassment.  The result, which Facebook began rolling out in April 2017, and which now includes partnerships with nine organizations across eight countries, is one of the most proactive efforts by any of the social media companies to address online abuse. And yet, despite the amount of time and money that Facebook has spent on the program, the whole thing is ultimately doomed to fail. It’s a revealing failure, though, because it points to fundamental limitations in the way that social media companies think about—and have encouraged the rest of us to think about—the problem of online harm.","completion":"The Narrowsight Board Facebook’s process for addressing revenge porn and other non-consensual sexual images requires victims to upload their images to the company, where a “specially trained” employee reviews the image and then creates a digital fingerprint of it. This allows image-matching software to detect if the same photo appears elsewhere on the site or is later uploaded again. This can potentially help some victims, but it has major shortcomings. It assumes that the victim has access to the non-consensual image, and it requires that the victim trust Facebook with extremely sensitive content. The image-matching software is also remarkably easy to fool; slight alterations to an image, such as changing the background, have been shown to elude the technology.  More importantly, the technology takes control away from the victim by assuming that deleting the images automatically is all that a victim wants. The victim never learns whether anyone else has tried to upload the images and has no proof for further action. Platforms even routinely ignore “preservation letters” from lawyers of victims of revenge porn, and delete crucial evidence.  At the most basic level, Facebook’s process, like other attempts to address online harm, suffers not from faulty algorithms, but from a crucial misrepresentation of the problem. Social media companies have construed a wide range of online harms as essentially problems of content (violating photos, violent or threatening posts, Nazi symbolism). As a result of this framing, the solution to online harm has largely been presented by these companies as “content moderation”: removing posts that a platform deems against the rules or toxic, and occasionally banning the user who posted the content.  Social media companies have a strong incentive to adopt the content moderation framework, which was originally developed to minimize spam, and all of the large social media companies moderate content to some extent. That’s because the quality of their platforms would spiral downward if they didn’t. Imagine logging into Facebook and seeing an unabated stream of violent images and junk messages—you probably wouldn’t want to log in again. Most advertisers don’t want their ads to show up next to such content either. A decline in user engagement and ad sales is bad for a social media company’s bottom line, and removing potentially offensive content is the cheapest way to ensure that doesn’t happen."}
{"prompt":"But although it might maximize profits, this way of thinking about online harassment is almost entirely unable to address the harm that harassment causes. It assumes that the problem is individual pieces of harmful content that must be moderated—not people and their relationships. As a result, content moderation fails to serve the needs of those who are harmed online or to change the conditions that make such harm possible.","completion":"Once the problem of online harm is framed as content moderation, it is already a lost cause for victims. Inevitably, platforms claim that the sheer amount of content makes it impossible to monitor. This is true, but it conveniently leaves out the fact that every single decision made by platforms prioritizes scale, and platforms generally avoid taking actions that might reduce user engagement. At the same time, as the scholar Sarah T. Roberts has detailed, they strive to minimize costs, especially for things like human moderators."}
{"prompt":"If platforms accept that something needs to be done about online harm, but frame the problem as needing simply to detect and remove content that breaks platform rules, the logical next step becomes automating this process. When Mark Zuckerberg was questioned by Congress in 2018, he mentioned “artificial intelligence” more than thirty times, framing it as “the scalable way to identify and root out most of this harmful content.”  Many experts disagree that AI will ever be able to apply content moderation rules effectively by itself. Even if it could, abusers quickly adapt to automatically enforced content moderation rules, for instance by editing non-consensual sexual images to bypass AI detection, creating fake porn videos of victims using deepfake techniques, or by coordinating attacks and using memes to mask their intent. What the vague promise of a forthcoming technological solution has been effective at doing is dampening calls for greater regulation of social media platforms.","completion":"The content moderation framework also severely limits our collective ability to push back against the way social media companies deal with harm on their platforms. Most platforms have no mechanism for contesting moderation decisions. In response to pressure from users and lawmakers, Facebook recently created an oversight board for content moderation, but because the problem itself is so narrowly defined, so is the solution. The oversight board can only review individual pieces of content, and only if the author of the content objects to their removal from the platform. This means that the oversight board has no influence over what content is allowed, how private groups are governed, or what the platform’s algorithms promote. Nor can it do anything to support people who have already been victims of harassment."}
{"prompt":"In order to do that, we need to think differently about the problem of online harm. Over the past two years I have been working with collaborators in communications, information studies, and computer science to imagine alternatives to the content moderation model. Our greatest resource has been abolitionist traditions that have challenged the criminal justice system for dealing with offline harm, and which have been extremely influential in shifting public perceptions of policing in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd.  In particular, those rallying to abolish prisons have developed models of restorative and transformative justice that can expand our imaginations of what can be done to address harm more generally. In listening to members of online communities, my research group has found that what is needed is not more sophisticated ways to identify and remove offending content—just as we don’t need better ways of policing and imprisoning people—but ways of supporting survivors and transforming the societies in which harm happens, including our online social worlds.","completion":"Obligation and Restoration Practices of restorative justice, which have their roots in Indigenous ways of repairing harm, are particularly useful to rethinking how we address online harm.  Restorative justice views harm not as a crime against the rules of the state, but as a violation of people and their interpersonal relationships. Violations create obligations, and the central obligation of restorative justice is to right the wrong. At minimum, restorative justice requires that we address the victim’s needs related to the harm; hold offenders accountable to right those wrongs; and involve victims, offenders, and communities in this process.  The primary tool of restorative justice is communication, and practitioners have developed structured modes of communication to take people through a process of reckoning with and repairing harm as much as possible. Although restorative justice has to be adapted to different communities and circumstances, its principles have been successfully codified into processes and formal training and embedded in churches, workplaces, and neighborhoods. In Oakland schools that have implemented restorative justice, students feel more respected by and connected to their peers, and detention rates have fallen to zero."}
{"prompt":"What would an approach to online harm grounded in restorative justice look like? My research group has conducted extensive interviews with restorative justice practitioners, as well as with the moderators of online communities on platforms such as Reddit and Discord. As part of this work, we practiced speculative design: giving participants real-world scenarios of online harm and asking them to discuss the ways that those harms might be addressed, including assessing which scenarios that were most likely to happen, most desirable, and most unexpected. Here is a basic table contrasting the kinds of questions that would be asked when using a content moderation framework versus one based on restorative justice: Content moderation What content has been reported? Is the content against the rules? Should the content be removed, demoted, flagged, or ignored? Restorative justice Who has been hurt? What are their needs? Whose obligation is it to meet those needs?  For example, in the case of non-consensual sexual images like the ones shared in the Marines United scandal, a restorative justice process might begin with the following questions:  Who has been hurt? The person whose private, intimate photos were shared without their consent. What are their needs? Victims have a diverse range of needs, including: protection, if they are in immediate danger; validation; and contextual information (Are they being stalked? Have the images been shared? Where?). While “blocking” is often presented to victims as a way to deal with abusers, in practice many victims seek to actively monitor their abuser so that they are not caught off-guard. Some victims want the harm to be acknowledged by the person who committed it, or by the community. Many victims want the harm not to happen again, to themselves or anyone else. Whose obligation is it to meet those needs? The obligations mentioned above fall to many people: the person who committed the harm, the wider community of people who know and care about these people, and the platform that provided the space for the harm to occur.","completion":"While the obligations of the person who committed the harm and of the wider community have been extensively discussed by restorative justice researchers and practitioners, the obligations of platforms are new and unique to online harm, and deserve special attention. Each case is different, and should be addressed individually and with care, but here are several possible approaches, which may need to be combined: Assign a trained caseworker. In the most extreme cases of harm, such as sharing non-consensual sexual images, trained caseworkers should be assigned to the case. Facebook currently assigns a “partner” to someone who seeks to report revenge porn, but their role is only to instruct the person on how to upload their images to Facebook. Instead, the case worker should support the victim, provide validation, share information on their options, and help them identify and activate a community of people that cares for them and can be involved in the restorative justice process.Be trauma-aware. Current methods of addressing online harm, including Facebook’s revenge porn process, are detached from the reality of being a victim of sexual harm. For instance, sharing private, intimate photos with unknown Facebook employees can retraumatize the victim. An alternative could be giving victims the tools to create a digital fingerprint of the image themselves with the help of trained outside support groups, who could verify and share the symbolic identifier with Facebook without sharing the actual photos.Support the harmer to take accountability. With the victim’s consent, their case worker may reach out to the offender, have a conversation about the harm, and gather and provide information. At present, Facebook deletes the photo or prevents it from getting uploaded, and in some cases they ban the offender with little explanation. This actively discourages responsibility on the part of the offender. But offenders need to be encouraged to understand the harm and to work towards repairing it. That might mean apologizing and working to not repeat the harm, becoming educated about the broader effects of the harm, or paying reparations for harms done in the past.Stop the continuation of the harm. This may mean placing limitations on posting, or even removing the person who has committed harm from the platform. This does not mean that anyone who commits harm should be immediately banned forever, but does mean that removal from the space is a valid and possible consequence of harm. Removal should be done with care so that it is not simply a punitive response but is actually necessary to stop the harm and is done with explanations and an opportunity to engage with the process.Create structures for continued accountability. Platforms should make addressing harm a priority before it occurs. This can mean setting expectations that sexual harm will not be tolerated when members join, and periodically reminding them as well as explaining what accountability protocols exist to address harm. It can also mean training and supporting users to intervene in sexual violence. Facebook Groups currently rely on admins from the group to moderate it; the platform could mandate that groups above a certain size conduct a yearly review of their protocols for dealing with sexual harm, and this could include designating at least two point people to whom such issues should be reported and a process for addressing incidents."}
{"prompt":"Communities of Care Restorative justice approaches to online harm require resources, time, training, and labor. Each harm case—from Donald Trump threatening violence against protesters to trolls sending journalists violent memes—will be unique and require a creative response. It’s a revolutionary idea that victims of harm, who are often people with the least power in society, should be cared for, and we cannot expect today’s large social media companies to commit the resources necessary to do this of their own accord. But we can pressure them to, and we can create alternative platforms that do.","completion":"The project of content moderation is costly, complicated, and controversial. To move beyond it, platforms need to spend considerably more resources to hire experts who are trained in restorative justice, trauma response, community accountability, and anti-racism. They would also need to help fund outside organizations such as victim support groups. This would mean lower profit margins; it would also mean adapting protocols to different cultures and geographical regions.  All of this would be difficult and expensive to achieve at the scale of current platforms, which is an argument for breaking those platforms down into smaller online communities governed by the users themselves. If companies whose main activity is to host user-generated content can’t effectively address harm on their platforms, maybe they shouldn’t have such high profit margins—or maybe they shouldn’t exist at all."}
{"prompt":"My research group has begun to practice some aspects of restorative justice in online communities in coordination with the moderators of those communities. Pre-conferencing, which involves one-on-one conversation between the mediator and different people involved in the harm, is often the first step of a restorative process. In order to get a deeper understanding of the types of harm that happen, the needs of those who are harmed, and what potential next steps could look like, we are currently conducting pre-conferencing interviews with people who have been harmed in online gaming communities, those who have been banned from certain games, and moderators.","completion":"In building a just future we cannot however rely solely on the intervention of platforms, or on restoring justice one harm at a time. Even as we work towards restoring justice right now, our long-term aim must be to transform the societies in which harm occurs. This is the work of transformative justice, which was popularized by women and trans people of color as a way to address interpersonal violence and tie it to structural and systemic forms of violence. As the organizer and educator Mariame Kaba puts it: “I am actively working towards abolition, which means that I am trying to create the necessary conditions to ensure the possibility of a world without prisons.” The future we should be working toward is one in which every single person has the skills to identify harm, hold themselves and others accountable, and work towards justice. At the same time, we must transform the social conditions, including patriarchy and racism, in which harm thrives. This kind of work leads us to fundamentally transform our relationships with one another, and it cannot be scaled or outsourced. When building a future that addresses online harm we should not seek mere alternatives to content moderation; we should work towards a world where no content moderation is needed."}
{"prompt":"One morning this June, I sat in my car at the drive-through of a local pharmacy, waiting for a COVID-19 test. Speaking through an intercom, a woman wearing a mask walked me through the process of administering the test on myself: where I could find the cotton swabs, how to open the vial of preserving saline, how to properly swab my nose, including the fifteen-second countdown for each nostril. She explained where there was an additional wipe for my protection when opening the biohazard bin in which I placed my sample, as well as how to wipe to protect others.","completion":"The woman administering all of this care was among the legions of specially trained frontline health workers needed to help manage the coronavirus crisis in the United States, under a dire lack of federal coordination and guidance. In the early stages of the pandemic, nurses around the country struggled to train enough people to provide care, especially after officials closed schools and other usual educational avenues. Technology, however, seemed to provide a ready solution: the National Council of State Boards of Nursing and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing, among others, recommended using computer simulations and online learning platforms to upskill the nation’s healthcare workers."}
{"prompt":"This turn to technological solutions for training caregivers in the face of an inadequate healthcare system is nothing new. At least since the early 1960s, when the country faced a shortage of trained nurses, computer-based education has been touted as an efficient and cost-effective way to patch holes in the nation’s disastrous healthcare infrastructure. Then, as now, the rhetoric of urgency has been paired with the logic of cost savings to make online learning and computer simulations seem indispensable.","completion":"But computerized medical education has inevitably represented complex patients through grossly simplified models. Because you can’t fit the diversity of human health experience into a software program, this education has always been oriented around notions of so-called “normal” or “typical” patients. In reality, these “typical” patients turn out to be composites of the sorts of people who hold power in society, particularly well-off white men. As a result, computerized medical education has helped to perpetuate the structural racism and sexism that has long pervaded the medical establishment, as well as our wider society.  Working under the promise that a computer could “dispense information just as effectively, sometimes moreso, than a human instructor,” students in Illinois in the 1960s began the very first experiment in computerized medical education, learning nursing fundamentals on one of the world’s earliest computer networks. Looking back to those students and their computer-based courses demonstrates what is often overlooked, and even dangerous, with techno-care, and why that matters more than ever in our algorithmic age."}
{"prompt":"Crushing Substernal Pain In the early 1960s, Maryann Bitzer was pursuing her master’s degree in educational psychology at the flagship campus of the University of Illinois. The university also employed her husband, Donald, who was using his engineering doctorate to investigate whether computers could be used effectively for education. Throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s, Donald led a team of researchers, including Maryann, in developing a computer network known as PLATO, Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations. PLATO comprised individual user terminals connected to a mainframe computer and, through the mainframe, to each other. The network went through several evolutions, and by the mid-1970s it included nearly 1,000 terminals around the United States, each with a flat-panel plasma touch screen, with applications including games, instant messaging, screen sharing, and email.","completion":"In a decision that ultimately benefited both of them, Maryann focused her master’s thesis on how computer-based education could work in nursing. She cited two motives for her study: a dearth of trained nursing instructors across the country, and the tremendous educational value for nursing students of working with “actual” patients. Using one of the early iterations of PLATO, which employed custom keysets and television-like cathode-ray tube screens, Maryann developed a course on treating heart attack patients. Then she delivered it to first-year nursing students at the university-associated Mercy Hospital. The course imaginatively integrated several components, immersing students in what sometimes seemed, behind the gloss of the new technology, like an actual experience of care."}
{"prompt":"First, the trainee nurse watched a short live-action film on the PLATO screen that depicted a doctor interacting with a patient, a middle-aged man. It was a clever way to present what Maryann described as “the patient’s socio-economic background, his present family situation, and his outlook on life [and] the patient’s past medical history and treatments.” Then, partway through the conversation with his doctor, the man grabbed his chest and was rushed to the hospital.","completion":"After this sudden turn, the terminal presented a series of screens that provided the trainee with fundamental information about different diagnostic tests and treatment courses. Then the nurse entered an extended simulation in which she could use the PLATO keyboard to select from a limited menu of options to test out various interventions on the virtual patient and see the results. For example, after administering oxygen or nitroglycerin to her virtual patient, the nursing student could ask the computer to report her patient’s pulse, temperature, blood pressure, electrocardiogram, or other test results. The nursing student could also consult a screen displaying clinical norms, such as the normal blood pressure range, to gauge the effects that her care was having on the patient.  It was a potentially engrossing but also highly circumscribed experience. The scenarios and results of the simulation were limited by the minimal level of complexity that could reasonably be programmed into the computer, especially given the fact that it took roughly forty hours of programming to create just twenty minutes of instruction. The film was designed so that each student could picture a particular living, breathing individual patient for whom they were caring as they worked through the simulation and its twenty-eight questions. But that single patient—a composite of several “typical” case studies—was the sole basis for how the computer was programmed to respond to the nurse’s therapeutic interventions.  This focus on a so-called typical patient—a middle-aged man—both reflected and reinforced the prejudices of contemporary medical practice. A quarter century of research, beginning in the mid-1990s, has shown that heart attack symptoms manifest differently for women than men. For a long time, however, doctors and nurses and PLATO programs did not know how to recognize and diagnose heart attacks in women. For example, Maryann’s course described its virtual patient as having “crushing” substernal pain. But women are much more likely to experience symptoms unrelated to chest pain. If they do experience chest pain, they more often describe it as discomfort or pressure. (Despite our advances in knowledge, women are still 50–60 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack.) Maryann’s course was blind to this clinical reality, and as she went on to expand her PLATO-based nurse training, she helped to inculcate this bias, and others like it, in a new generation of nurses."}
{"prompt":"Virtual Mrs. Dodd Maryann’s experiment with techno-care occurred against the background of significant national investments in nursing. In 1960, the US Public Health Service created a new Division of Nursing tasked with improving patient care, increasing the number of nurses, and ensuring better nursing education. In 1963, the Surgeon General’s office published the report Toward Quality in Nursing which identified, among other problems, too few nursing educators, too few new nursing students, and an inadequate nursing education system. Maryann realized her experimental nursing course could be positioned as an efficient technological solution to these problems, training nurses faster and more cheaply than traditional nursing courses. In 1964, Congress enacted the far-reaching Nurse Training Act, designating the substantial sum of $283 million (approximately $2.3 billion in 2020 dollars) over five years to nursing education. The Nurse Training Act funded the expansion of Maryann’s PLATO project to develop a complete course on maternity nursing and a series of lessons on pharmacology.  The reliance on a single “typical” patient continued. The maternity nursing course focused on the virtual Mrs. Dodd, a secretary. Its twenty-two lessons “emphasized the normal, and presented problems which required knowledge of the normal as a basis for recognition of and action concerning the abnormal.” Students learned that “Mrs. Dodd suffers from many of the common discomforts of pregnancy,” including nausea and swollen feet. And just as it was with the “typical” heart attack patient, the way “normal” Mrs. Dodd responded to therapeutic care was contingent on how PLATO had been programmed.","completion":"That programming was based on the standard of care for pregnancy in the 1960s, which was developed for, and applied to, white women—a bias that reinforced the invisibility of Black women to the medical establishment. (At many hospitals, including Mercy, the nurses, too, were overwhelmingly white; according to an archive at the University of Illinois, among the hospital’s hundreds of graduates until it closed in 1970, there were only ever six Black students.) For example, in the PLATO course, nurses monitored virtual Mrs. Dodd throughout all three trimesters of her pregnancy, as well as labor and delivery. But many Black women, then and now, lack sufficient access to and insurance coverage for complete prenatal and postnatal care; nurses exclusively trained to care for patients like Mrs. Dodd are poorly prepared to care for these women. Indeed, in the past few years, prominent Black women including writer and scholar Tressie McMillan Cottom and tennis superstar Serena Williams have called attention to how they and other Black women are dangerously mistreated during pregnancy, labor, and delivery. As Cottom recently wrote in Time: “In the wealthiest nation in the world, black women are dying in childbirth at rates comparable to those in poorer, colonized nations.” Though severely limited, Maryann’s nursing course was nevertheless a success—in part because it reflected the limitations of the surrounding medical establishment. All of the students who completed the PLATO maternity nursing course later passed the Obstetric Nursing portion of the Illinois State Board examinations; the biases encoded in Mrs. Dodd were the same ones written into the exam. During the remainder of the 1960s, hundreds of students at Mercy Hospital School of Nursing and nearby Parkland Community College completed PLATO nursing lessons, thus inscribing the biases into their own care."}
{"prompt":"The Other Pandemic In 1970, to commemorate its seventieth anniversary, the American Journal of Nursing invited prominent researchers to reflect on “Nursing in the Decade Ahead.” Under the title “Computers Have Entered Our Lives,” Maryann declared, “All indications are that computers are likely to play an integral part in assisting members of the health professions to provide comprehensive health care to people.” She has since been heralded as the influential figure who introduced simulations and computer-based courses to nursing education, where they are now widespread.  But the types of sexism and racism subtly enacted on PLATO’s small screens through Maryann’s nursing courses also continues to pervade computerized medical education—even in the midst of a pandemic that is disproportionately killing Black people. In early April, the healthcare staffing provider IntelyCare reported that over 37,000 nursing professionals had completed its COVID-19 online training, and another 310 healthcare facilities enrolled their staff in the course. When I took the course in early July, I discovered that every single patient and healthcare provider in it is white. Similarly, the online training assembled by the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses, which echoes Bitzer’s heart attack course on many levels, has four units that each begin by immersing students in a critical healthcare situation with a “real” patient, all of whom appear to be white.  The exception that proves the rule is a webinar from the American Nurses Association titled “How You Can Have a Direct Impact on Reducing the Devastating Racial Disparities of COVID-19,” which presents the case study of a forty-five-year-old Black man. Released in June amid protests over police brutality and the police murder of Black people, including George Floyd, it is the only online COVID-19 training I’ve seen that even begins to address American healthcare’s deeply ingrained racism.","completion":"These virtual trainings are telling instances of the larger systems of racism and sexism that are shaping the country’s response to the pandemic. Black people are dying from COVID-19 at a rate at least six times higher than white people. There is a multiplicity of overlapping and mutually amplifying reasons for this: the doubt with which many healthcare workers treat Black people when they report symptoms; the overall poor quality of care that Black people receive; the cumulative damage of environmental pollution that disproporationaly impacts Black communities; the precarious place that many Black people occupy in our racist economy, especially in the poorly paid jobs that we now deem “essential”; the daily stress of enduring racialized discrimination and violence. As a sign carried by Dr. Jasmine Johnson, who studies maternal-fetal medicine, declared at a Black Lives Matter protest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in June, “Racism is a pandemic, too.” Computerized medical education could be used to highlight and challenge this pandemic of racism, but only if institutions and society are willing to attend more closely to the specific needs of women and Black, brown, and Indigenous people; devote the resources necessary to creating courses that reflect the diversity of human experience; and overturn the centuries of economic exploitation that leave Black people at the bottom of America’s caste system.  Ultimately, though, no computer program can sufficiently capture the extraordinary range of individual human medical experience, so we also need to invest in the sorts of hands-on medical education that doesn’t seem efficient or cost-effective to policymakers and hospital administrators operating under the perverse logic of austerity. And as long as the medical establishment and medical knowledge remain hostile to the experiences of women, Black people, and other members of BIPOC communities, then no form of medical education can escape these sorts of biases.  Of course, this is true beyond medical education as well. The dramatic rise of online courses—not just in healthcare but across higher education—raises questions that were as relevant in the 1960s as they are today: What are we teaching? Who are we teaching? For whose benefit? For what larger public good?"}
{"prompt":"At the university-based outpatient practice where I work as a gastroenterologist, my office overlooks the construction site of a huge new hospital that is slated to open in the summer of 2021. Since taking this job three years ago, I’ve watched the project develop from its steel skeleton to its curving facade, a layer cake of plate glass and copper panels. The aesthetic matches the streamlined, futuristic style of academic megahospitals from Texas to Tokyo, casting the building as a technology that’s every bit as cutting-edge as the microsurgical robots and cancer immunotherapies it’s designed to house. At seventeen stories high and a price tag of $1.5 billion, it’s a tower among towers (including the one where my office sits on the seventh floor), adding to an already imposing skyline of healthcare buildings near the center of Philadelphia, just west of the Schuylkill River.  The new hospital is also visible from two vinyl tents, each slightly smaller than a double-wide trailer, that were recently set up in front of my current hospital’s emergency room in the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a few dozen fellow doctors, nurses, and medical assistants, I was redeployed there for several weeks in April to test and triage patients walking in with flu-like symptoms—coughing, short of breath, but not quite sick enough to merit a hospital bed. As far as tents go, ours were pretty nice: we had Wi-Fi, some bleach-proof laptops, and sinks connected to hot water hoses that were slung like vines across the sidewalk. We also had carts that were implausibly well stocked with gloves, goggles, masks, and nasopharyngeal swabs. I was grateful for those carts, having heard terrible stories of healthcare workers dying for lack of basic supplies at the loftiest medical institutions of nearby New York City. So long as I was wrapped in the appropriate protective equipment, I was content to sit in a folding chair with rainwater pooling at the edges of our makeshift clinic.","completion":"But I was also struck by the juxtaposition between the looming megahospital, glinting in the sun like a freshly landed spaceship, and the humble tents below. It evoked an abiding paradox of modern medical care. Contemporary hospitals are like great machines: each discipline exists in its own silo, outfitted with its own technologies and specialized knowledge, often connected to other disciplines only by confusing networks of elevators, corridors, primary care physicians, and a vast, computerized bureaucracy. The proton-beam radiation equipment used to treat prostate cancer patients in the basement is far removed from the specially-trained neurology nurses working with brain-damaged patients on the floors above, but they meet in the electronic medical record, with its templated notes and billing codes. Critics have long pointed out that the enormity and complexity of this infrastructure, which is designed to literally and metaphorically convey biomedicine’s healing power, frequently leaves patients feeling lost, even spiritually deadened.  The current pandemic adds another wrinkle to that longstanding contradiction. In the face of a widespread threat to our wellbeing, the megahospital hasn’t risen to the occasion. Past social upheavals, such as postwar modernism and the rise of mass production, helped to fuel major evolutions in hospital design. Looking out from my office window at the massive structure taking shape by the river, I wondered whether, after COVID-19 had laid bare the limitations of contemporary megahospitals, these buildings might be refashioned once again."}
{"prompt":"“It’s All in There” More than a decade ago, as a medical student in Michigan, I began researching the origins of modern hospital design. As a soon-to-be doctor, I was interested in how my university hospital unsettled me. Months and even years into my studies there, I kept coming across new wards, offices, and laboratories. It often seemed to me at the time that miracles of healing and scientific discovery—organs transplanted, inflammatory pathways defined—must be happening around every bend. Some days, though, the hospital’s beige walls depressed me, the monotonous stretch of high-ceilinged corridors gave me vertigo, and the ambient smell of disinfectant turned my stomach. I wanted to understand how much of this disorientation came from navigating an unfamiliar space and how much was intrinsic to the building itself.","completion":"That megahospital, like the one in Philadelphia where I’ll soon work, had its formal origins at the turn of the twentieth century. Before that time, American hospitals were more modest buildings, staffed by familiar faces from the local community, decorated like middle-class homes, with sash windows and sloping roofs. But the growing acceptance of germ theory, in which common diseases were ascribed to the spread of pathogens, correlated with a shift in hospital design toward blank, unornamented surfaces made of visibly aseptic materials like linoleum and metal.  At roughly the same time, industrial capitalism’s obsession with efficiency was exported from the factory floor to other domains, including medicine. Interest in scientific management led hospital designers to attempt to streamline patient movement in the way a factory was designed to streamline production processes. This move was reinforced by the rise of artistic modernism, which championed the now famous adage that form should follow function.  The predecessor of the Michigan hospital where I started my training was one of the prime examples of medicine’s embrace of the ideals of industrial efficiency. It opened in Ann Arbor in 1925 and was designed by Albert Kahn, an architect better known for planning several of Henry Ford’s automobile factories in nearby Detroit. Kahn drew clear analogies between these two building types, once telling the American Hospital Association that “the same principles underlying the proper functioning of a manufacturing plant apply to the planning of a hospital building.” Hospitals became emblems of progress and were celebrated for their rational forms. “The main purpose of the building is to function as a medical instrument,” said the Finnish architect Alvar Aalto with reference to his Paimio Sanatorium, a 1933 exemplar of modernist hospital design. But the flipside of the hospital’s increasing ability to anatomize patients was its capacity to dehumanize them. At the extreme, an analogy between hospitals and factories suggested an equivalence between sick people and disassembled parts."}
{"prompt":"Both the scientific power and the dehumanizing effects of the hospital have been amplified over the last several decades, as these buildings have increasingly been designed to accommodate new computing technologies. From wall-mounted monitors in every patient room to networked smartphones in the pockets of every white coat, digital interfaces have provided new avenues for clinicians to communicate with patients and each other, accelerating the pace of diagnosis and therapy. But these interfaces also risk further isolating patients, drawing clinicians’ eyes toward screens and away from the person in the bed. More than once, I’ve asked a patient to relate the story of their illness, only to have them point to the nearest computer and tell me wearily, “It’s all in there.” An Emerging Labyrinth I moved to a new state for each phase of my clinical training, spending a few years on one mammoth medical campus before graduating to the next. Though each had its spatial quirks, these tended to follow similar themes. Pavilions of various ages were connected by secret tunnels once used by hospital porters to transport equipment, now used by savvy employees to avoid walking outside in bad weather. Certain unmarked elevators skipped certain unmarked floors unless presented with a privileged ID badge. Wards were decorated with a hodgepodge of faded prints in dusty frames—geometric abstractions, a still life of flowers—apparently much easier to put up than to take down.","completion":"Irrationality emerges alongside obsolescence in hospitals, patchily, with various temporizing efforts made along the way to restore order and relevance. Inpatient units are retrofitted to new infection control guidelines requiring sinks in the hallway; radiology suites are widened to accommodate additional MRI machines. The hospital’s original floor plan is carved up, each territory stewarded by a different lineage of managers, each poised for its own idiosyncratic process of redesign: the secret tunnels’ access doors stay unlocked but have their signs removed; the enlarged radiology suite displaces the radiologists’ workroom to another wing, estranging them still further from the patients whose scans they read. It's maturation of a sort, but also a kind of decay; slowly, monuments to rationality become labyrinths.  New hospitals are built when the obsolescence of old hospitals becomes difficult to ignore, but new hospitals can also become old hospitals rather quickly. In Medical Nemesis, his 1974 polemic against biomedicine, the social critic Ivan Illich describes hospitals as “concrete manifestations of those professional prejudices which were fashionable on the day their cornerstone was laid and which were often outdated when they came into use.” Those prejudices can be as nominal as the flooring selected for intensive care units (which, at the hospital where I completed my residency, were inexplicably carpeted) or as consequential as the total number of intensive care beds available in a given city for patients in simultaneous respiratory failure."}
{"prompt":"All of which is to say that there’s a limit to how nimble hospitals can be in their readiness for the future, despite what their exteriors seem to promise—a point that our collective experience with COVID-19 makes plain. According to its promotional video, my university’s new building was “designed to be ready for technologies decades down the road.” This breathless rhetoric corresponds to fairly basic practices, less anticipatory than agnostic (involving, for example, multipurpose rooms designed with a lot of electrical outlets). And however flexible it may purport to be, much of the new hospital will lie dormant so long as our clinical attention is preoccupied with one particular virus and the comparatively basic technologies—masks, swabs, ventilators—needed to manage it.  Masks in Brown Paper Bags Once the pandemic recedes, where will we cast blame and seek reform? Politicians, wet markets, global supply chains—but probably not the megahospital. Most messaging from the medical-industrial complex, from drug advertisements to corporate hospital slogans, reinforces a belief in scientific progress, the reversibility of physical distress, and the usefulness of technology in both regards. These pre-pandemic ideals of biomedicine seem likely to persist in the post-COVID era, as does our tendency to celebrate them through the usual tropes of megahospital design. But these buildings’ failure to prevent a great deal of death has tinged their formidable architecture with irony, and I wonder whether there are subtler ways in which our movement through these spaces might change.","completion":"Just before my stint in the emergency room tents, I finished a week-long rotation as a consultant gastroenterologist for patients admitted to the old hospital with various perennial complaints—trouble eating, painless jaundice, bloody stools. In order to keep protective equipment available for the clinical areas where they were needed most, including the tents and the ICU, respiratory masks were being carefully rationed from a central location—a control desk that oversees the building’s forty or so operating rooms. Rather than discarding our masks at the end of the day, we were asked to return them in brown paper bags, writing our names on the front, like schoolchildren, so that they could be disinfected for two hours with ultraviolet light and later reused.  It was a long walk to the control desk from my office—past plaques bearing the names of erstwhile benefactors, past stairwells going up twelve flights, past rows of sleeping computers, past empty recovery bays, past unplugged fluoroscopic imaging machines stacked against the walls. Because my practice is focused on outpatients, my hospital-based rotations are rare, and on each one I have to make an effort to remember my way around. But it’s pleasant to get reacquainted with the vastness of the enterprise; the complexity of these spaces can beguile clinicians too. There’s plenty to marvel at along the way to preserving a two-dollar bit of air-filtering fabric—such a ridiculously simple thing, in the grand scheme, to be holding onto so tightly."}
{"prompt":"How did you end up reading this text? If you’re reading it online, you may have clicked a link in an algorithmically generated list of recommendations or search results. Or maybe a friend sent you the link—after finding it in an algorithmically generated list. Whatever the chain of events that brought you here, it likely involved a system of information retrieval.  Such systems select a handful of choices from billions of possibilities. Their existence is inevitable: at any given time, we can only comprehend a small portion of an immense world. The problem is that the systems that filter the world are not designed for your benefit but for corporate profit. No word captures the dominant form of information consumption on the internet more aptly than “feed”—a ubiquitous term derived from an agrarian metaphor. As in animal husbandry, your information diet is engineered to maximize the yield of a business operation.","completion":"If Silicon Valley’s PR departments claim that their products simply “find the most relevant, useful results in a fraction of a second, and present them in a way that helps you find what you’re looking for”—this is how Google describes its search algorithms on its website—executives and shareholders know better. They know that the whole point of the business is to get paid to show you things that you’re not looking for: ads."}
{"prompt":"The conflict of interest between advertisers and users has always been evident to the designers of commercial search engines. In 1998, a few months before the incorporation of Google, graduate students Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page presented their prototype of a web search engine at an academic conference. In an appendix to their paper, they commented, “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” Indeed. More than two decades after this prophecy, all major search engines, Google first among them, now operate precisely on the business model of surveillance-fueled targeted advertising.","completion":"These search engines’ algorithms are optimized for profit. The advertising industry governs the bulk of research and development in the field of information retrieval. Computer scientists and engineers often measure the “relevance” of potential results and test the “performance” of candidate algorithms according to evaluation benchmarks and validation data sets dictated by industry priorities. The predominant systems are designed to maximize ad revenues and “engagement” metrics such as “click-through rates.” Consequently, these systems tend to promote content that is already popular or similar to what users have seen or liked before. Whether the predictions of popularity and similarity are based on simple correlation and regression analysis or on complex machine learning models, the results tend to be predictable and like-minded."}
{"prompt":"No wonder the public sphere seems so impoverished in the digital age. The systems that manage the circulation of political speech were often originally designed to sell consumer products. This fact has momentous consequences. Recent scholarship has documented the disastrous effects of “surveillance capitalism,” and in particular how commercial search engines deploy “algorithms of oppression” that reinforce racist and sexist patterns of exposure, invisibility, and marginalization. These patterns of silencing the oppressed are so pervasive in the world that it may seem impossible to design a system that would not reproduce them.","completion":"But alternatives are possible. In fact, from the very beginnings of informatics—the science of information—as an institutionalized field in the 1960s, anti-capitalists have tried to imagine less oppressive, perhaps even liberatory, ways of indexing and searching information. Two Latin American social movements in particular—Cuban socialism and liberation theology—inspired experiments with different approaches to informatics from the 1960s to the 1980s. Taken together, these two historical moments can help us imagine new ways to organize information that threaten the capitalist status quo—above all, by facilitating the wide circulation of the ideas of the oppressed."}
{"prompt":"Struggle on the Library Front What happens the day after the revolution? One answer is the reorganization of the library. In 1919, Lenin signed a resolution demanding that the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment “immediately undertake the most energetic measures, firstly to centralize the library affairs of Russia, secondly to introduce the Swiss-American system.” Lenin presumably referred to the organization of the European libraries he had observed during his exile from Russia in the early 1900s. By imitating the “Swiss-American system,” the Bolshevik leader hoped to create a single state system of centralized control over the distribution of books and the development of collections.","completion":"Four decades later, Cuban revolutionaries also recognized the importance of what Soviet leaders like Nadezhda Krupskaya had once called the struggle “on the library front.” In the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Fidel Castro appointed librarian María Teresa Freyre de Andrade as the new director of the Jose Martí National Library in Havana. A lesbian and long-time dissident who had been exiled and jailed by the previous regimes, she had long been concerned with the politics of librarianship. In the 1940s, she had articulated her vision of a biblioteca popular, a “popular library,” distinct from a merely “public” one. Whereas the public library may be a “rather passive” one where “the book stands still on its shelf waiting for the reader to come searching for it,” the popular library is “eminently active” as it “makes extensive use of propaganda and uses different procedures to mobilize the book and make it go in search of the reader.”  After the revolution, Freyre de Andrade and her staff began to enact this vision. They brought books to the people by sending bibliobúses, buses that served as moving libraries, to rural areas where no libraries existed. They also began to develop a novel practice of revolutionary librarianship. Unlike with Lenin, the goal was not to imitate the organization of European libraries. In a 1964 speech, Freyre de Andrade argued that Cubans could not simply “copy what the English do in their libraries.” By doing so, “we would have a magnificent library, we would have it very well classified, we would provide a good service to many people, but we would not be taking an active part in what is the Revolution.”  How could librarians take an active part in the revolution? One answer was to gather and index materials that had been excluded or suppressed from library collections in the pre-revolutionary period, such as the publications of the clandestine revolutionary press of the 1950s. But librarians also became involved in a broader revolutionary project: Cuba’s effort to build its own computing industry and information infrastructure. This project ultimately led to a distinctive new field of information science, which inherited the revolutionary ideals of Cuban librarianship."}
{"prompt":"The Redistributing of Informational Wealth Both the revolutionaries and their enemies recognized that information technology would be a strategic priority for the new Cuba. A former IBM executive recalls that “all of the foreign enterprises had been nationalized except for IBM Cuba,” since the “Castro government and most of the nationalized companies were users of IBM equipment and services.” But from 1961–62, IBM closed its Cuban branch, and the US government imposed a trade embargo that prevented Cuba from acquiring computer equipment. This meant that Cuba would be forced to develop its own computing industry, with help from other socialist countries in the Soviet-led Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon).","completion":"Between 1969 and 1970, a team at the University of Havana created a prototype of a digital computer, the CID-201, as well as an assembly language named LEAL, short for “Lenguaje Algorítmico” (Algorithmic Language), an acronym that also means “loyal.” The design of the CID-201 was based on the schematics found in the manual of the PDP-1, a computer manufactured by the US-based Digital Equipment Corporation. Because of the US-imposed trade embargo, the team could not buy the necessary electronic components in Europe, but eventually succeeded⁠—with the help of a Cuban man of Japanese descent who worked as a merchant in Tokyo⁠—in bringing the components from Japan inside more than ten briefcases.  Cuban mathematicians also wrote a computer program in LEAL for playing chess; one of the CID-201’s engineers recounts that the computer even played—and lost—a game against Fidel Castro. Starting in the 1970s, Cuba manufactured thousands of digital computers, and even exported some computer parts to other Comecon countries."}
{"prompt":"The rise of digital computing transformed Cuban librarianship. Freyre de Andrade welcomed the digital age, paraphrasing Marx and Engels to analogize computing to communism: “a specter is haunting the informational world, the specter of the computer; and let’s be pleased that this circumstance has come to move our field [of librarianship], giving us a challenge that makes [the field] even more interesting than it already was by itself.” Cubans studied the techniques of informatics mostly with Soviet textbooks translated into Spanish. They combined the computational methods they learned from these books with the revolutionary ideals of Cuban librarianship. This synthesis produced distinctive theories and practices that diverged substantially from those of both Western and Soviet informatics.","completion":"Consider the concept of “information laws,” a staple of informatics textbooks. A classic example is “Lotka’s law,” formulated in 1926 by Alfred J. Lotka, a statistician at Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York, who sought to compute the “frequency distribution of scientific productivity” by plotting publication counts of authors included in an index of abstracts of chemistry publications. He claimed that the distribution followed an “inverse square law,” i.e., “the number of persons making 2 contributions is about one-fourth of those making one; the number making 3 contributions is about one-ninth, etc.; the number making n contributions is about 1/n² of those making one.” Like Western textbooks, the Soviet textbooks of informatics adopted in Cuba covered such “information laws” in depth. Their main authors, Russian information scientists and engineers A. I. Mikhailov and R. S. Gilyarevskii, quoted a peculiar passage by US information scientist and historian of science Derek de Solla Price on the distribution of publication counts: “They follow the same type of distribution as that of millionaires and peasants in a highly capitalistic society. A large share of wealth is in the hands of a very small number of extremely wealthy individuals, and a small residual share in the hands of the large number of minimal producers.” For Cuban information scientists, who had experienced a socialist revolution and an abrupt redistribution of material wealth, this unequal distribution of informational wealth also had to be radically transformed. Among these information scientists was Emilio Setién Quesada, who had studied and worked with Freyre de Andrade since the beginning of the post-revolutionary period. Setién Quesada contested the very idea of an “information law.” In an article co-authored with a Mexican colleague, he objected to the term “law,” which seemed to imply “the identification of a causal, constant, and objective relation in nature, society, or thought.” The mathematical equations represented mere “regularities,” without expressing “the causes of qualitative character of the behaviors they describe.” Those causes were historical, not natural."}
{"prompt":"Therefore, Setién Quesada and his colleague argued, publication counts did not conclusively determine the “productivity” of authors, any more than declining citation counts indicated the “obsolescence” of publications. Cuban libraries shouldn’t rely on these metrics to make such consequential decisions as choosing which materials to discard. Traditional informatics was incompatible with revolutionary librarianship because, by treating historically contingent regularities as immutable laws, it tended to perpetuate existing social inequalities.","completion":"Cuban information scientists didn’t just critique the limitations of traditional informatics, however. They also advanced a more critical approach to mathematical modeling, one that emphasized the social complexity and the historical contingency of informational regularities. In the 1980s, when Cuban libraries were beginning to adopt digital computers, Setién Quesada was tasked with developing a mathematical model of library activity, based on statistical data, for the purpose of economic planning. But he was dissatisfied with existing models of the “intensity” and “effectiveness” of library activity, devised by Soviet and US information scientists. (In the discussion below, I include mathematical explanations inside parentheses for interested readers, following Setién Quesada’s own terminology and notation.)  Soviet information scientists computed the “coefficient of intensity” of library activity by multiplying the “index of circulation” (the number of borrowings m divided by the number of potential readers N) by the “index of rotation” (the number of borrowings m divided by the total volume of holdings f). Meanwhile, US information scientists computed the “measure of effectiveness” of libraries, combining the index of circulation with an “index of capture” (the number of actual library readers n divided by the number of potential readers N). In contrast to these two approaches, Setién Quesada proposed an alternative “Cuban model,” which evaluated what he called the “behavior of Cuban public libraries”: “Coefficient of intensity” (Soviet authors)   “Measure of effectiveness” (US authors)  “Cuban model” Setién Quesada argued that “the Cuban model is more complete.” It included many more variables, all of which he considered important. For instance, the Cuban model included an “index of communication” (based on the number l of readers who use the archive), while the Soviet and US models “do not express the precise level of the author-reader social communication that happens in libraries.” Moreover, those other models “do not consider the role of the librarian in the development of the activity.” For Setién Quesada, the librarians, “together with the readers, constitute the main active agents involved in the development of this activity.” Hence in the Cuban model, every variable was adjusted relative to the number of librarians (incorporated into the adjusted variables denoted by a vinculum). Finally, the other models “do not offer an index that synthesizes the comparative behavior of places and periods.” By contrast, the Cuban model sought to facilitate comparisons of different libraries and time periods (each represented by the subscript i)."}
{"prompt":"Whatever the merits and limitations of this particular mathematical model, the broader story of Cuban information science encourages us to be skeptical of the claims attached to models and algorithms of information retrieval in the present. If yesterday’s information scientists claimed that their models ranked authors by “productivity” and libraries by “effectiveness,” today’s “AI experts” claim that their algorithms rank “personalized” search results by “relevance.” These claims are never innocent descriptions of how things simply are. Rather, these are interpretive, normative, politically consequential prescriptions of what information should be considered relevant or irrelevant.  These prescriptions, disguised as descriptions, serve to reproduce an unjust status quo. Just as print publications should not be deemed obsolete and discarded from library collections on the basis of citation counts, online information should not be deemed irrelevant and ranked low in search results on the basis of “click-through rates” and ad revenues. The innovative experiments by Cuban information scientists remind us that we can design alternative models and algorithms in order to disrupt, rather than perpetuate, patterns of inequality and oppression.","completion":"A Network Theory of Liberation Theology The Cuban experiments were supported by a socialist state. But experiments with anti-capitalist informatics are also possible in the absence of such a state. In fact, another major undertaking took place in countries that were controlled by US-backed right-wing military dictatorships."}
{"prompt":"In many Latin American countries, including Brazil after the 1964 military coup, authoritarian regimes took violent measures to silence dissidents, such as censorship, imprisonment, torture, and exile. Some of the most vocal critics of these measures were Catholic priests who sought to reorient the Church toward the organizing of the oppressed and the overcoming of domination. A key event in the formation of their movement, which would become known as “liberation theology,” was a 1968 conference of Latin American bishops held in Medellín, Colombia. At the landmark conference, the attendees learned of the dynamics of oppression in different countries, and collectively declared, “A deafening cry pours from the throats of millions of men, asking their pastors for a liberation that reaches them from nowhere else.” How could this cry be heard? The Medellín experience inspired a group of liberation theologians, largely from Brazil, to try to envision new forms of communication among poor and oppressed peoples across the world. Their objective was conscientização, or “conscientization”: the development of a critical consciousness involving reflection and action to transform social structures—a term associated with their colleague Paulo Freire, who had developed a theory and practice of critical pedagogy. Towards that end, the theologians planned to organize a set of meetings called the “International Journeys for a Society Overcoming Domination.” But international meetings were prohibitively expensive, which meant many people were excluded. One of the project organizers, the Brazilian Catholic activist Chico Whitaker, explained that “international meetings rarely escape the practice of domination: in general they are reduced to meetings of ‘specialists’ who have available the means to meet.” To address this problem, the liberation theologians and allied activists envisioned a system of information diffusion and circulation that they called an “intercommunication network.” This network would make available “information that was not manipulated and without intermediaries,” break down “sectoral, geographic, and hierarchical barriers,” and make possible “the discovery of situations deliberately not made public by controlled information systems.”","completion":"By “controlled information systems,” the organizers referred to the severe state censorship of print and broadcast media that had become prevalent across Latin America. Liberation theologians wanted the liberation of information, which would enable a new phase of Freirean pedagogy: from the era of “‘conscientization’ with the intermediaries” to that of direct “‘inter-conscientization’ between the oppressed,” in Whitaker’s words."}
{"prompt":"Since the modern internet was not yet available in the 1970s, the operation of the “intercommunication network” relied on print media and the postal service. The organizers set up two offices, called “diffusion centers”: one in Rio de Janeiro, at the headquarters of the National Conference of Bishops of Brazil where Brazilian bishop Cândido Padin, an organizer of the Medellín conference, served as project coordinator; and another in Paris, where Whitaker lived in exile with his wife, Stella, another Brazilian activist, because of his role in land reform planning before the 1964 military coup.  The diffusion centers received and distributed, by mail, submissions of short texts (or five-page summaries of longer texts) analyzing situations of “domination” from a worldwide network of participant organizations, connected via regional episcopal conferences in Latin America, North America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Oceania. Whitaker emphasized that the texts should ideally be written by “those who have the greatest interest in the overcoming of domination, namely, those who are subject to it,” and should include “analysis of their own situations and the struggles that they were developing to liberate themselves from domination.” The organizers published every text that matched the basic requirements, without any editorial modification; translated each text into four languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English); and mailed all texts for free to participants in more than ninety countries.","completion":"For Whitaker, the concept of intercommunication was rooted not only in “freedom of expression” but also in “liberty of information”: the ability for all participants to have access “to everything that the others wish to communicate to them and which serves the realization of the objectives which they share.” Intercommunication sought to produce radical equality: “All must be able to speak and be listened to regardless of the hierarchical position, level of education or experience, social function or position, moral, intellectual, or political authority of each.” The practice of intercommunication demanded the “acceptance to heterogeneity and of the ‘dynamic’ of conflicts that go with it,” Whitaker wrote.  Finally, intercommunication required an exercise of “mutual respect” and “openness towards the others” that reflected the Christian principle of fraternity: as Whitaker put it, “the respect for what the other thinks or does… the receptiveness to what is new and unexpected, to that which poses questions to us or challenges us, or to perspectives and preoccupations that we would have been able to leave aside because they are difficult to accept.” Despite the importance of Christian values, however, the intercommunication network was open to anyone. Some participants were non-Catholic, non-Christian, and even non-religious. Padin explained that as “children of God, we are in Christ all brothers, without any distinction.” The Freedom to be Heard Over the years, the intercommunication network circulated an extraordinary diversity of texts. Chadian participants examined the social consequences of cotton monoculture since its imposition under French colonial rule. Sri Lankan participants reviewed the labor conditions in the fishing industry, the profiteering tactics of seafood exporters, and the limitations of fishing cooperatives set up by the state. Panamanian participants narrated their struggle for housing and their formation of a neighborhood association. From Guinea-Bissau, a group of both local and foreign educators, including Paulo Freire, wrote about the challenges of organizing a literacy program and changing the education system in the aftermath of the war of independence. Between 1977 and 1978 alone, nearly a hundred texts circulated in the network. These were later compiled into a monumental volume, published in four languages and discussed at regional meetings of network participants across the world."}
{"prompt":"This volume featured an unusually sophisticated system of indexing. Each text had a code composed of a letter and a number; for example, the aforementioned Chadian text had the code “e35.” The letters indicated the type of text—“e” for case studies, “d” for discussion texts, “r” for summaries—and the numbers were assigned chronologically. The volume was divided into sixteen numbered sections, each about a different theme of “domination.” Section III focused on “domination over rural workers,” section IV on “non-rural workers,” section VII on “domination in housing conditions,” section X on “health conditions.”  Each text was printed inside one of the thematic sections, but since the classifications were not mutually exclusive, the index of each section also listed texts that intersected with the theme despite being from different sections. For instance, the index of section IX, on education, listed some main texts—“e4” from Thailand, “e6” from Guinea-Bissau, “e38” from the Philippines—as well as other texts from different sections, like “r3” from section X, which discussed the intersection of health and education in structures of domination. The end of the volume featured an additional index that classified texts according to “some particular categories of victims of domination”: “women,” “youth,” “children,” “elderly people,” and “ethnic groups.” The astonishing diversity of texts circulated by the intercommunication network soon brought its organizers into conflict with conservative factions of the Catholic Church. In 1977, some readers were especially scandalized by text “e10,” submitted by a small, women-led, self-described “community of Christian love” in rural England. The text bothered conservatives not only for its explicit denunciation of “the Roman Catholic Church as an instrument of domination” engaged in “a kind of efficient and specialized ‘brain washing,’” but also for its feminist proposals, which included the refusal “to call anyone ‘father’ in a clerical context” and the commitment to “calling the Holy Spirit ‘She’ and not ‘He.’”","completion":"After a long deliberation at the Rio de Janeiro diffusion center, the project organizers decided to publish the text along with a note restating their commitment to free expression and reminding readers of the minimal requirements for publication. Still, conservative bishops complained to Vatican authorities, who were increasingly concerned by the rise of liberation theology in Latin America and beyond. Pope Paul VI, who did not sympathize with the project, sent emissaries to Brazil to intervene. The Vatican demanded that the bishops stop, claiming that the conference in Rio de Janeiro “could not take an initiative of such breadth, and had surpassed its competence by inviting other episcopal conferences to join the project.” By building a distributed worldwide network via regional conferences, the liberation theologians had bypassed the central authority of the Vatican. Despite the Vatican’s order to stop the project, a group of Brazilian organizers continued in disobedience until 1981."}
{"prompt":"Later on, former organizers reflected on the relationship between their intercommunication network and the modern internet. They did not know that in the original paper on the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which outlined the technology that serves as the basis of the internet, engineers Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn had spoken of a protocol for packet “network intercommunication”—or simply an “internetwork” protocol, leading to the contraction “internet” a few months later. The paper had appeared in 1974, when the liberation theologians were planning their similarly named network.  In 1993, reflecting on the two internets, Chico Whitaker theorized that the “network” is an “alternative structure of organization,” much less common in “Western culture” than the “pyramidal structure”:  Information is power. In pyramids, power is concentrated, so also information, which is hidden or kept to be used at the right time, with a view to accumulating and concentrating more power. In networks, power is deconcentrated, and so is information, which is distributed and disseminated so that everyone has access to the power that their possession represents.  There is no doubt that Whitaker and his colleagues were prone to techno-utopianism. Their hope that technological progress would finally enable a “free” circulation of information was a fantasy, since various sorts of machine decisions and human labor, structured by political-economic conditions, always filter what information circulates and to whom. Techno-utopian conceptions of “information freedom,” whether in the Californian libertarian-capitalist version or in the Brazilian liberation-theological one, are never quite right.","completion":"Yet there is a crucial difference between the two conceptions. The Californian version of information freedom is largely limited to a particular understanding of freedom of speech. The Silicon Valley firms that manage public discourse on the internet, such as Facebook, appeal insistently to “free speech” as an excuse for their business decisions to profit from posts and ads that spread right-wing misinformation.  The remarkable innovation of the Brazilian liberation theologians is that they moved beyond a narrow focus on free speech and toward a politics of audibility. The theologians understood that the problem is not just whether one is free to speak, but whose voices one can hear and which listeners one’s voice can reach. The intercommunication network was meant to produce more equitable conditions not just for speaking, but for listening and for being heard. Ultimately, the network’s purpose was to amplify the voices of the oppressed. Today, our task is to reformulate this more critical conception of information freedom for the digital age. Information will be “free” only when the oppressed can be heard as loudly as their oppressors."}
{"prompt":"The Retrieval of History The history of technology is too often told as a linear progression, as a series of tales of triumphant inventors, emanating mainly from North America and Western Europe. Such tales are pervasive in part because they are easy to tell. After a certain technology prevails, the storyteller can simply follow the records and narratives given by the handful of people who are already credited for its invention.","completion":"Such commonplace narratives serve important ideological functions. First, they legitimize capitalist accumulation by framing the inventor-entrepreneur’s fortune as the merited payoff for an ingenious idea. This requires erasing all other contributors to the given technological artifact; in the case of search engines, it means forgetting the librarians (whose feminized labor is never valued as creative) and the information scientists whose cumulative work over the course of decades laid the foundation for Google."}
{"prompt":"More insidiously, such narratives also serve to sanction the dominant technologies by presenting them as the only ones ever conceivable. They overlook the many possible alternatives that did not prevail, thereby producing the impression that the existing technologies are just the inevitable outcome of technical ingenuity and good sense.","completion":"If peripheral innovations like the Latin American experiments with informatics did not become mainstream, this is not because they were necessarily inferior to corporate, military, and metropolitan competitors. The reasons why some technologies live and others die are not strictly technical, but political. The Cuban model was arguably more technically sophisticated than its US counterparts. Yet some technologies are sponsored by the advertising industry, while others are constrained by a neocolonial trade embargo. Some are backed by the Pentagon, others crushed by the Vatican."}
{"prompt":"It is crucial to recover those lost alternatives, for they show us how technologies could have been otherwise—and could still become so in the future. However, these histories are difficult to retrieve. Their protagonists may remain anonymous and their records unpreserved.  No search engine pointed me to the Latin American experiments. I could never have found them through traditional methods for searching the internet. Instead, I came across subtle clues through serendipitous conversations. I was chatting with Theresa Tobin, a retired librarian at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who co-founded the Feminist Task Force at the American Library Association in 1970. She commented that after she fundraised to donate a digital computer to a Sandinista library in the 1980s, Nicaraguan librarians used it to implement a Cuban system for indexing materials.","completion":"I set out to learn more about the Cuban system, a task that proved laborious. Even the most important sources on Cuban information science are hard to find using conventional search engines and databases. For instance, despite the prominence of María Teresa Freyre de Andrade, Google Scholar does not index her main books, and Wikipedia lacks an entry on her in any language. On the other hand, the Cuban online encyclopedia, EcuRed, features an extensive article on her. I also managed to find a few initial references on Cuban informatics in SciELO, a Latin American bibliographic database. I then contacted Cuban scholars directly to ask for help.  My discovery of the liberation theologians’ intercommunication network took a similar path. When I first met Stella and Chico Whitaker at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, which they co-founded in 2001, I had never heard of the intercommunication network. It was only years later, when I was helping the couple donate their personal papers to a public archive, that they mentioned in passing that one of the dusty boxes in their apartment contained documents from an old project involving informatics. They were surprised I showed interest. Sometimes the best method of information retrieval is talking to people."}
{"prompt":"Many more vital ideas for alternative futures, technological and otherwise, remain forgotten in dusty boxes across the world. The repressed dreams of past struggles will not easily appear on our corporate algorithmic feeds. To recover these lost ideas, we must develop more critical methods of information retrieval, continuing the work that the Latin American experiments left unfinished. In short, we need critical search.","completion":"The project of critical search would recognize that any quantification of “relevance” is an interpretive, normative, and politically consequential act. Critical search would actively strive to increase the visibility of counterhegemonic intellectual traditions and of historically marginalized perspectives. We must build systems of information diffusion and circulation that seek to amplify critical voices and to cut across linguistic, national, racial, gender, and class barriers. Let us draw inspiration from our predecessors, and try to follow in their footsteps. Let us experiment with algorithms, interfaces, and tactics for reindexing the world anew."}
{"prompt":"In early 2014, I attended the demonstration of an experimental technology funded by DARPA, the US military’s advanced research and development agency. In a conference room at a Los Angeles office park, a young man sat on stage before a computer screen, with cameras trained on his face and body. On the screen, a rudimentary 3D model of a casually dressed young woman sat upright in a plush armchair of the type one might find in a psychotherapist’s office. The character said her name was Ellie and that she was not a therapist, but created “to talk to people in a safe and secure environment.” Another monitor, visible to the audience but not to the man, displayed real-time information from the cameras, tracking his posture, eye movement, and the changing shape of his mouth.","completion":"“I’ll ask a few questions to get us started,” Ellie said, regarding the man with an unnervingly neutral gaze. “And please feel free to tell me anything. Your answers are totally confidential.” As the demonstration proceeded, Ellie asked if he could recall the last time he felt truly happy. He didn’t have a ready answer, and the system’s computer vision software detected that he was breaking eye contact more than he had earlier in the conversation. “I noticed you were hesitant on that one,” Ellie said."}
{"prompt":"Ellie’s goal was to conduct conversations that would allow the software to pick up “distress indicators,” from evasive glances to “negatively valenced words,” that are “correlated with depression, anxiety, or post-traumatic stress disorder,” researchers from the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, where the system was designed, wrote in a subsequent paper. To that end, Ellie was made to seem highly empathetic. “A particular concern in the design … was whether users would feel comfortable enough in the interaction to speak openly about their mental health issues to a virtual agent,” the researchers wrote.","completion":"Though Ellie was obviously virtual, there were potential advantages to this. DARPA was funding ICT’s research through a larger program called DCAPS, the Detection and Computational Analysis of Psychological Signals, which aimed to “develop novel analytical tools to assess psychological status of warfighters in the hopes of improving psychological health awareness and enabling them to seek timely help,” the agency said. After the demo finished, one of the researchers explained to the room that speaking to a virtual avatar about mental health issues could be ideal for military personnel who are taught to be and act tough, leaving them too ashamed to open up to another human being."}
{"prompt":"Something like Ellie could be useful to the military in other ways, too. To identify and help all current and former personnel with PTSD would be a massive undertaking. Estimates from the US Department of Veterans Affairs suggest that between 11 and 20 percent of the 2.7 million service members who deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan—roughly 300,000 to 540,000 people—suffer from the disorder in any given year. Of those, DARPA says that only a small fraction seek help. It’s difficult to imagine recent administrations deploying the battalions of people—therapists, trainers, outreach personnel—needed to find and care for half a million or more people with PTSD. Automation, of the kind represented by Ellie, seems to hold out the possibility of treating mental health problems at scale, or even keeping soldiers on active duty for longer periods. If successful, computerized therapy could also be applied in other circumstances where human-to-human treatment is undesirable or impractical—such as in the midst of a pandemic.","completion":"Behind this possibility lurks a larger vision, too. Though the Ellie program is in some ways crude, it seems to herald a future system that can continuously track, report, and support users’ mental health on an ongoing basis. At the time of the demo, consumer devices like the Fitbit and Apple Watch were being marketed on the basis of their round-the-clock monitoring and data-collection features for physical health—information which would yield life-improving insights and interventions, the companies behind these technologies implied. More recently, researchers affiliated with Amazon published a paper describing efforts to determine a user’s emotional state from their voice. If an Amazon Alexa divined you were upset, it could ask what was wrong—and maybe upsell you on some indulgent self-care items. Supporting mental health could be one more reason to justify the ambient collection and interpretation of vast streams of data from our bodies and behavior."}
{"prompt":"After seeing the DARPA demo, I was unsettled by the idea of an emotionally-aware technology ecosystem constantly reporting back to companies or governments about our mental states, and then trying to intervene in them. But the thing I kept coming back to most often was the avatar of Ellie, sitting in her chair with her hands folded in her lap, calmly interviewing an actual human being with a potential mental illness. As a designer and writer of video games, I know that well-crafted interactive digital characters can elicit deep emotions from players, causing changes in their mood and outlook, just as powerful works in any medium can. Until I encountered Ellie, though, I hadn’t imagined what it would mean for people to share their most private thoughts and feelings with a machine. I wondered whether this artificial interaction could actually help people change, or even heal. So, in a spirit of curiosity, I set out to create a sort of Ellie of my own.","completion":"An Algorithm for Thoughts When I began researching computerized therapy, virtual mental health care was already a booming category—and that was before the world was struck by the coronavirus. Following the outbreak of COVID-19, the possibility of inexpensive, scalable virtual mental health tools may very well become a necessity. Social isolation, unemployment, pervasive uncertainty, death—the pandemic and society’s response to it have created a wave of emotional distress while at the same time stripping millions of people of their jobs, healthcare, and access to therapy. “With the coronavirus pandemic causing unprecedented levels of stress and grief, companies offering virtual mental health care say they’re seeing a massive surge in interest,” the medical news site STAT recently reported."}
{"prompt":"There’s currently a bewildering array of mental health apps to download, with names such as Calm, Happify, and MindShift. Some of these programs are simply collections of user-directed exercises (“write down how you felt today”). Some seek to connect clients with human therapists over video or text chat. Others contain characters like Ellie. But most of them claim to implement elements of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, a kind of therapy that emerged in the 1960s to become one of today’s most heavily used and studied methods of treating depression, anxiety, and PTSD. For many years, CBT has been considered the most effective treatment for such disorders. One recent meta-analysis of mental health app trials found that over 80 percent of them used CBT in one form or another.","completion":"CBT is a heavily “manualized” form of therapy, meaning that it expects providers to stick closely to highly specific, almost scripted interactions with clients. Providers teach clients to recognize negative thoughts and “dispute” them in order to reduce their effect and replace them with positive ones. If the recurrent thought “I’m destined for failure” runs through a patient’s head, for example, CBT prompts them to systematically dispute the thought with alternative interpretations: Is this, perhaps, an exaggeration? Is there really any evidence that this is true? It’s akin to running an algorithm on a thought until its power diminishes and eventually disappears.  As a result, a common complaint from those on the receiving end of CBT is that it is cold, mechanical, and lacks empathy. Writing for Vice about the game I eventually made about a virtual CBT therapist, the critic Rob Zacny said he recognized in it “that sense of emotional whiplash that comes from finally starting to confide something serious and scary, only to be met with weirdly programmatic responses from well-meaning counselors.” But the mechanistic quality of CBT also makes it especially well-suited to be supplemented by, or turned entirely into, a computer program. If your human therapist already acts and sounds like an automaton, what would be lost by replacing him with one?  But virtual characters can only be effective if on some level we believe or buy into them. In a 2016 article for the Guardian about new questions surrounding CBT’s efficacy, the journalist Oliver Burkeman spoke with a woman who had experienced postnatal depression. “I don’t think anything has ever made me feel as lonely and isolated as having a computer program ask me how I felt on a scale of one to five, and—after I’d clicked the sad emoticon on the screen—telling me it was ‘sorry to hear that’ in a prerecorded voice,” she told him. What she realized she needed, Burkeman writes, was “real connection: that fundamental if hard-to-express sense of being held in the mind of another person, even if only for a short period each week.”"}
{"prompt":"Patients aren’t the only ones who have recognized this need. In 1976, a computer scientist at MIT named Joseph Weizenbaum declared the notion that “a computer can be programmed to become an effective psychotherapist” was nothing but “perverse.” This was a renegade position for the MIT of the era, where a powerful belief in the capabilities of artificial intelligence reigned. Weizenbaum was well aware that he was committing apostasy, but his assault on the idea of computerized therapy was all the more forceful because he had created the first virtual therapist himself.","completion":"Alien Worlds The ELIZA program that Weizenbaum created, which he released in 1966, is often called the world’s first chatbot. Cleverly, Weizenbaum designed ELIZA around the stereotype of a psychotherapist’s propensity to turn a client’s statement into a question. (People don’t like me. Why do you think people don’t like you?) This was an elegant way to create the effect of a computer holding its own in a conversation with the user.  Of course, ELIZA, which Weizenbam named after Eliza Doolittle, the character in the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion, possessed no real understanding of what its human partner was saying. As the information technologist Ted Nelson wrote of the program in his classic 1974 book about hacker culture, Computer Lib / Dream Machines: “Now, do not be fooled. There is no Ghost in the Machine. The program does not ‘understand’ the user. THE PROGRAM IS MERELY ACTING OUT THE BAG OF TRICKS THAT JOE WEIZENBAUM THOUGHT UP.” The explanation (and emphasis) was necessary because ELIZA’s noncommittal responses were surprisingly good at convincing users either that it did understand them, or that there was actually another human being on the other side of the teletype.  Indeed, ELIZA sometimes seemed to perform flawlessly, as in this example from Weizenbaum’s original 1966 paper describing his creation: Men are all alike.IN WHAT WAYThey’re always bugging us about something or other.CAN YOU THINK OF A SPECIFIC EXAMPLEWell, my boyfriend made me come here.YOUR BOYFRIEND MADE YOU COME HEREHe says I’m depressed much of the time.I AM SORRY TO HEAR YOU ARE DEPRESSEDIt’s true. I am unhappy.DO YOU THINK COMING HERE WILL HELP YOU NOT TO BE UNHAPPYI need some help, that much seems certain."}
{"prompt":"But it is also easy to have a conversation with ELIZA that goes nowhere: HOW DO YOU DO. PLEASE TELL ME YOUR PROBLEMI have so much work to do.THAT’S QUITE INTERESTINGNot really.THAT IS INTERESTING. PLEASE CONTINUEIt’s not.DO YOU FEEL STRONGLY ABOUT DISCUSSING SUCH THINGS It usually becomes clear to modern users within minutes how fragile ELIZA’s illusion of real conversation is. In the late 1960s, however, the program left a lasting impression. The astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan, in a 1975 essay for Natural History magazine, predicted a time in which such therapy would be commonplace, delivered through “a network of computer psychotherapeutic terminals, something like arrays of large telephone booths.” Even established mental health professionals began to seriously consider the idea of computerized therapy. Perhaps most notable was the psychiatrist Kenneth Colby, who later developed his own mental health chatbots and once told a reporter, “after all, the computer doesn’t burn out, look down on you, or try to have sex with you.”  Weizenbaum himself believed that ELIZA only demonstrated that computers did not have to actually understand anything in order to mimic everyday conversations. The year after ELIZA was released, his more famous colleague at MIT, Marvin Minsky, declared that “within a generation, the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved.” But ELIZA helped Weizenbaum to develop a more skeptical view of computer science, and of the relationship between computer and human intelligence.","completion":"Weizenbaum argued that even if a future computer were powerful enough to perform automated therapy, it would still be wrong. Human intelligence and computer logic are fundamentally different processes and wholly “alien” to one another, he wrote in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason. As Zachary Loeb explains in the introduction to Islands in the Cyberstream, a posthumously published interview with Weizenbaum, “Computers excelled at tasks involving quantification, but for Weizenbaum there was much about human beings that simply could not be quantified.” As tempting as it was for computer scientists to believe that computers could model the world around them or human thought, in truth they could only create their own separate reality. “If Weizenbaum called for renunciation of the computer, in certain contexts,” Loeb continues later, “it was because the embrace of the computer in all contexts had led to a renunciation of the human.” In her paper “Authenticity in the age of digital companions,” Sherry Turkle, a fellow MIT professor who taught classes with Weizenbaum, recounted how ELIZA’s reception informed his stance: Weizenbaum found it disturbing that the program was being treated as more than a parlor game. If the software elicited trust, it was only by tricking those who used it. From this viewpoint, if Eliza was a benchmark, it was because the software marked a crisis in authenticity: people did not care if their life narratives were really understood. The act of telling them created enough meaning on its own."}
{"prompt":"Perhaps this is the most salient question when it comes to automated therapy: can the act of telling be separated from the act of listening? Does simply speaking create enough meaning on its own? If being listened to, recognized and understood by another human being is the source of therapy’s power, then there is no way bundles of code—such as ELIZA, Ellie, or the fictional app in the game I eventually created—could work. Automated mental health care would be built on a faulty premise about what therapy should be and what computers can ultimately do.","completion":"Talking to the Dog Almost all of today’s mental health apps are built on that potentially flawed premise. Many take the form of an instant message–like interface with a friendly character, making comparisons to ELIZA difficult to avoid. One prominent example is Woebot, which boasts Stanford-linked founders and closed an $8 million funding round in 2018. As with its distant ancestor, Woebot’s lack of genuine human understanding is easily revealed. Telling the program I was feeling anxious about the fact that “I have so much work to do” resulted in this stilted interrogation, which reads as if it comes straight out of a CBT manual: Are you perhaps catastrophizing in your statement?NoAre you Future Predicting with your thought, “I have so much work to do”?NoYou’re doing awesome thinking through this by the way… we’re nearly thereAre you ‘Mind-reading’ in your thought, “I have so much work to do”?NoHow about black-or-white thinking in this thought: “I have so much work to do”?NopeGot itAnd is there a chance that you may be mistaking your feelings as evidence of the truth?NoOK Matthew, you did a great job there…Now for the most important bit… rewrite “I have so much work to do” without those distortions.I have so much work to doSo how did your rewrite go? The smarmy attitude and rigid dialogue of apps like Woebot makes one sympathetic to Weizenbam’s view that computerized therapy is inhumane. At the same time, I couldn’t help but notice again the similarity to my own work as a game developer. Using a bag of tricks not unlike the ones Weizenbaum used to create ELIZA, many games invite players to believe that digital characters are friends who can perceive and understand them in some way. Combinations of animations, sounds, and contextually appropriate behaviors create illusions not only of life, but of genuine communication between the alien worlds of humans and computers."}
{"prompt":"Taking advantage of “the human propensity to suspend disbelief in the presence of a persuasive dramatic presence” was the “true source of Eliza’s power,” the digital media pioneer Janet Murray wrote in her groundbreaking 1997 book Hamlet on the Holodeck. In the world of games, these persuasive dramatic presences are (usually) clear about what they really are—characters. Game developers still rely on audiences to voluntarily buy into them at some level, in a parallel to the way the live theater becomes reality, though only temporarily. The actor who was stabbed to death during the play returns to the stage at the curtain call; the gamer eventually takes off their VR headset. What happened inside the magic circle was certainly not “true,” but was also, in a way, real, and exerted a powerful effect on those who experienced it.","completion":"Might this be all that it is needed for automated psychotherapy to work? In the nearly fifty-five years since ELIZA first appeared, very few digital characters have made an attempt to understand their users in any real way. The reason might be that they simply don’t have to in order to be compelling. And in that case, does it really matter if a therapy program understands its user or not? One of the principal investigators on the project that created Ellie, the computer science professor Louis-Pilippe Morency, compared the experience to talking to a pet. “Some people talk to their dogs,” he said, speaking to a journalist for the Atlantic. “Even though the dogs don’t understand it ... I think there's a little bit of that effect—just talking with someone makes you feel better.”  Aside from the fact that dogs aren’t, so far as we know, uploading their data anywhere, this is an important consideration. If the feeling of connection is all that’s needed for successful therapy, then human-to-human interaction may be superfluous. As Turkle asks, “If a person feels understood by an object lacking sentience, whether that object be an imitative computer program or a robot that makes eye contact and responds to touch, can that illusion of understanding be therapeutic? What is the status—therapeutic, moral, and relational—of the simulation of understanding?” Between a Novel and a Game Perhaps because of the shifting priorities of a new administration, DARPA’s interest in mental health has waned since 2014, and it isn’t currently funding research into goals like treating PTSD. But witnessing Ellie at work caused me, over the course of the next several years, to design and draft a video game about the experience of computerized psychotherapy. By early 2019, the world I had slowly been building took its final shape: a present-day Seattle not so different from the real one, where gig workers called “proxies” read prompts given to them by “Eliza,” a cloud-based, AI-powered virtual therapist program developed by a fictional tech giant. The company names the product after Weizenbaum’s program in an attempt to ride its notoriety while, in true tech giant fashion, ignoring its creator’s misgivings."}
{"prompt":"Players guide the game’s main character, Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey, as she takes a job as one of these proxies, performing therapy sessions for a wide variety of people. As a proxy, all she can do is read what the Eliza algorithm has told her to read. Evelyn is warned multiple times not to deviate from the script, priming savvy gamers to believe they will immediately be able to do just that. But Evelyn performs session after session without deviating. For most of the game, I lock the character into being a “good” proxy, even at the expense of upsetting players’ expectations. If Evelyn expresses doubts, she does so privately.","completion":"I deny players choice for such a long time because I couldn’t accept the idea of a game where different phrases uttered by a therapist would be considered better or worse for a patient. It’s easy to imagine a game in which a client comes in with certain combinations of conditions, and the challenge for the player is to pick the right things to say to match those conditions. But that would be to accept in advance the notion that a certain type of person needs to hear a certain type of thing in order to be guided to the best possible outcome—an assumption encoded in materials like the CBT manuals I had studied. I wanted to create therapy clients who were irreducible individuals, real fictional human beings. So in opposition to prevailing game design wisdom, I ended up with something in between a novel and a game, something that requires players to be patient and to give up control."}
{"prompt":"Between sessions, Evelyn has lengthy conversations with people who work, or used to work, on Eliza. Some believe the product is working well; others very much don’t. Some see it only as a ladder for their own ambitions in the tech world and beyond. Evelyn must also confront her own past and struggle with depression. As the story of the game concludes, it allows players to decide the best way for Evelyn to move forward in life. Each choice includes some compromise. She could continue to contribute to Eliza. She could take her newfound interest in therapy to pursue a career as a traditional human-to-human therapist. She could turn her back on all of it. This is the first and last major choice the game asks players to make.","completion":"A human player playing a virtual human (Evelyn) whose choices are circumscribed by a computer program (Eliza) which is at once both real and a fiction created by me, its human developer: my hope is that these layers of human-computer interaction help to challenge the simple binary between warm and empathetic human-to-human therapy and the encroachment of cold, computerized systems. The reality, of course, is more complicated. Under the manualized framework of CBT and similar modes of treatment, even human therapists act robotically, whereas in ELIZA, a rudimentary but surprisingly expressive computer program emulated a much more humanistic, open-ended style of psychotherapy. It is not about a “computer” approach versus a “human” approach—it is about an indifferent versus a compassionate one."}
{"prompt":"At the time of this writing, in July 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has killed over 133,000 people in the United States. The dead are disproportionately Black and Latinx people and those who were unable, or not allowed by their employers, to work remotely. During the pandemic, we’ve seen our technological infrastructures assume ever more importance—from the communications technology that allows people with the means and privilege to telecommute, to the platforms that amplify public health information or deadly, politicized misinformation. We’ve also seen some of the infrastructure that runs the social safety net break down under an increasing load. This includes state unemployment systems that pay workers the benefits they’ve contributed to for decades through taxes. In a global pandemic, being able to work from home, to quit and live on savings, or to be laid off and draw unemployment benefits has literally become a matter of life and death.  The cracks in our technological infrastructure became painfully evident in the spring, as US corporations responded to the pandemic by laying off more and more workers. So many people had to file for unemployment at once that computerized unemployment claim systems started to malfunction. Around the country, phone lines jammed, websites crashed, and millions of people faced the possibility of not being able to pay for rent, medicine, or food.  As the catastrophe unfolded, several state governments blamed it on aged, supposedly obsolete computer systems written in COBOL, a programming language that originated in the late 1950s. At least a dozen state unemployment systems still run on this sixty-one-year-old language, including ones that help administer funds of a billion dollars or more in California, Colorado, and New Jersey. When the deluge of unemployment claims hit, the havoc it seemed to wreak on COBOL systems was so widespread that many states apparently didn’t have enough programmers to repair the damage; the governor of New Jersey even publicly pleaded for the help of volunteers who knew the language.","completion":"But then something strange happened. When scores of COBOL programmers rushed to offer their services, the state governments blaming COBOL didn’t accept the help. In fact, it turned out the states didn’t really need it to begin with. For many reasons, COBOL was an easy scapegoat in this crisis—but in reality what failed wasn’t the technology at all."}
{"prompt":"A “Dead” Language is Born One of the most remarkable things about the unemployment claims malfunction wasn’t that things might suddenly go terribly wrong with COBOL systems, but that they never had before. Many computerized government and business processes around the world still run on and are actively written in COBOL—from the programs that reconcile almost every credit card transaction around the globe to the ones that administer a disability benefits system serving roughly ten million US veterans. The language remains so important that IBM’s latest, fastest “Z” series of mainframes have COBOL support as a key feature.  For six decades, systems written in COBOL have proven highly robust—which is exactly what they were designed to be. COBOL was conceived in 1959, when a computer scientist named Mary Hawes, who worked in the electronics division of the business equipment manufacturer Burroughs, called for a meeting of computer professionals at the University of Pennsylvania. Hawes wanted to bring industry, government, and academic experts together to design a programming language for basic business functions, especially finance and accounting, that was easily adaptable to the needs of different organizations and portable between mainframes manufactured by different computer companies.  The group that Hawes convened evolved into a body called CODASYL, the Conference on Data Systems Languages, which included computer scientists from the major computing hardware manufacturers of the time, as well as the government and the military. CODASYL set out to design a programming language that would be easier to use, easier to read, and easier to maintain than any other programming language then in existence.  The committee’s central insight was to design the language using terms from plain English, in a way that was more self-explanatory than other languages. With COBOL, which stands for “Common Business-Oriented Language,” the goal was to make the code so readable that the program itself would document how it worked, allowing programmers to understand and maintain the code more easily.","completion":"COBOL is a “problem-oriented” language, whose structure was designed around the goals of business and administrative users, instead of being maximally flexible for the kind of complex mathematical problems that scientific users would need to solve. The main architect of COBOL, Jean Sammet, then a researcher at Sylvania Electric and later a manager at IBM, wrote, “It was certainly intended (and expected) that the language could be used by novice programmers and read by management.” (Although the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper has often been referred to as the “mother of COBOL,” her involvement in developing the specification for the language was minimal; Sammet is the one who really deserves the title.) Other early high-level programming languages, such as FORTRAN, a language for performing complex mathematical functions, used idiosyncratic abbreviations and mathematical symbols that could be difficult to understand if you weren’t a seasoned user of the language. For example, while a FORTRAN program would require programmers to know mathematical formula notation, and write commands like: TOTAL = REAL(NINT(EARN * TAX * 100.0))/100.0 users of COBOL could write the same command as:  MULTIPLY EARNINGS BY TAXRATE GIVING SOCIAL-SECUR ROUNDED."}
{"prompt":"As you can tell from the COBOL version, but probably not from the FORTRAN version, this line of code is a (simplified) example of how both languages could compute a social security payment and round the total to the penny. Because it was designed not just to be written but also to be read, COBOL would make computerized business processes more legible, both for the original programmers and managers and for those who maintained these systems long afterwards.  Image of COBOL tombstone, copyright Mark Richards. Courtesy of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.","completion":"A portable, easier-to-use programming language was a revolutionary idea for its time, and prefigured many of the programming languages that came after. Yet COBOL was almost pronounced dead even before it was born. In 1960, the year that the language’s specification was published, a member of the CODASYL committee named Howard Bromberg commissioned a little “COBOL tombstone” as a practical joke. Bromberg, a manager at the electronics company RCA who had earlier worked with Grace Hopper on her FLOW-MATIC language, was concerned that by the time everybody finally got done designing COBOL, competitors working on proprietary languages would have swept the market, locking users into programming languages that might only run well on one manufacturer’s line of machines."}
{"prompt":"But when COBOL came out in 1960, less than a year after Mary Hawes’s initial call to action, it was by no means dead on arrival. The earliest demonstrations of COBOL showed the language could be universal across hardware. “The significance of this,” Sammet wrote, with characteristic understatement, was that it meant “compatibility could really be achieved.” Suddenly, computer users had a full-featured cross-platform programming language of far greater power than anything that came before. COBOL was a runaway success. By 1970, it was the most widely used programming language in the world.","completion":"Scapegoats and Gatekeepers Over the subsequent decades, billions and billions of lines of COBOL code were written, many of which are still running within financial institutions and government agencies today. The language has been continually improved and given new features. And yet, COBOL has been derided by many within the computer science field as a weak or simplistic language. Though couched in technical terms, these criticisms have drawn on a deeper source: the culture and gender dynamics of early computer programming."}
{"prompt":"During the 1960s, as computer programming increasingly came to be regarded as a science, more and more men flooded into what had previously been a field dominated by women. Many of these men fancied themselves to be a cut above the programmers who came before, and they often perceived COBOL as inferior and unattractive, in part because it did not require abstruse knowledge of underlying computer hardware or a computer science qualification. Arguments about which languages and programming techniques were “best” were part of the field’s growing pains as new practitioners tried to prove their worth and professionalize what had been seen until the 1960s as rote, unintellectual, feminized work. Consciously or not, the last thing many male computer scientists entering the field wanted was to make the field easier to enter or code easier to read, which might undermine their claims to professional and “scientific” expertise.  At first, however, the men needed help. Looking back, we see many examples of women teaching men how to program, before women gradually receded from positions of prominence in the field. Juliet Muro Oeffinger, one of about a dozen programmers I interviewed for this piece, began programming in assembly language in 1964 after graduating college with a BA in math. “When COBOL became the next hot thing,” she said, “I learned COBOL and taught it for Honeywell Computer Systems as a Customer Education Rep.” In the images below, Oeffinger teaches a room full of men at the Southern Indiana Gas and Electric Company how to program in the language. Within a short time, these trainees—who had no prior experience with computer work of any kind—would have been programming in COBOL.","completion":"Programmer Juliet Muro Oeffinger teaching students Gerald Griepenstroh, Ron Holander, Von Hale, and Ed Tombaugh how to program in COBOL c. 1967. Photos from the personal collection of Juliet Muro Oeffinger. Another retired programmer I spoke to named Pam Foltz noted that good COBOL was great long-term infrastructure, because it was so transparent. Almost anyone with a decent grasp of programming could come into a COBOL system built by someone else decades earlier and understand how the code worked. Foltz had a long career as a programmer for financial institutions, retraining in COBOL soon after getting her BA in American studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the 1960s. Perhaps this dual background is one reason why her code was so readable; as one of her supervisors admiringly told her, “You write COBOL like a novel! Anyone could follow your code.”  Ironically, this accessibility is one of the reasons that COBOL was denigrated. It is not simply that the language is old; so are many infrastructural programming languages. Take the C programming language: it was created in 1972, but as one of the current COBOL programmers I interviewed pointed out, nobody makes fun of it or calls it an “old dead language” the way people do with COBOL. Many interviewees noted that knowing COBOL is in fact a useful present-day skill that’s still taught in many community college computer science courses in the US, and many colleges around the world.  But despite this, there’s a cottage industry devoted to making fun of COBOL precisely for its strengths. COBOL’s qualities of being relatively self-documenting, having a short onboarding period (though a long path to becoming an expert), and having been originally designed by committee for big, unglamorous, infrastructural business systems all count against it. So does the fact that it did not come out of a research-oriented context, like languages such as C, ALGOL, or FORTRAN."}
{"prompt":"In a broader sense, hating COBOL was—and is—part of a struggle between consolidating and protecting computer programmers’ professional prestige on the one hand, and making programming less opaque and more accessible on the other. There’s an old joke among programmers: “If it was hard to write, it should be hard to read.” In other words, if your code is easy to understand, maybe you and your skills aren’t all that unique or valuable. If management thinks the tools you use and the code you write could be easily learned by anyone, you are eminently replaceable.  The fear of this existential threat to computing expertise has become so ingrained in the field that many people don’t even see the preference for complex languages for what it is: an attempt to protect one’s status by favoring tools that gate-keep rather than those that assist newcomers. As one contemporary programmer, who works mainly in C++ and Java at IBM, told me, “Every new programming language that comes out that makes things simpler in some way is usually made fun of by some contingent of existing programmers as making programming too easy—or they say it’s not a ‘real language.’” Because Java, for example, included automatic memory management, it was seen as a less robust language, and the people who programmed in it were sometimes considered inferior programmers. “It's been going on forever,” said this programmer, who has been working in the field for close to thirty years. “It's about gatekeeping, and keeping one’s prestige and importance in the face of technological advancements that make it easier to be replaced by new people with easier to use tools.” Gatekeeping is not only done by people and institutions; it’s written into programming languages themselves.","completion":"In a field that has elevated boy geniuses and rockstar coders, obscure hacks and complex black-boxed algorithms, it’s perhaps no wonder that a committee-designed language meant to be easier to learn and use—and which was created by a team that included multiple women in positions of authority—would be held in low esteem. But modern computing has started to become undone, and to undo other parts of our societies, through the field’s high opinion of itself, and through the way that it concentrates power into the hands of programmers who mistake social, political, and economic problems for technical ones, often with disastrous results."}
{"prompt":"The Labor of Care A global pandemic in which more people than ever before are applying for unemployment is a situation that COBOL systems were never designed to handle, because a global catastrophe on this scale was never supposed to happen. And yet, even in the midst of this crisis, COBOL systems didn’t actually break down. Although New Jersey’s governor issued his desperate plea for COBOL programmers, later investigations revealed that it was the website through which people filed claims, written in the comparatively much newer programming language Java, that was responsible for the errors, breakdowns, and slowdowns. The backend system that processed those claims—the one written in COBOL—hadn’t been to blame at all.","completion":"So why was COBOL framed as the culprit? It’s a common fiction that computing technologies tend to become obsolete in a matter of years or even months, because this sells more units of consumer electronics. But this has never been true when it comes to large-scale computing infrastructure. This misapprehension, and the language’s history of being disdained by an increasingly toxic programming culture, made COBOL an easy scapegoat. But the narrative that COBOL was to blame for recent failures undoes itself: scapegoating COBOL can’t get far when the code is in fact meant to be easy to read and maintain.  That said, even the most robust systems need proper maintenance in order to fix bugs, add features, and interface with new computing technologies. Despite the essential functions they perform, many COBOL systems have not been well cared for. If they had come close to faltering in the current crisis, it wouldn’t have been because of the technology itself. Instead, it would have been due to the austerity logic to which so many state and local governments have succumbed."}
{"prompt":"In order to care for technological infrastructure, we need maintenance engineers, not just systems designers—and that means paying for people, not just for products. COBOL was never meant to cut programmers out of the equation. But as state governments have moved to slash their budgets, they’ve been less and less inclined to pay for the labor needed to maintain critical systems. Many of the people who should have been on payroll to maintain and update the COBOL unemployment systems in states such as New Jersey have instead been laid off due to state budget cuts. As a result, those systems can become fragile, and in a crisis, they’re liable to collapse due to lack of maintenance.  It was this austerity-driven lack of investment in people—rather than the handy fiction, peddled by state governments, that programmers with obsolete skills retired—that removed COBOL programmers years before this recent crisis. The reality is that there are plenty of new COBOL programmers out there who could do the job. In fact, the majority of people in the COBOL programmers’ Facebook group are twenty-five to thirty-five-years-old, and the number of people being trained to program and maintain COBOL systems globally is only growing. Many people who work with COBOL graduated in the 1990s or 2000s and have spent most of their twenty-first century careers maintaining and programming COBOL systems.   If the government programmers who were supposed to be around were still on payroll to maintain unemployment systems, there’s a very good chance that the failure of unemployment insurance systems to meet the life-or-death needs of people across the country wouldn't have happened. It’s likely those programmers would have needed to break out their Java skills to fix the issue, though. Because, despite the age of COBOL systems, when the crisis hit, COBOL trundled along, remarkably stable.","completion":"Indeed, present-day tech could use more of the sort of resilience and accessibility that COBOL brought to computing—especially for systems that have broad impacts, will be widely used, and will be long-term infrastructure that needs to be maintained by many hands in the future. In this sense, COBOL and its scapegoating show us an important aspect of high tech that few in Silicon Valley, or in government, seem to understand. Older systems have value, and constantly building new technological systems for short-term profit at the expense of existing infrastructure is not progress. In fact, it is among the most regressive paths a society can take."}
{"prompt":"As we stand in the middle of this pandemic, it is time for us to collectively rethink and recalculate the value that many so-called tech innovations, and innovators, bring to democracy. When these contributions are designed around monetizing flaws or gaps in existing economic, social, or political systems, rather than doing the mundane, plodding work of caring for and fixing the systems we all rely on, we end up with more problems than solutions, more scapegoats instead of insights into where we truly went wrong.","completion":"There are analogies between the failure of state unemployment systems  and the failure of all sorts of public infrastructure: Hurricane Sandy hit the New York City subway system so hard because it, too, had been weakened by decades of disinvestment. Hurricane Katrina destroyed Black lives and neighborhoods in New Orleans because the levee maintenance work that was the responsibility of the federal government was far past due, a result of racist resource allocation. COVID-19 continues to ravage the United States more than any other nation because the federal infrastructure needed to confront public health crises has been hollowed for decades, and held in particular contempt by an Administration that puts profits over people, and cares little, if at all, about the predominantly Black and Latinx people in the US who are disproportionately dying.  If we want to care for people in a pandemic, we also have to be willing to pay for the labor of care. This means the nurses and doctors who treat COVID patients; the students and teachers who require smaller, online classes to return to school; and the grocery workers who risk their lives every day. It also means making long-term investments in the engineers who care for the digital infrastructures that care for us in a crisis."}
{"prompt":"When systems are built to last for decades, we often don’t see the disaster unfolding until the people who cared for those systems have been gone for quite some time. The blessing and the curse of good infrastructure is that when it works, it is invisible: which means that too often, we don’t devote much care to it until it collapses.","completion":"Cubicles as far as the eye can see, each one containing a government worker clacking keys in front of an ancient, humming green screen. On the other side of those screens are millions of people trying to file for unemployment, apply for food stamps, or access any other number of government services. The website keeps crashing when they try to submit their online form, or they wait in line for hours only to reach the end and find that the piece of mail they brought to verify their identity is invalid. Try again tomorrow."}
{"prompt":"This is a familiar trope about dysfunctional government, one that emerged to serve the political goals of the right during the crisis that was, in the words of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “the close of the golden age of US capitalism.” The stereotype—mindlessly bureaucratic, hopelessly outdated—was used to justify attacks on organized labor, tax cuts for capital, and the hollowing out of what little safety net the US established after the Great Depression and World War II. Historian Mar Hicks writes in their piece for this series that the implications of that hollowing out for government technology were that “as state governments have moved to slash their budgets, they’ve been less and less inclined to pay for the labor needed to maintain critical systems.” We asked a few of the people who were tasked with making those systems work anyway about their decades-long careers in government technology.","completion":"Beginning in the mid-1980s, Jed Wagner began architecting the federal system that handles veterans’ benefits appeals—a system that he alone was responsible for for three decades. Around the same time, Mike Schwab was a unionized employee of Illinois’ Central Management Services, developing and maintaining mainframe applications that other state agencies used in their day-to-day work. A few decades later, Adam Grandt-Nesher was typing Hebrew blindly into dumb terminals, the start of a winding career through taming legacy systems across private and public sectors that landed him in the middle of mainframe modernization efforts for the US federal government today. We sat down with the three of them to get a kaleidoscopic picture of how the government technology systems we have today came to be, and what they will look like in the future."}
{"prompt":"The interviews included in this series were edited by Jen Kagan, and conducted by Christa Hartsock and Julie Sutherland, who work together at Code for America, a technology nonprofit that works with governments to better deliver services like SNAP, Medicaid, and criminal record clearance. Christa is a software engineer and Julie is a designer and qualitative researcher. The interview team would like to thank Mike Schwab, Adam Grandt-Nesher, Jed Wagner, Marianne Bellotti, Philip Young, Teresa Curtis, Jason Anton, Joe Klemmer, Mike Cowden, John O’Duinn, Genevieve Gaudet, Zoe Blumenfeld, Jen Pahlka, and the many others who fielded questions, chased mainframe leads, and shaped the series.","completion":"The story does not stop here—we would like to continue chronicling stories from mainframe developers and need your help. If you have an experience to share, please reach out at mainframes@logicmag.io. The series: Built to Last, by Mar Hicks Mike Schwab on Mainframe Programming for the State of Illinois Adam Grandt-Nesher on Modernizing Infrastructure Jed Wagner on Being the Sole Maintainer of the Veterans Appeals System Tell us a bit about your work."}
{"prompt":"For twenty-six years, I was with Central Management Services (CMS) for the State of Illinois. CMS is like a super agency that provides services to other state agencies. They run the payroll system and do the health insurance and other benefits for most everybody that’s employed by the state, including universities. There are some large agencies that do their own payroll.  I used to work on the application side developing for mainframes before I moved over to storage. On the storage side, I worked with state agencies to make sure they had enough space on the mainframe to hold their files.  What did the storage side entail? We managed equipment for state agencies and billed for CPU, disk space, and all that. If equipment was shared among a few of our agencies, we only billed each agency for what they were actually using. But there were some storage areas that were limited to one agency—since they were the only ones that used it, they got billed for all the storage, whether or not it was being used.","completion":"We set a notification level of 10 percent. So if you had less than 10 percent storage capacity remaining, you got notified to add more. But, you know, the agencies didn’t want to pay for another storage volume. We’d call them up and tell them they needed more, but they’d say, “Let it drop to 9 percent, 8 percent,  7 percent—we’re still working!—5 percent! Four percent!” Eventually, they’d say ”We’re not working any more. We need more space.” Why do you think they cut it so close?  They didn’t want to pay for it. If we added a volume, which was eight gigabytes, they’d have to pay for that space even if they didn’t actually need it for a file. They didn’t want to drive up the computer budgets.  But when you’re operating like that, any tiny little bump can stop your work from happening. And it did from time to time. One time, this agency had a log get up to the maximum number of extents. The log itself wasn’t too big; it was just using too many little chunks of memory. They called me and said, “We can’t do this transaction!” Everything came to a screeching halt and their system shut down until they had defragmented that log so that they could gather more space for it.  That sounds like what’s happening to these government systems that are crashing as millions of people file unemployment claims. What’s your perspective on all the recent news about that, and particularly the criticisms of COBOL? Do you feel the criticisms are warranted?  Totally unwarranted. COBOL is the backbone behind the businesses on the web. Your credit cards would not work without COBOL. American Express, Visa, MasterCard—they’re all running COBOL. Airline tickets? The backbone behind that is all on mainframes. The airline industry developed software in the 50s on specifically designed computers. The software they run on mainframes today is directly descended from COBOL code they wrote for the IBM 360, which came out in the mid-1960s.  COBOL was designed for accounting. It’s designed to be exact to the penny. The IBM 360 came out with instructions that fit into that kind of paradigm. When you go to any other language, they don’t often have decimal math instructions for that kind of accounting work. So any time you port COBOL over to another language, you can get your basic logic over and then you’ve got to test your accounting and make sure you come up to the penny again. There are often rounding errors that creep in after a while: you start losing your least significant digits and, eventually, you’re no longer accurate to the penny. That does not happen with mainframes running COBOL."}
{"prompt":"COBOL’s strengths aside, these systems are struggling. Do you have any thoughts based on your experience about why they’re struggling? None of the other recessions we’ve had since 1918 have come all at once like this. You start to have a recession and your unemployment systems are handling 0.1 percent more, 0.2 percent more. Your systems have time to grow and scale. You’ve got more workload handling the new people coming in while paying everybody else out from their last week’s records.  Today, you’ve got 10 percent of the US population laid off and filing for unemployment within months. That’s one hundred times your normal recession workload. The employees who process those claims are completely overwhelmed. The CPU processing speed is overwhelmed. Your disk storage for all these new people is completely overwhelmed. If you’re going to 15 percent unemployment and you were at 5 percent, you need three times as much storage space. And the people who work in the unemployment office are trying to handle fifty to a hundred times their normal workload. You can’t just enter your information and automatically get unemployment. A person has to sit there and approve or disapprove every request.  Yeah, we work a lot with government caseworkers and there’s always a human that has to do some sort of thing on the other side of the screen. When I talk with friends who work at Facebook or wherever, they think it’s this perfectly oiled mechanical system. But there are humans all over it, and they do really complex things. And humans are hard to scale.","completion":"That’s right. At CMS, we worked with the agency in charge of unemployment. The only person we ever saw from that office was a shop steward who would come down for meetings. She had a guy transfer from the Department of Corrections who had trained to work on the unemployment system. Of course, it had lots of complex rules and you have to have them all memorized. It takes weeks, if not months of training to learn all the rules you have to follow before you can say yes or no. So this guy spent months in training, but in the end, he found it so stressful to be handling the unemployment claims that he went back to corrections.  How do you actually sustain that when the software is so complicated? And we’ve seen several times in our government work that one or two people maintain ten systems. What happens when they leave? The complexity of these systems is a big issue. On the technical side, if there’s only one person who knows a system and that last person goes to retire, there’s nobody left to train new people on the software. And the mainframe software is so much more complex to use. With Linux or Windows applications, you get trained up in a week. But for mainframe applications, every installation is custom. There are tricks of the trade that new hires have to learn by osmosis, by working with the prior person. A new guy comes in, you tell him what to do, and you sit there and hold his hand while he goes through and does it. And you are still learning new tricks even after a couple of years."}
{"prompt":"Now, if you’re the last person and you’re not training anyone, all that knowledge goes away. A new person who comes in and starts working on a system that hasn’t been maintained for three or four months. People try to write everything down but you never say a lot of these things, even to a person sitting right there next to you.  If you want to see somebody actually working on the mainframe screens to get a sense of how complicated they are, moshix—that’s his username—on YouTube has about 160 video recordings up.","completion":"Have you watched some of these? Quite a few, yes. Some of them I watch because I’ve never used the products he’s working on. Others remind me of systems I’ve worked on and I find it enjoyable to watch it over again. Get Your CICS You mentioned earlier that you were on the applications side at CMS before you were on the storage side. Can you tell us about when you started and what it was like? When they hired me, they were moving into a brand new office building. There were about 150 people there, and we had thirty or forty mainframe applications. We had CICS, IMS DB, just about everything. We were a service bureau.  Teams now tend to have product managers, designers, and programmers. What was the makeup of your team?  We had systems analysts and we had coders. I was in-between. In terms of designing the applications, you’d start with a screen layout and a database layout, and go from there. Usually, you’ve got a form that you need someone to fill out. You have to replicate the form fields on screen: first name, last name, middle name, social security number, address, and all that. That gives you all your records."}
{"prompt":"The first IBM was this Hollerith card system they used for the 1890 census. You’d have a person’s name, their address, and all this other information punched on cards. Of course, it wouldn’t all fit, so you’d need a few cards for each person and you needed to know what information was on what card—card one had the name and address, card two had the spouse and job, card five had whatever. That’s your set of information for that person.  Now that you’ve got computer files on hard drives, it’s all in one record. All the transactions for that person—having a kid, changing their healthcare plan—those are different fields under that person.  It sounds like, when you were building out features, there was programming you did on the backend and then programming in CICS. Is that more like the frontend? CICS itself is a multitasking transaction manager, where it takes in a transaction name that the user enters. It uses that transaction name to start the COBOL programs associated with it. A transaction in this case is like a thread. Maybe CICS runs the programs, then returns the result and exits. Or maybe it shows you a result on the screen, asks for more inputs, then does more work, and then exits. So CICS itself would not change but you’d get releases every other year with updates through the operating system.  When you found a problem with your application program, you’d put the changes in at that point. Only a few people could update the authorized production application, because you just don’t want a bunch of people going in and messing up a production database, causing all kinds of problems. The real problems were bad enough.","completion":"Did you all do any user testing where you’d have a caseworker or an HR worker go through that screen with you?  Yes, we’d call up our end users and they’d try out the changes to the system themselves. Everybody who did the testing had a coax switch to switch between test and production. Like a physical switch?  A physical switch on a coax line, yes."}
{"prompt":"Software engineers now expect to be on call and sometimes get called in the middle of the night. Were you on call for these systems? Yes, I was. All thirty-some years.  We would have two or three people in a group, so we could rotate. But then we got people in that had grown up around PCs, and they just don’t appreciate that computers have to operate 24/7.  How did being on call for thirty years affect your life?  Since I did it my whole life, it’s hard to say.  I was limited in how far away I could go for a social event since I had to be able to get back to work if called. And limited on drinking since I had to be able to drive to work at any time.","completion":"Most nights I didn’t get called, but then some nights would be bad and I’d get two to three calls in one night. Other times, I wouldn’t be called but once a month. When I got towards the very end of my career, it was less than once a month because we kept so on top of those storage groups, made sure we had enough space on them."}
{"prompt":"When you were working on those applications and you were working with people who then were using your application, how did that feel? I felt a real pride and ownership in working on that screen. There were 300 to 400 people who used it to sign up 80,000 state employees for healthcare programs all across the state. It was important that it worked just right for them.  These people are all counting on me to do my thing right. I felt quite a bit of responsibility.  Make and model Backing up a bit in the story—how did you first get into computers?  I was in high school in 1979 and they got in two TRS-80 Model Is with a cassette tape drive and sixteen kilobytes of memory. We started doing little projects on that. They had one in the electronics lab and it was empty during my lunch hour, so I would go down there and use it then. That got me interested in computers.  You could sit there and see your results right in front of you. I had even used a teletype printer keyboard at this physics camp at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in June 1978. You type in a command and it’s printing as you go. Then, when you press enter, the command goes in and starts printing up the results.  I got my computer science degree at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois. I used punch cards for my first two classes in the fall of 1981 and spring of 1982. We got IBM 3270 consoles at that time, and that was also when the IBM PC came out. I also had one class on an Apple II computer with a Zilog Z80 card in it, which was a follow-up to the Intel 8080.  Could you describe the teletype printer keyboard more? Was there a screen? We used it to play this Star Trek game. You didn’t have a screen; it was all printed text. You’d type your command at the printer because it was a teletype interface over an acoustic coupler modem that had cups to hold the phone headpiece with speaker and microphone. The teletype machine would output sounds that the cups would then receive and transmit through the modem. The telephone system didn’t have the RJ45 phone plugs to directly connect phones into the modem yet.","completion":"When you were going to college at Illinois State, why did you choose computer science?  The IBM PC didn’t come out until November ’81 and they didn’t have one at the university until fall of ’82. At that time, if you wanted to use a computer, you had to work for a big business that could afford to buy one. Even the TRS-80 was a couple thousand bucks and I was earning three bucks an hour. I was not going to be able to get one. I knew a computer-oriented job would be with a big company that had an IBM mainframe or a minicomputer."}
{"prompt":"In 1981, the IBM 360 had just been out fifteen years and they were still rolling out major changes to the operating system. It had thirty-two bit registers but only used twenty-four bits for the address so it could only address sixteen megabytes. Our mainframe computer at the university had eight megabytes and when they expanded it to twelve, it took a whole refrigerator-sized unit to add that amount of memory. Every four megabytes basically meant another refrigerator. And then the computer core itself was one or two refrigerators.  So where did you end up working after college? I applied to the Illinois State Police (ISP) because they had a job posting. I went and interviewed, and they initially said they were going to hire me, but then they called back and said I wasn’t going to get in because I had voted in the Democratic primary. They told me to contact my county Republican chairman and join their Young Republican’s group, which I did. After that, ISP offered me a job. I started on December 3,1984 and I worked on various applications there. One was crime statistics reports, and then I went to online applications for them. Never involved in cases; I was just making sure the computer systems were up and running to track traffic tickets and, later, investigatory files.","completion":"What were your first impressions of that job?  The office building was sixty years old by the time I got there. You had a desk on one side and a computer table on the other. There was a 3178 display, which is basically a CRT unit and a keyboard with a little computer box on the side of the computer that communicated over coax cable to the box in the closet. There wasn’t a full PC there yet. It worked really well. In fact, I kind of missed it when we got our PCs. The PCs wanted everything in twenty-four lines instead of forty-three, so we had half the amount of screen we’d had before, but it seemed like even less. But other than that, you know, it’s all the same information.  Could you talk about the applications that you worked on while you worked there and who used them?  It was the dispatchers at the state police headquarters who talked to the troopers over the radio. Entering traffic tickets, entering a license plate to do a query on it. Find out who the owner was, if they had any warrants out on them.   That system had been around over a decade by the time I got there in ’84. It was about ’69 or ’70 when they got their first computer going to communicate with the FBI and offices in other states."}
{"prompt":"It was a federal project? There was a state project called LEADS that communicated with the FBI’s computer and then each state had their own computer and applications, just like every state has their own state police.  These were applications written in COBOL, Assembler, and IDEAL. Then I did a reporting system on a CICS with Datacom. For a drug traffic stop system, I copied an application we had to a new application called Valkyrie. It was to track what they found during traffic stops: drugs, weapons, whatever was found. I think we were the first state to come up with an application to do something like that, and that was one of the last projects I got to do over at the state police about 1989. The headquarters for that was going to be in El Paso.  We work on technology to help clear people’s criminal records. So I’ve talked to a number of people at the FBI and Nlets about making sense of criminal record data across state lines.","completion":"Yes, it’s complicated. The FBI has their own network for sending electronic law enforcement data nationally, but the states can’t use it. The states had to create their own organization called Nlets to communicate criminal justice information, like out-of-state arrests, across state lines. There are other barriers too. You know the 1-800 number you have to call to do the background check for a firearms purchase? By US law, all that information has to be stored on paper. So when you call that number, somebody takes the person’s information and goes and looks it up on paper and then calls you back with the information. You can’t just type it in and get the information back, or even just have a person in FBI headquarters type the name in and find out right there. The FBI person doing the lookup has to go physically search through paper for that person.  And Congress doesn’t want the information released. So they just put up all these obstacles in people’s ways.  Why did you leave ISP?  Well, that was the asbestos. We were up on the sixth floor and we had like skylights up there and the caulk would leak from time to time. Sometimes, we’d have a leak and you’d smell the mold. And then that started dropping on the asbestos and it all started falling off the pipes and onto people’s desks."}
{"prompt":"One person had a four-inch-high conical pile of white powder on their desk every day for about two weeks. We thought the janitor was pulling a prank or something because they’d sweep it off in the morning and there’d be nothing there all day. Then we’d come in the next day and there would be another pile there.  When we found out it was asbestos, we were concerned. We reported it to building maintenance and they covered it with duct tape and started taking air samples. This air sample machine was sitting there every day making noise. We lived with it. They moved us to another floor while they fixed it up, and when they were done, we went back up there.  You went back?  Yup. But that was the last straw for me. Repairs were going so slow. They were there for another twenty-five years in that building. It was 2009 before they bought the Franklin Life buildings in town and got the people out of there. It was 2012 before they got the computers out. The rest of the building still has to be cleared out and they haven’t done that. It’s been sitting empty for close to a decade now.","completion":"Union Dilution Were you covered by the union at that time? And was the union present in those conversations about the asbestos?  Most of my time at state police, I was in a merit comp, a nonunion position. The “programmer analysts” were in the union, but we were just “programmers” so we weren’t. Right before I left, around ’88, they brought us in.  Do you know why they did that? When the union wants to bring in a particular title, they send out letters to everybody in that position. When the union gets back so many letters, they can go to the National Labor Relations Board and call for an election where everyone votes on whether they want union representation. Enough of us voted to join."}
{"prompt":"By the time you moved to CMS, were you always in the union going forward?  After that point, yes. I told ISP in spring of 1990 that I was going to go over to CMS. The US Supreme Court was sitting on a case called Rutan versus Republican Party of Illinois over the hiring practices by the state of Illinois. There was a transfer freeze and hiring freeze during that whole period, so I sat there for six months working on a project not knowing when my transfer would go through. Once that decision came down, all the transfers went through all at once.","completion":"What union were you a part of? AFSCME. Different locals represent different agencies. There was one for the police officers in the state police department and then there was another for several agencies that have employees in Springfield, just the employees in Springfield. There was Local 2224 that covered CMS and five other agencies in Sangamon county. And then Council 31 has all the other state employees in different locals. So they were running the show whenever they were negotiating contracts. In about 1994 or so, I actually stood election for negotiator and won, so I was involved in those negotiations for about five months. We’d go in for a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday negotiation session. And then three weeks later we’d have the next one. Each local could send five delegates, so we had something like 250 people total for our side and then there’d be maybe a dozen agency heads for the management. We’d meet in convention centers."}
{"prompt":"What else would the union work on? For example, my coworker was applying for other positions and she had the seniority and the skills to take these other positions. But she would never hear back about her applications. Most people, when they don’t hear anything, they just assume that they didn’t get it. But she would follow up, find out who got the position, and then compare their record to hers. If she had seniority on them, she’d file a grievance. She’d get the raise she should have gotten before, though it wasn’t backdated to make up for all the time she had been underpaid. She was stuck and trying to go someplace else for fifteen years. I know that happened to her at least three times. And it just seemed so cheap, you know. Her seniority should have applied—your seniority is supposed to give you priority within your bargaining unit, within that county—but the state wanted somebody else and it didn’t cost them much.","completion":"The state basically just hires whoever they want. And if the person who they should have hired eventually found out, then and only then would the state have to give them a small raise to match what should have already been their pay. It’s a low-cost violation for them. When did you first experience contractors in your government work? When I was first hired on at the state police, they already had some contractors and we basically treated them the same. The main thing was, on the phone list, they all had an asterisk by their names. And if they did something wrong, then boom, they were gone and there was nothing they could do about it.  The big thing about being a state employee is you get a pension and health insurance. The state has to do that to keep people there, and if you as an employee want to keep those things, you have to stay with the state of Illinois. But if you were a contractor, you didn’t get anything else. They were paid twice what we were, but no pension or healthcare. If they found better wages or something more interesting somewhere else, they could be gone in two weeks. Lots of people stuck around, but they also might be gone in a year or two when their project wrapped up."}
{"prompt":"What sorts of roles did contractors fill?  Application programming for the most part. The union had put into the contracts that agencies couldn’t do a personal services contract. So that meant that they could never interview an individual contractor. The contractor would have to incorporate into their own company or be hired through some other company. But they were basically just employees.  We got rid of those for the most part about 2005. The union got the state to recognize what state agencies were doing. Now, if you want an employee, you’ve got to hire an employee. You can’t just hire a contractor through a third party and say it’s not personal services. The state had a year to hire replacements for those people. That was quite a bit of turmoil: a lot of people to hire and a lot of expertise was lost. I mean, some of the contractors had been in there for decades.  Did it seem like that was one for one, like one employee was hired to replace every contractor, or were there some contractors who were never replaced?  There was considerable shrinkage. It’s worth noting that by this time, the state of Illinois had cut taxes, yet kept up their expenditures, so they were behind on paying bills and falling further behind every year. They were borrowing out of our pension funds just trying to catch up on bills. Today, Illinois has something like five billion in unpaid bills with about six months delay.  Back to your question about contractors specifically: the agencies tried hiring, but they didn’t get many replacements. Many contractors didn’t apply for their own jobs as employees because the pay was lower. I saw the job postings go up on the bulletin boards. Normally, there would be enough surface area on the board for each listing to have its own place. The listings were so thick you had to leaf through pages and pages. Even after a year, they had all these vacancies they were still trying to fill.  When did you first start learning to program?  I’ve been programming since I can remember. I grew up in Israel so I couldn’t actually speak or read English, but I could write elementary BASIC code.","completion":"What was it like not knowing English when you were learning BASIC?  I memorized the commands in Hebrew, which were overlaid on top of the standard QWERTY English keyboard. So to draw a circle I spelled the word ’circle’ in the Hebrew letters. It’s not an actual word, obviously. I didn’t recognize or understand English letters."}
{"prompt":"I’ve been reading fluently in English since I was eleven or twelve, and learning English definitely helped me learn to code because I could recognize the shape of the letters and something about their meaning earlier than the smarter kids did. Do you feel that the prevalence of English in coding languages is a barrier for non-native English speakers? I stopped using Hebrew when working on computers when I was fourteen or fifteen, as soon I had access to control my own computers. Growing up, I used the Hebrew version of Windows, which is built to support right-to-left languages and tries to translate. But, supporting both Hebrew and English languages is really hard and is never done well, and so I gave up on Hebrew as a working language at a very young age.","completion":"So, the short answer is yes, absolutely it’s a barrier. And the solution is that most of us just give up. My phone and computers have been in English for about as long as I can remember, because the experience is horrible otherwise.  When you were young, what did you think that you wanted to do with your life?  I was very, very certain until my late teens that I was going to be a doctor, like a good Jewish son of a good Jewish mother. I have some medical challenges though, and when I joined the Israeli Army for my mandatory service I was assigned to be a truck driver, which was less cool."}
{"prompt":"At that point, I had already developed some level of programming knowledge. I remember an interesting discussion with my HR non-commissioned officer, where I expressed discontent with being a truck driver. She tried to explain that it’s a fantastic gateway to a career in life, and I—maybe slightly rudely—expressed that as an eighteen-year-old, I had slightly higher aspirations than being a truck driver.","completion":"And so I failed the truck driving class. I failed it horribly.  Was that intentional?  Yes, very much so. Somewhere in my files, I still have that rejection letter, which more or less says that I am too stupid to drive a truck. It’s one of the things that I’m most proud of. That got me out of that black hole and into the general assignment. Then I mentioned that I could code and they made me a small computer operator in the Salary Analysis unit of the HR division of the Israeli army, which is now called the Manpower Directorate.  This job started on an actual terminal, which is basically a keyboard attached to a printer. You typed blind, hit enter, and got a response, which is usually something like “error on line three.” Then you have to guess what line three is, because the end of line submits a query so everything you’re typing is on one single line. So, to debug, you just type it over and over again.  The language used on the terminals was a Hebrew query language called אמת3, or EMET 3. In Israel, speaking Hebrew has a nationalistic value. It’s a revived language that was part of the creation of the country as a country. So a lot of the motivation behind the creation of אמת3 was that it had to be in Hebrew."}
{"prompt":"The query language was written in Hebrew but compiled into English—because everything is compiled in English. Brackets had to be reversed because figuring out how to write brackets in reverse does not work in that compiler installed in pre-Unix VMS. They used the ASCII code that corresponded with the letter that was on the keyboard when you typed in Hebrew, and while compiling reversed the Hebrew letters into those ASCII codes. It was essentially gibberish English, basically what I did when I was learning BASIC. The language was written in 1973, and I started working on it in 1999.","completion":"But, that was my life. You’d get a question like, \"How many people served between 1998 and 2000 as nurses in this unit? And how much money did they get paid?\" And then they would run an analysis to get a sense of what kind of modification to their salary they should have because they were practicing emergency medicine in a medical combat unit. My job was to run those reports for them, because translating from the logic of the query to that stupid language was hard."}
{"prompt":"Like every other piece of legacy software, when you work with it long enough it shapes the organization around it. Workflows are created to handle the limitations and people like me start building bits and pieces on top of it to make it better so that the workflow can become better. And what you end up with is a whole bunch of legacy code held together with duct tape.","completion":"How did you feel about your job at the time? Initially, I was very grateful because I wasn’t driving a truck. Being the clever guy who can do these reports when everybody else gets stuck was exciting for a while. But then I got tired of doing the same thing over and over again. You just have to copy and paste, change the dates. It gets very boring."}
{"prompt":"Outside of the desire to do interesting things, did you feel any responsibility to your job or a sense of civic duty? I’m curious what motivated you.  That’s a discussion that’s really interesting for my current job. But, for that job? You need to remember that I was eighteen and serving in the Israeli army is a complicated thing. Everybody has to do it. Caring about the people that I was affecting by supporting the system clearly isn’t something that eighteen-year-olds do. Or at least, I didn’t at that age. So, no. I was there because it was fun and interesting and it didn’t involve driving a truck.","completion":"Now, it’s very different. My current work affects five million federal employees and two and a half million military units. What I’m doing directly improves their lives and improves the life of the people who serve them, and that is awesome. That’s why I’m doing my job now. I don’t think that any of those considerations existed back then."}
{"prompt":"What made you leave that job? Where did you go next?  I moved from the Salary Analysis unit, to the HR division IT. At the end of my service, I was given the opportunity to work on a tool that was supposed to remove the need for anybody accessing or using אמת3 ever again. I was so full of resentment of that system that it sounded like an awesome idea.","completion":"The first RFP for that project came out in 1981. I was born in 1981. In 2001, I was essentially the tech lead on it. The intention was to wrap this system in a modern—2001 modern—UI system where people could go into a graphical interface, type in the ID number of the soldier or the query, and get the results they needed to make their decisions. I decided to volunteer for an extra six months of army service to see this project through."}
{"prompt":"The workflow that we're trying to solve is the following: we have something called lonely soldiers in the Israeli army. They are soldiers who usually are American volunteers. Their family does not live in Israel. They get housing, food, and extra money. For the record, when you join the Israeli army, as a soldier, you basically make twenty-four bucks a month. You don't get paid for your service for the first three years. But, lonely soldiers get a bunch of services and more money because they need to eat.","completion":"So, let's pretend that a lonely soldier is in a combat unit on the border somewhere. When they submit their application for benefits, there’s a couple-months-long process of passing paper up the chain of command, at the end of which, someone runs a bunch of queries and updates the record in the mainframe system. Now, let's pretend that there’s a typo in the form being passed. That form would then travel back another two and a half months to get back to the soldier to be corrected."}
{"prompt":"What we wanted to do was to shorten that process by offering a graphical interface accessible to the local HR officer so they could submit the applications form electronically and have it approved by the central command HR staff. That was our goal. Take a six month process, turn it into two weeks. To make that possible, we have to build that UI system, wrap it around the actual mainframe system, and make the connection.","completion":"Now, that is a fairly common modernization approach to mainframes, but it’s really not modernization. Today, I am generally angry at this approach.  How come?  Because what I’m doing now is cleaning up after people who made that decision twenty years ago. I’m also twenty years older and I understand technical debt a lot better now. Wrapping a UI around a legacy system doesn’t pay the technical debt. It adds more technical debt. My job now is literally cleaning up after that situation."}
{"prompt":"There’s a bunch of parts of the industry where people basically make their living out of building wrapper systems around mainframes, because it means that, despite whatever is currently running, you appear to have a shiny new modern system six months later. But you don’t, not really, because you can’t actually change the underlying workflow in any way—which works for a while, until you have to change something and you can’t.","completion":"Making Moves Where did you go after the army?  I got to New York and as I was about to head out on a month-long cross-country roadtrip, a relative of an army buddy of mine said he needed a website to write quotes for his moving company. I said okay, I’ll work for a couple weeks and make a little bit of money and I can do a two month long trip... And that was nineteen years ago."}
{"prompt":"Eventually, around 2010-ish, I got pulled into fintech by somebody that I was working with on the moving side, introducing me to the idea of taking programming algorithms, hosting them on a stable system, and running it. Essentially, the foreign exchange (forex) market is ginormous, and has many, many, many, many traders, with each of them trading tiny amounts with insane leverage. It’s a very, very bad industry, morally speaking. There’s a tool called MetaTrader, which was the primary go-to tool for retail trading in the forex industry—this is a Windows application running thirty-two-bit code in 2016. You wrote your algorithm and you ran it on this application on your desktop. If you had a power outage or one of your kids came over to play a game and closed your application, you would lose money as a result of it.","completion":"Fairly early on, we came up with the concept of taking a machine and running it on a Linux server using Wine, to make things more stable. I ended up doing a lot of work with Wine to make it run this trading algorithm properly online. Today I would just do this with virtualization or containerization, but since we’re talking about the late 2000s, none of these were options. I spent the next four years getting that up and running, having up to 11-12,000 people using the system at some point, and then selling that. That was the first and only software that sold successfully. It was my primary success in fintech."}
{"prompt":"Then, the company I worked for got bought by a Slovak conglomerate of foreign exchange brokerages. After buying our company, they just kept buying more and more brokerages. Each brokerage would hand us—hand me—their technology team and their technology stack. We would work to bring their team into our environment, taking their technology and combining everything to create a unified service. We became a technology service company.","completion":"As we bought new companies, we became really good at wrapping around other people’s projects—regardless of which stack they were using—and getting them to talk to each other. We’d take complete projects, wrap them, and turn them into services supporting our unified frontend and unified APIs. Over time, we got into refactoring stuff and breaking them into different pieces and we eventually started building lean microservices, running on AWS, things like that."}
{"prompt":"Now that I’m talking to you about this, it’s very, very sad. The story of my career is that I absorb other people’s legacy software and then kick it until it becomes useful again. Which is, to an extent, what I’m doing now for the federal government.  What was your experience transitioning to the public sector? Well, at first I went looking for jobs at nonprofits as opposed to government because government is—in my head, at least—morally ambiguous. But non-profits don’t like people who don’t have degrees. Government doesn’t like people who don’t have degrees. Anywhere else in tech, nobody cares about what certificates you have; people care about what you’ve done. You only need certificates or degrees if you haven’t done enough yet.","completion":"I spent two and a half years trying to find a way to transition my career over to something meaningful. At the end of the day, the problem is that the not-for-profit jobs are few and far between. I applied for dozens of jobs. All of that failed miserably. My search for more morally fulfilling work ended up taking two years."}
{"prompt":"Wow, two years is a long time.  Eventually I discovered the United States Digital Service (USDS) on Twitter. I applied to USDS and I went through their very tedious six-interview process. Apparently I passed that. But, because I’m a former officer in a foreign army and they do most of their work with the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Department of Defense, they felt I would never pass their security checks and decided not to hire me.","completion":"But there’s a circle of government technology organizations where they all know each other and work together—USDS, the General Services Administration (GSA), Technology Transformation Services (TTS) which includes 18F, etc. They forwarded my resumé to them. I interviewed for GSA and then waited three months to hear they wanted to hire me. And then, three months after that, they told me I’d need to start the background check process. It took something like eight months altogether from the time I interviewed for GSA to the time I started to work for them."}
{"prompt":"I’m interested in how you feel about that government hiring process. My understanding is that one of the reasons why there’s an insistence on pedigrees or a specific number of years of experience is to try to level the playing field. For example, testing someone on specific topics in an interview can privilege certain backgrounds and it’s easier to let bias slip in. But, if you look just at years of experience, in theory that will make it a bit more equal. That doesn’t account for your experience with needing a specific academic pedigree, though.","completion":"Yeah. I understand the need to try to remove bias from hiring. But access to higher education is a biased measurement. And in tech, it’s also kind of irrelevant to skill. One of the things that I have done many, many, many times is hire people who have just come out of their bachelors or masters programs and then spent six months paying them salaries while I’m undoing what academia did to them. People come out of academia with an interesting theoretical background. But honestly, let me ask you, have you ever done Big O analysis during your professional work as an engineer?  I’ve had to think about it, but not deeply or often."}
{"prompt":"Exactly. You think about complexity and you think about efficiency and you measure it, but Big O analysis as an interview tool is only useful to measure how much attention you paid in your second year of college. It’s one of my pet peeves. It’s a symptom of a disease. Nobody Puts COBOL in the Corner As I understand it, you’re not currently a permanent employee with the federal government. How would you describe your position? My position right now is a termed position. Technically, in eight months, I am supposed to go back to the private sector and move on with my life. I probably won’t because this is what I want to do with my life. So I am going to fight to find a way to stay beyond my term. For the government, every change requires years.","completion":"As an example, take my current effort to replace a specific mainframe overseeing the benefits and livelihoods of two and a half million people. Getting away from that system will take more than five years, because of the amount of technical debt that has to be paid. We have led a successful acquisition of a mainframe that took three months and we’re very proud of that. Usually it takes more like seven months to finish an acquisition process in government. We bought a new mainframe, which is a horrible thing to say, but that was the right thing to do because the old system was really about six, seven years past the end of life, and we needed five years to pay the technical debt to fix the system. So, we had to buy a new one and we did it in three months."}
{"prompt":"That’s what I think makes the GSA’s Centers of Excellence (CoE) so special; because the CoE is a part of the federal acquisition service, we can cut that time down to get a new system. But there is value in people like me, people who are angry at the way government works, sticking around for five years, for ten years to see these things through.","completion":"Right now, government is shortcutting the hiring process with termed employees like me who have short two-year stints to try to make change. I don’t think that’s effective because you need someone to stay and see it through. Especially for an organization like the federal government where, every four years, regardless of what happens from the mission perspective, leadership goes away. Targets change. To create sustainable change, we need angry people in the same chair for more than two years."}
{"prompt":"What is a termed position? And what are the other positions available in government, whether salary or contract? The federal government has four positions that I’m aware of. You have general service (GS) employees, who are salaried employees who work for the federal government. They’re somewhere between GS-1 and GS-15, which is a salary scale, and they are competitive service positions. Essentially, that means they have the ability to apply to any position within government, compete for it, and get it as a long-term position.","completion":"Then there are people like me, termed service. To make my position valuable, they let me slide into GS-15 step 8, which is two steps below the maximum salary of GS-15 step 10. They try to match our salaries from the private sector. They couldn’t—they could only match two thirds of what you make in fintech in New York. But they tried, which I appreciate. I was completely aware that I was going to take a salary hit by switching."}
{"prompt":"In my case, the termed position is two plus two, meaning I have a two-year term and would be up for renewal for another two years. They can fire me within the first three months and they can decide whether or not to renew my term at the end of the first two years. Terms can be anywhere from a year to eight years.","completion":"Termed employees are essentially civilians—I can’t apply for other competitive positions outside of my current role. When I’m done with this role, I have to apply again to a GS position and all of my government experience doesn’t count. When you say it doesn’t count, do you mean toward the qualifications for other positions or for benefits?  All of the above. That experience essentially doesn’t exist. If I apply and get into a permanent position that is open to the public, which is some small percentage of the perm job positions, it could contribute to the pension calculation, if and when I retire. But that’s about it."}
{"prompt":"It also doesn’t count for experience for other positions. My position right now is nonsupervisory. For accessing the third kind of position, you have to have a year of supervisory experience. I can manage as many people as I want right now, it doesn’t count. I have to start from scratch from that perspective.","completion":"The third kind of position is Senior Executive Service, or SES. Most people with senior titles—CIO, CEO, directors—tend to be SES. There is a subset of management criteria that you have to reach to become SES, and you also have to have the supervisory experience as a competitive employee that I mentioned earlier."}
{"prompt":"My goal in life now if I’m going to state government is to become SES. But I can’t even start working towards that until I am rehired. Practically speaking, from a career perspective I may as well be a civilian right now.  Why is your goal to be SES?  Because whichever system I’m in, I require myself to accomplish the highest level possible. Right? Also, because that’s where change is. I’m trying to effect change.","completion":"The more you spend time in technology, the more you understand that technology is not the problem. I can build the shiniest system in the world, but it doesn’t mean that anyone will use it. Change is always about people, and people are controlled by management. For example, if I want to get an agency to start working in a different way, I have to be near enough to the top to be able to make decisions that affect how people function. Being at the top doesn’t make it easy, but it gives you the option of trying to accomplish it. This is kind of the sad thing about technology—the more you look into it, the more you understand how little the technology means.  We haven’t yet talked about contractors. From your perspective, what is the role of contractors within these teams and systems? And why does government often procure or contract technology versus building in-house?  That’s a really complicated question. I mentioned there are four classifications, right? Termed, GS, SES—and contractors are the fourth one."}
{"prompt":"It takes me somewhere between two to three months to get a contractor in the door, whereas a new hire takes about eight months to a year. So as a product manager, if I’m trying to get something done in government, contractors are usually my go-to solution. The other piece here is that for political reasons or other reasons, hiring freezes are a thing in government. A bunch of agencies have had eight to ten years of hiring freezes and, as a result, have basically gotten to the point where only 20 percent of the workforce are federal employees. Because they can’t hire, they just buy more contracting because there’s no monitoring of that. That is actually fairly common.","completion":"As an example of one of these freezes, say a lot of the mainframe support people across government started to work as federal employees, but then the federal government can’t hire any new ones. The federal government will go out and buy contractor support to help maintain this legacy system, and the contractor support will turn to the salaried employee and say, “we’ll pay you 150 percent of your salary and give you better benefits if you come work for us.” Federal employees in those positions get to essentially keep the same job, but have better quality of life as a contractor."}
{"prompt":"The law says that federal contractors can’t manage contractors, so a federal employee has to be the contracting officer representative who manages that contract. So you have people whose job used to be technologist or system administrators, but now they are federal employees who are middle management and as a result all they do is manage those acquisition contracts. We’ve seen this pattern a lot.  How does that impact the maintainability of software?  Theoretically, it should improve it because every single person is replaceable. Practically, it presents interesting challenges.","completion":"For example, VB6 was decommissioned in 2012, I think, but there are many VB6 systems across government because VB6 presents a fairly low barrier to entry for development. There’s a whole bunch of these lying around. Say I have a contract with the vendor and that contract says I need VB6 experts to manage these VB6 systems. Awesome. The contractor gets to move those experts around, and they’re supposed to be interchangeable. But what you learn from managing technology as opposed to doing technology is that knowledge management is really hard to do. Organizational knowledge dissipates even if we get a new VB6 expert, because that expert has never seen this system and the person who was an expert in this system gets moved to another project."}
{"prompt":"Documentation is hard—and if it doesn’t exist, I end up paying the same contracting company over and over to learn the business logic and reasoning behind a specific system. That’s the flaw of this approach. To your point about people, COBOL and mainframe systems have been in the news lately as state unemployment applications struggle under the historic load of applicants from the pandemic. A lot of folks are demonizing the languages, but my opinion is that it’s not just about the language or the technical systems—there’s an important social component, too. What is your take on that? I actually got into a very angry discussion with a few of the protectors of COBOL. I described what happens to COBOL in its lifecycle. Every language has a lifecycle for large systems. COBOL has a very specific one.","completion":"Mainframe systems have one primary benefit, which is a horrible trap: you can set the system up, leave it alone, and it will keep running, forever. What you get is forty-year-old codebases that keep doing their job and management doesn’t bother paying for it. Why would you? I can get away with paying less money and the system will keep producing, so I don’t need to bother maintaining it. But then you have code that was written forty years ago by people who have since retired."}
{"prompt":"When the time comes to make a change, you see one of the following. I’m looking at a system that had 900,000 lines of code. It was obviously not man-made. Who made it? Multiple times in the past, IBM introduced new hardware. To make the migration to the new hardware easier, they built tools that would automatically rewrite code. So I have a piece of code that was a hundred thousand lines long to begin with that has now been rewritten and rewritten by other pieces of code. It works, but now there’s no documentation to speak of. There is no understanding of which piece of the code does what. And what I have is people—and they’re really good people—who’ve been maintaining it from the edges, writing around pieces of code that are too big to change like I did back in 2001. But the system is still there. And so you have massive systems that are completely monolithic. There is no understanding which piece of the code is what, or what I can do to kill it or make it better. I have no way to maintain it.","completion":"And then something happens like COVID-19. Suddenly my system that can handle x amount of calls per day needs to handle 400x, and I have no idea how to approach it because that is part of the underlying system itself. It’s not an edge problem. I’m not saying that COBOL is a bad language. I’m saying that it’s so good that it gets abandoned over and over again."}
{"prompt":"May the Pipeline Be Unbroken One of the things we’ve struggled with in this series is finding a diverse set of people who have held technical roles with mainframe systems for a long time—and are willing to speak with us. So, given the breadth of your career and where you are now, I’m curious if that lack of diversity matches your experience or if it’s just a problem with our sourcing? I think it’s an instance of the fake “pipeline problem” for people who are not white men into technology roles. I call the pipeline problem “fake” because I don’t think that’s the actual problem. General technology in GSA has the largest number of queer people, the largest number of women I have ever worked with. For people who shoulder the joys of unpaid work as part of their lives, government does what is actually necessary to make it feasible for those people to stay at their jobs.","completion":"For people still maintaining these systems, though, you’re looking at the pipeline from thirty to forty years ago. There are new people who are pouring into the larger pool of workers, but the mainframe teams haven’t changed. That’s the way it was forty years ago and that’s the way it is now, because these are the same people."}
{"prompt":"What we’ve heard from people maintaining these systems on under-resourced teams is that they’ve been basically expected to be on call for their entire career. One of the things we’ve been trying to understand is: What impact does it have on their personal life? What you are describing gives some color to that, as well.  Ah, that question brings me back to the joys of working in fintech. Foreign exchange is open 24/7. The market opens Sunday at 4:00 p.m. and closes on Friday at 4:00 p.m. and is open 24/5 in the middle. This means that if you’re in charge of the system, you’re on call during the week because you have to be there if things break, and the weekend is when you do all your maintenance. So, you just work constantly.","completion":"In terms of the impact on people's personal lives: you really shouldn’t talk to me, you should talk to my partner and ask him. The fact that I can’t make plans, the fact that I have to walk out of dinner with his parents and go deal with work calls, I’m sure that has an impact. And yeah, people working maintaining government systems have been doing that sort of on-call work forever. That is what they do.  By the way, these people that are on call all the time, the same people who weren’t willing to talk to you when you asked for an interview: part of the reason they refused is that they are still GS-12s and 13s. They’re low in the hierarchy, and yet so essential. Let’s say you publish something and it somehow comes out as negative about GSA. In my position, I would get a slap on the wrist. If they said anything that they shouldn’t say about their agency however, then they’re done. That is their career. So, I have a kind of privilege; I’m coming at this from a position where I can talk to you and I’m not risking that much. These people who’ve been here for forty years—and they’re completely essential—know for a fact that they’ll be railroaded if anything happens."}
{"prompt":"I'm sorry, I'm not trying to guilt you. I'm trying to expose the dynamic. Tell us about your job. My official title is Computer Specialist. I’ve been the lead developer on a team of one for over thirty years. I created and maintain a computer system called VACOLS, the Veterans Appeals Control and Locator System, which manages the appeals process for the US Department of Veterans Affairs.","completion":"That’s an interesting title, “computer specialist.” Why is that your title as opposed to “software engineer”? When I first got started that was what we were: specialists. We did everything from hardware to running cables to configuring and maintaining switches and routers. We maintain our own Exchange servers, which are Microsoft systems used for email and calendaring. So when I started at the VA, I was involved with all of that. Then, in 1986 or 1987, I started developing VACOLS as a side project. Eventually, more and more people started using the application, and it became more and more my primary task.  I don’t know if the government has “software engineers,” I imagine they do. But “specialist” was my official title thirty years ago, and that’s what it still is today.  You started out as a contract worker at the VA. What was that like?  I was on a full-time contract at the time with the State Department’s diplomatic security unit, and they were ten blocks away from the VA. At lunchtime, I’d run over to the VA, do my VACOLS stuff, and then head back to my regular job after that."}
{"prompt":"The VA had me working in the computer room, which was about sixty-two degrees. Remember, this was pre-PC so we had what were called dumb terminals: a keyboard and screen all attached directly to the server with a coax cable. No processor or anything. At the VA, the coax cable ran back to these Wang minicomputers. I was a team of one back then, too, so it was just me in there.","completion":"There was a lot of learning to do. It’s fairly complicated, that whole appeals process. A lot of different legal regulations, things you have to follow. So it was a bit of a challenge in figuring out everything that goes on there.  Can you tell us what an appeal is and why someone might go through the appeal process?  The majority of appeals are for benefits. Let’s say there’s a vet who returns from service and he has a knee condition that’s rated as 30 percent disability. As time goes on, he might get worse, and he can appeal his original decision and say, hey this is a lot worse. I’d like to get 50 percent, or 100 percent, or whatever. So those are called increased rating appeals, which is probably 50 percent of what we do.  The other appeals are for service-connected compensation. Someone says, “I have PTSD resulting from my service.” He goes to his local office, puts in a PTSD claim, and it gets denied. He can say, “I want to appeal my original grading decision and appeal to the Board of Veterans’ Appeals.” At that point, he can have a hearing before a judge at the Board, and the Board will issue a second decision either affirming the original or overturning and granting his request for benefits or to increase his rating. Basically, it’s an appellate court.  I don’t think that I had fully understood that appeals in this context could be a case of a disability worsening over time."}
{"prompt":"At any point he can appeal his initial rating up to 100 percent disability if that’s warranted. But the appeal also involves presenting new evidence, new exams and everything. A judge reviews all the new evidence and has a hearing face-to-face or via video with the appellate and then writes a decision.  So a veteran continues interacting with this system over the course of their life? Not every decision that the VA makes is appealed. Only about 10 percent of the original decisions made by the local offices get appealed to the Board. In 90 percent of the cases, the veteran is either satisfied with the decision or decides not to pursue the claim further.","completion":"How many appeals does the current system process per year?  Last year, they decided about 90,000 legacy appeals. When the Board was 400 people, they’d do about 30,000 a year. Now that they’re 1,200 people, they can process about 90,000 a year.  What is the increase from?  More people, more judges, more attorneys. Over the last twenty years, the board has tripled in size. The more people they have drafting decisions, the more judges they have holding hearings, the more cases they can get out the door. Basically just increased manpower."}
{"prompt":"And how does the system that you built fit into the appeals process?  It tracks all the elements of the appeal. If a veteran was in an accident, he could’ve injured his knee, his elbows, his head—so there could be different issues on appeal. He could be rated 30 percent for an elbow injury, 10 percent for a knee injury, 30 percent for the head injury. Typically, each appeal has an average of three issues. VACOLS keeps track of all the issues he’s appealing, keeps track of all the forms he has to submit during the process.  Like for the first step, he’s going to file a notice of disagreement to indicate that he disagreed with the VA’s original decision. And then there’s four or five other forms to fill out during the process, depending on how far it progresses. And all those forms are kept in the database.  Then, if he requests a hearing, it keeps track of that request and the dates, as well as any mail or evidence we get in correspondence that they sent to the VA. That gets loaded into VACOLS and tracked.  The appeal will start out at the regional office (RO) and it’ll go to the decision review officer, then it might go to the appellant’s rep at the Veterans of Foreign Wars, American Legion, whoever his rep is. The same information will go to an attorney and a judge, so there might be ten or fifteen people touching the appeal at any given point. VACOLS keeps track.  What was the process before they decided to build a technology system to handle it?  Paper. Up until about five years ago, all the claims files with all their service records and military records and everything were in these big twenty-four-inch-thick folders.  For the first twenty-five years of VACOLS, one of the main things it tracked was exactly where these big claims folders were—who physically had them in their possession. Was it with a judge, was it with an attorney, was it out in the regional office, was it with a veteran service organization? We used barcode technology to track all the claims folders. We had thousands of these moving through the building.","completion":"So that was the main purpose of VACOLS to begin with: let’s track where these folders are and who has them and the outcome of the appeal. Since then, we’ve added on module after module to schedule hearings, hold virtual hearings, and do all sorts of other things that are part of the appeals process.  Originally, the system kept track of a physical folder. Now, it’s keeping track of virtually who has the claim and what the status is and what part of the process it’s in."}
{"prompt":"That sounds complicated.  Yeah, and I’ve only touched on a few of the areas. There’s a lot of information it keeps track of. Punch Out What originally led you to computers?  I graduated from Penn State back in the ’70s. I got a business degree coming out of school. I didn’t really take any IT classes. There wasn’t really any offered back in the ’70s. I got my first job with a contractor here in the DC area and the guy that hired me worked for a small business and he was looking for programmers, but he really wanted non-technical people. He hired about a dozen people, with different backgrounds, and then he taught us how to program. My first programming job was working on COBOL applications for large naval contracts.","completion":"Did you have any experience with computers before you landed that job?  Not really. I took one computer course in college and we had to write our programs on punch cards, go to the computer lab at night, and wait in line for two hours to submit the big deck of punch cards. Then it would compile that as your program, and you’d find out that you missed a comma, so you’d have to go correct that and stand in line again for two hours. That was my initial exposure to programming: writing COBOL programs on punch cards.  Do you remember how you felt about it at the time? I felt like it was not a field I wanted to get into.  So what led you to take that first job?  School loans, rent, all the usual things. I’d had a lot of blue-collar jobs, worked in factories, and I knew I didn’t wanna go back to small-town Pennsylvania working the factories again. So it wasn’t as much a matter of falling in love with programming; it was a matter of avoiding the alternatives. The job market was tight back in the early 80s, so if you got an offer coming out of school, you jumped on it.  At that time, did you imagine that you would do different things with your career afterwards?  Yeah, but I showed an aptitude. I was pretty good at programming, and after a few years I realized it was a growing market, so it looked like a good field to get into.  There still weren’t PCs and all that at that point, but if you had strong COBOL skills back in the 70s, early 80s, there were a lot of job opportunities. So I bounced around on a number of different contracts. One of them happened to be with the VA."}
{"prompt":"How did that first contract at the VA end up turning into your career? After I developed VACOLS, I maintained it part-time for about five years. Then, in the early 90s, they wanted to migrate the system off their old Wang computers and onto PCs and a relational database. That’s when they asked me if I wanted to come on board and take on the project. I did that migration, and then we started developing with a rapid application development tool called PowerBuilder, which was big back in the early 90s. And that’s been the formula for the last twenty-five years. We’ve used Oracle as a database and PowerBuilder as the window into that database, to create a client-server solution.  Have you ever thought about leaving for another job or another opportunity?  Yeah, I’ve thought about it. But I feel a responsibility. I’ve always been loyal. I’ve always believed strongly in the VA’s mission. My dad was a veteran. I have uncles that are veterans. And my dad, he’s in his eighties, and still goes to the VA every month. He loves the VA. You only hear the bad stories, but there are lots of people out there like my dad. They love the care and the attention. He goes there and they give him stuff he never even asks for. He raves about the care he gets at the VA. I’ve always felt a loyalty and a strong commitment to the mission of the VA. So, yeah, I’ve thought about other jobs, but the VA treats you well.","completion":"Go It Alone When you were first starting to build out the system, were there other good technical models you looked to, or were you just creating this thing from scratch?  No, I was winging it. I picked up PowerBuilder off the shelf and learned it on my own. It was a great tool back in the 90s, although it’s since lost market share. Sybase eventually purchased it, and I think SAP owns it now. There’s a few people still using it. At the time, it was really easy to pick up and learn.  I was working directly with the end-user base to get all the user requirements and everything—the attorneys and the judges and the admin people that held hearings and docketed the appeals cases."}
{"prompt":"We did an Agile-type development back then before Agile was the big thing. We would just go in and get the requirements and knock them out. We’d try to put something in production in a couple weeks like they do today, move on, and then add onto it a couple of weeks later. It was a good place to work in that regard because you’re working without any constraints. Being a development team of one and working directly with the end users and being there in the same office—you could really get a lot done fast.  That’s interesting to hear, because we’ve talked with a lot of government folks who are trying to move away from Waterfall towards Agile.","completion":"Yeah, we were ahead of our time, but it worked out. Were you still working on things other than VACOLS? I not only did the programming, but we did all the Windows upgrades, as well as the wiring and cabling. I’d do programming on a Friday, the come in Saturday and run cables through the ceiling. You had to do everything back then.  Every shop—the Veterans Benefits Association, Veterans Health Administration, the Board of Veterans’ Affairs—all had their own IT guys, and as an IT guy you did pretty much what you wanted in terms of technology. Like, the Board was running Windows NT, while all the other organizations within the VA chose to go Windows 95, Windows 98. So even the version of Windows used within the VA was not standardized at the time. We had a lot of freedom as far as what type of servers we wanted to use.  Today, everything’s more consolidated and organized and everybody’s on the same platforms. But back then, it was the Wild West. You did what you wanted, and as long as it worked, nobody complained.  What were your responsibilities to that system? If it were to go down, were you on call?  Yeah, I’ve always been the primary point of contact if we ever have server issues or database issues.  Has that been difficult at all?  Not as long as you keep your cell phone on-hand. I always take short break vacations—don’t want to be away too long.  What about before you had a cell phone?  They had my home number back then. There is always a way to find me if they need me. We had pagers back in the 80s. I think I still have one in a drawer here somewhere.  Was it daunting to be working on that system alone for decades? It sounds like a lot to handle.  Yeah. It started out being a system just for the Board of Veterans’ Appeals, which was 400 people at the time, and now it’s grown to over 17,000 users as we pushed it out—VBA, VHA, and all these other organizations. As we developed more applications and interfaces for more kinds of users, it became more and more my baby. It became a full-time job—I painted myself into a corner."}
{"prompt":"Who are those users? Who do they work for? You said a couple of government agencies, but I’m curious what all those acronyms mean.  All the appeals start at the VBA, Veterans Benefits Administration, and then they may move to the Board, but not necessarily. About 14,000 of VACOLS users work for VBA. The appellant could decide to withdraw before the board sees it or the VBA can decide, hey, we made a mistake when we originally denied this, and they can grant benefits before it gets to the board. So a lot of things go on before an appeal ever gets to the Board. The majority of VA people using VACOLS are VBA.  Then we have the Board, which is about 1,200 people now. It’s more or less tripled in size. I also got about a thousand veterans service reps—American Legion, VFW, Disabled American Vets, Paralyzed Veterans of America—about thirty, forty different organizations that we call service organizations that have access to VACOLS. And then VHA is the fourth group. We don’t get a lot of medical appeals; there’s probably 500 or so VHA users. If you combine the VBA, BVA, VHA, and the veterans service orgs then you come up with roughly 17,000 users.","completion":"When you were working on VACOLS, was there ever a point when you said, “I actually need more people on this”? Not really. It was client-server, so deployment was easy. It’s not like a lot of web applications today where you need a lot of people to maintain them. If it worked, it worked; you threw it out on the server and everybody accessed it from the same point. And, knock on wood, we haven’t had much downtime. We’ve been using Oracle databases for thirty years and they never go down. The hardest thing was that, a couple years ago, they decided that all VA applications had to have two-factor authentication. We learned that 17,000 users hadn’t been logging in correctly and wouldn’t be able to get into their own accounts, so I had to quickly create a new authentication database for those 17,000 users. Other than that, things went pretty smoothly the last few years.  Do you think of yourself as a craftsperson? Yeah, I guess. It’s nice to sit back and look at what you’ve created. Right now, VACOLS is a suite of twenty different applications. There’s one for scheduling hearings, HR has their own application, quality review has an application, the intake team has their own application. The dispatch team has an application. They’re separate versions, VACOLS for the VSOs [Veterans Service Organizations], those service reps, and for the regional offices. So it’s a lot like the VA’s Caseflow software, how they’re developing different modules, sort of copying what we did. Just like there’s a VACOLS dispatch program, there’s a Caseflow dispatch program. Once they get all their apps finished, I’m looking at retirement here soon."}
{"prompt":"The Last Appeals We recently went through a project where we were doing research on how people get Supplemental Security Income and disability insurance. Getting evidence for a claim in those cases is often an insurmountable obstacle for people. The appeals process that VACOLS handles seems even more complicated than those.","completion":"That’s why they came up with this new Appeals Modernization Act, where they’re revamping the whole appeal process to make it a lot simpler and faster. The problem with the old appeals system was that it was an open-ended process. At any point in the process, the guy could submit new evidence, new exams, so things were constantly changing. If he filed a claim two years ago, the records could be stale by the time it reached the judge. He might have to go out and get new exams. The new process is a lot tighter. You submit all the evidence up front and then you’re locked in. They try to review in a more timely manner, within six months or so, so you don’t have all these issues with stale records. They’ve streamlined it."}
{"prompt":"Has that changed over time? Now that you’re working with the United States Digital Service, I’m curious how that has changed your development process.  No, it’s still basically the same thing. There are less requirements now that VACOLS is getting ready to be sunset, but there are some new things they’re doing. Within the last couple of months, they’ve introduced virtual hearings where the veteran can have a hearing with a judge from his home, just like we’re doing here with a Skype or a Zoom meeting. We have to start tracking those for the legacy appeals. I’ll have to make some modifications just to indicate that these are virtual hearings, as opposed to face-to-face or video hearings held in the office. So there’s still a few new requirements that I have to put into VACOLS. Most of the new development is in the Caseflow system. I used to work closely with those guys, showing them all the requirements and what VACOLS did, and what they’d have to account for.","completion":"What was the most surprising thing about working on that project with them?  How young they all were. They were all younger than my kids, so that took some getting used to it. But they were all great to work with, really sharp. They came in and got things done quickly. I mean, that whole digital service thing was thrown together by Obama in his last year. The VA was one of the first organizational digital services and so far it’s worked out pretty good.  When the discussion started on your end to start replacing that system, did you indicate you wanted to retire and they were like, wait, we’ve got to replace this thing—or how did that conversation come about?  It wasn’t so much replacing VACOLS as replacing the appeals process with the Appeals Modernization Act to make it faster and simpler. They were gonna have to develop a new system for that anyway, so it just made sense. VACOLS had run its course. There’s going to be legacy appeals for another couple of years, but VACOLS can be sunset after that.  How does that feel for you?  Sounds good to me! Sounds good to my wife. She’s got a lot of places she wants to go. Get to do a little traveling, do things that you put off all these years. So long as none of the kids move back home, we’ll be fine.  That’s exciting! What is the timeline for that? Maybe two years. The legacy appeals, there’s probably 200,000 left. And they do about 100,000 a year. They could get through most of them in the next couple of years.  One of the reasons that we’re doing this series now is because COBOL has been in the news lately with New Jersey making a call for COBOL programmers to help with their unemployment systems struggling under the load of applicants impacted by COVID-19. I think a lot of folks are realizing for the first time that COBOL systems are still a part of government technology. I was curious if you’ve heard of this happening, and what your thoughts are about that and the criticisms of these legacy mainframe systems?  I’m surprised they’re still out there. I haven’t been following the news that closely, but I wasn’t aware that New Jersey was having an issue with them. I mean, there are tons of legacy systems within VA. They have their own programming system, VistA, and they have something like 180 different VistA applications that are used in the VA hospitals and medical centers. So the Board is just a minute little part of the VA. There are a lot of legacy programmers at the VA that work on these VistA systems that have been there longer than I have, and they’ve got the same situation where they’ve now painted themselves into a corner. They’re the expert on the system and probably the only person who knows how to maintain them. Nobody’s coming into the job market these days saying, “I want to be a VistA programmer or a COBOL programmer or a PowerBuilder programmer.” But somebody has to do it."}
{"prompt":"I know the VA still has what they call stovepipe systems, which are basically standalone systems that don’t interface with anything else. That was VACOLS for a while, although now we’ve integrated with Caseflow and other systems. But I’m sure there’s still a lot of these old stovepipe systems out there. They’re probably running in some background that nobody’s even aware of.","completion":"1/ The internet began with the dream of a common language. The vision was a network of networks, bound together by a protocol that let a global community of computers speak to one another—an Esperanto, but for machines.  This dream expressed distinct and sometimes directly competing desires. It was built on wartime sciences of command and control, yet it also contained a communalizing impulse. On the early internet, everything was open source. Open standards prevailed over proprietary ones. Then, after the end of the Cold War, the US government gave the internet to the private sector. The paradox followed that as the internet became truly commonplace, widely popularized, it gradually lost its openness: it became a set of walled gardens, dominated by the so-called platforms. The mediation of billions of lives through infrastructures owned by a handful of companies has not made us more free, even when their services are."}
{"prompt":"Neither has it made us more alike. As the internet has become more massified, it has created more differentiation: producing filter bubbles, epistemic crises, and ever finer demographic segmentation—not to mention amplifying inequalities between those who own a piece of the platforms and those who scramble to put together a living on them; those they give the God’s-eye view, and those they’re used to oversee. Despite the expectations of early US cyberutopians—or, you might say, imperialists—the global spread of the internet has not brought American values everywhere. On the contrary, there are strong tendencies toward fragmentation, from the General Data Protection Regulation in the European Union and calls for data sovereignty in South Asia and Latin America, to the billion users behind the Great Firewall of China. Even as networked technologies have become increasingly universal, it is debatable whether they are “common,” in the deep sense of that word.  2/ Commons is an unusual kind of noun. Singular plural. The article it takes is: The. Historically, “the commons” has referred to the various kinds of resources that members of a community might share. Within village settings, for example, the commons consisted of a central green area where villagers grazed livestock, or a forest where a kind nobleman let them hunt, fish, and gather berries.","completion":"Elinor Ostrom, the economist who won the Nobel Prize for refuting the popular thesis of a “tragedy of the commons”—that is, the idea that any freely shared resource would inevitably be abused and deteriorate—said that a commons consists, at a minimum, of:  Common goods — Those fruits of nature and society that everyone needs to survive and thrive, including our atmosphere, oceans and forests, biodiversity, all species of life, natural systems, and minerals; our food, water, energy, and art; culture, technology, healthcare, and spiritual resources; and, also, news media, and the trade and finance systems we use.Commoners — Groups of people who share these resources. Commoning — Inclusive, participatory, and transparent forms of decision-making and rules governing access to, and benefit from, these common resources.  Ostrom also specified that commons came with boundaries. A commoning process, to include some, had to exclude others. What is needed, who needs it, and how to claim it are hotly contested political questions in our moment—particularly in the midst of a global pandemic. Who will ensure that the answers to these questions are found fairly? 3/ This issue examines the theme of “commons” from all three of Ostrom’s angles and more. Our authors investigate how large quantities of data have been collected and connected—not only by nation states, as the privacy advocates of the early internet feared, but by corporations, some of which sell their services back to the very government entities from which they were supposed to shield us. The fact that advertising, or attention capture, became the default business model of the internet is one reason for the situation in which we find ourselves. But, as this issue demonstrates, there are others. In the 2010s, advances in machine learning created powerful, and lucrative, incentives for companies to begin gathering as much data as they possibly could."}
{"prompt":"Alongside the companies that gather data, there are newly powerful companies that build the tools for organizing, processing, accessing, and visualizing it—companies that don’t take in the traces of our common life but set the terms on which it is sorted and seen. The scraping of publicly available photos, for instance, and their subsequent labeling by low-paid human workers, served to train computer vision algorithms that Palantir can now use to help police departments cast a digital dragnet across entire populations.  What might have once looked like a transgression of the public-private boundary starts to look more like its transformation. But data can also be put to different purposes. Across the country, anti-eviction activists are using digital tools to extract information once held exclusively by corporate landlords and police departments, and put it into the hands of the tenant organizers who need it.  4/ Our authors and interviewees also investigate who is setting the terms of our world-system: the lingua franca that our machines use to speak to one another, and we use to speak through them; the standards that govern infrastructures on which more and more of us depend. The past is a source of lessons, alternative visions, and practices that might help us thread the gap from present conditions to a livable future. “Freedom quilting” was a form of computation that was also a form of care work, and not only that.  Pieces in this issue ask how to organize a fairer system of algorithmic distribution, and what a more public, less commodified internet might look like. They explore why diversity initiatives have failed, and might have been designed to—and why opposing racism might require a radical transformation of the business model, not just new inputs to it.  We are writing from strange times. The luckiest among us have spent months in digitally mediated isolation. For others, the closing year has been a time of hunger, illness, and intensifying hopelessness. All of our lives are increasingly managed by algorithms that target and personalize. Then again, we have all been compelled to think with new keenness about our points of proximity. How intimate, to worry about breathing in air that a stranger in the supermarket has breathed.","completion":"In Latin, the phrase locus communis literally means “common place.” Figuratively, it means a familiar topic of conversation. The “commonplace,” in this sense, is not pejorative, like a cliché. It is a set of shared assumptions, a ground on which a diverse set of actors can meet. We hope this issue contributes to the making of that ground, to the construction of a space for us to think together about how, in whatever comes next, connected machines might help us create new collectivities and possibilities."}
{"prompt":"Back in 1993, you published a book called The Panoptic Sort. In it, you described how the computerized collection and processing of personal information was creating an all-encompassing surveillance regime that, by sorting people into categories and classes, shaped their lives by controlling their access to goods and services.","completion":"When I read it last year, I found it incredibly prescient. In the early 1990s, the internet hadn’t yet gone mainstream, and digitization wasn’t nearly as sophisticated or comprehensive a process as it is today. Yet you identified an emerging phenomenon that, almost thirty years later, has become the central organizing principle of our digital lives. How did you see the contours of this trend so early? How do you see it now? At the time, the book was supposed to be a challenge to the way that most policy scholars were thinking about privacy. For them, government was the major focus of concern—they were worried about governmental invasions of privacy. I wanted to shift the focus to corporate surveillance: the gathering of information by businesses in order to produce market segments and targets. In retrospect, that turned out to be an appropriate focus."}
{"prompt":"The mid-1990s was also the era when techno-libertarianism—as developed by Kevin Kelly, John Perry Barlow, Wired, and others—was gaining influence. The state was seen as the principal enemy. And in fairness, they had a point—the Communications Decency Act of 1996 did represent an attempt by the government to censor the internet. But the techno-libertarian approach could also downplay or even completely ignore the threat posed by corporate power.","completion":"Right. But of course, a lot has also changed since then. I was writing about the kind of data gathering and analysis being done by researchers at firms, or researchers working as consultants to firms. There has been a really substantial shift in the nature of that work, because it’s now being done by algorithms. Algorithms are now taking on, or being assigned, greater responsibility for the kinds of questions that are being asked and the kinds of relationships that are being explored. That’s a major shift, and one that I’ve certainly been paying attention to. And I’m hoping that the rest of the world is paying attention as well, because there are going to be new consequences with a new actor.  I used to struggle with some of my graduate students in talking about algorithmic systems as “actors” in this regard. But we’ve got to understand them as actors in order to be able to assign responsibility—whether it’s through legal means or some other kind of tool. These systems are doing assessments, making classifications, generating predictions, and designing interactions in order to influence our behavior.  How do you hold an algorithmic actor responsible for its actions? First we have to understand how the law is limited by its historic focus on the individual. It is structured around the idea that privacy invasions are attacks on individual liberty. But algorithmic processing is about groups.  There are certain groups that federal law has designated “protected classes.” For instance, employers cannot discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability. But we’re really behind the eight ball in terms of algorithmically-defined groups. These groups have limited political capability, because their members don’t understand the nature or even the identity of the groups to which they are being assigned—even though their membership in these groups serves as the basis on which they are discriminated against by commercial and state actors that have an interest in manipulating them."}
{"prompt":"In other words, we all have identities that we’re not aware of—identities that a computer has constructed in order to make it easier for a company to sell us things, or for the state to lock us up. But because we don’t have access to what these identities are, or knowledge of how they’re made, it’s hard for us to organize around them politically. This is in contrast to the identities that make up federally protected classes, which reflect the achievements of struggles by members of those groups who composed themselves into a political bloc.  There is a whole host of technologies that have to do with identifying individuals as members of groups in order to make predictions, in order to estimate things like value or risk. For instance, a firm might calculate insurance rates based on where you live, or on the characteristics of the people within your neighborhood, and the estimation of risk associated with those factors. They are legally prohibited from using race to calculate those rates, but they can still use proxies for race, intentionally or not.  If a bank says it won’t lend to someone because they’re Black, it’s illegal. But if a bank uses an algorithmic system that ingests a bunch of data and performs an analysis that in effect infers that the prospective borrower is Black—say, they live in a majority-Black zipcode—and then denies them on that basis, they can get away with it.  Correct. Discrimination is continuing on the basis of race, gender, and other categories. This kind of discrimination—against groups whose members self-identify and therefore relate to each other and mobilize politically on the basis of that shared identity—is very important. But what I’m trying to get us to pay attention to is the other groups that we have been assigned membership, and through which we experience discrimination, but which we know nothing about.  This relates to a distinction you draw in your work between “identity” and “identification.” Identity, you write, “is primarily the result of personal reflection and assessment, something closely associated with individual autonomy.” Identification, on the other hand, is “almost entirely the product of the influence and determination of others.” Identification is a social process, in other words, mediated by various digital technologies. And once an individual is identified, they can be classified into a group, and subjected to statistical analysis.","completion":"And discriminated against, and manipulated with nudges in order to shape their behavior.  Individuals are placed within these new categories, these new identities, because these identities matter to the actors who are relying upon algorithmic systems in order to influence the behavior that matters to them. That matters to them as capitalists, perhaps, or that matters to them as governors and mayors and others in the political realm. The actors are different, and they have related but different motivational factors. But they are all making decisions with the aid of algorithmic systems that identify people, and then direct manipulative communications towards them in order to influence their behavior. And, to push it one step further: to influence who you are, who you want to be, how you think you ought to change in order to become the kind of person you are being led to believe you should be.  How do these processes of identity and identification interact? On the one hand, there’s clearly a tension between an identity that I’m conscious of and which is important to me, and an identity that I’m not aware of and is important primarily to the state or corporate actors who want to influence my behavior.  Yet as more of our lives is mediated by digital technology, these technologies also become the medium through which many of us come to know ourselves—where our identity actually undergoes formation. Social media comes to mind. Of course, social media platforms are major sites of what you call identification: software is observing our activity on these platforms in order to sort us into groups we know nothing about so that our attention can be better sold to advertisers. But people are also constructing their identities quite consciously through their interactions on these platforms, and those identities can in turn produce real political effects by triggering new waves of social mobilization.  Part of what we are seeing with social media is further diversification within all categories of identity. There are new kinds of identities that we may not even be able to articulate yet, but which are being reflected in new kinds of social movements, such as the movement in the months following the death of George Floyd. All of these white folks are out there engaging in active demonstration against anti-Black abuses by police. Something has clearly happened, in part through social media, which has led to new forms of identity emerging among white people."}
{"prompt":"So yes, we need to address the variety of identities that people are aware of, including the many new ones being created. But we also need to address those that we don’t have names for yet, the ones that are being generated by algorithmic manipulation. The bottom line is that we are in the midst of a historical moment in which both identity and identification are undergoing dramatic change.","completion":"Risk Factors We’ve been talking about algorithmic logic. But the focus of your most recent book, Coming to Terms With Chance, is on actuarial logic—specifically, “the actuarial logic that shapes the distribution of life chances in society.” You tell a story about how society became obsessed with assessing and managing risk, and the role that probability and statistics have played in this shift. What does it mean to live in such a society, and how did we get there? Let’s start with the term “life chances.” What are the chances for good things to happen to us? What are the chances for bad things to happen to us? And what shapes those life chances?  Increasingly, the decisions that influence our life chances are made on the basis of statistics. The probability that we’re going to have a good future versus the probability that we’re going to have a bad future is itself determined through practices of probabilistic analysis. And this has enabled the emergence of something I call “rational discrimination.” Rational discrimination is when discrimination becomes justified in terms of an assessment of risk that can be said to be rational. It is both a methodology and a way to make discrimination acceptable in the eyes of the law. It is rooted in the argument that it is justifiable to discriminate against people—including people who can be identified by race, gender, and a host of other attributes—where there is statistical evidence of risk.  This gets back to our conversation about using proxies for race to perpetuate racial discrimination without formally discriminating by race. In this case, the bank is not saying it won’t give someone a loan because they’re Black. It’s saying that an algorithm told them that the individual has too high a risk of default, so they can’t get a loan."}
{"prompt":"But then why are members of certain groups considered riskier than others? This is where we need to talk about “cumulative disadvantage.” For example, some of these models make predictions on the basis of an individual’s level of education. Well, we know the education system is highly unequal. Therefore, there is cumulative disadvantage as a result of the kinds of differences in education that people have, because those differences are then used to discriminate against them.  And it’s not just education, of course. There are all sorts of factors that are subject to cumulative disadvantage. And these will continue to perpetuate discrimination unless there is a powerful actor that steps in and limits the use of certain factors in making predictions. Otherwise, the harms that are associated with cumulative disadvantage will just pile up.  How new is the practice of rational discrimination? I’m reminded of the redlining maps that government officials and banks developed in the 1930s to deny certain neighborhoods access to federally backed mortgages. These neighborhoods were predominantly Black and Latino, but the formal basis for excluding them was that they had a higher risk of default.","completion":"True enough. Look, I’m an old guy. I did statistics by hand. Statistics has been around for ages. The estimation of risk has been around for ages. And while discrimination on the basis of race may not have been based upon statistics at first, it soon was. But the nature of statistics has changed, and the nature of the technologies that use statistics have changed, in part through rapid developments in computation. That’s what we’ve got to pay attention to, especially if we want to gain control over these systems."}
{"prompt":"These statistical systems infer the future from the past. But is this a reliable mechanism in our historical moment? As we’re speaking, there are red skies over San Francisco. Extreme weather events are only going to increase as climate change gets worse. We’re also clearly entering a new era of intensified social and political conflict. It seems likely that the next few decades will be full of events that may be hard to predict by looking at the past. Does this create a vulnerability for these systems? It’s true that for these systems, knowledge of the future is based on knowledge of the past. But the past is getting to be very short. If you think about big data, if you think about the systems being used by Google and Facebook, decisions are being made continuously in response to new data. So forget the past. Seriously, forget the past. The data and the models are being altered daily. The most powerful of them are being altered moment to moment. So the past is not relevant anymore. Not really. Not meaningfully.  What’s the best path forward towards a better future? In the final chapter of Coming to Terms With Chance, you call for “a social movement to oppose expanded use of statistical techniques for the identification, classification, and evaluation of individuals in ways that contribute further to their comparative disadvantage.” Might that offer a path forward? It’s lost. There’s no chance. That’s gone.  The future is the algorithm. The future is what Pascal König calls “the algorithmic Leviathan.”  Tell me more about this algorithmic Leviathan.","completion":"In the Foucauldian panopticon, you have a central tower. The central tower has tremendous power because the population believes that observers within the tower are able to see what everyone is doing—even though there is no way to know for sure. The way the tower operates is that we learn the behaviors that are expected of us, and modify our behavior accordingly.  The Leviathan is similar. But there is no central tower. Rather, you have an algorithmic system that doesn’t need to be located in a central place because we are now in a networked environment. It doesn’t need to be in a place at all, it just has to be in the network. More specifically, it has to be in a position within the network where it has access to the data that has been gathered by all of the responsible elements within the network. Those responsible elements within the network have their own subsystems and their own sub-networks for gathering the information that matters for them. The Leviathan provides the control systems for this gathering and consumes the data that results from it."}
{"prompt":"In the panopticon, the central tower is feared. The Leviathan, however, is a trusted figure. A god-like figure that is trusted to act in our individual and collective interest.  But I don’t want to trust. And I don’t want the rest of us to trust. I don’t trust systems. Systems are built by designers who work for corporations that have very specific ideas about how such systems should work.  Is there any hope then of taming the Leviathan? One could imagine a community of algorithmic systems. A plethora. These systems would be designed to have a socially agreed-upon wisdom. I’m not ready to grant a single Leviathan that wisdom. I believe in the multiple. I believe in the differences among us. We can make systems that embody those differences: not quite Leviathans, but committed resources that stand in for the differences among us. That’s about as close as I can get to envisioning a better future at the moment.\t I’m not ready to write about it yet. I’m thinking about it. I’m working on it. If you look at my resume, you can see that I write books ten years at a time. But I don’t think I have ten more years. I really don’t. So if I’m able to make the Leviathan my next thing, or my last thing, that’s good enough for me.","completion":"Why did you make EvictorBook? Erin: Particularly since 2008, we’ve seen the rise of corporate landlordism. We’ve seen huge investment companies—Blackstone and Invitation Homes are two of the biggest in the US, but there are many others—that will buy up swaths of property with unique limited liability company (LLC) or limited partnership names.  Take 55 Dolores Street LLC and 49 Guerrero Street LLC. These two LLCs are subsidiaries of Urban Green Investments, which is a big investment company that evicted many tenants in San Francisco in 2013. In the process of buying those properties, the company established a separate LLC for each one, which helped them with a number of things in terms of finance and liability, and also afforded them anonymity. It’s often very hard for tenants to know which other buildings in the city are owned by their landlord if each property has a unique-sounding ownership name.  When that was happening in 2013, the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project was just getting started, and we didn’t have a tool like EvictorBook, so we were doing property research manually. We’d create static websites where we’d list all the LLCs and all the evictions that we were able to connect to that investment company, with the idea that this information should be public and that tenant organizers should be able to use it for campaigns—ideally, multibuilding campaigns against large-scale landlords. They were essentially profile pages on different landlords. That’s useful because you have a much stronger chance of winning a fight against your landlord if you’re working together with other tenants across that landlord’s other buildings."}
{"prompt":"We also created a lookup tool and pledge map back in 2014. You can type in an address, see if there’s been an eviction there, and then pledge to not rent from that landlord. The map was pulling in public eviction data from the San Francisco Rent Board. The obvious next step was to connect other data to it, like parcel data and corporate ownership data. That turned out to be a lot harder than we realized, so it’s taken us some time. But that’s what the EvictorBook website does: it brings together a lot of those tools that we’ve already been using for years and makes it easier to see the landlords, LLC networks, and eviction histories of different buildings in San Francisco. You can enter an address or a landlord’s name, and we’ll show you a profile page with evictions connected to that entity.","completion":"Search EvictorBook by entering an address, landlord, or neighborhood name. How did you all build it? Erin: The work began in early 2019 in collaboration with other member organizations of the San Francisco Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC), and in collaboration with the Mapping Action Collective (MAC) in Portland, Oregon.  Since then, we’ve done some workshops with different tenant groups to figure out what needs and questions they had given the new Covid conditions, and we’ve been really lucky to get new frontend people involved in development work. Right now, we’re making the site more user-friendly and doing more user testing in LA and Oakland."}
{"prompt":"Azad: The tenants unions in Los Angeles and San Francisco already do this kind of research when they’re fighting evictions. And organizers in other cities around the country are making similar tools, drawing from the same resources that we draw from: assessor data, property records, eviction data where possible, and sales data.  With EvictorBook, we’re just trying to make it easier, since tenants are most motivated to do this research when they’re already in crisis. They’re faced with belligerent landlords who harass them in all kinds of ways—ripping out appliances or sending fake legal notices to get people out.  Before we had EvictorBook, we’d start at the assessor’s office doing searches on paper and then look up what we could online. But property ownership networks have gotten very sophisticated. People wring out profits from one city and then move to other cities. So in the process of connecting all the data we’re working with, we’re also trying to map networks of financial speculators and evictors.","completion":"Have you heard about any surprising uses of EvictorBook? Azad: There are a bunch of use cases. One is proactively asking: What has this landlord done in the past? Is this landlord representing themselves accurately?  Another is: Is this landlord lying to me about what’s taking place? In California, landlords can do what’s called an Ellis Act eviction, where they evict someone because they say they no longer want to rent out the building. In Los Angeles, there’s a five-year limit with this kind of eviction when the landlord is not allowed to rent out the unit they evicted someone from. But they can move in for a little while and then sell the property before five years are up. There are also owner move-in evictions that operate similarly. EvictorBook could tell you if something like that is the reason you’re being evicted."}
{"prompt":"Do landlords do these kinds of evictions in order to get rid of rent control in their buildings? Erin: Indirectly, yes, because they can rent and sell the units for more money if there’s no rent control. In San Francisco, after a landlord uses the Ellis Act to evict tenants from a rent-controlled building, the building will often then get sold as multiple “tenancy in commons,” which will still have rent control—but then they will get converted into condos. And when that happens, the building loses rent control. That’s one of many loopholes. In short, what we’re seeing with Ellis Act evictions and Owner Move-In evictions is that we’re losing effective rent control, which, in the case of condo conversion, is a nonrenewable type of protection.","completion":"Azad: I was thinking we could add a feature to EvictorBook that shows how much a landlord profited from an eviction. We have the sale price before and the sale price after. Erin: Oh, yeah, that would be great to see. Azad: It wouldn’t be hard to do. We have all this data that we’re actually not spending much time analyzing. We know who the evictor of a given building was—and not just who evicted that one unit a few years ago, but looking back over fifteen, twenty years of evictions. That, combined with the networks of LLCs, shows not just ownership structures but also the evictor structures in the history of housing, which is the history of gentrification and the history of displacement in neighborhoods that are financialized. There are so many questions we could use this data to think about."}
{"prompt":"For multibuilding campaigns, tenants have to know what other properties their landlord owns. EvictorBook surfaces that information. Half-Open Data Erin: There are all these public datasets and open data portals that different cities have, but none of those datasets will indicate who corporate landlords or evictors are.","completion":"Azad: Or the stories of the people who are impacted. Erin: Right. So the data that’s fueling EvictorBook is technically public, but people have to put zillions of hours into stitching it together for what we need. You would think that cities and different administrative bodies would do this work, but it’s not in their interest. So we’re taking public data and connecting it so that it can be useful to tenants."}
{"prompt":"I remember looking for rent stabilization data when I lived in New York, and the closest I found was this project, AmIRentStabilized.com, which is someone’s personal project to help people do this. The city has that data and could share it with tenants, but they don’t. Erin: Totally. Azad: And New York is a special case where there are different levels of rent stabilization and rent control, and the property owners know the status of their building, but it’s not easy for tenants to look up that information themselves.","completion":"The website walks you through the process of contacting a city office, which is then supposed to mail you the answer, but if they don’t, you’re supposed to set a calendar reminder for yourself to follow up with them! Azad: That’s because these institutions are beholden to property owners who fight tooth and nail for data about them to remain inaccessible. And with open data, as soon as the data gets politicized, it gets pulled. We just saw this in Chicago, where there were some open datasets about policing in the city—several reports were written about them—and then that open data got removed. The neoliberal fantasy that motivated the open data movement in the first place was like, “If you just open the data, people will make great business products out of it!” But it’s proven to be much more complicated.  EvictorBook shows historical eviction data for a given building—data that’s otherwise difficult to find and piece together."}
{"prompt":"It’s also a ton of ongoing work to maintain that data and keep producing clean datasets. We want to be very transparent in EvictorBook. We’re not just saying: this person might own this property. We’re saying: there was an eviction here, this person owned the property during that eviction, and here’s why we’re sure of that. A ton of due diligence goes into that.","completion":"We’ve talked a lot over the course of this project about how we can avoid replicating some of the horrible data practices of property tech. Landlords have blacklists on prospective renters that they create by doing a regex [Ed: short for regular expression, a way of defining a pattern and then finding matches that fit the pattern] on five characters of a last name, without any other verifying information. That’s a great way to block large swaths of entire demographic populations from renting. We’re being extremely careful about that kind of thing.  Tell me more about these lists of renters based on five characters of a last name. I usually think of landlord tech more as surveillance cameras in buildings."}
{"prompt":"Azad: It’s that too. Erin: Tenant screening has been around since the mid-1970s and has experienced different booms, such as a big one after 9/11 and another one after 2008. It’s getting more and more robust as an industry, weaving together past eviction history with any criminal record history that someone might have, along with credit reporting. There are so many bad data practices within each step. Of course, people are being wrongly criminalized at the outset, but also, oftentimes, these screening bureaus only look to see if a tenant has appeared in any kind of housing court—not necessarily what the outcome of the case was. So someone may have reported that their landlord was abusive, which gets their name registered in some database because they filed a complaint. It’s a mess.","completion":"Azad: We talked to eviction lawyers who were shocked that those lists were out there. We assumed that they knew, but they were like, “No, there is no central repository.” There’s just a patchwork of data on people who have been evicted. I think tenant screening companies literally just sell CSVs back and forth."}
{"prompt":"Erin: Different states have different policies about this. A few years ago, California passed a law that’s supposed to protect tenants from having their data collected by these screening companies. New York just last year passed a law that bans tenant blacklists. But apparently it’s still happening in both California and New York despite these laws. More broadly, there’s not a lot of regulation or enforcement around how these companies get data. In New York, LexisNexis sends its own people to housing court to take photos of the computers with all the eviction records. Then they bring those back, standardize them, and sell the data to tenant screening companies. Really weird things like that! The surveillance you mentioned is also part of the property technology, or proptech, umbrella, which involves biometric data and all kinds of other tools and practices. We have been having a lot of conversations with other organizers about how to ensure that we don’t put data out there that can be used against tenants.","completion":"That gets to a security issue: there are housing justice groups already using EvictorBook, but it’s not publicly available yet. Can you talk about how you’re thinking about whether or not to make it public? Azad: We’ve been thinking through worst-case scenarios: how could this data be used in a way that we didn’t plan for? What if the data was hacked? The eviction data is something we have access to that most people do not. We’ve gotten it through relationships with the courts, housing boards, and tenant organizers. So the raw data itself will probably remain restricted. But the rest of the site will be public and usable."}
{"prompt":"Erin: We’ve been weighing the risks of putting it out there—there’s always more verification of the data that can be done. On the other hand, there are risks involved in not putting it out there—it could be useful to people organizing rent strikes right now, particularly with Covid.  Anti-eviction Constellation Chapters are a relatively new thing for AEMP. AEMP used to be limited to San Francisco. As the group grows, how do you keep the focus on housing justice that the original chapter has? Erin: One of the things that I’ve always valued about AEMP is that people come in with such different backgrounds. Probably half of the people in the collective are doing narrative-based and storytelling work. There is a growing crew that’s bringing software skills, which are necessary—but we do work collectively to stay as far away as possible from Silicon Valley tech culture in our processes, in how we conceive our projects, and in how we work with community partners. The housing justice politics undergirding our work are first and foremost. Many people in the project are also in tenants unions, show up in different coalition meetings, and/or participate in actions.  We’re also a young organization. When we began in 2013, our group was housed in the San Francisco Tenants Union, which has been around for decades, as have many other orgs we’ve worked with. When the LA and New York chapters started, people in those places did a lot of outreach to figure out what kind of organizing was already happening in their cities.","completion":"Azad: In every chapter, there’s pretty tight integration with tenants unions. I know in LA there are four or five chapters across the city, and we have people going to meetings at most of those. We see ourselves as beholden to that movement; it’s built into our projects, the community agreements we’ve written, and the onboarding. We’re very clear that we’re not just building whatever tech.  The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is always juggling collaborations with multiple other groups. At the same time, both of you have mentioned the zillions of hours that have gone into EvictorBook alone. How are you sustaining these efforts in a volunteer project? Azad: I don’t know how Erin keeps it all together. I’m on two projects and it’s a full-time commitment."}
{"prompt":"Erin: You do so much, Azad. He’s working on both EvictorBook and the COVID-19 Global Housing Protection Legislation and Housing Justice Action Map, which tracks tenant protections, housing justice actions, landlord retaliation, and soon will include tenants’ oral histories since Covid. It’s an interesting moment because, for a while, we had these three chapters, and each chapter was working on its own projects, so I don’t even know a lot of what’s happening in places where I’m not there, going to those meetings. I know in the Bay, there’s a thirty-minute film that’s an homage to tenant organizing that weaves together three struggles: the anti-Google fight in San Jose, the fight for rent control in Santa Rosa, and the fight for Aunti Frances’s home—she’s a former Black Panther who was evicted from her home in Oakland a few years ago. Our Counterpoints atlas will come out later this year with PM Press. That’s a project that many, many people have been working on for almost three years. Probably well over a hundred people contributed to the atlas, some affiliated with AEMP and others not. There’s also the Black Exodus zine that came out last year that tracks Black experiences of gentrification and resistance in San Francisco. I’m sure Azad knows about a lot of projects in LA that I don’t know about.  With EvictorBook, we started this interchapter collaboration model that more of our work is taking on, since Covid means that we’re all meeting online and not in person anyway. We’re having interchapter meetings every month whereas we used to have those every few months. But, yeah, it’s all volunteers, and we’re always trying to find ways to create more sustainability and be better organized. People are dedicated, and it somehow keeps going.","completion":"Azad: I think it’s partly that these are decentralized projects, and we’re just providing a framework. The framework is: How does this relate to housing justice? You’re not just making this for your own curiosity or to scratch your own itch; you can do that by yourself. So what is the nexus between how we see our role in the housing movement and the kinds of group projects that people are willing to take on?  When the LA chapter started, we would pair with another organization in the movement and they would say, “Help us look into this.” More recently, it’s become less of that model. Instead, we have a north star—it might be a little vague—and within that project, people are decentralized and empowered to work toward the ends they define. That’s the post-and-beam structure that AEMP provides."}
{"prompt":"What would you say is the north star of all of these projects? What do you see them as building toward? Erin: This is not an AEMP-affiliated project in any way, but we’re really inspired by the Moms for Housing movement, which has shifted the conversation in the Bay Area. Four Black mothers in Oakland who had been unhoused organized to reclaim a home that was sitting vacant. It was owned by Wedgewood, which is one of these big investment companies with many LLCs throughout California. They were asking: Why should there be this vacant home owned by this corporate landlord when there are so many people who need housing now? The mothers helped create a huge movement in Oakland that inspired people in LA and beyond to do similar organizing. That spirit, that politic, has all sorts of afterlives, particularly in this intense moment where eviction moratoriums are ending while there’s still a pandemic going on.  Azad: What’s the north star? That’s a question that I think everyone who does work like this asks themselves. Is it about resisting, is it about building toward something new, is it about throwing sand in the gears? For me, it’s a mix of all of the above: community land trusts, decommodified housing—and let’s also repeal the state proposition that bans new public housing from being built in California! But more broadly, I think the idea is to keep making constellations. We’re providing north stars for others, and they provide them for us.","completion":"How did you first get involved in open source software, and what drew you to it?  Before there was open source, there was free software. I generally had this late-1990s, early-2000s understanding that, within the technology world, there was free software, which was often literally free, and then there was Microsoft stuff that cost a lot of money. I grew up poor and it was financially very difficult getting through college, so just in terms of access, I thought, “This Linux thing that I put together from various parts? This is good.” I went to the University of Washington in Seattle. Microsoft land. My experiences were shaped by both my economic status and the ways I saw Microsoft impact the university. It all funneled me to the free software, and, later, the open source movement.  I got into the community side of open source through volunteering at Free Geek for a couple of years, which is a computer recycling facility and educational institution. They have a great founding story about starting the organization after seeing a computer monitor that someone had thrown into the Willamette River.  Also, they give you a computer that runs Linux if you volunteer there. I graduated from college during a recession, so it took me a long time to find work and my computer died in the middle of that process. I figured I’d put in some volunteer time and get a computer. That’s what brought me into this local community of user groups, where people were teaching each other about programming. Most people would call these “meetups” now, but the user groups hosted at Free Geek tended to focus on a particular technology, like Perl or PostgreSQL. That community supported me getting into this career. So, it made sense for me to find ways to support other people too."}
{"prompt":"At some point, you left Seattle and went down to Portland. You got involved in the Portland open source community in a big way, planning multiple conferences over the course of a decade. What drew you to that work?  I just kept asking questions. The question that brought me to Free Geek was: How do I get a computer? The question that brought me to user groups was: How do I learn how to write software for it? And then: How do we cross-pollinate the different user groups? The answer was to host meetups and organize conferences. How do we keep track of all the events we’re hosting and resources we’re sharing? In 2008, I ended up building Calagator, which is an open source calendar app that’s also kind of a wiki. I’m still the maintainer.  It's always been like that: We need this thing. How do we get it? How do we make it? Where does that take us next? For the past decade, it’s always led you back to open source. I'm curious what your thoughts are on the state of open source today and the phases you've seen it go through.","completion":"Open source is not one big thing; it is a giant umbrella for many different activities and goals. For a long time, Linus Torvalds said that the goal of the Linux project was technical excellence. The technical excellence perspective has meant that open source is the base layer of most technologies that we work with. Linux is in everything. Developer tools, web servers, our programming languages are all open source or built on open source components. Very little of our technical stack is proprietary. That's part of what drew corporations to open source. That’s also what drew me to open source: it provides low-cost solutions for people."}
{"prompt":"What has become more complicated over time is the ideological piece. I’ve written about reframing open source, so that it values the people who make it more than anything else. The lens we don’t apply nearly enough is: How do we build technology in a way that is beneficial to people? How do we make software for what we actually need? Software that supports us, teaches us, builds communities, and solves real problems. We need to talk about this from a community perspective, from a human perspective.  Technical excellence cannot be the primary goal. I do not care about code quality, or how fast the process is, or whether it scales. Where we need to innovate today is around community safety. Many of the technical challenges that we work on as developers have had solutions for decades. I think that we can take what has worked for us from that version of open source and throw the rest of it back out there.","completion":"My answer would have been much tidier a year-and-a-half ago, but my perspective has shifted from thinking about the open source community as the center to thinking about where open source sits within the rest of the world. It doesn't give me as easy of an answer. Mind the Gap You founded The Recompiler in 2015 to feature writing on technical topics like DNS and floating point numbers. The website describes the magazine as a feminist hacker zine, whose tagline is \"Technology for the world we want to live in.” How does The Recompiler and the larger Recompiler Media project fit into that?  I have to be honest here and say that the question The Recompiler was answering for me was not: How do we build better technology together? Although that is a great, true mission statement. The question for me was really: How do I continue to work in technology—after a certain point in my career, knowing what doesn’t work, knowing that this industry continues to marginalize people and exacerbate power differentials?  Is there a specific experience you were thinking of? It sounds like a shitty workplace.  It was, but it was also burnout. It was the mid-career developer experience of someone who's not a white man. So many conversations I’ve had are about that experience, and they’re almost always framed as: Do we stay or do we leave? And I thought, well, what else, what’s another option? That's really how The Recompiler came to be. Prominent writers and speakers in the industry kept effectively saying that there are no women in technology. But I knew women in technology, I knew people of color in technology, I knew people from lots of marginalized groups in technology. So the Recompiler projects were about creating a platform to reflect that we already have technical experts representing a lot of different kinds of people.  Across the Recompiler Media projects—the newsletter, the podcast, the magazine, the blog—you cover a wide variety of subjects: technical deep dives, police brutality in Portland, how surveillance technologies work at the code level. How do you see those all fitting under the same umbrella?"}
{"prompt":"It goes back to asking questions and following them, whether it’s operating systems or legacy software or what the police are doing in Portland. I always wanted the deep dives to be what distinguished us. Really good, easy-to-understand explanations of technical topics that everybody bullshits about.  You’re interested in demystifying.  Yeah. We need to understand how things work for ourselves. And, if you’re asking questions about how technology impacts people’s lives, policing and surveillance keep coming up. Palantir, facial recognition, who had access to what databases after the 2016 election—there was no way to avoid those topics. So, that's what brought the Portland protest blog into The Recompiler’s wheelhouse.","completion":"Can you talk about the organizational structures of The Recompiler and how you find contributors and collaborators? I usually give my title as either publisher or editor-in-chief, depending on who I'm talking to. Basically, I pay the contributors. The only person who does not generally get paid is me. I would love to be doing this full-time, but this is why I've come back to having a day job. I did do The Recompiler full-time for a couple of years, but funding-wise it's better for me to have a software engineer job.  That is also part of Logic's funding model."}
{"prompt":"It helps. In terms of finding contributors, we've done an open call for every issue. I encourage people to put stuff in and people come to me asking if their idea would be a good fit. That's how we ended up with the Responsible Communication Style Guide. My friend Thursday Bram had always wanted to put out a guide like that. I thought it was a good idea and that people would use it, so we did it.","completion":"With the newsletter, the person who had done it originally wanted to step away because talking so much about all the ways that technology harms people got to be really draining. I started asking around and somebody introduced me to Margaret Killjoy, who does the newsletter now. She makes most of the decisions on that, and she’s brought a more leftist, anarchist focus, which I think is very appropriate for the moment.  Since first reading Margaret in the newsletter, we've been listening to her anarchist prepper podcast in our house. Did you ever think that The Recompiler would be one hop away from an anarchist prepper podcast? One of the skills that I bring is that I'm always looking for the gap—what do we need that nobody is doing? And I’m always thinking, “What if I grab another person and we make something to fill the gap?” That’s how all these projects start, in this fractal way, where we're going along and then I see an opportunity halfway through and branch off. What I hope is that we end up with a whole organism of projects that are supporting the different interlinked needs we have."}
{"prompt":"No Bosses, No Knife Missiles I want to switch gears and ask you about labor organizing and union busting at NPM. I found a GitHub gist that you published in 2015, titled “A Feminist Hacker's Guide to Labor Organizing,” a year or so before Trump’s election sparked the current wave of white-collar tech worker organizing. In 2015, it was a national press story that Googlers were anonymously sharing their salary data in a spreadsheet, and #TechWontBuildIt was still years away. Do you remember making that gist? Wow, yeah, I do remember that. That was after a conversation I was having with someone in a user group. I wrote it down, sent it to the list for the group, and haven't looked at it in years. I wonder if there’s anything I would disagree with now.  It's pretty solid! Can you talk about why you were thinking about tech worker organizing in 2015?  Before people were talking about Trump and how technology would be used under his administration, I was concerned about power differentials within tech: the ways that tech companies drive developers to burn out; the fact that Silicon Valley companies saw us in Portland as a source of cheaper labor; the fact that you can't make your boss stop being racist, but you can create consequences for your boss being racist.  I wrote that gist because we were talking in the user group about all the things that hadn't helped us. The employee resource groups that companies created to try to make us feel heard, HR, all these trainings that were like, \"Here's your bias,\" and then everyone says, \"Yup,\" because bias does not go away when you learn about the existence of the bias.  There was this real frustration about how things weren't changing. We had been in the industry long enough to have seen some efforts that went nowhere, and not because we didn't try very hard. We became educated about a lot of things, and then we told other people, and then they still didn't do what we needed them to do. I just got to this place where I didn’t want to keep nicely asking: “Please stop being racist, please stop being sexist.” I wanted to do something that we hadn't tried yet.","completion":"Labor organizing is a solution. It helps us leverage what we have, which is people—multiples of people—against these institutions. But it requires that workers are informed and talking to each other. In many ways, it’s like organizing an open source project: we have people, we have a need, how do we share what we know with each other, how do we build something together? How did that start at NPM?  My organizing at NPM happened by accident. Right before I joined, the company brought in this CEO who was the stereotypical guy that you hire so that the company can finally make money for the investors. But the company had attracted people whose ideals were at odds with just cashing out at any cost. There had also been unaddressed burnout issues before the CEO joined, and he made them worse because he was so terrible to the people who had put in so much work to get NPM to that point. Yet we were encouraged to talk about it all: about burnout and retention and the company's new focus."}
{"prompt":"I was in a team meeting at the company all-hands, which was an offsite, but I was one of two people who was there over video. People were saying things like, “Well, you know, if we had HR, then we'd have somebody to help with some of these management issues. And if we could get them to do this, then we'd have that.” And I was like, “That's cool, but we could also unionize.”  I was having this really awkward experience over video, I was cranky, and, as I mentioned, none of my previous experiences led me to believe that we were going to be able to make incremental institutional change in the way that some people wanted. so I didn't think that it was a particularly outrageous thing to say. I thought some people would agree with me, although I did have a moment of doubt afterwards when it occurred to me that maybe everyone thought that was a terrible idea and there was nothing I could do about it because they were in a room together and I was just there on a screen. But, in fact, there were people who were thinking, “That's what I wanted to say. She just said it.” Were you friends outside of work already? Because I'm guessing you weren't doing this in the work Slack.  After that conversation, two of my coworkers were trading phone numbers and talking about meeting up later. So over the Zoom call, while the bosses were out of the room, we all exchanged numbers. Our initial organizing group came out of that.","completion":"Now that everyone is a remote worker, no one has those in-person opportunities. But what you can do is say, “Hey, I'd like to talk to you about how things are going.” Companies all have their own ways for workers to connect with each other. And then over Zoom you say, “A few of us are talking about our concerns in this other place—would you like to join us? How are you feeling about what the CEO said or that policy change or whatever?” Just ask. And then you get off the Slack. No Slack DMs about how you're going to unionize! Once we had our organizing group at NPM, people started doing something that’s really common in these groups. They’d say, \"This is really bothering me.\" And then other people chime in and say, \"Yeah, that really bothers me too.\" Or, \"I think I'm getting underpaid. What are you getting paid?\" Or one person voices concerns about the lack of trans healthcare, and then someone else would offer to ask about it for them. That kind of thing often happens automatically. I'm not just talking about NPM here. But people start having these conversations about what is actually happening and agreeing with each other. Even if it's just a solidarity forum, that's valuable."}
{"prompt":"What really grinds us down in tech is feeling like we're not heard or seen. We're told that everything is fine, that everyone loves it here! The solidarity groups can be validating. And people are motivated and impacted by the kinds of topics that come up there, so they want to teach each other—about forms of marginalization or using inclusive language or organizing in general.","completion":"Something that’s been interesting is that when I asked people what brought them to the organizing group, they often responded that they had some experience of organizing from another area of their lives: they grew up in a union household, they organized in college, they had a family member who talked about organizing—more tech workers than you would think. And that’s a stepping stone for them.  At some point, you were illegally fired from NPM."}
{"prompt":"Rather quickly, yes. Because I made that comment in front of my whole department and it didn’t take long to make its way back to the CEO. They didn't know who all was involved, but they got rid of who they thought the troublemakers were. That ended up being a sizable part of their open source expertise.  One of the other people who was fired said that they were going to file a National Labor Relations Board complaint. I'd never even thought about it. I just had to find another job immediately because I was coming out of doing The Recompiler full-time, so I didn’t have any buffer left. But this person wanted to try so I said, “Okay, let’s try.” The combination of the firing and the NLRB settlement negotiation was honestly one of the most stressful things I've ever gone through. I was job searching and then starting a new job and worrying that I was going to spend my fortieth birthday testifying. There were so many calls about what we were going to ask for and what we’d accept and what was happening with the negotiations. I'd be on the phone wandering through Muji, totally overwhelmed, staring idly at a houseplant. And NPM’s CEO was a real dick to us. When we thought we had agreed to a settlement to the NLRB complaint, he reneged on the agreement.","completion":"I learned a lot, like that I don't ever want to go through that again without a union filing the complaint for me, which is how it usually happens. But the Oakland NLRB office was great.  I read in some of the reporting that NPM management eventually settled with three of the workers who were fired and who weren’t managers and that, as part of the settlement, the NLRB made the company remind all the workers that they are allowed to organize."}
{"prompt":"Yup. Reminding people of their rights turns out to be one of the stock things the NLRB does in these kinds of settlements. We were really into it. We also received back pay for the period between our firing and the settlement, and we received a few weeks of additional pay that was similar to the severance agreements we turned down in order to be able to talk about what happened.","completion":"As we wrap up, can you talk about where you're at politically now and how you see that as interwoven or not with your professional work as an open source developer? We are living through an extreme moment in history. The things that felt relevant even a couple of years ago don't have the same relevance or urgency now. I was focused last year on different kinds of ethics clauses in open source licenses. I’m not doing that right now. I've spent my summer watching people be beaten by the police. I’ve heard politicians say again and again that tear gas is bad, but then there is still tear gas. I’m one of many people who have been radicalized by this summer in Portland—by what the police and the mayor have done. I was already a lefty, but it's refocused things for me."}
{"prompt":"So I'm still thinking about labor and open source and access in tech, but there are some life or death issues in front of us that software is not going to solve. The technology industry has landed at this point where it is not separable from prisons, policing, and surveillance. If companies are there to make the profits, do the launch, and get the return on investment, they are going to be doing this work. Look at policing as a budget line item in our cities, even small cities. Look at the military contracts, the intelligence contracts. That is where the money is. Companies say, “Oh, well, we don't work with ICE; we only work with DHS!” Or “We work with Raytheon, but not on the knife missiles!”  We have to get rid of ICE. If we don't want Palantir helping DHS identify immigrants to put in cages, we have to get rid of Palantir and DHS. We have to abolish these systems and, when we do, the tech industry will have to find a way to make money some other way.","completion":"Amazon is a huge and complex organization. How should we think about it as a whole? Amazon is an opportunistic corporation. It invests in businesses where we think we have a competitive advantage. In general, Amazon thinks of itself as a technology company. So we put the technology first, whatever the product is that we’re selling. And we believe that because we have so much talent and so much capital, we should be able to use our technology advantage to dominate any market that we decide to enter.  What were its origins? Why did Amazon start off as a company that sold books on the internet? In the mid-1990s, the internet was widely seen as a replacement for the library—the library 2.0—so figuring out how to buy books on the internet felt like a natural next step. A little later on, you could see some of that same spirit living at Google through the Google Books project, which was an enormous undertaking. They put a hugely disproportionate amount of resources into it. Amazon’s ultimate goal was similar to that of Google Books: to digitize all of the information in the world’s books and make it available universally, because that was the promise of the internet.  Jeff Bezos studies other “great men” in history and imagines himself to be a kind of Alexander the Great. There's even a building on the Amazon campus called Alexandria, which was the name of one of the company’s early projects to get every single book that had ever been published to be listed on Amazon."}
{"prompt":"But there was also a more practical reason. Books are ideal because you can stuff them in a box. They’re relatively cheap to ship. Also, they’re easy to protect when shipping. It’s difficult to damage books. From the beginning, Amazon sold physical things. That meant its business evolved very differently than that of Google or Facebook, which make their money by tracking people around the internet and using that information to sell ads.","completion":"Right, Amazon is not primarily an ad-driven platform. Although it does have a subsidiary, A9, that’s in the online advertising business. But A9 is not a top moneymaker. The top money makers for Amazon by revenue are the retail side, and AWS. Why did Amazon get into the cloud computing business in the first place? What was the original impetus? Amazon wanted to explore the possibility of selling web services because they realized most other firms weren't doing a terribly good job of it. From the start, startups flocked to AWS because we saved them a lot of time and effort. Once AWS had the startups hooked, it was easy to start selling to large businesses—the “enterprise” market—because they envied how well the more technically sophisticated startups were doing."}
{"prompt":"That was good for us, because big companies are more lucrative. But they also have stricter security requirements. They tend to be in mature industries that are more heavily regulated, and regulators care about how they’re securing their data.  And that’s where you come in.  For a long time, security hadn’t been a big focus at Amazon because the data being collected—what books people were ordering—wasn’t that sensitive. It's not information most people were concerned about anybody having. We had to have a way to secure credit card information to make online transactions possible. But we outsourced that.  After AWS got started in 2006, security became a much bigger concern. Amazon realized how important it was to its most lucrative customers. These days, the company takes security extremely seriously. I think you'd be hard-pressed to find many nation states that have as sophisticated a security approach as Amazon does.  Security is mostly about making yourself a difficult target. It’s like that joke where you go hiking with your friends and a bear attacks you. You don’t need to be faster than the bear; you just need to be faster than your slowest friend.","completion":"Big companies have traditionally operated their own data centers. Was it hard to make the case to them that they should move to the cloud? They might feel more secure if they’re doing everything themselves. They might, but ultimately the security standards of their data centers are always going to be lower than those of a cloud provider like AWS. A cloud provider has many tenants and they can have economies of scale that let them have more sophisticated security systems than someone fully managing their systems in-house."}
{"prompt":"Also, if you're a company that's operating your own data center, you're responsible for 100 percent of your security—infrastructure security, transit security, perimeter security, everything. If you move to the cloud, Amazon is responsible for at least some of that. So when you use AWS, part of what you’re paying for is security.  Right; it’s part of what we sell. Let’s say a prospective customer comes to AWS. They say, “I like pay-as-you-go pricing. Tell me more about that.” We say, “Okay, here's how much you can use at peak capacity. Here are the savings we can see in your case.” Then the company says, “How do I know that I'm secure on AWS?” And this is where the heat turns up. This is where we get them. We say, “Well, let's take a look at what you're doing right now and see if we can offer a comparable level of security.” So they tell us about the setup of their data centers.","completion":"We say, “Oh my! It seems like we have level five security and your data center has level three security. Are you really comfortable staying where you are?” The customer figures, not only am I going to save money by going with AWS, I also just became aware that I’m not nearly as secure as I thought.  Plus, we make it easy to migrate and difficult to leave. If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.  What? How do you do that? We have a product called Snowmobile. It’s a gas-guzzling truck. There are no public pictures of the inside, but it’s pretty cool. It's like a modular datacenter on wheels. And customers rightly expect that if they load a truck with all their data, they want security for that truck. So there's an armed guard in it at all times.  It’s a pretty easy sell. If a customer looks at that option, they say, yeah, of course I want the giant truck and the guy with a gun to move my data, not some crappy system that I develop on my own.   Wow.  There are also specific security services that AWS sells, such as Amazon Inspector. Amazon Inspector is a tool that will audit all of your configurations for AWS, and will provide recommendations about how to change those configurations."}
{"prompt":"When you make a connection to a server, that connection is made over a specific port. And there are some ports that nefarious people might sniff to see if they’ve been left open because they’re frequently used for the management of that server. And so Amazon Inspector might say to you, “We have scanned your server and detected that this port has been left open and you're not using it. Do you want to close this port to prevent people from trying to connect to it?” Or it might say, “These two servers that you have are communicating to each other in a format that is easily eavesdroppable. We recommend that you use at least version X of the connection software that will plug some security holes.”  If you're a competent system administrator, you should have done all that when you configured your system. But not every system administrator is competent. If you’re the sysadmin for some, you know, insurance agency, what do you give a shit? You live in Sioux Falls. Why would you care about cloud security? You don't have to bust your ass because you live in a small-town market where you know everybody and you’re never going to be out of a job. A lot of companies that are headquartered in remote areas don't have particularly sophisticated IT teams. So they’ll pay Amazon to do security for them.","completion":"You mentioned that the most lucrative customers for AWS are large companies in mature industries, which tend to be more heavily regulated. How does AWS help those kinds of companies meet their compliance obligations? Certain institutions and industries are regulated more than others. Take the healthcare industry. Hospitals and health insurance providers are bound by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). There are a lot of regulations about how data can be stored, how long it can be stored, and what types of consent are required. It can be very difficult to implement a system that is fully compliant with HIPAA, but AWS has products that can help with that."}
{"prompt":"Same thing with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European privacy law. It requires organizations to handle personal data in very specific ways. One of the new rights that it creates is the “right to be forgotten.” So if you’re a company that does business in Europe, you’re going to need a way to fulfill requests from customers who want their data deleted. AWS can produce a report that says, “Yes, that data was deleted; we can no longer access it.”  So compliance can create lucrative business opportunities for AWS. Presumably those opportunities will grow, with new privacy regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act, and more regulations expected from the European Union around data and AI.","completion":"AWS is a money machine, basically. Today, retail is something like 70 percent of Amazon's revenue. But AWS is 70 percent of the company’s operating profits.  One of the reasons why the antitrust people are looking at Amazon is because Amazon is using highly profitable businesses where it has a really durable advantage in order to subsidize losses in other divisions that it uses to capture market share. Without an organ similar to AWS, a competitor like Walmart has to lower prices below the level of profitability to remain competitive. And they can only sustain those losses for so long."}
{"prompt":"What’s an example of a division that AWS subsidizes particularly heavily? Prime Video, for one. Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life. A Really Big Deal We’re now many months into the COVID-19 pandemic. How has work changed for you?  The first thing everybody noticed was conferences getting canceled, and everybody was like, “Wow, I guess COVID is a really big deal!” Then we emptied out all the buildings. There was a bifurcation of the people who work in corporate and the people who work in the fulfillment centers. The white-collar folks are fine because we can just work from home. But there was a huge internal drive to make fulfillment centers safe.","completion":"What was the outcome of those conversations? I know there have been a number of collective actions among Amazon warehouse workers around the issue of safety during the pandemic. At the beginning of the pandemic, management brought in some consultants and scientists to analyze how disease is spread. We had one week to figure out what we were going to do and then three weeks to execute. Now there are temperature reading cameras. You can't go into Amazon buildings if your temperature is elevated. They figured out how to reduce touch as much as possible. They implemented ways to scan badges at a distance and ways to use barcodes instead of near-field communication readers. They also created a testing regimen.  There was initially no way to get tests but because of our industrial might and muscle, we were able to identify a vendor, so we worked with them to do tests for warehouse workers. I'm not sure how often those tests occur. And it’s not like we test for a whole slate of things. A lot of the warehouse workers are older people who are out of the traditional workforce and find it hard to get back in because they can't retrain or they don't want to, or the job they used to do doesn't really exist anymore. A lot of them don't work enough hours to get health insurance. So if you have cancer and you might die from your cancer, we won't help you get treatment. But if you have this infectious respiratory disease, we want to know."}
{"prompt":"I actually don’t know if the steps that have been taken around COVID have made things worse, or whether they have improved the warehouses. Internally, people say, “Oh, we’re probably better than our competitions, or other warehousing and logistics companies.” But I don’t know if that’s the case. There were other challenges at the beginning of the pandemic too, right—with supply chains for instance? Supply chains all across Amazon were definitely impacted. It was difficult to get hand sanitizer. It was difficult to get cardboard boxes.  We got lucky in the sense that the beginning of the pandemic overlapped with the Chinese New Year. So we had already accounted for some slowdown, because we expected the Chinese New Year to impact timetables anyway.  Overall, though, it seems like the pandemic compounded all of Amazon's advantages and significantly reduced the impact of all of Amazon's weaknesses.  How so? The crisis advantaged large purchasers. The more scale you have, the more buying power you have, right? If you're a factory, the way that your distribution of customers is set up is that you have one or two customers that make up 80 percent of your business and then a ton of customers who make up 20 percent of your business. So if your production is down 30 or 40 percent, you say, “Okay, I’m going to have to cut out all of the small vendors and only focus on the big partners.” That’s what happened. Amazon was able to get preferential distribution of shipments when smaller companies were totally sold out.","completion":"And there’s been so much e-commerce growth in general during the pandemic. The question on everybody's minds in retail is: can Walmart and Target use their local distribution infrastructure to get packages to people's doors faster than Amazon can? Walmart and Target’s only advantage is their physical stores. When the stores are closed, they can be used as distribution hubs. You can pick things up close to where people's homes are and deliver them. Buying Whole Foods gave Amazon the opportunity to reach, you know, 80 percent of the 1 percent. But vast swaths of America aren't reachable by Whole Foods.  The rumors that I hear, both internal and external, are that we're very seriously interested in acquiring post office real estate. The reason why the post office is valuable to privatize is because of their real estate holdings. They have great real estate in every downtown of every city in the United States. Amazon may be interested in buying all of the post office locations, and we have the cash to do it. So why not?  The other week we announced we're hiring one hundred thousand more workers again. We're expanding dramatically across the board, in part-time and full-time, at corporate and retail and fulfillment and logistics and devices and distribution and all the various pies we have our fingers in.  How about AWS? Are you growing the same way? Some of our customers obviously saw a dramatic decline in their income. Some large customers in the hospitality industry and the retail industry negotiated substantially discounted rates or got large one-time credits.  But in general, COVID did convince a lot of companies to accelerate their cloud migration, because if you're an organization that has your own data center, chances are that you now have to implement a bunch of safety guidelines and restrictions. Amazon just operates at such a scale that we can do it better and more efficiently.  For instance, a lot of security companies throughout the industry were impacted because suddenly their secure facility had entry rules. Only one person could be in there at a time. But in the security technology industry there are a lot of processes that need two or more people to be physically present. So that made it impossible to use a lot of the secure facilities because the guidelines were in conflict. It was kind of a Freaky Friday moment where everybody realized that, in the context of a pandemic or a natural disaster, these procedures they created to make sure that their facilities were safe were actually preventing them from following security best practices."}
{"prompt":"Customers who were experimenting with a small presence in AWS, who had maybe kept their own data center for security purposes, freaked out. They were like, “Wow, we really need to move to the cloud quickly because they can do all these things for us that we can't do on premises now.”  Besides the challenges of dealing with social distancing, are you seeing new cybersecurity threats in the COVID era? The security threats that are emerging now are the same as ever. They're just more intense. 80 percent of security problems are petty cybercrime. And that’s what’s going up.","completion":"Why? Increasingly, large tech firms use people in developing countries as a disposable white-collar workforce. Smaller shops do too. A lot of startups will have one CTO in the Bay Area, and then they'll have their whole development shop be in Ukraine or Romania or something.  But when funding dries up for startups and companies have to shutter, then all of their digital operation overseas is cut loose. And the people who lose their jobs go into cybercrime. They think, “There's no other options for me. So sure. Let's do it. Lock and load.”  A cybercriminal can also get paid by a competitor to expose data, or to change the configuration so the data is exposed publicly to make that company look bad. The Capital One breach in 2019 involved a former Amazon employee, actually. Capital One suffered a huge embarrassment in the press. But unfortunately, as with the Experian data breach in 2015, the Capital One incident showed that the markets are very forgiving of data breaches, because the people who are most victimized by them are poor people who have no idea how to control their data anyway, and didn't even know what it means to have their data breached.  Companies don't like to have their whole ass be shown that way. It's a lot of egg to get on your face. But in the end, the market is learning that massive data exposures are not that bad of a problem unless Congress comes calling.  Unlocking the Last Foot  So you work in cybersecurity and that’s clearly a major focus for AWS. But as we talk about this, there’s another sense of the word “security” in the back of my mind—home security. This is an area Amazon is now getting into with Ring, the internet-connected doorbell."}
{"prompt":"I wasn't involved with that acquisition. But what I've heard is that our investment in Ring was initially about wanting to combat package theft. The retail side of Amazon is basically a logistics company. We have a distribution infrastructure that we chop up into different segments. “First mile” is from manufacturing to distribution. “Middle mile” is from the first distribution center—a warehouse—to the second—the place where a package will get delivered from, like a postal depot. “Last mile” is from that second distribution center to people's front door. And one of the major problems with the last mile is package theft.","completion":"But that wasn’t the only motivation with Ring. More broadly, Amazon’s smart home projects are also aimed at unlocking the “last foot”—not just how you get the package to the customer’s door but into their house. At one point we tried to make an electronic lock with an electronic key that Amazon deliveries could use. But then someone else made Ring, and we realized we could use that instead."}
{"prompt":"Amazon has aggressively marketed Ring to police, partnering with hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country and in some cases even giving the devices away for free. Cops are given access to a portal they can use to request Ring footage from individual houses. Has Ring brought Amazon into much closer relationships with law enforcement? Relationships with law enforcement take a very long time to build, so it would really surprise me if any of those relationships were the result of the Ring acquisition. The groundwork was already being laid. I think Ring just helped accelerate things.","completion":"In general, the nice thing about working with law enforcement is that they know what they want. Regulators don’t. But honestly, I think Amazon also kind of backed into that situation. We only realized after the fact that we had all this data about who was coming to people’s front doors. And then there was a lot of gleeful Mr. Burns–style finger touching, when we thought about what we could do with that data. Ring has a Neighbors app, where you could take your Ring data and share it with the app, and your neighbors could see who was in the neighborhood. So law enforcement was a natural next step. And law enforcement dovetailed nicely with our interest in pursuing the home security angle through our other smart home products.  Like the Alexa-enabled smart speakers."}
{"prompt":"Right. Ring dovetails nicely with Alexa on the home security front. And Alexa could also help the retail effort to unlock the “last foot” and get packages inside the home. You said that Amazon was already building relationships with law enforcement long before the Ring acquisition. Why? AWS works extensively with US government agencies. At the federal level, AWS runs a special cloud for a number of intelligence agencies, and we’re still trying to get the contract for JEDI, the Pentagon’s big cloud project.","completion":"The other factor that presumably contributes to Amazon’s coziness with intelligence agencies and law enforcement is the fact that many people from those fields go work for Amazon. Why is that? Amazon pays a better salary and you get to work on more exciting stuff, and there’s just less hassle.  Do the cultures mesh well? In general, the military is pretty top-down, command-and-control. That’s not Amazon. We mostly want people to be as autonomous as possible. At Amazon it's easy to shoot up the hierarchy and talk to senior executives if there's a problem.  Does Amazon make a concerted effort to hire from law enforcement and the military?  For the rank and file, yes. There is a concerted effort to recruit former law enforcement and military. In fact, Amazon thinks of military personnel as a diversity category and does targeted hiring. We have an internal affinity group called Warriors@Amazon for ex-military personnel, and it is by far our most successful diversity hiring group.  At the higher levels, there’s a revolving door. If you’re a chief procurement officer at the Pentagon, the guy who orders whatever they’re buying for the military, you do that for awhile and then you go to the General Accountability Office to be a watchdog. And then after you've been a watchdog for awhile, you go to work for Amazon, where you can make half a million dollars a year selling Amazon services back to the Pentagon. And you can get it past the watchdog because you used to be the watchdog."}
{"prompt":"Amazon’s not the only company that does this, obviously. Everybody does. It’s the same twenty thousand people in the United States who have had jobs in the military, regulatory, and industry, all selling these things to each other back and forth. In September 2020, Amazon appointed Keith Alexander, the former NSA chief, to be on your board of directors. How did you and your coworkers see that?  At the most obvious level, it’s a move to get influence over the Defense Department and win more US government contracts. Because Keith Alexander has relationships with all of the right people in the Pentagon, he can help move the needle in terms of not only managing relationships with current officials, but also helping us strategize about what's important to the decision makers going forward.  But it was also highly controversial. Even within Warriors@Amazon, they’re of two minds about it. Some of the Warriors love the US government. On the other hand, bringing on someone like Keith Alexander also poses serious risks to Amazon's business.  How so? Our European partners are screaming about the message that hiring Keith Alexander sends with regards to the privacy of their data. It also comes at a particularly bad time. AWS needs the European market. But there have been a couple of recent legal decisions in Europe that have made our lives harder, like the courts striking down the Privacy Shield agreement in the summer of 2020. [Eds.: Privacy Shield was a compliance framework that certified the data security of US-based companies, and allowed them to receive EU user data in a manner deemed compliant with GDPR.] AWS has been working really hard with customers to make sure that we can comply with whatever new privacy standards the European Union develops.  So within this context, bringing Keith Alexander onto the board is definitely going to raise a lot of eyebrows on the other side of the pond. Our European partners are going to say, “Well, excuse me. Our concern is that you're taking data from our citizens and bringing it back to the States. And now you're hiring the architect of the program that’s been spying on the entire world?!” It sends mixed signals at best. But the fact that there’s a business case against it has also helped the people inside the company who are opposed to it for philosophical or ideological reasons.","completion":"Are there many of them? A lot of my coworkers are concerned about Keith Alexander’s presence. I would say a quarter of the people at Amazon would identify with digital freedoms organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and they are pissed off. I think there are a lot of AWS employees who would rather quit than turn data over to the NSA. Those people are all up in arms and they’re some of the smartest and most innovative people at the company. I don’t think Amazon counted on so much internal opposition and resistance.  Inside Voices White-collar workers at Amazon have organized internal campaigns against the sale of facial recognition software to law enforcement agencies, and the sale of cloud services to companies that enable ICE. Has Amazon’s relatively large contingent of former law enforcement and military personnel made the organizing environment for these campaigns more challenging? My experience with ex-military people is that they love America but they don't care for the government. So they're like, “Yeah, I worked for Uncle Sam, but I could give a shit.” So I don’t think the presence of those people necessarily makes organizing harder. I just think the collapse of the Left in general over the past several decades has made workers everywhere believe that resistance is futile. Maybe we're doing right in the world, maybe we're doing wrong—but if we’re doing wrong, there's really very little we can do about it except some things around the margins.  It seems that most of the organizing energy at Amazon among white-collar workers has been around climate issues. There is an ongoing campaign to push the company to dramatically reduce its carbon emissions that have involved open letters to Bezos. And in April 2020, the company fired two white-collar workers who had helped lead the climate organizing, and who had also criticized the company’s treatment of warehouse workers during the pandemic. What’s your perspective? I didn't sign any of those letters, because I'm not sure what good they accomplish either internally at Amazon or externally in the world."}
{"prompt":"In general, campaigns at Amazon fall into three groups. The first is mainstream causes that are palatable to everyone, like donating winter coats and protecting animal rights. The second is environmentalism. It's easy to find people at Amazon who care about global warming. So there is some support for people who recognize the severity of the problem and are willing to organize internally at Amazon around it. But that organizing effort is still pretty small. It has an outsized voice in the media, because everybody’s fascinated by Amazon. But there aren’t a ton of people who are paying attention to it internally.","completion":"The third category of campaigns is social justice activism, like the #TechWontBuildIt campaigns against working with ICE or law enforcement. There’s a spirited debate on a couple of internal mailing lists about that kind of activism. But again, it's a small number of Amazon employees. Why do you think there aren’t a lot of people participating in this conversation internally? Historically, Amazon has probably had some of the worst internal communications tools of any large company. It's very difficult to discover active conversations happening in the company. There is no central clearinghouse. There is no internal social media. We recently got Slack, but it hasn’t made much of a difference for employees interested in organizing."}
{"prompt":"Do you think the lack of internal communications tools is intentional? I think this is one of those cases where you should not presume malice. Amazon doesn’t actively not want employees to talk to each other. They just don’t see how employees talking to each other benefits productivity, morale, or the bottom line. If it did, and that impact could be quantified in some way, we'd have it tomorrow. But as it is, Amazon gives employees the tools that it thinks will help them get the job done. And they don't see employee fraternization as relevant to the job.","completion":"Google, by contrast, has very robust internal communication infrastructure. And that infrastructure played an important role in facilitating organizing at Google. (Although more recently, management has been limiting the kinds of conversations that can happen on internal platforms.) Do you think the absence of similar tools helps explain why Amazon has seen comparatively less organizing? Well, if you look at Google, you'll notice they're headquartered in Mountain View, in the heart of Silicon Valley. And if you're an employee at Google and you're good at your job and you want to leave your job tomorrow, there are fifty-three employers out there that are going to be ready to hire you."}
{"prompt":"If you're working in Seattle for Amazon and you're good at your job and you want to leave your job tomorrow, you have far fewer opportunities. Where are you going to go, Microsoft? There's not nearly as much mobility. So I think a big part of the reason we have less organizing is that people are more afraid to jeopardize their jobs. If you want to stay in the Northwest, you keep your head down.","completion":"Statistically it is also more likely that an Amazon employee will have a family than a Google employee. So that’s another factor that makes people more risk-averse. Why should they do something that would potentially jeopardize their job? Particularly when it has a low chance of success?  As you pointed out, one of the reasons that the organizing efforts within Amazon have received so much media attention is because the media is fascinated by Amazon. There have been a spate of stories looking critically at Amazon’s market power, partnerships with law enforcement, labor conditions in its warehouses, and so on. Amazon also has prominent critics in national politics like Bernie Sanders.  How are these kinds of criticisms perceived from the inside? How do people respond to that sort of thing?  I think your question kind of misses the forest for the trees. For most people at Amazon, glancing at the Apple News feed on their iPhone is about as much of the discourse as they consume. They don’t care about the news. It doesn't contribute anything to their life. There are colleagues I'm friends with who don't really know who ran for president. They figure it's all going to be the same anyway, so why bother."}
{"prompt":"But by the same token, if they hear someone criticize Amazon, they’re not inclined to be super defensive. There aren’t a lot of intense loyalists. People at Amazon are mercenaries. The company doesn't have great benefits. Office life kind of sucks and it’s not that fun of a place to work. It’s a grind. People work there because it pays a little bit better than the competition and it looks good on a resume. They can go in, do their job, go home, spend time with their kids, watch sports. That’s the good life.","completion":"Amazon has around a million employees worldwide. The majority work in shipping and logistics and delivery. There are maybe eighty thousand corporate employees. And I would estimate that fewer than two thousand of them have participated in discussions around organizing. Do you see any cause for hope? In general, the people who are going to organize are the people who need to organize because they are fighting for their lives and their subsistence. Those are the people on the logistics side of Amazon who work at the distribution centers. Those are the members of the industrial proletariat in China who are manufacturing the things that are shipped out on the retail side. Those are the humans in developing countries doing piecework on Mechanical Turk."}
{"prompt":"If there is going to be change, that’s where it will come from. I think that if you’re looking at corporate employees within Amazon as a source of hope, that’s ludicrous. The notion that these companies are going to repair the damage they’re causing by having white-collar workers organize internally to me is crazy. But maybe that's cynical and nihilistic. Maybe I’m a bad man.","completion":"On the night of March 18, 2018, Elaine Herzberg was walking her bicycle across a dark desert road in Tempe, Arizona. After crossing three lanes of a four-lane highway, a \"self-driving\" Volvo SUV, traveling at thirty-eight miles per hour, struck her. Thirty minutes later, she was dead. The SUV had been operated by Uber, part of a fleet of self-driving car experiments operating across the state. A report by the National Transportation and Safety Board determined that the car's sensors had detected an object in the road six seconds before the crash, but the software \"did not include a consideration for jaywalking pedestrians.\" In the moments before the car hit Elaine, its AI software cycled through several potential identifiers for her—including “bicycle,” “vehicle,” and “other”—but, ultimately, was not able to recognize her as a pedestrian whose trajectory would be imminently in the collision path of the vehicle.  How did this happen? The particular kind of AI at work in autonomous vehicles is called machine learning. Machine learning enables computers to “learn” certain tasks by analyzing data and extracting patterns from it. In the case of self-driving cars, the main task that the computer must learn is how to see. More specifically, it must learn how to perceive and meaningfully describe the visual world in a manner comparable to humans. This is the field of computer vision, and it encompasses a wide range of controversial and consequential applications, from facial recognition to drone strike targeting.   Unlike in traditional software development, machine learning engineers do not write explicit rules that tell a computer exactly what to do. Rather, they enable a computer to “learn” what to do by discovering patterns in data. The information used for teaching computers is known as training data. Everything a machine learning model knows about the world comes from the data it is trained on. Say an engineer wants to build a system that predicts whether an image contains a cat or a dog. If their cat-detector model is trained only on cat images taken inside homes, the model will have a hard time recognizing cats in other contexts, such as in a yard. Machine learning engineers must constantly evaluate how well a computer has learned to perform a task, which will in turn help them tweak the code in order to make the computer learn better. In the case of computer vision, think of an optometrist evaluating how well you can see. Depending on what they find, you might get a new glasses prescription to help you see better."}
{"prompt":"To evaluate a model, engineers expose it to another type of data known as testing data. For the cat-detector model, the testing data might consist of both cats and other animals. The model would then be evaluated based on how many of the cats it correctly identified in the dataset. Testing data is critical to understanding how a machine learning system will operate once deployed in the world. However, the evaluation is always limited by the content and structure of the testing data. For example, if there are no images of outdoor cats within the testing data, a cat-detector model might do a really good job of recognizing all the cats in the testing data, but still do poorly if deployed in the real world, where cats might be found in all sorts of contexts. Similarly, evaluating Uber’s self-driving AI on testing data that doesn’t contain very many jaywalking pedestrians will not provide an accurate estimate of how the system will perform in a real-world situation when it encounters one.   Finally, a benchmark dataset is used to judge how well a computer has learned to perform a task. Benchmarks are special sets of training and testing data that allow engineers to compare their machine learning methods against each other. They are measurement devices that provide an estimate of how well AI software will perform in a real-world setting. Most are circulated publicly, while others are proprietary. The AI software that steered the car that killed Elaine Herzberg was most likely evaluated on several internal benchmark datasets; Uber has named and published information on at least one. More broadly, benchmarks guide the course of AI development. They are used to establish the dominance of one approach over another, and ultimately influence which methods get utilized in industry settings.  The single most important benchmark in the field of computer vision, and perhaps AI as a whole, is ImageNet. Created in the late 2000s, ImageNet contains millions of pictures—of people, animals, and everyday objects—scraped from the web. The dataset was developed for a particular computer vision task known as “object recognition.” Given an image, the AI should tag it with labels, such as “cat” or “dog,” describing what it depicts.","completion":"It is hard to overstate the impact that ImageNet has had on AI. ImageNet has inaugurated an entirely new era in AI, centered on the collection and processing of large quantities of data. It has also elevated the benchmark to a position of great influence. Benchmarks have become the way to evaluate the performance of an AI system, as well as the dominant mode of tracking progress in the field more generally. Those who have developed the best-performing methods on the ImageNet benchmark in particular have gone on to occupy prestigious positions in industry and academia. Meanwhile, the AI systems built atop of ImageNet are being used for purposes as varied as refugee settlement mapping and the identification of military targets—including the technology that powers Project Maven, the Pentagon’s algorithmic warfare initiative.  The assumption that lies at the root of ImageNet’s power is that benchmarks provide a reliable, objective metric of performance. This assumption is widely held within the industry: startup founders have described ImageNet as the “de-facto image dataset for new algorithms,” and most major machine learning software packages offer convenient methods for evaluating models against it. As the death of Elaine Herzberg makes clear, however, benchmarks can be misleading. Moreover, they can also be encoded with certain assumptions that cause AI systems to inflict serious harms and reinforce inequalities of race, gender, and class. Failures of facial recognition have led to the wrongful arrest of Black men in at least two separate instances, facial verification checks have locked out transgender Uber drivers, and decision-making systems used in the public sector have created a “digital poorhouse” for welfare recipients."}
{"prompt":"Benchmarks are not neutral pieces of technology or simple measurement devices. Rather, they and the measures that accompany them are situated, constructed, and highly value-laden—the reality of which is frequently discounted or ignored in dominant AI narratives. Datasets have hidden and complicated histories. Uncovering these histories, and understanding the various choices and contingencies that shaped them, can help illuminate not only the very partial and particular ways that AI systems work, but also help identify the upstream origins of the harms they produce. What we need, in other words, is a genealogy of benchmark datasets.","completion":"Chair Inherits from Seat  Teaching computers how to see was supposed to be easy. In 1966, the AI researcher Seymour Papert proposed a “summer project” for MIT undergraduates to \"solve\" computer vision. Needless to say, they didn’t succeed. By the time the computer scientist Fei-Fei Li entered the field in the early 2000s, researchers had acquired a much deeper appreciation for the complexity of computer vision problems. Yet progress remained slow. In the intervening decades, the basics had been worked out. But there was still far too much manual labor involved."}
{"prompt":"At a high level, computer vision algorithms work by scanning an image, piece by piece, using a collection of pattern recognition modules. Each module is designed to recognize the presence or absence of a different pattern. Revisiting our cat-detector model, some of the modules might be sensitive to sharp edges or corners and might “light up” when coming across the pointy ears of a cat. Others might be sensitive to soft, round edges, and so might light up when coming across the floppy ears of a dog. These modules are then combined to provide an overall assessment of what is in the image. If enough pointy ear modules have lit up, the system will predict the presence of a cat.  When Li began working on computer vision, most of the pattern recognition modules had to be painstakingly handcrafted by individual researchers. For computer vision to be effective at scale, it would need to become more automated. Fortunately, three new developments had emerged by the mid-2000s that would make it possible for Li to find a way forward: a database called WordNet; the ability to perform image searches on the web; and the existence of crowdworking platforms. Li joined the Princeton computer science faculty in 2007. There, she encountered Christiane Fellbaum, a linguist working in the psychology department, who introduced her to a database called WordNet. WordNet, developed by cognitive psychologist George A. Miller in the 1980s, organizes all English adjectives, nouns, verbs and adverbs into a set of \"cognitive synonyms... each expressing a different concept.\" Think of a dictionary, where words are assembled into a hierarchical, tree-like structure instead of alphabetically. “Chair” inherits from “seat,” which inherits from “furniture,” all the way up to “physical object,” and then to the root of all nouns, “entity.”  Fellbaum told Li that her team wanted to develop a visual analog to WordNet, where a single image was assigned to each of the words in the database, but had failed due to the scale of the task. The resulting dataset was to be called ImageNet. Inspired by the effort, in early 2007 Li took on the name of the project and made it her own. Senior faculty at Princeton discouraged her from doing so. The task would be too ambitious for a junior professor, they said. When she applied for federal funding to help finance the undertaking, her proposals were rejected, with commenters saying that the project’s only redeeming feature was that she was a woman.","completion":"Nonetheless, Li forged ahead, convinced that ImageNet would change the world of computer vision research. She and her students began gathering images based on WordNet queries entered into multiple search engines. They also grabbed pictures from personal photo sharing sites like Flickr. Li would later describe how she wrote scripts to automate the collection process, using dynamic IP tricks to get around the anti-scraping safeguards put in place by various sites. Eventually, they had compiled a large number of images for each noun in WordNet."}
{"prompt":"However, they still needed a way to verify that the images actually matched the word associated with them—that all of the images linked to “cat” really showed cats. Since the scraping was automated, manual review was required. This is where Amazon's crowdworking platform, Mechanical Turk (MTurk), came in. It was a \"godsend,\" Li later recalled. MTurk had been launched just a couple of years before, in 2005. Her team used it to hire workers from around the world to manually review the millions of images for each WordNet noun and then verify the presence or absence of a target concept.  The ImageNet dataset would take two and a half years to build, its first version completed in 2009. When it was finished, it consisted of fourteen million images labeled with twenty thousand categories from WordNet, including everything from red foxes to Pembroke corgis, speed boats to spatulas, baseball players to scuba divers. At the time, it was the largest publicly available computer vision dataset, hosted on the ImageNet website for anyone to download.  Convolutional Cat Ears Although it took an immense amount of effort to create ImageNet, the initial uptake was slow. Li and her students presented a poster announcing its creation at a major computer vision conference. Tucked away in a corner of a conference center in Miami Beach, they even distributed logoed keychains and pens to advertise it. But beyond ImageNet’s limited popularity, there was a deeper issue. The problem that Li had hoped to solve with the creation of ImageNet—the fact that object recognition modules needed so much manual work to produce—still hadn’t been solved.  In an attempt to encourage wider adoption of the dataset, Li’s team decided to organize a competition. The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge was officially launched in 2010. To enter the challenge, competitors would develop machine learning models using the benchmark training data, and submit their model’s predictions on a set of the benchmark testing data. The team whose model could detect objects in the images with the highest accuracy would be the winner.","completion":"In 2012, computer scientist Alex Krizhevsky, along with his colleagues at the University of Toronto, won the ImageNet Challenge with AlexNet, a neural network–driven machine learning model that outperformed all other competitors by a previously unimaginable margin. After a long period during which neural networks were out of fashion in AI, AlexNet almost single-handedly put them back at the center of research into the field. Part of what enabled the return of neural networks was the much greater processing power of modern computers, which was needed to handle massive datasets.  AlexNet helped fulfill the potential of ImageNet and solve the problem that Li had identified when she first started out: that computer vision required too much manual labor. Krizhevsky and his colleagues didn’t rely on handcrafted modules for object recognition. Rather, using neural networks, AlexNet was able to “learn” what an object looked like completely from the data.  Neural networks work by stacking layers of artificial “neurons” on top of each other. Each layer alters the image slightly, like a camera lens filter. Some of the first layers of AlexNet’s neural network model, known as “convolutional,” allowed it to automatically encode information that used to be manually coded—like the pointy edges of a cat’s ears. There was no longer any need to enter such information by hand. With enough images of cats, the neural network would be able to learn which patterns were most predictive of the animal.  AlexNet’s success is often credited with sparking the resurgence of neural networks—under the new name of deep learning, which refers to multiple stacks of neural network layers—as the dominant machine learning paradigm. The 2012 paper associated with the model now has over seventy-two thousand citations on Google Scholar, an indication of its popularity in academic and industry circles alike. Deep learning techniques have achieved near-universal adoption not only within computer vision, but also within natural language processing—which works with human language—and a number of related subfields."}
{"prompt":"The deep learning era has, in turn, placed data—more specifically, vast quantities of data—at the center of AI development. Because deep learning models become more accurate when trained on more data, tech companies are highly incentivized to gather as much data as possible. The amount of information available on the internet continues to grow. Users on Instagram share 8.9 million images a day alone. Meanwhile, a new cottage industry of data annotation work has sprung up to feed soaring demand for data labeling. The people who do this work are typically subcontractors or crowdworkers, like the MTurkers who helped create ImageNet, and represent a growing underclass of invisible tech workers.","completion":"Algorithms of Oppression Why does the history of ImageNet matter? ImageNet has had an enormous influence on the field of modern AI, and on many of the AI systems that affect so many aspects of our lives. By understanding the particular circumstances of ImageNet’s creation, we can better understand these systems. We can also understand how the progress of AI moves in fits and starts, how its reliance on massive amounts of data is contingent and accidental, and how its present course was just one possible path among many."}
{"prompt":"ImageNet was built on three technological pillars: WordNet, search engines, and crowdworking. The reliance on WordNet has proven to be particularly problematic. ImageNet recodes outmoded and prejudiced assumptions—many of them racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic—because those assumptions come directly from WordNet.  A good illustration of this comes from a website called ImageNet Roulette. Developed by AI researcher Kate Crawford and artist Trevor Paglen, ImageNet Roulette allows users to upload images of themselves. These images are then analyzed by a machine learning model, trained on a set of ImageNet data, which generates a description. When Guardian journalist Julia Carrie Wong uploaded a photo of herself, it labeled her with an ethnic slur, while New York Times video editor Jamal Jordan was consistently labeled as \"Black, Black person, blackamoor, Negro, or Negroid,” no matter which image he uploaded.  To their credit, ImageNet’s creators quickly sanitized the dataset of such labels for its future users. But those categories still exist in multiple machine learning systems, due in part to the influence of ImageNet. AI researchers Vinay Uday Prabhu and Abeba Birhane recently demonstrated that the categories in the WordNet database persist in several widely cited public computer vision benchmarks, resulting in the takedown of a prominent benchmark by MIT called Tiny Images. And if they exist in these open datasets, then they are potentially replicated in many internal industry ones.","completion":"WordNet is not the only issue with ImageNet, however. The data contained within ImageNet was gathered from internet search engines in the early 2000s. Such search engines, as the UCLA professor of information studies Safiya Umoja Noble has explained, encode racist and sexualized imagery for Black, Latina, and Asian women, and overrepresent imagery of white men in positions of power. These engines also portray a Western white male vision of the world, associating \"beauty\" with white women, \"professor\" or \"ceo\" with white men, and \"unprofessional hairstyles\" with Blackness. These assumptions filtered into ImageNet as the dataset was constructed."}
{"prompt":"One common response from AI researchers to the oppressive aspects of ImageNet, and to the crisis of algorithmic injustice more generally, is that the problem lies with the data: if we get more or different data, then all these problems will inevitably go away. This was the response that Yann LeCun, one of the “godfathers” of deep learning and chief AI scientist at Facebook, provided when a machine learning model designed to depixelate faces ended up whitening them as well. Timnit Gebru, co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team, struck back, underscoring how AI systems cause real harm and exacerbate racial inequality, and arguing that improving them must mean more than just focusing on better data collection. (Disclosure: two of us, Hanna and Denton, are members of Gebru’s team.) Furthermore, data collection efforts aimed at increasing the representation of marginalized groups within training data are often executed through exploitative or extractive mechanisms such as, for example, IBM’s attempt to “diversify” faces by scraping millions of images from Flickr without the consent of people in them. As Gebru explained during a tutorial at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition conference in June 2020, “Fairness is not just about datasets, and it’s not just about math. Fairness is about society as well, and as engineers, as scientists, we can’t really shy away from that fact.” A particularly pernicious consequence of focusing solely on data is that discussions of the “fairness” of AI systems become merely about having sufficient data. When failures are attributed to the underrepresentation of a marginalized population within a dataset, solutions are subsumed to a logic of accumulation; the underlying presumption being that larger and more diverse datasets will eventually morph into (mythical) unbiased datasets. According to this view, firms that already sit on massive caches of data and computing power—large tech companies and AI-centric startups—are the only ones that can make models more \"fair.\"","completion":"A Genealogy for the Many Exploring the history of ImageNet has implications not only for how we discuss the problems and failures of AI, but also for how we make critiques and formulate solutions to those issues. We need to develop genealogies of data to show that datasets are the product of myriad contingent assumptions, choices and decisions, and that could, in fact, be otherwise. Genealogy is an interpretive method of analysis, which we can apply to the historical conditions of dataset creation. Understanding these conditions illuminates the origins of certain problems, but it also opens up new paths of contestation by enabling us to imagine new standards, new methods for evaluating AI progress, and new approaches for developing ethical data practices in AI.  Instead of the narrow focus on \"bias,\" we can start to ask deeper questions such as: How did particular datasets emerge? What agendas, values, decisions, and choices governed their production? Who collected the data and with what purpose? Are the people represented in the datasets aware that they are participants in them? Can they meaningfully opt out? How about the workers, like the Amazon MTurkers, who annotated them? Were they fully recognized for their labor and fairly remunerated? And, most importantly, does the creation of the datasets serve the interests of the many or only those of the few? In March 2019, the Unicode Consortium, which controls the publication of emojis worldwide, released an emoji of a Hindu temple. Until then, a Hindu temple had been conspicuously missing from the set of emojis representing religious places, which included a Christian church ⛪ and Shinto shrine ⛩️ (approved as part of Unicode 5.2, in 2009) and a kaaba 🕋, mosque 🕌, and synagogue 🕍 (Unicode 8.0, 2015). The most popular emojis are the ones that convey emotion, such as the crying-while-laughing face 😂, but many emojis are also powerful ways to represent cultures and identities (a woman in a headscarf 🧕🏽, same-sex couples 👬, different skin tones 👋🏻👋🏼👋🏽👋🏾👋🏿). On the face of it, then, the publication of an emoji evoking the religion of 1.2 billion people seemed like an important act of inclusion."}
{"prompt":"But the form that the temple emoji took, and the timing of its release, carried distressing political connotations. Its publication coincided with a period of intensifying demands for a Hindu temple to be built on a contested site in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya. The construction of this temple is one of the most fraught political projects in contemporary India, and a symbol of violent attempts by Hindu supremacists to create a Hindu-first nation at odds with the ideal of a secular Indian democracy that emerged after Indian independence, in 1947.","completion":"In 1992, Hindu fundamentalists from all over India traveled to Ayodhya to demolish a sixteenth-century mosque called the Babri Masjid. In the following months, at least two thousand people, mainly Muslims, were killed in violence between Hindus and Muslims across India. Much of this violence was led or inspired by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a militant Hindu nationalist organization that boasts millions of members throughout the country. The RSS has a two-pronged mission: to narrow the extraordinarily broad set of beliefs and practices known as Hinduism into a single political form of the religion, and to make India—which is roughly 80 percent Hindu, 15 percent Muslim, and 5 percent Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, and others—a formally Hindu state."}
{"prompt":"If the destruction of the Babri Masjid was one of the RSS’s greatest symbolic victories, its greatest political victory came in 2014, when Narendra Modi, a longtime officer of the group, was elected India’s prime minister. Since then, the country has taken a brazenly fundamentalist turn, with mob killings of Muslims being implicitly and explicitly encouraged by members of Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is effectively the political wing of the RSS.  The mission to build a Hindu temple in Ayodhya has also advanced. In 2017, an extremist member of the BJP took power in India’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh, where the contested religious site is located. He promised that under his leadership, no force could stop the construction of the temple. Then, in November 2019, the long-awaited verdict in a twenty-seven-year-old court case was decided by India’s highly politicized supreme court: the construction of the Hindu temple, known as the Ram Mandir, could go ahead.","completion":"This was the charged political climate into which the Hindu temple emoji was released by the Unicode Consortium earlier that year. Remarkably, the emoji bears two of the main emblems of Hindu political-religious fundamentalism: the color saffron, and a distinctive red flag that looks exactly like the banner of the RSS. The emoji’s design is also similar to the plans for the Hindu temple that is to be built in Ayodhya, which have been in development since the early 1990s.  The Hindu temple emoji can now adorn almost any message on any social media site in the world, whether or not users understand its significance. Many people, in India and abroad, put the emoji in their screen names to signal their allegiance to a Hindu-first nation; some also use it when making calls for violence against Muslims. But even when the emoji is used in less explicitly political contexts, its effect is to uphold and normalize the RSS’s political version of Hinduism, its violent attacks on Muslims, and its Hindu-supremacist vision of India.  Because it has a fairly superficial theory of what emojis are and remains focused on a narrow set of criteria for approving new emojis, the Unicode Consortium failed to understand the cultural and political significance of the Hindu temple emoji. The story of the emoji’s development reveals that the process for approving new emojis—arguably the most popular lingua franca in history—privileges the economic concerns of large tech companies, and ultimately replicates the ways that these companies see, and fail to see, the world."}
{"prompt":"Hello, Interoperator? When you type a message into your smartphone or scroll through the articles on your Facebook feed, you are interacting with the work of the Unicode Consortium. The consortium is responsible for encoding all the characters you see on your screen—letters and numbers in various scripts, hanzi and kanji, dingbats—into binary, so that they can be read on pretty much any machine, with any operating system, anywhere in the world. The purpose is to ensure that a line of code written in Bangalore, or a tweet fired off from San Francisco, arrives at its destinations essentially unchanged. Want a functioning Bengali website that can be accessed just as easily in East London as in Dhaka, or a Chinese-manufactured tablet that can render fonts designed in Accra? You need Unicode for that.","completion":"By encoding many of the world’s scripts—Latin, Arabic, Greek, Tamil—in this way, the Unicode Consortium plays a crucial role in determining who can use the internet, which languages will survive digitization, and who can reap the gains of the digital age. It also helps to determine who can enter the global digital marketplace as consumers, advertising targets, and data sources for extractive surveillance capitalism. In other words, universal standards for interoperability are not just about bringing people online and connecting them—they’re also about driving profits through an ever-expanding digital ecosystem."}
{"prompt":"These goals reflect the structure of the consortium. The consortium is a Silicon Valley–based nonprofit, and many of the people who do its work—assessing new alphabets for inclusion, doing the codification—are volunteers. But the power to decide what gets encoded by the consortium ultimately rests with the top tier of its paying membership, a group of about eight of the world’s largest tech companies (including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) along with a small handful of governments and a university, which buy into the consortium for roughly $10,000 to $20,000 per year, and get voting power as a result. (By paying as little as $35, other individuals and institutions can be members of the consortium, but they don’t get voting privileges.)  Since 2007, as part of its overarching aim to expand the use of digital technologies, the consortium has taken on the standardization of emojis. Emojis not only help encourage user engagement with consumer technologies, but also provide a valuable seam of minable data—for example, in the millions of emoji reactions to Facebook posts that occur every day. As of Unicode 13.1, released in September 2020, there are 3,521 emojis, as well as more than 143,000 characters in dozens of different scripts. By encoding new emojis, the consortium is deciding which characters can exist in this new visual language. This gives Unicode a powerful form of sovereignty over digital life, and adds a further political dimension to the consortium’s work, since it decides what sorts of representation—interracial couples, say—get universalized as emojis, and which do not.  The consortium itself is not always clear on or honest about the significance of its work. It tends to see emojis as “playful, colourful representations,” as one Unicode document puts it. It also likes to present the process of creating new emojis as a fairly open one. It’s true that, by submitting a formal proposal, including a provisional design, anyone can suggest a new emoji to the organization, out of which about sixty to seventy new emojis are approved every year. However, the proposals are evaluated behind closed doors by the consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee, and then voted on by the highest tier of corporate, state, and institutional members. Although there are criteria that new emojis supposedly must fulfill, the extent to which an emoji does meet those criteria is a matter of broad interpretation. What’s more, the criteria are designed to ensure that an emoji is as widely used as possible, so that tech companies can derive the maximum monetary value from it. A narrow focus on these standards can obscure the larger cultural and political significance a new emoji might bear.","completion":"To maintain its unique role in encoding the world’s language scripts, the consortium presents itself as neutral and above politics. It tries to avoid political conflicts by admonishing designers not to “justify the addition of emoji because they further a ‘cause,’ no matter how worthwhile.” All the same, “a proposal may be advanced despite a ‘cause’ argument—if other factors are compelling,” states the document detailing how to submit emoji proposals, which was written in 2009 by an Apple employee. As the scholars Luke Stark and Kate Crawford observed in a 2015 paper, “proposed solution[s] for improving emoji diversity in fact [signal] a further evolution in the business models of affective digital communications.” In other words, the political and cultural representation furnished by emojis—brown skin tones, a trans rights flag 🏳️‍⚧—may be deeply meaningful to users, but for the Unicode Consortium and its members, allowing such representation is primarily a means to get more people to use more digital technology more often."}
{"prompt":"Bright Orange to Blood Red The Unicode notation for the Hindu temple emoji is U+1F6D5. In the Twitter rendering of the emoji, the graphic has a stepped structure, tapering upward in tones of saffron to a tall spire, with a prominent two-fanged flag at the top. Hindu temple emoji. Source: Iconify (CC BY 4.0).","completion":"Its architectural form is an ambiguous mix of the two most canonized styles of Indian temple architecture, the north Indian Nagara and south Indian Dravidian. In this way, it seems to combine two major streams of ancient temple architecture, each with many offshoots and tributaries, into a single statement. It also shares many features of the temple that is to be built on the contested site in Ayodhya, according to a design that has recently been circulated on social media by the Modi government’s Shri Ram Janmbhoomi Teerth Kshetra, a trust constituted to lead the construction and management of the temple."}
{"prompt":"The emoji was originally designed by Girish Dalvi, a professor at the Industrial Design Centre of the Indian Institute of Technology, and Mayank Chaturvedi, who at the time was working for an agency of the Maharashtra state government that is dedicated to promoting Marathi language and culture, including through Unicode representation. A first version of the proposal was sent back by the Emoji Subcommittee for clarifications about whether the proposed image would mean “Hindu temple” to anyone who saw it, and whether it would be the best symbol to account for regional differences in what temples look like. In response, Dalvi and Chaturvedi argued that their design used a “common architectural grammar” among Hindu temples, and that the saffron color provided “semantic reinforcement” because the “saffron colour is often associated with Hinduism.” They also claimed that, like their design, “most Hindu temples have a flag at the apex.” This rationale used Unicode’s criteria to justify the inclusion of the emoji’s most blatantly Hindu-supremacist symbols. In reality, there’s an extraordinary diversity to Hindu temple architecture. Many temples are whitewashed, while others are brilliantly polychromatic. In recent years, though, the color saffron—in hues from bright orange to blood red—has become increasingly associated with Hindu nationalism. There’s even a word, “saffronization,” for the Hindu right’s attempts to rewrite everything from daily news to the history of the country in a way that reinforces Hindu supremacism: rechristening cities and streets that had Islamic-sounding names, purging textbooks of accounts of Mughal rule and heritage, claiming that ancient Hindus had “airplanes, stem cell technology, and the internet,” and generally presenting a glorified version of the past in which Hindu civilization is always virtuous and always supreme. Online, saffron is used in a range of ways by members of the Hindu right to signal their allegiance to the idea of a Hindu-first nation, and to issue threats to non-Hindus—for example, by saturating images with saffron tones, or by using saffron as the background color for aggressive text memes.","completion":"The red swallow-tailed pennant that flies from the top of the temple emoji is also quintessentially Hindu-supremacist. It isn’t necessarily the case that most temples have flags, and the temples that do have flags rarely have a flag of this kind. The pennant in the emoji, however, looks exactly like the bhagwa dhwaj, the banner of the RSS. Although it doesn’t fly over many temples, it is sometimes used by Hindu fundamentalists to distinguish Hindu shops and other buildings from those owned by non-Hindus—information that could be put to vicious use during a pogrom, and which has come to inspire fear in non-Hindus in daily life."}
{"prompt":"The Unicode Consortium’s criteria for new emojis require that the designs should be at once unique and representative, so that, for example, the beer mug emoji 🍺 is instantly recognizable as a mug of beer while at the same time standing for beer in general. Part of what this means is that there will likely never be another Hindu temple emoji that could exist alongside, and contest the symbolism of, this one. The major social media platforms, software companies, and hardware manufacturers all adapt Unicode’s approved emoji designs to their own products. Some of their versions of the temple are more clearly Hindu-supremacist than others, but all share at least one feature in common with the emoji’s original design: many have pennants, and most are saffron. The upshot is that the Unicode Consortium’s decision has massive downstream effects: whenever anyone adds a temple emoji to their Facebook post, they’re reproducing a symbol of Hindu supremacism. (Members of the Unicode Consortium’s Emoji Subcommittee did not make themselves available for comment before this piece went to press.) One of the emoji’s designers, Dalvi, told me that his design has been misinterpreted because of the political context into which it was released. “The timing could not have been more unfortunate,” Dalvi said. “As a designer, this is the pitfall. My design can be politicized and used towards ends that I cannot control.” But it’s impossible to deny the Hindu-supremacist symbolism of the emoji, especially given that countless other approaches were theoretically possible. The consortium wanted to make sure the emoji was clearly a “Hindu temple,” but they didn’t say how to accomplish this. If Dalvi didn’t intend for his emoji to be a badge of Hindu supremacism, his design choices show just how successful the RSS has been at promulgating its vision for India.","completion":"Permanent Supremacy Use of the :hindu_temple: emoji (as its shortcode is known on Slack, GitHub, and other platforms) is still picking up, spurred on by software that suggests it whenever users type “temple,” “mandir,” or other words on their keyboards. The emoji has been adopted by some social media accounts dedicated to sharing temple photos and discussing temple tourism, but it has also quickly become a shorthand for expressing support for Hindu supremacy—or issuing direct threats—when included in social media usernames and messages.  The emoji has something in common with other ways in which Hindu supremacists have deployed language online to further their cause. Like the emoji, certain phrases purport to be descriptive but actually promote dangerous narratives about who is an enemy and who is a supporter of Hinduism and India. These phrases include “Love Jihad,” which refers to a supposed phenomenon of Muslim men seducing Hindu girls, and “Urban Naxal,” which is used to describe a certain type of English-speaking, urban-dwelling leftist thought to be sympathetic to Maoist revolutionaries operating in parts of the Indian countryside.  The central danger of the emoji is that it is as generative of people’s ideas about what counts as Hindu or Indian as it is reductive of Hinduism’s and India’s complexities. “We have to be very careful with the process, that what we ultimately encode is going to be something that has permanence and will stand the test of time,” Craig Cummings, a senior technical product manager at Amazon and the vice chair of the Unicode committee that oversees the approval of new emojis, says in Picture Character, a 2019 documentary about emojis. What the consortium has helped give permanence to in this case is the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s vision for Hindu supremacism in India and worldwide. It is a small but potent example of the way that Silicon Valley has chosen to make money from hate."}
{"prompt":"Pit Schultz was sitting in a Kreuzberg art gallery, less than a mile from the ruins of the Berlin Wall, when he sent one of the first emails to a mailing list that he had just helped launch. Schultz laid out a vision for what it might become: It should be a temporary experiment to continue the process of a collective construction of a sound and rhythm—the songlines—of something we are hardly working on, to inform each other about ongoing or future events, local activities, certain commentaries, distributing and filtering textes, manifestos, hotlists, bits and blitzmails related to cultural politics on the net. It’s also an experiment in collaborative writing and developing strategies of group work… The list is not moderated. Take care.","completion":"It was June 1995, and the internet was changing in fundamental ways. The US government–funded National Science Foundation Network (NSFNET), once the backbone of the internet, had been decommissioned a few months earlier. New companies like Amazon, Yahoo!, and Netscape were racing to cash in on an early wave of commercialization, and a rising priesthood of techno-utopians gathered around Wired magazine—launched in San Francisco in 1993—to herald the coming digital economy as the harbinger of a more unified, democratic, and horizontal world."}
{"prompt":"The 1990s were a heady time, but not everyone was convinced. If Wired was the pulpit for a new gospel of venture-funded tech, Schultz’s mailing list, called Nettime, was an effort to build a home for the early commercial internet’s discontents. Drawing on various contemporary anti-capitalist currents, from the anti-globalization movement to Italian autonomism to Berlin’s lively squatter movement, Nettime aimed to synthesize an alternative to the techno-determinist optimism oozing out of Silicon Valley: the worldview that media theorist and Nettime regular Richard Barbrook named the “Californian Ideology” in a 1995 essay co-written with Andy Cameron.","completion":"The Californian Ideology, through its “bizarre mish-mash of hippie anarchism and economic liberalism,” celebrated the rampant commodification of digital networks as a force for personal liberation. The 1990s are often remembered as a time in which this vision of the internet went unchallenged, but the Nettime crowd wanted to chart a different path forward. They developed theories of digital culture, pioneered tactics for new media activism, and wrote ground-zero critiques of the commercial internet as it took shape around them. The mailing list itself was also a platform for experimental forms of collaborative writing that tried to embody a different experience of being online. At a moment in history when profiteers and privatizers were terraforming the internet into the market-saturated system we know today, the Nettime circle gestured toward a more collective, less commodified alternative—but only vaguely."}
{"prompt":"A Collective Undertaking to Deconstruct the Utopian Wired Agenda Nettime lived on the internet, but it came from Europe. The idea for the mailing list was first proposed by Schultz and his friend Geert Lovink at a meeting of the Medien Zentral Kommittee—German for “Central Media Committee”—at the Venice Biennale. The Kommittee was a loose collective of academics, net artists, and new media activists who believed in the necessity of creating alternatives to both the Silicon Valley worldview and the commercial internet it had inspired. In doing so, they drew on materials closer to home, building an umbrella for an anarchic strain of critical net culture that flourished across Europe.","completion":"Whereas Wired drew from the ranks of a thriving private tech sector, Nettime’s milieu came from a relatively communal and localized hacker culture. This took shape, for example, around spaces like c-base, the member-funded nucleus of Germany’s rapidly expanding hackerspace scene, which went on to promote free public internet access via wireless networks. Another spiritual progenitor was Austria’s Public Netbase, a nonprofit internet service provider and new media initiative that promoted “network democracy from below,” openly clashing with the country’s right-wing government."}
{"prompt":"Europe had also been home to a number of ambitious publicly funded efforts to extend social and civic life into the digital realm. Perhaps the most famous was France’s publicly owned Minitel network. Rolled out in the 1980s, Minitel was the most successful online service prior to the modern internet. It ran across nationalized phone lines, distributed free terminals, and boasted a peak of twenty-five million users out of a total population of sixty million.","completion":"By the 1990s, similar initiatives had cropped up around Europe at the municipal level, like Amsterdam’s Digital City (DDS). A citywide free-net, DDS grew out of the pirate radio scene and aimed to create a universally accessible network that could guarantee certain basic rights online. There were public terminals, and anyone could sign up for a free account with email, internet access, and space for a homepage. Instead of being organized around the free market, the network’s architecture was designed with the city metaphor in mind: you received mail at the “post office,” links were accessed through a “station,” “public squares” hosted government services, organizations and companies could rent “shops,” and the entire system was navigable through a graphical city interface."}
{"prompt":"Public networks like Minitel and DDS can help us understand why European hacker culture diverged so sharply from the cult of Silicon Valley. While the US obscured the internet’s publicly funded origins behind a veil of bootstraps entrepreneurialism, many Europeans first encountered mass computer networks as explicitly public entities.","completion":"Nettime took inspiration from these projects, and attracted many of their architects, but the list itself represented a different kind of intervention. If projects like c-base, Public Netbase, and DDS explored new ways of creating and organizing networks, Nettime was also an attempt to theorize and embody a new way of experiencing them. In the words of Geert Lovink—a cofounder of both Nettime and Amsterdam’s DDS—the list was “a collective undertaking to deconstruct the utopian Wired agenda. Not directly, in word or academic texts, but by doing.” In the early to mid-1990s, the internet could be a disorienting place; a seemingly endless labyrinth of what Baffler contributor Kate Wagner described as “haphazardly designed, amateur-generated sites.” But it also often felt more grounded and neighborly than today’s internet. Most online communities were small and focused enough for participants to develop personal familiarities, shared norms, and something like a localized collective consciousness—“netiquette,” as it was called. In a time before platform capitalists had carved the net into siloed empires of attention-time, it was still possible for anti-capitalists of the sort that gathered around Nettime to see the internet as a catalyst to dissolve commercialization and competitive individualism—but by 1995, things were starting to change. Developments like online shopping, powerful search engines, and interactive advertisements were beginning to rend the federated collectivism of the early internet into a world of quantitative efficiency and algorithmically mediated “users.” A window of possibility seemed to be closing. Nettime was determined to keep it open."}
{"prompt":"Living in Social Time Nettime’s name was chosen as an alternative to “cyberspace,” the dominant metaphor for understanding the internet in the ’90s. “Cyberspace” renders the internet in spatial terms, and evokes images of highways, libraries, webs, clouds, and shopping malls. All of these tend to naturalize concepts like scarcity and enclosure, which in turn lend themselves to the possibilities of exclusive ownership, exploitation, debt, or rent.","completion":"By contrast, “nettime” renders the internet temporally. Whereas the concept of a spatial network frames humans as occupants of a fixed virtual world—one that could be chopped up into shopping malls—“nettime” suggests that their mutual engagement fundamentally constitutes the network itself—that there is no network without the nodes it connects. Rather than passively “going” online and browsing shelves, we actively produce the network together, in real time, through our collective participation. “The time of nettime is a social time,” wrote Pit Schultz in the introduction to an October 1996 Nettime publication. “Time on the net consists of different speeds, computers, humans, software, and bandwidth, the only way to see a continuity of time on the net is to see it as an asynchronous network of synchronized time zones.” In trying to embody this “social time,” Nettime pioneered a practice of “collaborative text filtering,” a continual, self-organizing process whereby texts were submitted to the broader group, replied to, expanded upon, and ultimately flowed into a collective train of thought. The original vision was to initiate something like a perpetual conversation, without editors, boards, gatekeepers, or centralized moderation; the list’s “filter” was the collective interests and capacities of its self-selecting membership. In the introduction to ReadMe!, a collectively edited book of Nettime essays published by Autonomedia in 1999, the list is described as “always different from what it was a moment ago; it’s always discovering something new about itself. As such, it is a working implementation of what subjectivity might become in an online environment.” In practical terms, this meant that Nettime served numerous functions: it was a tactical bulletin for Europe’s anarchic hacker community; an open source prepublication platform for academics; and a forum to discuss current events, announce events, post manifestos, and theorize the commercial internet as it came into focus. Prominent works to come out of Nettime were occasionally circulated at conferences, republished in magazines, or rounded up into physical publications—but online, the emphasis was always on a perpetual process of becoming. Whereas early online messaging programs like AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) and early virtual communities like The WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link) operated on the concept of exchanging content between discrete, static users, hierarchically sorting information, and publishing text in a self-contained, finalized state, an unmoderated mailing list leaves participants with no common structure or interface but one another."}
{"prompt":"Collaborative text filtering was meant to recover, in a many-to-many communication system, the experience of temporally interconnected thought that is foundational to real-time conversation. Nettime members developed a collective style of writing that embraced its own incompleteness, questioning the notion that any text can or should be understood as finished, or that any thought is worth isolating from its discursive context. This practice generated prescient missives and essays on applying copyleft practices to non-software intellectual property, the reality that the internet was already doing more to restructure labor rather than expand leisure, the creeping power of data collection and surveillance, and the creation of a new class of “information proletariat.” Above all, it emphasized the network’s participants as its creators, rather than mere residents.","completion":"Haunted Variables Nettime fought for alternatives to the privatized net, pushed back against the Californian Ideology, and experimented with a collective experience of being online. But the list had considerably less success in articulating a comprehensive alternative to the commercial internet at scale, or bringing its experience to the broader public. The mailing list grew to thousands of subscribers, but its vision for an alternative to the commercial internet remained dormant, and its members ultimately failed to alter the course of the internet’s commodification."}
{"prompt":"This failure was partially rooted in a vagueness at the heart of Nettime’s challenge to the Wired line. While mailing list participants could momentarily enact a more collective experience through collaborative text filtering, the lack of organization also ensured that no consensus around a comprehensive alternative would emerge. Nettime participants tended to share certain anti-capitalist principles—a preference for publicly owned internet infrastructure, the decommodification of intellectual property, and the abolition of various digital hierarchies—but the particulars were subject to endless debate. Real-world implementation was thus limited to aesthetic interventions—culture jamming, détournement, and critical net art—and local, uncoordinated, long since defunct projects. Media theorist McKenzie Wark later observed that Nettime was united by “a negative consensus around the need for a countervailing theory.” That negative consensus never evolved into a positive one, because a single countervailing theory never emerged.","completion":"Attempts to build such a unified theory tended to fall flat, as when Richard Barbrook sent an essay called “Cyber-Communism” to the list in 1999. “A spectre is haunting the Net,” it began, “the spectre of communism.” Barbrook’s central contention was that everyday internet users were already on a path to transcending the profit-driven logics of the privatized net, thanks to the popularity of gift economies around phenomena like user-generated content, open source software, and peer-to-peer networking. In other words, he argued that the experiments in collaborative text filtering that Nettime was undertaking to cultivate a more collective experience of the internet were already being superseded by mainstream initiatives with far greater reach."}
{"prompt":"Twenty years later, a commercial internet dominated by a handful of platform oligarchs makes Barbrook’s optimism easy to dismiss. But it didn’t take the power of hindsight to notice that his “wait and see” determinism was functionally indistinguishable from the techno-utopian Wired set. A satirical Nettime response to Barbrook’s essay captured the point: Subject: THE GIF ECONOMY: How Several Layers of Lossy Images Are Synthesized into a Moving Image that Will Animate the Masses and Inspire Them to Do What They're Doing Anyway, Namely, Clicking Their Way to Liberation; Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Californian Ideology<-----! DECLARE ALL VARIABLES !----->HAUNTED_VARIABLE = ( EUROPE | WORLD | NET)<-----! END DECLARE ALL VARIABLES !----->Just imagine … a specter is haunting HAUNTED_VARIABLE for the second time. Luckily, if it’s a tragedy the first time, the second time around it’s only a farce — so fear not: no more messy dogmatic truths, state bureaucracies, apparatuses of oppression, proxy wars, or national collapses. CyberCommunism[TM] GUARANTEES you won’t have to change a single setting, preference, or property in order to build a communist society! You can contribute DIRECTLY to the construction of a workers’ paradise on a GLOBAL scale from the comfort and privacy of your own home or office WHENEVER you feel like it - just by surfing the Internet! Largely derided on Nettime, “Cyber-Communism” nonetheless displayed a foundational shortcoming of critical ’90s net culture: an aversion to the firm commitments and big-picture thinking that would have been essential for mounting a serious challenge to the internet’s rapid privatization. One of Nettime’s signature critiques of the Wired line was that the techno-utopian gospel’s apparent optimism about the networked future disguised a fundamental pessimism about the role that humanity might play in it. Humanity was not the subject of this future; technology, mediated by the profit motive, was. Utopia was coming, whether we liked it or not.","completion":"Yet Nettime’s participants often reiterated this same idea in a slightly different register. In the end, Barbrook shared the techno-utopian faith that, through the commercial internet, humanity was automatically generating a better future, albeit a communist rather than a capitalist one. Lacking a coherent political program, such immanentist arguments amounted to little more than a vague hope that things would work out in the end or, at best, a collection of abstract demands: “Deprivatize corporate content, liberate the virtual enclosures, and storm the content castles!” Echoes of Electric Agora By 2020, a handful of Nettime’s once-utopian ideas have become ubiquitous facts of the commercial web—but only in forms that have been disfigured to the point of unrecognizability. Collaborative text filtering, for example, has become a core feature of how modern social media platforms create and manage feeds. Rather than employing formal gatekeepers or editorial staff, websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google rely on collective behavior and decentralized editorial discretion to produce evolving, personalized hierarchies. But most of the agency has been transferred from conscious human actors to algorithms, with networks operating beyond the scale of comprehension."}
{"prompt":"Meanwhile, Nettime was forced to abandon its anarchic commitment to total decentralization around the turn of the millennium, and began tolerating light moderation once the list got big enough to encounter a few deliberate disruptors—as well as a general tendency for men, in particular, to use it “to compare the length of their bookshelves,” as communications professor Matthew Fuller put it in 1998. Given that decentralized collaborative text filtering proved unmanageable at scale, and given the extent to which corporate social media platforms have adapted the same techniques to alienate “users” from their own experiences of the internet, it may be best to understand Nettime’s experiments in collective subjectivity as windows into a time when the internet’s corporate trajectory seemed less inevitable, rather than practical steps toward building a decommodified internet from within. Like the broader anti-globalization movement that influenced it, the Nettime circle was ultimately naïve about how easily the system would reabsorb aesthetic transgressions and hyperlocalized struggles.","completion":"Nettime has receded into obscurity since its halcyon years of 1995–2001, but the list is still running and open to new members after twenty-five years. Some of Nettime’s early disciples have even risen to positions of real influence, buoyed by the post-2016 techlash and the resurgent popularity of democratic socialism. Richard Barbrook, for example, coordinated Jeremy Corbyn’s 2016 “Digital Democracy Manifesto,” which proposed significant state support for platform cooperatives, open source software, and public broadband expansion—structural solutions that harken back to the pre-commercial European internet. As Nettime’s critiques bubble back to the surface amidst a renewed climate of tech skepticism, the list’s archive provides lessons, warnings, and a usable intellectual history for today’s tech-skeptical left."}
{"prompt":"The Nettime circle may have failed to stall the rapid privatization of the internet or dismantle the Californian Ideology in the ’90s, but today, these forces face far more mainstream scrutiny. As an ascendant techlash resurfaces many of the European hacker culture’s early critiques of the private internet, and looks for tools to build an alternative, the list’s archive reveals a forgotten forerunner that kept a torch burning in dark times.","completion":"Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd were murdered in early 2020, victims of persistent anti-Black violence. In the midst of nationwide uprisings over their deaths, leaders in the technology industry responded. Amazon donated $10 million—roughly forty-five minutes worth of its gross annual profits—to racial justice organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Social media companies like Facebook and streaming services like Netflix made content created by Black people more visible. Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, promised a number of corporate commitments to racial equity, such as establishing anti-racist educational programs within the organization. And almost all of these actions were accompanied by pledges to bring more Black and brown people into tech company ranks—a desperately needed measure in a chronically white industry."}
{"prompt":"When tech leaders made those pledges, they often presented themselves as breaking bravely with the past: they would take unprecedented steps to overcome the implicit bias within their own companies and the structural racism of the industry as a whole in order to forge a more equitable future. (“Google commits to translating the energy of this moment into lasting, meaningful change,” Pichai wrote in a letter to the company.) But there’s good reason to doubt this self-presentation. In 2014, following pressure from public figures including Reverend Jesse Jackson, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft publicly disclosed their diversity data. Only 6 percent of Apple’s workforce, 2 percent of Microsoft’s, and 1 percent of Google’s and Facebook’s identified as Black, according to statistics compiled by Wired. Each company vowed to do better; Apple’s Tim Cook said the company would become “as innovative in advancing diversity as we are in developing products.” By 2018 and 2019, however, the percentage of Black tech workers at Facebook, Google, and Microsoft had increased by only one point; Apple’s numbers hadn’t changed at all.","completion":"Far from making a break with the past, when tech leaders pledge to diversify their companies, they are drawing from a playbook drafted over the course of the industry’s history. Information technology firms have been trying—and largely failing—to become more racially representative since at least the 1960s. To understand some of the reasons why the tech industry has failed to become more diverse year after year, decade after decade, it’s useful to go back to the earliest large-scale efforts by a major technology company—IBM—to diversify its workforce.  IBM has been actively trying to bring more Black and brown people into its workforce longer than any other major tech company, and it has adopted or invented the widest range of strategies to do so. If any company has had a margin of success in this, it’s been IBM, and all of the tech companies that have come after it have in some way followed its example. At the same time, IBM’s history is instructive because the company has been at the forefront of producing racist information technologies that have disparately harmed the very same people the company has spent decades trying to recruit—a dynamic that also characterizes many of today’s tech giants."}
{"prompt":"IBM’s flawed motives, failed strategies, tempered successes, and massive contradictions over more than half a century provide critical lessons for today’s tech industry to learn from if it is serious about advancing racial justice and equity. What the history of IBM shows is that creating racial equity in tech requires a commitment from institutions beyond the industry. It also demands that we rethink the sorts of technology that we allow tech companies to build.","completion":"The Original Bootcamp In 1964, US civil servants transformed a former army base known as Fort Rodman, on the outskirts of New Bedford, Massachusetts, into the campus for an audacious new experiment in technical education. The base would host hundreds of male high-school dropouts—most Black, some white and Latino, all poor or working-class—from across the country for a free fourteen-month training program designed to produce graduates who could go on to entry-level jobs at tech companies, including IBM. As IBM president Tom Watson Jr. later recalled in his memoirs, “The idea was to train 750 hard-core unemployed each year—black high school dropouts from the inner city who had never held jobs.” This was IBM’s first and, in many ways, most ambitious diversity initiative. It was run by IBM but funded by the federal government as part of the Job Corps, a free education and workforce training program that was conceived by the Kennedy administration and which later became a key part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, including the so-called War on Poverty. The Job Corps was one of the ways in which Johnson sought to quell the social and economic frustration fueling Black and working-class political mobilization during the civil rights era in order to maintain and expand Democratic power.  IBM had two major goals in launching the Fort Rodman experiment. First, it hoped to ingratiate itself with the federal government, a source of lucrative contracts for everything from tabulation machines for the US Census to computer consoles for operating NASA space flights. Second, and perhaps more critically, the computing giant needed to train a large entry-level technical labor force to help fuel the company’s rapid expansion. In 1965 alone, IBM acquired twenty-six new facilities, and in the subsequent five years it would double its annual revenue to roughly $7 billion ($45 billion in 2020 dollars)."}
{"prompt":"The first crop of 350 students arrived at Fort Rodman in January 1965. They hailed “from the big cities and the small ones, the shut-down mining towns and the farm country” in New York, Texas, Alabama, and thirty-one other states, according to a 1966 promotional film about the program. Some of these young men may have been lured to Fort Rodman by postcards that featured an aerial photograph of the base on a sunny day, looking almost like a beach resort, and on the other side the text: “A HANDUP—NOT A HAND OUT.” One student said that the program was his last resort; a judge told him it was either Fort Rodman, or else.","completion":"Students at Fort Rodman were separated into small cohorts, with one instructor assigned to five or six students. The instructors were white college graduates, some from the Peace Corps, who had been trained on site to be “tutor-counselors” to the young men who for more than a year would make Fort Rodman their home. The tutor-counselors were expected to be mentors and to bond closely with the boys; they ate with the students, hung out in barrack-style dormitories where as many as fifty slept in bunk beds with military-cornered sheets, and played football together. This was as much a part of the students’ training as their remedial math and language courses and their regimen of office skills training, which included how to use typewriters, calculators, and keyhole-punch and data-processing machines.  In the 1966 promotional film for Fort Rodman, students seem impressed as an IBM employee shows them around a new punch-card tabulating machine. “How much time would this machine save compared to how you do ’em by hand?” a Black student in a shirt and blazer asks in the film. “Take a payroll application, for example,” the IBM instructor answers. “A payroll that might take an entire week to prepare could be done on this machine in, say, two to three hours at the most.” But if the electronic magic showcased by IBM captivated the boys at Fort Rodman, it wasn’t enough to help them develop proficiency in the skills needed to get a technical job at a company like IBM. Most of what we know about the program comes from promotional materials that reflect how the people running the program, and IBM leadership, idealistically imagined it working. Even in these sources, however, the causes of Fort Rodman’s failures are clear. Some were operational: for example, despite being designed to provide small-group, individualized attention, the program hired too few staff to meet student needs. Reports noted that students were often neglected by their instructors. Some students stopped showing up for class."}
{"prompt":"Compounding this neglect was no doubt the paternalism of Fort Rodman’s mission, and the belief in Black cultural inferiority that the project embodied. In the 1966 promotional film, for example, as the camera fixates on the face of a young Black man working through a math lesson, the narrator intones: No one has ever given a damn about him until now. He’s failed in school. He’s failed with his family. He’s failed within society. And so he is turned inwards and in a very bad way. We have to convert this history of serious failure into a present history of success.","completion":"This viewpoint—that it was the young men at Fort Rodman who were broken and needed fixing, not the systems of racist and sexist capitalism that Fort Rodman was, in theory, training them for—reflected the “culture of poverty” idea underlying many of President Johnson’s Great Society programs. This idea held that Blacks were poor because they had an inferior culture that didn’t prioritize work and individual responsibility, among other things; in order to change, Black people had to experience and adopt the “right”—supposedly white—cultural values. At the same time, Fort Rodman isolated young men from the communities that provided acceptance, care, safety, and pride for who they were as people.  For its part, the local community in New Bedford made it clear that the young men weren’t wanted there; in May 1966, worried about “unruly elements” at the camp, as a Washington Post report put it, the city council asked President Johnson to move the Job Corps center out of Fort Rodman. Though Fort Rodman had enrolled more than 870 young men by then, the Johnson administration pressured IBM to close it. “The experience caused us some real soul-searching, because there were more problems than we anticipated,” IBM President Tom Watson admitted in his memoirs. “IBM ended up hiring very few Camp Rodman ‘graduates,’ and I doubt any other company did either.” Racism as a Business Model Fort Rodman may have been a failure, but IBM invented a number of other diversity programs that continued, with limited success, into the late 1970s. Several of its initiatives were aimed at luring Black people to IBM through job fairs and targeted advertising in Black media outlets, as well as by loaning equipment and funding faculty positions at historically Black colleges and universities. The company’s primary focus, though, was on developing the “supply side” of the labor market by training the folks it hoped would fill its demand for technical workers. These efforts were smaller in scale than Fort Rodman, but similar in spirit."}
{"prompt":"IBM doesn’t seem to have tracked its diversity programs with any rigor, making it difficult to know just how many they ran, where, and to what effect. But between 1978 and 1981, the period when IBM was most public about the success of its diversity programs, roughly 20 percent of IBM's new hires were non-white, and the number of non-white managers in the company increased from 1,973 to 2,600.","completion":"But like Fort Rodman, IBM’s other diversity programs were flawed in important ways. Most notably, they focused on short-term, skills-based training for people whose educational background made it unlikely they would move beyond low-level positions at the company. Frank Cary, the chairman and CEO of IBM throughout most of the 1970s, admitted as much in a speech to the company’s board and stockholders in 1974. “We’ve made good progress on one of our objectives—bringing into IBM capable and highly motivated minorities and women,” Cary said. “Our second objective is taking longer to achieve: helping minorities and women qualify themselves for advancement at every level of the business consistent with their abilities and their growing population in the company.” Among the obstacles to promoting talented women and people of color, Cary’s comments implied, was the desire among members of IBM’s managerial class to hold onto the privileges conferred by their whiteness. “The relevant question I’m asked most frequently by IBM managers,” Cary said, “is: ‘How can we do that without practicing reverse discrimination?’” This attitude was connected to a more fundamental problem. As much as IBM did in this period to try to remove the metaphorical “Whites Only” sign from its company doors, racism at the company wasn’t just a cultural or structural issue—it was part of its long-term business model. As early as the 1920s, IBM marshalled its computing powers to support eugenics, sterilization, and population control in Jamaica. The company sold technology to Hitler’s regime that allowed the Nazis to tabulate census figures in order to identify and eventually murder Jews, and it sold similar technologies to South Africa to run the apartheid state."}
{"prompt":"From about 1961 through the late 1960s, IBM was also deeply invested in helping federal, state, and local governments imagine, develop, and deploy carceral technologies that became known as “criminal justice information systems.” IBM engineers, designers, and salesmen aggressively marketed computer hardware and software applications to the law enforcement community. Through lucrative contracts with big city police forces like the NYPD, research and development partnerships through President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Crime Commission, and millions of dollars in grants from the newly formed federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, IBM laid the foundations on which today’s policing and surveillance infrastructure has been progressively built over the past fifty years.  In 1968, for example, IBM debuted a system called ALERT II in Kansas City, Missouri. The system began as a database—a place to store police records about arrests, adjudications, jailings, and juvenile justice cases. But by the early 1970s, when it was fully built out, ALERT II, along with similar systems across the United States, was a nationally networked platform that provided law enforcement the ability to profile, surveil, target, and deploy police manpower based on the racial composition of neighborhoods and locations where crime allegedly predominated.  This reinforced a vicious cycle of racist policing. Because police believed Black people committed more crime, they deployed more police to Black neighborhoods. That led to more arrests, which meant Black people were captured more in police databases. Relying on that data to determine where to target police resources meant policing Black neighborhoods more intensively, thus perpetuating the cycle. As a result, entire communities were effectively criminalized in part by the technologies IBM was building.","completion":"Over the next three decades, through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, such criminal justice information systems—some built by other companies following IBM’s lead, many built by IBM itself—proliferated throughout the US, criminalizing Black and brown communities across the country. Since then, IBM has developed newer technologies with even more expansive law enforcement applications, including facial recognition, predictive policing, and police management systems—all of which wreak havoc on Black and brown people in similar ways to IBM’s earlier generation of carceral technologies."}
{"prompt":"It’s impossible to draw clear lines of causality between the racial makeup of IBM and the racist carceral technologies it has built. Would an organization with more Black and brown people in roles with seniority and power necessarily eschew helping law enforcement agencies criminalize communities of color? Would an organization that didn’t build racist carceral technologies have more Black and brown people eager to join its senior ranks? Or would class interests trump racial solidarity so that even an IBM that was more diverse at all levels would still choose profit over racial justice?  Those may be unanswerable questions, but there is nevertheless a clear thread connecting IBM’s diversity projects with the racist technologies it developed. In both cases, IBM saw Black and brown people as easily exploitable sources of profit—either in the form of low-wage labor, or as the material inputs that fed its policing technologies.","completion":"Building Black Tech In the half century since the Fort Rodman experiment ended, big tech companies have launched many other diversity programs. But the numbers of Black and brown people in those companies, and the underlying logics of racialized capitalism that powers the technology industry, have remained largely unchanged. IBM’s supply-side labor programs continue in the form of legions of coding bootcamps that promise Black and brown young people entree into the tech industry—though, in the absence of government and philanthropic support, these are run almost entirely as for-profit ventures.  The same approaches have correlated with the same results. The percentage of full-time Black employees in the tech industry today is about the same as IBM’s was in 1965—roughly 2.5 percent. This lack of progress is reflected in, and may in part be caused by, the attitudes of the people who run these companies: a new report, People of Color in Tech, reveals that the majority of tech founders and CEOs believe that diversity work is ineffective. Roughly half of that same group are unconcerned about the fact that only 1 percent of tech entrepreneurs funded by VCs are Black. This sort of indifference is echoed in the experience of Black tech workers, who (more than their white peers) say they have trouble finding mentors at the companies they work for."}
{"prompt":"What would a more effective approach to improving the diversity of the tech industry look like? Three lessons stand out from the history of IBM’s diversity programs. First, we need to ditch the supply-side approach that only prepares people for the lowest-level jobs, with the goal of creating an expendable and increasingly cheap labor force. Second, we can’t leave it to the tech industry to change itself—we need government watchdog agencies like the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to hold companies accountable, and the commitment of public resources, like those marshaled by Johnson’s Great Society programs, to help transform society itself. Finally, we can’t just seek to change racist cultures or structures at tech companies—we need to fundamentally change their business models.  In June 2020, IBM’s recently appointed president, Arvind Krishna, announced to Congress that the company would no longer sell or develop facial recognition technology. He did so out of an explicit concern for racial justice, recognizing that these technologies have been and continue to be used to devastate people of color, including those within his own company. The tech industry should follow IBM’s lead in examining its products, investments, and research and development projects. When these are inconsistent with racial equity and justice, the companies must abandon them. Diversity in tech is not just about sharing the gains of technology. It’s about reimagining the tech we build and why.","completion":"What would a socialist economy look like? The answers to this question vary, but most of them involve planning. A capitalist economy is organized through the interaction of prices and markets. A socialist economy, by contrast, would be “consciously regulated… in accordance with a settled plan,” to borrow a line from Marx. But how would such a plan be made and implemented? This has been a matter of sharp debate among socialists for more than a century.  One camp has placed particular emphasis on computers. These “digital socialists” see computers as the key to running a planned economy. Their focus is on algorithms: they want to design software that can take in information on consumer preferences and industrial production capacities—like a gigantic sieve feeding into a data grinder—and output the optimal allocations of resources."}
{"prompt":"Over the years, there have been a number of experiments along these lines. In the 1960s, the Soviet mathematician Victor Glushkov proposed a nationwide computer network to help planners allocate resources. With the help of the English cybernetician Stafford Beer, Salvador Allende’s administration in Chile tried something similar in  the 1970s, called Cybersyn. Neither project got very far. Glushkov’s idea ran into resistance from the Soviet leadership, while Pinochet’s coup ended Cybersyn before it was fully implemented. However, the dream lives on.","completion":"Today, digital socialism could obviously do much more. The internet would make it possible to funnel large quantities of information from all over the world into planning systems, almost instantaneously. Gigantic leaps in computer power would make it possible to process all of this data rapidly. Meanwhile, machine learning and other forms of artificial intelligence could sift through it, to discover emergent patterns and adjust resource allocations appropriately. In The People’s Republic of Walmart, Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue that large companies like Walmart and Amazon already use these digital tools for internal planning—and that they now need only be adapted for socialist use."}
{"prompt":"While there are certainly emancipatory potentials here, they are far from adequate to the task of planning production in a post-capitalist world. The digital socialist focus on algorithms presents a serious problem. It risks constraining the decision-making processes of a future socialist society to focus narrowly on optimization: producing as much as possible using the fewest resources. To travel down this road is to ignore and discard vast amounts of qualitative information, which remains crucial to achieving many of the ends and goals of a socialist society.  After all, the societies of the future will want to do more than just produce as much as possible using the fewest resources. They will have other goals, which are more difficult to quantify, such as wanting to address issues of justice, fairness, work quality, and sustainability—and these are not just matters of optimization. This means that, no matter how powerful the planning algorithm, there will remain an irreducibly political dimension to planning decisions—for which the algorithm’s calculations, no matter how clever, can only serve as a poor substitute. Algorithms are essential for any socialist planning project because they can help clarify the options among which we can choose. But human beings, not computers, must ultimately be the ones to make these choices. And they must make them together, according to agreed-upon procedures.","completion":"This is where planning protocols come in. They streamline decision-making by clarifying the rules by which decisions are made. Deployed in concert with algorithms, protocols enable a range of considerations—besides those available to an optimization program—to enter into the planning process. We might say there is a division of labor between algorithms and protocols: the former discard irrelevant or duplicate options, clarifying the decisions to be made via the latter.  Putting both algorithms and protocols to work, people can plan production with computers in ways that allow their practical knowledge, as well as their values, ends, and aims, to become integral to production decisions. The result is something that neither capitalism nor Soviet socialism allowed: a truly human mode of production.  The Price Is Right Any serious attempt at socialist planning has to reckon with the problems posed by the “socialist calculation debate,” a decades-long argument that has influenced how generations of socialists have imagined a post-capitalist future. The right-wing Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises kicked off the debate in 1920 with “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” a full-frontal assault on the feasibility of socialist planning.  At the time, this wasn’t just a theoretical question. The revolution was already well underway, not only in Russia, but also in Germany, and very nearly in Italy and other countries. Socialists claimed that, with the capitalists cast aside, they could use modern machinery to construct a new type of society, one oriented around human needs, rather than profit. Everybody would get access to the goods and services they needed, while working less.  Mises argued that socialists were wrong on both counts. Instead, people in a socialist society would work more hours and get less for it. That’s because, in his view, the efficiency of modern economies was inextricably connected to their organization via the market, with its associated institutions of money and private property. Get rid of these institutions, and the technologies developed over the course of the capitalist era would become fundamentally worthless, forcing societies to regress to a less advanced technological state."}
{"prompt":"To illustrate Mises’s point, let’s take a simple example: the manufacture of a pencil. The manager of a pencil-making factory has to make many production decisions, because there are many ways to make a pencil out of its component parts. How does a pencil maker decide how to produce his “final good,” the pencil, out of all the possible “intermediate goods,” the various types of graphite, wood, paint, and other things that go into making it?  In a capitalist society, he begins by checking the price catalog, where he discovers that graphite A costs 35 cents per pound, while graphite B costs 37 cents. If either works, his choice is clear. This manager can perform the same price test for all the relevant inputs, in order to arrive, quickly and accurately, at the most rational way to make a pencil. He does not need to understand how all the activities of society add up to an overall economy.  Prices allow the pencil makers to quickly set aside numerous procedures for making pencils that would result in functioning pencils, but at the cost of squandering natural or labor resources better employed elsewhere. If given tons of the finest quality Cocobolo or Osage Orange lumber, the pencil makers could undoubtedly make good pencils. But this would be a waste if some other tree, like the humble cedar, provided lumber that worked just as well.  Of course, the prices that pencil makers use to make production decisions are not just random numbers. They are expressions of a living market society, characterized by decentralized decision-making, involving large numbers of producers and consumers. Markets place pressure on all producers to get prices right. If it proves possible, for example, to make pencils more cheaply without sacrificing quality by using a new technique, the firm that does so will earn a sizable profit. New information about pencil production possibilities will show up in the system as a lower pencil price.","completion":"Each producer can make rational decisions about what and how to produce, only because a struggle for market supremacy forces producers to maximize their revenues and minimize their costs. All of these market-dependent producers absorb information to the best of their abilities, make decisions, and take risks in search of new production possibilities and the corresponding monetary rewards. Socialist planners couldn’t possibly reproduce such a complex system, Mises believed, because they would never have more information than market participants mediated through the price mechanism.  Ultimately, prices tell producers which production possibilities have any chance of turning a profit. Without prices, Mises argued, the rational allocation of assets becomes impossible.  Fatal Errors What’s striking about Mises’ description of capitalism is that it is already highly algorithmic. In his account, the managers of the pencil factory behave like a computer program. They collect price information about intermediate inputs and then follow a simple rule: choose the cheapest option for each input that does not lengthen production time or lead to an unacceptable reduction in demand.  Many socialists responded to Mises’s challenge by accepting his basic premise and then trying to write their own algorithm. In other words, they wanted to show that planners could create a substitute for the price system that could generate enough information to arrive at the correct production decisions for a socialist society.  The Polish economist Oskar Lange and the Russian-British economist Abba Lerner were the first to develop this idea. Their proposals, worked out over the course of the 1930s and 1940s, involved socialist planners “feeling” their way towards the right prices through trial and error. For example, planners might set the price of an intermediate good required to make a pencil, and then adjust that price as necessary, until the supply of the final good matched consumer demand. A series of approximations would get closer and closer to the true result, much like a computer calculating pi through a sequence of slight additions or subtractions."}
{"prompt":"When Lange and Lerner were writing, modern digital computing didn’t exist. But at the end of Lange’s life, as computers emerged, he discussed the possibility that they could perform this price-guessing work far better than humans. This line of thinking has been taken up by contemporary digital socialists, who point to developments in applied mathematics as evidence that we could do away with the price system, calculating optimal allocations of resources with advanced forms of programming instead.  After all, we have more data than ever before, as well as an unprecedented amount of processing power with which to perform computations on that data. Gigantic firms like Walmart and Amazon are already using advanced algorithms to put all this data to work to plan their internal operations. So, can the promise of algorithmic socialism finally be fulfilled? Not so fast. Advocates of algorithmic socialism misunderstand Mises’s position in the socialist calculation debate, and thus fail to respond adequately to his criticisms. For Mises, the challenge is how to allocate intermediate goods to producers of final goods. That’s not something companies like Walmart and Amazon do, for the simple reason that these companies distribute goods rather than make them. The firms supplying pencils to Amazon and Walmart still rely on market signals to figure out the best way to make their product.","completion":"As Mises’s student Friedrich Hayek later emphasized, an economy is not a set of equations waiting to be solved, either with a capitalist price system or a socialist computer. It is better understood as a network of decision-makers, each with their own motivation, using information to make decisions, and generating information in turn. Even in a highly digitally mediated capitalist economy, those decisions are coordinated through market competition. For any alternative system to be viable, human beings still need to be directly involved in making production decisions, but coordinated in a different way.  As Hayek observed, running a business involves practical reasoning, acquired through years of experience. To reproduce the work of the manager of a pencil factory, a planning algorithm would have to know not only about the supply and demand for each type of graphite used in pencil making, but also about the detailed implications of choosing one type of graphite over another in that particular production location, with its specific machines and workforce. It is possible that one could formalize all of this knowledge into explicit rules that a computer could execute. However, the difficulties involved in articulating such rules across all workplaces, in all sectors, are simply staggering."}
{"prompt":"Mises and Hayek were correct to observe that people’s participation in decision-making will remain essential for any economy to function. Yet their vision also sets strict limits on who has the opportunity to exercise this agency. In capitalism, the people involved in making production decisions are managers. They represent only a small fraction of the total number of people involved in production, and they do not need to consult all of those other people when making decisions—except insofar as they are forced to do so by law or contract.  Managers are therefore free to pursue economization within broadly defined limits. If their decisions require that large numbers of workers in a particular town lose their jobs—because the pencil factory is being moved to a place with lower labor costs, for instance—then that is a decision the manager can make without answering to the townspeople. For the market to function, therefore, decision-making power must be concentrated in relatively few hands.","completion":"In a socialist society, however, the entire population would control production. Decision-making power would be democratized, and this would almost certainly lead to different kinds of decisions being made. Should people begin to run their own workplaces, they would likely decide to introduce all sorts of changes, such as those related to working conditions, for instance, or to how tasks are organized and assigned. Efficiency, whether calculated in terms of energy use, resource consumption, or labor time, would remain a concern, but it would no longer be the sole concern. It would simply be one of many. Other considerations—dignity, justice, community, sustainability—would also enter the picture.  These other considerations could not easily be absorbed into a one-dimensional optimization algorithm, however, for the simple reason that there is no reliable way to reduce them all to a single, quantitative unit of account. Even natural units, such as tons of iron or grams of penicillin, would prove inadequate. What is the natural unit of justice? Given these constraints, the most advanced computer on the planet still could not determine the correct production plan because the different choices are rooted in competing values and visions of the good—in other words, they are political choices.  If socialist planning is purely algorithmic, it executes decisions in a similar way to capitalist firms. It reiterates the logics of capitalism in a different register: what matters is the extraction of the relevant quantitative information from the mess of qualitative life. But it is only in this mess that the content of socialism can be found."}
{"prompt":"Crafting the Protocol How can a greater variety of qualitative goals become part of the planning process, to be pursued for their own sake? To answer this question, we need to turn to the work of Viennese philosopher Otto Neurath.  Neurath was one of the original targets of Mises’s 1920 broadside against planning. He is remembered today as the theorist of total planning—a phrase that incorrectly conjures the image of social engineers running the economy from a control room. Nothing could be further from Neurath’s vision. On the contrary, Neurath argued that a socialist economy would have to be highly democratic—precisely because it could not be purely algorithmic.  For Neurath, the algorithmic character of the price system was a problem to be overcome, rather than something that socialists should try to replicate. In a capitalist economy, managers are able to make clear-cut decisions about cost-effectiveness only because they are allowed to ignore all of the non-economic costs of their decisions, which include destroying communities, immiserating workers, depleting non-renewable resources, and filling the world with garbage. Economically rational decisions at the level of the firm add up to an increasingly irrational society.","completion":"Instead of just optimizing for efficiency, then, socialists need to figure out how to incorporate multiple qualitative criteria directly into their planning mechanism. The issue socialists face is not quantification as such. They could probably quantify many of the criteria relevant to their production process—establishing indexes of sustainability and safety, for example. But to distill all such relevant indicators to one unit of account suggests a degree of commensurability between goals that is exactly what socialists would want to overcome."}
{"prompt":"A capitalist society that wants to reduce pollution needs to set legal limits on how much each factory can pollute, allowing those firms to continue to optimize their production strategies, but under new restrictions. That, in turn, creates incentives for pencil factories to get around those restrictions—and if they can figure out how to pollute without getting caught, those firms can make large profits. By contrast, a socialist society would want to take pollution reduction as a goal to be pursued for its own sake. It would look for ways not just to limit pollution at the pencil factory but to positively improve the environment—increasing air quality, planting trees, and so on—wherever doing so does not rule out the pursuit of other goals.","completion":"Such an approach requires far more than mere optimization. Rather than trying to convert all of the qualities and quantities of life into a unifying metric that can be algorithmically optimized, we need to find a way to deal with those qualities and quantities on their own terms. We need to be able to make planning decisions on the basis of multiple, incommensurable criteria, and to coordinate these decisions across society. To do this, we must have agreed-upon procedures for making such decisions collectively—protocols.  There are many ways to design a planning protocol. It could be as simple as a population-wide vote, with the majority deciding the outcome. Or it could take the form of a complex bidding procedure, like an auction. A protocol could even be a game, with a set of rules that specifies who can play, what actions each player can take, and what real-life allocations result from different outcomes. There are many possibilities, but the unifying theme is the need to to craft protocols that allow actual human beings to make holistic decisions that take a variety of criteria into account.  Neurath laid out his version of a planning protocol—a term that he did not himself use—in “Economic Plan and Calculation in Kind,” an essay he wrote in 1925. Planning begins with expert planners reducing the “unlimited number of economic plans” that are “possible” down to a few “characteristic examples.” These planners do the algorithmic calculations, which clarify the options among which people must decide. People are then presented with these options for direct comparison. They evaluate a few different plans across multiple criteria and decide which they prefer: listening to comments, voicing their concerns, and taking a vote."}
{"prompt":"Neurath believed that such a process would enable a particular kind of rationality to emerge. Even where it proves impossible to make clear and precise calculations, he argued, we can still decide rationally. However, the rationality we deploy will be a practical and political rather than purely algorithmic. People will have a chance to voice both their concerns and their desires, before arriving at collective decisions about how to shape, constrain, and direct the production process. They will balance how much they want to consume against how much they want to work. They will weigh their need for energy to heat their homes and power their workplaces against values of ecological sustainability and intergenerational justice. They will decide how much of their time and resources would be set aside for expanding or transforming production and how much for cultural, athletic, and intellectual activities.","completion":"In Neurath’s model, decisions made collectively, at the highest level, would then filter down through the rest of the economy, to be implemented across various industries and workplaces. But how would that work exactly? How are local production decisions made? What happens if conflicts or collisions arise—for instance, between the decisions of society as a whole and the demands of workers in pencil factories, producing goods to meet society’s needs?   These complexities suggest that what we need is not one society-wide protocol but many protocols—many structured forms of communication that enable people to reach decisions together. Algorithms would have an important role to play. They would codify what philosopher John O’Neill describes as “rules of thumb, standard procedures, default procedures, and institutional arrangements that can be followed unreflectively and which reduce the scope for explicit judgements,” streamlining the planning process so it doesn’t become an endless series of meetings. At the same time, we would need some set of rules for how to tie all of the protocols together, and to integrate them with the algorithms, in order to create a unified planning apparatus based on software that is easy to use, transparent in its outcomes, and open to modification.  After all, even if we incorporate qualitative goals into our planning, we still have to solve the socialist calculation problem. Producers still have to make decisions that add up into a coherent production plan.  Freely Associated Producers Neurath’s emphasis on democratic decision making was essential. But by proposing the idea of the protocol, he raised more questions than he could answer, especially with the limited technologies available to him at the time. Towards the end of his life, Neurath spent years trying to determine how semi-literate peasants and urban workers could be incorporated into a planning protocol, via the distribution of simple graphical representations that he called isotypes."}
{"prompt":"Today, literacy is widespread across the world, and cell phones are common even in remote areas. The possibilities for protocol socialism are correspondingly enlarged. However, true democratic decision-making about production cannot simply be a matter of a perpetual social-media plebiscite scrolling across one’s phone screen—for the simple reason that many individuals lack the practical knowledge necessary for making most production decisions.  Participation in making each decision, therefore, generally needs to be limited to those involved in and affected by each decision being made, with only decisions that concern everybody being brought to society as a whole. Coordination should take place, in other words, mostly within and between associations. These associations might be composed of producers, consumers, or other groups of people with common identities and interests.","completion":"Neurath saw this future dimly, through the lens of the social mobilizations of his time. During World War I, masses of workers joined militant rank-and-file movements demanding workplace democracy, including the Industrial Workers of the World in the US, the Shop Stewards Movement in the UK, the councilists in Germany, and the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain, France, and Italy. An issue that arose in these organizations was how to coordinate production among worker-controlled workplaces. Too often, theorists turned to market prices or price-like labor-time calculations for the answer, anticipating the later Lange-Lerner model of an algorithmic socialism.  Neurath hoped that councils, guilds, and other associations could find another way forward. In particular, he speculated that they might be able to use planning protocols to make their own direct comparisons between different “ways of working”—taking into account many and varied criteria that could not “be reduced to one single unit”—while collaborating with one another to help fulfill society-wide goals.  Today’s digital technologies might make it easier for such comparisons and collaborations to occur. The association of pencil producers might be algorithmically assigned tokens or “points”—as in economist Daniel Saros’s model of digital socialism—which the association uses to bid on graphite, wood, and other intermediate goods, in an effort to find the best way to make a pencil. Periodically, the association of pencil makers would then meet with other graphite-consuming associations. They would examine existing allocation patterns, consider larger social goals, and alter the graphite allocation protocol accordingly. What would otherwise have been an impossibly long, if not interminable, series of meetings might become, with the help of algorithms and protocols, something more manageable—a streamlined planning process, capable of undertaking complex multi-criteria adjustments."}
{"prompt":"From any given starting point, the socialists of the future might then begin to alter the overall shape of their productive apparatus. For instance, they might set out to reduce the work week by 10 percent over five years, without a significant loss in productive capacities. Associations of workers and consumers would then consider the options available to them for enhancing productivity levels in the specific areas that concern them. New technologies might improve labor productivity in pencil factories, but require more rapid depletion of forest reserves. Meanwhile, a new way of organizing hospitals might result in less work for nurses, but at the cost of lower-quality elder care. Where do different associations of workers and consumers stand on these issues?  Associations would make recommendations and reach decisions through the direct comparison of plan options, considering the consequences that each productivity-enhancing innovation would have for other issues that their members care about, such as sustainability and justice. At a certain point, a committee might compare society-wide goals of work reduction to actual achievements, looking at sticking points, theorizing solutions, and adjusting incentives to prioritize certain kinds of labor accordingly.","completion":"From this perspective, it is easy to see that a planning process would not emerge fully formed with the push of a button on an algorithmic dashboard. Nor would production be constantly revolutionized—at the cost of dislocating human lives and destroying the environment. Instead, step-by-step adjustments would make the production process ever more rational—in the Neurathian sense, not the capitalist one—across a wide variety of criteria. People themselves would propose, debate, and implement improvements for themselves."}
{"prompt":"The productive apparatus would have more in common with a “food forest” than a factory—a garden of edible plants, tended for hundreds of years and designed to provide for a multiplicity of needs, spiritual as much as material. It would connect the past to the future, across generations. It would be a common inheritance that made it possible for the masses of humanity to live and work as they wanted. Beyond this shared realm of mutual obligations, an enlarged realm of freedom would progressively open up space for radical experimentation that could be explored by all, without endangering anyone’s material security or individual freedom.","completion":"A Dance Club for Pencil Makers Digital technologies will assist in the construction of a socialist society, but the role they will play needs to be clarified. We do not want software to substitute for the price mechanism. No matter how digitally mediated a socialist society becomes, it will never be able to escape the need for democratic deliberation at all levels. Human beings are never simply rule followers. They look beyond the rules, sometimes for social benefit, sometimes for personal advantage, and often for both.  At the same time, we have to accept that deliberating endlessly is undesirable and doomed to failure. To function at all, a society that replaces the single-minded focus on cost control with multi-criteria decision-making must use algorithms to help clarify the choices to be made and protocols to help structure the way it makes these choices. We cannot rely on a single, unified mechanism for this purpose; we will need many. And open-ended debate must modify these mechanisms when they generate bad results or threaten to give rise to new forms of domination.  In designing our protocols and our algorithms, it is crucial to remember that the point of this process of social transformation is not only to make work better, but also to work less. Too often, socialists have seen work as the highest realization of human freedom. In truth, work will never be an entirely free activity. But in a world no longer beholden to the capitalist growth imperative, advanced technologies can substantially reduce the amount of work demanded of any individual. With greater free time and available space, all individuals will be able to develop their personalities outside of a work-centric identity.  The world’s pencil makers would be free to invest themselves in a much wider range of ends, whether starting specialized gyms or dance clubs, joining theatre troupes, or forming amateur scientific societies. A rich and varied life beyond work is only possible if work is organized in a way that is fair, rational, and resistant to whatever forces might emerge to subjugate human beings once again. Instead of waiting for a breakthrough in artificial intelligence to achieve this goal for us, we should begin to develop the protocols of the future today."}
{"prompt":"The Los Angeles Police Department’s Real-Time Analysis and Critical Response Division (RACR) is housed in a hulking, institutional-gray building about a mile north of downtown. Its only marking is its address: 500. In the fall of 2013, I had an early morning meeting there with Doug, a “forward-deployed” engineer from Palantir Technologies, which builds and operates one of the premier platforms for compiling and analyzing massive and disparate data used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies. He was one of about eighty people I interviewed over the course of five years to understand how the LAPD uses Palantir and big data.","completion":"Palantir’s goal is to create a single data environment, or “full data ecosystem,” that integrates hundreds of millions of data points into a single search. Before Palantir, officers and analysts conducted mostly one-off searches in siloed systems: one to look up a rap sheet, another to search a license plate, another to pull up field interview cards, and more still to search for traffic citations, access the gang system, and so on. Seeing the data all together in Palantir is its own kind of data.  Palantir’s clients—federal agencies such as the CIA, FBI, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the Department of Homeland Security; local law enforcement agencies such as the LAPD and New York Police Department; and commercial customers such as JPMorgan Chase—need training in order to learn how to use the platform, and they need a point person to answer their questions and challenges. That’s where engineers like Doug come in.  In a training room at the RACR, I watched as Doug logged in to Palantir Gotham, the company’s government intelligence platform, and pulled up the homepage (Figure 1). For him, it was a banal moment, but I’d been eagerly anticipating this sight: there is virtually no public research available on Palantir, and media portrayals are frustratingly vague."}
{"prompt":"Palantir homepage. Source: Los Angeles Police Department. Doug started running through some of the different ways the platform could be used. He patiently explained what he was doing as he queried, clicked, zoomed, narrowed, and filtered: So now, imagine a robbery detective who says, “Hey, you know what, I have a male, average build, black four-door sedan.” Like, they would [previously be able to] do nothing with that, right? So, we can do that.Let’s go take a look at vehicles that are in the system… There are 140 million records in this system … we know it’s a Toyota, maybe a Hyundai, right? Or a Lexus… So let’s say we think it’s one of those types of vehicles, right? And that got us then to 2 million [vehicles]. And if we were to go look at, say, a color … we know it was black. Maybe it was blue, ’cause it could have been blue. It could be dark green… And we know it was a four-door.Do you see what’s happening over here? In five hops, they’re able to get down to 160,000. Now they’re still not going to look at 160,000 vehicles. We didn’t get into model and year, but we could do that, and we could chart it, which makes it easy… So now I could say, I think it was between 2002 to 2005, drill down, now we’re 23,000. Now it gets pretty manageable.\t\tSo now let’s flip over and let’s look at the people that are connected to these vehicles. And I know I’m looking for a male. And I’ll just do one of them.And I know that, like, let’s say he was pretty short. And he was on the heavier side. Brick house. We just got down to thirteen objects, thirteen people. And you could say, “Okay, well, now let me take a look at—all thirteen have driver’s license numbers.” So now we’ve narrowed it down to thirteen potential people, and they could take these thirteen objects and go to the DMV and pull their DMV photos and go to the witness or victim and say, “Here you go.”\t In less than a minute, using partial information, Doug was able to narrow a search from 140 million records to thirteen. He went on to show me how to look up which of the thirteen had any citations or arrests, the LAPD divisions in which they received their citations or were arrested, and identify one person who had been cited in the same division in which the robbery occurred. If the person ended up not being the person who committed the robbery, officers could save this search formula and keep running it in the coming days, in case any new data came in.","completion":"I asked what happens when the system gives a false positive. What happens to the wrong suspect? Doug said bluntly, “I don’t know.” One Person’s Click Is Palantir’s Clue We all leave hundreds of digital traces—clues, should it come to that—every day. When we use our cell phone, run an internet search, or buy something with a credit card, we leave a digital trace. Rapidly proliferating automatic data-collection sensors record and save those digital traces, and make dragnet surveillance—the collection and analysis of information on everyone, rather than only people under suspicion—possible at an unprecedented scale. Individuals with no direct police contact are now included in law enforcement systems, and police now collect and use information gleaned from institutions, like credit-rating agencies, that are typically not associated with crime control."}
{"prompt":"But data—particularly large, diverse sets of data—are relatively useless on their own. You need a good platform to sort through them. And Palantir is excellent at processing, sorting, and analyzing data. With the right platform, searches that used to take hours, days, or even weeks may now take only a few seconds. Dragnet surveillance—and the data it produces—can be incredibly useful for law enforcement to solve crimes. As one officer explained, after any crime, “the first thing you’re gonna do, always, is check the digital footprint.” People working in information technology have a vested interest in making the case that information technology is a crucial component of law enforcement. But no matter how you quantify it—through increased federal and within-department funding for data-intensive policing, the proliferation of law enforcement contracts with tech companies, the increase in tech-training sessions for police, or the rising number of data points the police access daily—data analytics are central to law enforcement operations today.  The Southern California fusion center Joint Regional Intelligence Center (JRIC), a multiagency, multidisciplinary surveillance organization, started using Palantir in 2009 to connect and analyze Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs). At the time, it was the largest law enforcement deployment of this software anywhere in the world. The LAPD, Long Beach Police Department, and LA City Fire Department soon adopted the platform, and there were over 1,300 trained Palantir users in the region by 2014. More users are onboarded every month. A sergeant named Michaels, who coordinates some of the training sessions at JRIC, claims “they catch bad guys during every training class.” The LAPD’s arrest records and field interview cards—small, double-sided index cards that officers fill out with key information about people they interact with in the field—were the first data sources integrated into Palantir. Both are geocoded, meaning you can plot where these police stops and arrests occurred. Palantir does not own the data the LAPD uses, but rather provides an interface that makes it possible to link data points across previously separate systems. Users can plot data on maps, as a network, as a time wheel, or as a bar graph with a timeline of phone calls and financial transactions, for example. The platform even allows users to organize structured and unstructured data content such as emails, PDFs, and photos through tagging.","completion":"Because one of Palantir’s biggest selling points is the ease with which new, external data sources can be incorporated into the platform, its coverage grows every day. LAPD data, data collected by other government agencies, and external data, including privately collected data accessed through licensing agreements with data brokers, are among at least nineteen databases feeding Palantir at JRIC. The data come from a broad range of sources, including field interview cards, automatic license plate readings, a sex offender registry, county jail records (including phone calls, visitor logs, and cellblock movements), and foreclosure data."}
{"prompt":"Though there was a lot of uncertainty among my interviewees about exactly what data were in the databases they were accessing, a pair of civilian employees mentioned the use of LexisNexis’s public records database Accurint and speculated that it contained documents like utility bills and credit card information. Indeed, LexisNexis has over 84 billion public records from 10,000 diverse data sources, including 330 million unique cell phone numbers, 1.5 billion bankruptcy records, 77 million business contract records, 11.3 billion name and address combinations, 6.6 billion motor vehicle registrations, and 6.5 billion personal property records.  The process of labeling and linking objects and entities like persons, phone numbers, and documents makes it possible to plot data on maps and graphs that let users see data in context and make new connections. It can also make it easier to see what crucial data might be missing or what sorts of data might be useful for law enforcement to begin collecting. Whereas one piece of information may not be a useful source of intelligence on its own, Doug explained, the “sum of all information can build out what is needed.” The Danger Imperative Most sworn officers and civilian staffers, including crime analysts, who use Palantir Gotham use it for simple queries (what Palantir calls “drilling down using ‘object explorer’”). Users can search for anything from license plates to phone numbers to demographic characteristics, and a vast web of information will be returned. One officer described the process:\t You could run an address in Palantir, and it’s going to give you all the events that took place at that address and everyone who’s associated to those events… So if it’s a knucklehead location where a lot of things are happening there, you’re gonna get people documented on there one way or the other… Either field interview cards, or they’re on crime reports, whatever… Otherwise you could search all of the records within [LexisNexis’s] Accurint … and see who’s living with who a lot of times.","completion":"It’s not quite so simple as “run a query, get a list of suspects.” Notice, for example, how the officer says “knucklehead location”—he means that you can query an address, and if it’s been listed as the address for many people or their car registrations, if it’s been the site of multiple calls for service, or it’s otherwise connected across the databases, a Palantir Gotham search is going to return a tangle of information. Some of it will be useful, some of it won’t, but the presumption is that if criminal activity is going on at a location, someone or something will be in Palantir."}
{"prompt":"Another employee at Palantir demonstrated how the platform can be used for retroactive investigative purposes: Law enforcement had a name of someone they thought was involved in trafficking. They ran a property search, which yielded the person of interest’s address and date of birth. Then they ran a search for common addresses (whether there are any other people in the system associated with the same address). One turned out to be a sibling of the initial person of interest, which sent investigators searching again, this time coming up with a police report for operating a vehicle without a license. They also searched the address of a third sibling, who lived at a different address. A radius search revealed several tips concerning this same house: one neighbor had called in to report a loud argument, and another reported that a suspicious number of cars was stopping at the house.  With this information, the police were able to set up in-person surveillance and subpoena phone records, which were run through Palantir’s “time wheel” function to identify temporal patterns. Modeling revealed phone calls to one or two phone numbers at the same time each week; using those phone numbers, police got a new database hit. They found a name and a police report and identified their suspect.","completion":"In another instance, I saw a user search for a car using just a partial license plate. They entered “67” and accessed all of the crime reports, traffic citations, field interview cards, automatic license plate readings, names, addresses, and border crossings associated with cars whose license plate contained these numbers in this order.  Advanced analytic tools on the platform include geo-temporal and topical analysis, each of which can be visualized differently. For example, users can plot (geo-analysis) all the types of crime they are interested in (topical analysis) during a given period of time (temporal analysis). Users can visualize the data on a map or along a chronological axis, as well as conduct secondary and tertiary analyses in which they analyze the results by, for example, modus operandi (e.g., using a bolt cutter) or proximity of robberies to a parolee’s residence."}
{"prompt":"Another way to use the analytic suite is to paint a detailed picture of the population of interest in an area. One officer explained this: The big thing that Palantir offers is a mapping system. So, you could draw out a section of [his division] and say, “Okay, give me the parolees that live in this area that are known for stealing cars” or whatever [is] your problem… It’s going to map out that information for you … give you their employment data, what their conditions are, who they’re staying with, photos of their tattoos, and, of course, their mugshot. [And it will show] if that report has [a] sex offender or has a violent crime offender or has a gang offender. Some are in GPS, so they have the ankle bracelet, and … we have a separate GPS tracker for that.","completion":"A Palantir software engineer spoke of the gang unit monitoring entire networks of people: “Huge, huge network. They’re going to maintain this whole entire network and all the information about it within Palantir.” Palantir, one sergeant explained, is also an “operational game changer”: it gives him the data he needs to protect his officers’ safety by, for instance, locking down a neighborhood and positioning an airship overhead while law enforcement conducts a search. Of course, this situational awareness made possible by Palantir can ratchet up officers’ sense of danger and escalate an already tense situation. Such platforms provide an unprecedented number of data points supporting the “danger imperative,” or the cultural frame officers are socialized into, which encourages them to believe that they may face lethal violence at a moment’s notice."}
{"prompt":"Criminal Justice Creep New data sources are incorporated into Palantir regularly. One captain commented:\t\t\t\t I’m so happy with how big Palantir got… I mean it’s just every time I see the entry screen where you log on there’s another icon about another database that’s been added … they just went out and found some public data on foreclosures, dragged it in, and now they’re mapping it where it would be relative to our crime data and stuff.","completion":"Another interagency data integration effort is LA County’s Enterprise Master Person Index (LA EMPI) initiative. If established, LA EMPI would create a single view of an individual across all government systems and agencies: all of their interactions with law enforcement, social services, health services, mental health services, and child and family services would be in one place under a single unique ID. Although the explicit motivation behind the EMPI initiative is to improve service delivery, such initiatives extend the governance and social control capacities of the criminal justice system into other institutions."}
{"prompt":"This is one of the most transformative features of the big data landscape: the creep of criminal justice surveillance into other, non–criminal justice institutions. I encountered many examples of law enforcement using external data originally collected for non–criminal justice purposes, including LexisNexis, but also TransUnion’s TLOxp (which contains one hundred billion public and proprietary data points, including social security numbers, employment records, and address records); databases for repossession and collection agencies; social media, foreclosure, and electronic toll pass data; and address and usage information from utility bills.  Respondents added that they were working on integrating hospital, pay-parking lot, and university camera feeds, as well as rebate data, pizza chain customer lists, and so on. One interviewee in the LAPD’s Information Technology Division said they had their eye on consumer data: “Other stuff, shopping data. You can buy it, you know, certainly other vendors are. So why not?” In some instances, it is simply easier for law enforcement to purchase privately collected data than to rely on in-house data, partly because there are fewer protections and less oversight over private sector surveillance and data collection.","completion":"Another of the most substantively important shifts that have accompanied the rise of big data policing is the shift from query-based systems to alert-based systems. By “query-based systems,” I mean those databases that operate in response to a user query, such as when an officer runs your license plate during a traffic stop. In alert-based systems, by contrast, users receive real-time notifications when certain variables or configurations of variables become present in the data. High-frequency data collection makes alert-based systems possible, and that carries enormous implications for the relational structure of surveillance."}
{"prompt":"Imagine an officer wants to know about any warrants issued for residents of a specific neighborhood. In a query-based system, they would need to set up specific searches, and most of those would be useful only well after the warrant had been issued. All of the millions of warrants in LA county are geocoded and can be translated into object representations spatially, temporally, and topically in Palantir. Through tagging, users can add every known association of a warrant to people, vehicles, addresses, phone numbers, documents, incidents, citations, calls for service, automatic license plate readings, field interviews, and the like. All that information is cross-referenced in Palantir. Then, using a mechanism in Palantir that’s similar to an RSS feed, an officer can set up automatic notifications for warrants or events involving specific individuals (or even descriptions of individuals), addresses, or cars to ping their cell phone.","completion":"For example, an alert can be set up by putting a geofence around a given area and requesting an alert every time a new warrant is issued within that perimeter. One sergeant had an email alert set up in this way, and could even get the alert while he was out on patrol. “Court-issued warrant, ding!” As soon as he got the notification, he says, he was able to track down and arrest the suspect. Previously, the process was far slower. “Now,” he explained excitedly, “you draw a box in Palantir and go about your business. Ding!” A civilian employee described a similar approach using automated license plate readings: “If you have an automated license reader, you can flag a plate or a partial plate and you could attach it to your email. And if it ever comes up, it will send you an email saying, ‘Hey, this partial plate or this vehicle, there was a hit last night. Here is the information.’”  Becoming Carmen Sandiego Law enforcement databases have long recorded who has been arrested or convicted of crimes. Today, they also include information on people who have been stopped, as evidenced by the proliferation of stop-and-frisk databases. The real surprise may be that as new data sensors and analytic platforms are incorporated into law enforcement operations, the police increasingly utilize data on individuals who have not had any police contact at all."}
{"prompt":"The automatic license plate reader (ALPR) is perhaps the clearest example of a low-threshold “trigger mechanism,” lowering the bar for criteria that justifies inclusion in databases. ALPRs are quintessential dragnet surveillance tools—they take readings on everyone, not just people under suspicion. Their data come in the form of two photos—one of the license plate and one of the car, along with the time, date, and geo-coordinates attached to those photos, as read by ALPR cameras mounted on the tops of police cars and static cameras at intersections and other locations. ALPR data collected by law enforcement can be supplemented with privately collected ALPRs, such as those used by repossession agents. Just this one relatively simple technological tool makes everyday mass surveillance possible on an almost unimaginable scale.  In addition to ALPRs, there are all sorts of low-threshold trigger mechanisms being leveraged by the LAPD. Much of the data is what’s being called “collateral data collection,” and it is a passive, pervasive way people are beingcaught up in the surveillance state. Figure 2 is a de-identified notional representation, based on a real network diagram I obtained from the LAPD.\tNetwork in Palantir. Source: Palantir Technologies; diagram by David Hallangen.","completion":"The Carmen Sandiego–looking figure in the middle, “Stephen Thompson,” is a person with direct police contact. Radiating outward, we see all the entities he is related to, including people, cars, addresses, and cell phones. Each line indicates the type of connection (e.g., sibling, lover, co-arrestee, vehicle registrant)."}
{"prompt":"To be in what I call the “secondary surveillance network,” radiating out from the person of interest, individuals do not need to have direct law enforcement contact; they simply need a connection to the central person of interest. And once they are in this system, these individuals can be autotracked, meaning officers can receive real-time alerts should they come into contact with the police or other government agencies.","completion":"When many streams of information flow together, they form a “data double,”  which can be a powerful tool in the hands of law enforcement. As a member of legal counsel at Palantir explained, digital traces can be knit together so that circumstantial evidence looks like a comprehensive picture: there is “usually not one smoking gun document, but we’re able to build up a sequence of events prosecutors might not previously have been able to do … [we can integrate] data in a single ontology to rapidly connect illicit actors and depict a coherent scheme.” This reconstruction may be invisible to civilians—and to their lawyers, if they end up being charged."}
{"prompt":"But indiscriminate data collection is not the inevitable outcome of technological advancement. Mass surveillance is not the “natural” result of mass digitization. Instead, what we allow to proliferate and become the objects of massive data-collection efforts are choices that reflect the social and political positions of the subjects and subject matter that we feel comfortable surveilling.  As a counterpoint, consider guns in the United States: we do not permit the mass tracking of guns. There is no federal gun registry, and the National Instant Criminal Background Check System is required by law to destroy the audit logs of background checks that go through its system within ninety days. We certainly have the technology to track guns, and we could easily leverage existing technology to do more tracking, but gun owners are powerful political subjects. They have the resources to assert that their guns should not be tracked.  Police officers, too, have routinely invoked their authority and legitimacy to undermine attempts to surveil their work lives. They have the power to resist in ways that their more usual subjects, disproportionately low-income, minority folks with little political capital and no small amount of fear, cannot. In that way, too, dragnet surveillance serves to reinscribe inequality.","completion":"1/ Futures are always arriving. They are never evenly distributed. Over the past year, those of us lucky enough to hang on to our WFH jobs have lived a life that might have previously sounded science-fictional, if not paradoxical: a life of extreme isolation predicated on almost continuous connectivity.  Depending on how distributed your workplace was before, within a matter of days or weeks in March 2020, you retreated into your kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, closet, or virtual Zoom background. To become a ghost of pixels, you leaned out or in. You became or failed to avoid becoming a virtual animal. I’m here live, I am not a cat! You took what pleasure you could in the thin camaraderie of memes.  You scrambled to find relatives or professionals or impossible reserves of inner energy to keep your child, or children, remotely happy in remote school. Or you kept swiping through dating apps. Maybe you did teletherapy. Maybe you ordered groceries from Instacart or takeout from Grubhub. You almost certainly bought more things online. In 2020, as brick and mortar stores still standing in the ongoing “retail apocalypse” struggled to make ends meet, especially in the expensive urban markets where periodic lockdowns occurred, ecommerce grew by 40 percent.  Powered by the cloud, life went on. Vast machine learning systems designed to predict consumer demand at the zip code level sprang into action. City streets filled with delivery trucks as shipments that used to go en masse to big-box stores were rerouted to individual households.  Go every man unto his City. Whatever happens with vaccines and variants in the coming months, it is clear that this period has accelerated certain trends towards the decentralization of work and the concentration of wealth. In the process, it has also created an opportune moment to reconsider fundamental questions, such as: What are the best ways for a society to distribute its risks and rewards? What role do digital technologies play in the process?"}
{"prompt":"2/ In this issue, our contributors talk about distribution in many different senses. These include: the distribution of physical objects, like pieces of US mail and utilities like electricity; the use of algorithms to distribute work and wealth and risk; the distribution of computing power, including to devices not typically thought of as “smart.”  Distribution links mundane questions of logistics and lofty questions of justice. How should a society spread around life chances? Who should control information about genes that may partially predict them? In the US, education and technology are dubious fix-alls. Around the world, groups of tech workers are making new kinds of demands on how the power and wealth generated by new technologies should be distributed. We see both the global dispersal of ideas and the importance of local differences. It may look different for gig drivers in Bengaluru or Jakarta than at HQ of Alphabet.","completion":"3/ As we closed the issue, vaccination rates in the US picked up and a container ship, having completed tracing an obscene graffito, then wedged itself in the Suez Canal. This year has been a reminder that, even as many of us have been more isolated than we would have ever thought possible, everything remains connected to everything else."}
{"prompt":"There are fish getting sick in lakes in Zhejiang, China. This is because Midwestern moms who lost their jobs during Covid have stepped up their side hustles selling freshwater pearls on Facebook Live. The pearl farmers in Zhejiang pour pig poop into the ponds to feed the algae that feed the mussels that grow the pearls. The phosphorus and nitrogen from the pig poop get into the groundwater.  There are landfills in Nigeria glittering with snow leopard necklaces because in Winter 2019 Facebook analytics told US dropshippers that in that Spring / Summer women 18-25 who liked something and something else would also like snow leopards, and AliExpress made it too easy for any dropshipper with a Shopify storefront and Oberlo integration to automate placing orders for the necklaces.  There are Bulgarians selling batches of defective suspension brakes they bought cheap from Bangladeshis through Amazon Marketplace. When those brakes fail, and a car crashes and kills not just the driver but everyone around it, will the cops called to the scene think to look for fake suspension brakes? No. They’ll just see an accident.  We are making most of this up. But we hear things like it on good authority, or what seems like it, all the time. Look at any piece of the world system too closely and it will give you the pleasurable sensation of any good conspiracy thriller. Am I going insane? Or am I the only one who grasps the secret logic of the whole?  Some uncertainties about where to draw lines are ethics. Some are cop-outs. As a new world opens or reopens, with a new will to build or rebuild, everything depends on knowing the difference.","completion":"Sometime around 1870, the New York City Post Office established a new department, staffed by a small team of specialists. According to an 1871 profile in Harper’s Magazine, these postal workers spent their days scrutinizing what looked like “the foot-prints of a gigantic spider that had, after wading knee-deep in ink, retreated hastily” across envelopes and postcards. In reality, these would-be arachnologists were employed to make sense of the “miserable chirography” of city residents, whose poor penmanship was causing unacceptable delays in delivery.  One expert decipherer recalled working on a letter that had arrived back in New York after traveling hundreds of miles over four days, repeatedly rejected as illegible by clerks in regional post offices. He studied the chickenscratch for a full workday before finally cracking the code: it was addressed to Chappaqua, a city just thirty miles north. Taking its name from the informal term clerks reserved for these most challenging pieces of mail, the new outfit came to be known as the Bureau of Hards."}
{"prompt":"Delivering hards, no matter the cost, is a reflection of the US Post Office’s commitment to truly universal service—a radical vision of democratic communications infrastructure enshrined in the Postal Service Act of 1792. No matter the sender, the recipient, or the distance separating origin and destination, federal code stipulated that the Post Office must “bind the nation together.” As Alexis de Tocqueville put it in his 1835 treatise Democracy in America, the US mail system, unlike its European counterpart, “was organized so as to bring the same information to the door of the poor man’s cottage and to the gate of the palace.” To live up to this idealistic ethos, hards must be treated no differently than easies.","completion":"But, as the errant letter destined for Chappaqua demonstrates, universal mail service tends to be extremely laborious. Supplanting human postal workers—slow, error-prone, and wage-requiring—with nonhuman proxies has long been a prospect with considerable purchase for postal management. The first machines arrived in post offices in the 1870s, and it’s no coincidence that the first postal worker unions were formed then, too. By the turn of the twentieth century, the Post Office and its governmental overseers had set into motion an unceasing drive to maximize the role of machines and minimize the role of humans."}
{"prompt":"Today, the United States Postal Service possesses the third-largest information technology infrastructure in the world—a rarely cited superlative. Not often included in the discourse around Big Tech, the USPS controls a sophisticated and sprawling computer network, linking together over 30,000 facilities and nearly 10,000 pieces of automated machinery, shuttling 150 billion pieces of mail per year between 150 million delivery points: houses, businesses, and PO boxes from Utqiagvik, Alaska, to Key West, Florida. The number of mail pieces per postal worker, a rough measure of automation’s impact, has more than doubled since 1950.","completion":"Despite significant advances in postal technology made since the mid-twentieth century, however, the USPS remains the country’s largest public-sector employer. The majority of its workforce is stationed at the input or output stage of what is, in effect, an enormous circuit: clerks are responsible for getting mail into the mailstream, and letter-carriers handle mail once it has exited. No single mandate better captures the thrust of modern postal operations than that of realizing a fully automated mailstream capable of connecting clerk and carrier with zero intervention from humans along the way."}
{"prompt":"But a tiny fraction of the USPS’s half a million workers—about two-tenths of 1 percent—toil away in a modern day Bureau of Hards. Two miles south of the Salt Lake City International Airport, in a drab warehouse, these workers parse the squiggled and smudged addresses emblazoned on each piece of mail that has proven illegible to the advanced machine-readers deployed in processing plants across the country. The 1,100 workers on staff at the Remote Encoding Center (REC) tend to the “nonmachinable” scraps discarded by the Postal Service’s automated leviathan. They ensure that more than one billion pieces of mishandled, misdirected, and misidentified mail arrive at their destinations each year.","completion":"Hards have never been simply a technical problem in need of a technical solution. Rather, hardness is better understood as an index of the social and political conditions under which mail is delivered. Taken together, these two deciphering operations—the nineteenth-century Bureau of Hards and the twenty-first-century REC—become legible as something like the origin and destination of an arduous and ongoing struggle between postal management and postal workers over the question of technological change."}
{"prompt":"RIPS 122K Workers stream into and out of the Salt Lake City REC at all hours, with shifts staggered to begin every 15 minutes, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Once inside, Data Conversion Operators, informally known as keyers, consult one of the many large monitors scattered around the facility displaying a clutter of acronyms and numbers. On the morning when I visited the REC last summer, this coded to-do list read “PARS 209K / RIPS 122K / PRES 28K,” indicating that just over 350,000 items were awaiting judgment from a discerning human eye.","completion":"At the center of the 77,000-square-foot facility is an elevated platform that keyers cheekily refer to as “air-traffic control.” From this vantage, managers consult a comically large array of computer screens with charts, spreadsheets, and data visualizations that track the incoming and outgoing flow of mail. What arrives at the REC is not the physical piece of mail itself, but rather a digital surrogate. Each time a sorting machine in a postal plant encounters an address it cannot match with one in the USPS’s database, it takes a snapshot and automatically sends it on a virtual detour to the REC. Keyers receive these images in large batches and make quick work of them; eyes quickly scanning for visual clues, fingers dexterously entering relevant address data."}
{"prompt":"Once the address data has been entered into the keying interface, the image is sent back to the plant, where the sorting machine applies a new barcode to the parcel, ensuring it remains legible to the subsequent sorting machinery it will encounter en route to its destination. This seemingly simple image-processing task depends upon a dense and dated patchwork of software and hardware linking the REC to more than 300 postal hubs across the country.","completion":"Acronyms abound at the REC, indicating the sheer number of image-processing systems in use. Different sorting machines, designed to handle different types of mail, send different types of data to the REC, using different software platforms designed over the last several decades. Some links in this complex chain have been designed in-house, but many have been farmed out to contractors, including Lockheed Martin and Siemens."}
{"prompt":"The goal of consolidating these many overlapping but incompatible systems has long been a high priority for keyers and management alike. RIPS, which launched in 2019, is the newest consolidation effort. Once completed, it will funnel the data from IPS, PICS, FICS, and PRES—four currently siloed systems that handle letters, packages, “flats” like magazines, and other postal paperwork—into a single keying interface.  In the past, different sections of the facility were hardwired to handle these different types of mail, creating a bustling, sometimes chaotic environment. Keyers would walk, or occasionally run, from one section to another as keying queues ebbed between parcel types throughout their shift. Endcaps on cubicles still display “No more cutting through aisles!” signs, despite the REC’s current library-like stillness. Much to management’s delight, less time spent on foot means more time spent keying.  Every keying station is stocked with a keyboard, a monitor, and three or four desktop towers, each dedicated to one of the many acronymic systems in use. Many of these towers are brand new, but run as virtual machines emulating legacy software platforms developed decades ago. In lieu of physically moving throughout the facility, keyers speed back and forth between different programs every several minutes—say, from APPS (packages) to PARS (change-of-address forms) and back to APPS—each time reentering their username and password.","completion":"The work of keying is almost unfathomably fast-paced. But it is graceful, not frenetic. Most keyers sport headphones, listening to music or podcasts as they nimbly flit through an unending sequence of rasterized black-and-white images, logging upwards of 10,000 keystrokes per hour. Some have elected to work at standing desks, a benefit associated with an intensive ergonomics program won by their union. To speed up the information exchange between processing plants and the REC, the images are heavily compressed, producing low-resolution depictions of physical objects that are, oftentimes, in far from pristine condition. Torn shipping labels, waterlogged envelopes, and smeared ink are common. This combination makes for an oddly compelling aesthetic, somewhere between the warped scanlines of artist Bruno Munari’s Xerografia and the lo-fi letterforms of mid-aughts reCAPTCHA puzzles."}
{"prompt":"What scant media coverage the REC has received has almost universally focused on the idiosyncrasies of bad handwriting. The thousands of letters addressed to SANTA, NORTH POLE sent each year by grade-schoolers still honing their penmanship is a recurring motif. One keyer reminisced about envelopes decorated with hand-drawn pin-ups, barbed wire, and skulls that inmates at a local prison used to send, and which he would occasionally receive for keying in the 1990s.","completion":"But according to several keyers I spoke with, the lion’s share of the five million items that pass through the REC each day are not handwritten addresses. Contemporary machine-readers, it turns out, can read handwriting with relative ease, leaving keyers to trudge through a bottomless pile of machine-printed detritus, much of it cheaply printed junk mail slung by mass marketeers.  Crash Program The vast infrastructure required to affix problematic parcels with a packet of human-verified metadata—a thankless clean-up job, performed in the service of machines—is the culmination of a century and a half of technological change. This arc has not been one of linear progress, but rather one of tumult and negotiation, as postal workers from the late nineteenth century onward fought to retain autonomy in the face of encroaching machinery.  The first to arrive was the mechanical “canceller,” a device patented in 1876 by a pair of Boston inventors. The Post Office Department—not yet the United States Postal Service—contracted the production of one hundred cancellers, and allocated them to the nation’s busiest post offices to assist clerks in the slow-going process of manually voiding postage stamps to prevent repeated usage. The contraption’s hand crank rapidly fed letters through a pair of rollers, allowing clerks to cancel fifteen times more postage per hour than was possible by hand. Mechanical cancellers, like many of the technological novelties that would eventually make their way into the post offices, helped to set unprecedented expectations for postal worker productivity."}
{"prompt":"Innovations like this helped the Post Office keep up with a dizzying uptick in mail volume. Sending and receiving mail had become gradually more accessible during the nineteenth century, as a growing share of the public was now within spitting distance of a local post office, and a new policy offered rural delivery for no additional charge. A new class of senders had also entered the scene. Just a few years before the mechanical canceller was introduced, Montgomery Ward had sent its first mail-order catalog, using the Post’s unparalleled delivery network. Mail volume ballooned by a factor of fifty in the decades leading up to the twentieth century, and showed no signs of slowing down.","completion":"The rising demands of commercial mailers put even greater strain on postal operations in the first half of the twentieth century. The cumbersome work of sorting the mail was still performed using the peek-and-poke method: clerks would glance at and then manually deposit each item, one by one, into an appropriate cubbyhole. This outmoded process, developed in the eighteenth century, was plainly incapable of scaling up to the degree necessary. By midcentury, a full nickel’s worth of each six-cent stamp still went toward covering the labor costs of sorting the mail. With competition mounting from private upstarts like the quickly expanding United Parcel Service, the Postmaster General publicly committed the department to a “crash program of modernization and mechanization.” In 1957, the Transorma, an impressive piece of Dutch engineering that mechanized the peek-and-poke, was brought stateside. Five clerks at a time would take their posts at terminals within the belly of this hulking, fifteen-ton apparatus. Letters were shuttled through the machine’s guts, briefly pausing in front of a clerk who would manually punch in a memorized code pegged to the letter’s destination. The machine would then whisk the letter away to a bin for subsequent processing. This new breed of machine enabled a five-fold increase in sorting productivity, but also gave management greater control over workflows."}
{"prompt":"By the 1960s, utility bills, catalogs, advertisements, invoices, receipts, and other forms of impersonal, bulk communication had come to account for more than 80 percent of all mail—clogging up the mailstream, but also providing a critical revenue stream. It was clear to postal management that, on their own, hardware innovations like the Transorma would not be enough. Accordingly, in 1963 the Post Office introduced what might be best understood as its first innovation in software: the five-digit ZIP code.  Above all, ZIP codes served as a new standardization protocol, transforming an unruly map into an efficient mosaic. Encoded in each five-digit string was a surfeit of data, helping to direct each parcel through a carefully delineated geographical hierarchy, from regional processing plant down to localized delivery zone. Not only did this numerical logic significantly simplify manual mail sorting, it also greased the skids of mechanization.","completion":"Homegrown alternatives to the Transorma were developed throughout the 1960s, designed specifically to take advantage of the new ZIP system, which theoretically enabled faster keying by workers. As installation expanded, sorting machines began to play the part of crucible for a brewing hostility between postal workers and management. By 1968, the Post had purchased 145 Multiple Position Letter Sorting Machines (MPLSM) designed by the Burroughs Corporation, famous for its hand-crank calculators. Unlike the Transorma, which advanced to the next letter only after the clerk had entered a code, the new American-built MPLSM made pacing a point of contention. Workers wanted to be able to advance the sorting machine themselves, letter by letter, allowing for more flexibility and precision in the keying process. Management wanted to program the machine to advance at automatic intervals, maximizing productivity and ensuring predictable throughput.  The distinction between operator-pacing and machine-pacing was the subject of considerable research: Which was more efficient? More sustainable? More cost effective? Consultants were hired to conduct extensive psychophysical studies, monitoring eye movements and keystrokes, fatigue and focus, hoping to determine the optimal balance between speed and accuracy. Despite the findings in these reports, management opted for machine-pacing, disregarding the ample evidence that this would greatly reduce overall efficiency and further degrade working conditions.  The tug-of-war over the MPLSM was not an isolated incident. Grievances over wages and working conditions—facilities were dated and deteriorating, the hours were getting longer, the productivity quotas higher—were piling up in postal facilities across the country. But disputes over the role of technology in particular helped to set the stage for, and ultimately played a starring role in, the most significant reshaping of the Postal Service in its history."}
{"prompt":"Processing Progress In the spring of 1970, several thousand disgruntled postal workers in New York City walked off the job. Over the next week, they were joined by over 200,000 of their colleagues around the country, forming the largest wildcat strike in American history, and bringing nationwide postal operations to a near standstill. This action put immense pressure on management and congress to come to the bargaining table. The hardscrabble negotiations that ensued between labor, management, and policymakers carved a new route for postal operations—a route leading directly to the REC.","completion":"These negotiations resulted in the 1970 Postal Reorganization Act (PRA), signed by President Richard Nixon, which minted the United States Postal Service. It earned postal unions the right to collectively bargain over wages, benefits, and working conditions for the first time, something expressly prohibited for the Post Office Department, which had been a part of the US Cabinet. This apparent win for organized labor, however, came at a cost, as the PRA also cemented a new ideological foundation undergirding all postal operations. It made manifest the decree of a federal commission assembled in 1967 and helmed by an ex-chairman of AT&T, one of the USPS’s key competitors in the private sector: “Today the Post Office is a business.” The PRA renewed the Post’s commitment to provide “a basic and fundamental service,” but made clear that a balanced budget was of equal—perhaps, greater—importance. But in the eleventh hour of negotiation, an important caveat to this prioritizing of fiscal concerns was hashed out. Congressional representatives had attempted to slip in one last amendment stating that the “Postal Service shall promote modern and efficient operations and should refrain from [any activity] which restricts the use of new equipment or devices.” If accepted, this would significantly erode labor’s bargaining power by letting postal management make unilateral decisions about technological changes. But labor representatives refused to concede on this point. Tech, they maintained, must be bargainable.  After the amendment was struck down, the battles over technology continued with a renewed vigor, centered around the automated equipment that had begun to replace the mechanized machinery of the 1950s and ’60s. The key difference between the two paradigms lay in the question of who—or what—would be responsible for the work of actually reading the address line, a necessary first step before any sorting could commence. The promise of postal automation, which would require delegating the reading to machines, had long been undermined by optical-character recognition (OCR) technology’s failure to deliver on its own promise. OCR developers had a track record of lofty assurances about the efficacy of their machine-reading systems, stretching back to the early patents filed by AT&T in the 1920s. While the fanfare around OCR was clearly overblown, it had created a deluge of commercial research and investment into the technology in the 1950s."}
{"prompt":"The Post Office Department had begun experimenting with OCR in the late 1960s, but had quickly run aground. Throughout the 1970s, various attempts were made to enhance existing Multiple Position Letter Sorting Machines by integrating an OCR that could identify the bottom-most line of an address and read the five-digit ZIP code. All mail fed into this OCR first had to be examined and presorted by workers on site, as these initial iterations could only read a fraction of the most popular typefaces in use. They were also highly susceptible to paper jams, and handwritten mail remained especially elusive. Consultants determined that until 85 percent of mail could be accurately read by OCR, the mechanized MPLSM—and its waged, unionized operator—would be both more efficient and more cost effective than the automated alternative.","completion":"Automation would become viable in Reagan’s 1980s, which were a hotbed of innovation for both postal technology and management-labor relations. The decade opened with an unprecedented showing of strikebreaking force, as Reagan fired over 10,000 air-traffic controllers who were protesting over wages and working conditions. This sent a message to the American Postal Workers Union (APWU) who, weeks prior, had been on the verge of calling for another large-scale strike. Reagan’s airport intervention spooked the postal unions, who cancelled their pending strike authorization vote. The militant worker energy that came to define the 1960s and ’70s, giving rise to the PRA, continued to dissipate throughout the 1980s. With organized labor on the defensive, management saw an opportunity."}
{"prompt":"In 1982, the high-volume plant in Los Angeles was selected to pilot the Postal Service’s first multiline OCRs, which could automatically read entire addresses, not just ZIP codes like their single-line predecessors. To celebrate, the Postal Service also coined a new employment category. “Mail Processors,” who would monitor these new OCRs, were added to the employment hierarchy two rungs on the payscale below that of MPLSM operators. The APWU filed a grievance, alleging that this constituted unfair labor practices and went against the PRA provision about bargaining over new technology.","completion":"Reagan’s notoriously management-friendly National Labor Relations Board sided with the Postal Service, allowing the new employment category to stand. It turned out that the consultants had been wrong: it wasn’t the technical feat of bringing OCR up to 85 percent accuracy that made automation economically viable, but rather the Postal Service’s technocratic insight about how to redefine work and reduce wages."}
{"prompt":"This was a clever bit of politicking, but it improved neither the literacy rate of machines nor the USPS’s overall service outcomes. Over time, the optimistic narratives of innovation that dominated the 1980s began to wane. Progress was made in OCR, but not quickly enough to keep apace with the steady growth in mail volume. Two congressional reports published in the early nineties captured this sentiment: 1992’s “Automation Is Restraining But Not Reducing Costs” and 1995’s “Automation Is Taking Longer and Producing Less Than Expected.” Hamstrung by successive waves of neoliberal policymaking, the twin values of service and innovation upon which the Post Office was founded had been rendered incompatible with one another. A regime of unrelenting austerity had motivated and justified a blind faith in the promise of automation—all the while undermining this promise. It was out of this failure that the Remote Encoding Center was born.","completion":"Long-Term Temporary Nairn Higginson was a day-one hire at the Salt Lake City REC when it opened for business in 1994. He had responded to a job ad seeking keyers, which described the position as “long-term temporary” and “strictly transitional.” The gig paid more than double the federal minimum wage, and previous experience as a typist or computer technician was required."}
{"prompt":"Higginson recounted to me how frequently he and his colleagues had been advised by management over the years that their days were soon to be numbered. More than a quarter-century into his tenure at the USPS, he is now the REC’s Manager of Operations. Much remains the same since his days as a keyer, save for one notable difference: the hards have gotten considerably harder. “Those last few percentage points,” another veteran keyer hired in the mid-nineties noted, alluding to lingering OCR error rates, “take years and years and years.” In the early 1990s, as a last-ditch effort aimed at bolstering the still imperfect machine-reader systems it had so heavily invested in over the decade prior, the USPS began to experiment with new “remote video encoding” technology. Rather than require on-site clerks to deal with each piece of mail rejected by the machine-readers, “remote encoding” provided an off-site, human backstop to augment the OCR systems. If successful, this fix would serve to prop up automated sorting operations until OCR technology had improved enough to finally make the remaining human cogs in the mailstream redundant, once and for all.","completion":"The USPS initially opted for part-time subcontractors located outside of expensive metropolitan hubs, rather than full-time career postal workers. Twenty-five of these remote encoding facilities were launched by private firms in 1992, with another two hundred slated to open in the following years. But the APWU intervened, claiming that this public-private subcontracting arrangement was a breach of the union’s collective bargaining agreement. This time, the Clinton-appointed National Labor Relations Board ruled in the union’s favor, bringing all remote encoding operations back in-house."}
{"prompt":"Salt Lake City was the inaugural outpost, and additional RECs in upstate New York, suburban Arkansas, and formerly industrialized East Pittsburgh soon joined the ranks. Many of the subcontracted workers hired and trained by private firms were recruited to join the unionized workforce of USPS keyers. On the eve of the twenty-first century, there were 30,000 keyers at 55 RECs, keying 25 billion images per year. RECs had been conceived under the pretense of imminent redundancy, but had proven surprisingly resilient.","completion":"When Higginson started as a keyer, each REC handled the nonmachinable parcels for only its regional processing plant. (Higginson once keyed a letter addressed to himself, sent by a friend with particularly inscrutable handwriting.) Today, however, the first of its kind is the last still standing: all mail that stumps the OCRs in every state and every territory flows through Utah. The barrios of Puerto Rico send a disproportionate share, several keyers told me, speculating that Postal Service OCRs had not been designed to account for the territory’s unique street address schema."}
{"prompt":"The long-presaged closures and consolidations had finally begun in the first decade of the 2000s. But the new century mirrored the old: tech had improved since the Postal Reorganization Act era, to be sure, but changes in the political climate were more decisive. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, signed by President Bush in 2006, renewed and deepened the reign of postal austerity instituted by Nixon and Reagan.  Only ever a “temporary fix,” RECs were first on the chopping block. By 2007, all but eight were shuttered, and 80 percent of keyers had been laid off. Closures continued, and some seasoned keyers relocated more than 1,000 miles to continue keying at the final two remaining facilities—now deemed MegaRECs—in Salt Lake City and Wichita. The two, however, became one in 2014, when Wichita was decommissioned, and all national remote encoding operations were consolidated in Utah.","completion":"Today, only about one-third of the REC’s 1,500 beige cubicles are occupied at any given time, as budgets have continued to tighten and postal OCR has improved to read more than 99 percent of letters and about 85 percent of packages. As the overall stock of illegible mail continues to shrink, it follows that each remaining item sent to the REC is progressively more degraded and harder to read. “The quality of the images we get sent,” Higginson reported, “is getting worse and worse.” Incremental steps forward in the tech make for incremental steps backward at the REC."}
{"prompt":"Very Hard Tasks The story of the REC—and its uncertain future—is a parable for what happens when a robust public service is systematically hollowed out by the dagger of neoliberalism. For the Postal Service, this dagger has often been hidden within the cloak of technological solutionism. But the fully automated mailstream, ever over-promised and under-delivered, may finally be materializing. In late 2019, the USPS announced a partnership with NVIDIA, the leading producer of the powerful computer chips that have catalyzed recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence.","completion":"According to the press release, sorting machinery in more than two hundred USPS facilities will soon be enhanced with AI models designed by NVIDIA. The company’s image recognition systems have advanced so significantly in the past decade that they can now reliably distinguish a white wolf from a species of large white dog. Reading the mail, one might assume, should be a no-brainer. Indeed, OCR error rates have plummeted thanks to classification models like the ones developed by NVIDIA, and character recognition is now sometimes referred to by researchers as a “solved” problem. Perhaps the notoriously stubborn “last few percentage points”—the ones that have kept the Utah keyers busy for far longer than anyone expected—have finally met their match."}
{"prompt":"Curiously, however, the origins of these very same AI systems now installed in mail processing plants—known as “deep” neural networks—can be traced back to the USPS. In the late 1980s, a young researcher at AT&T named Yann LeCun began to experiment with neural networks using a dataset provided by the Postal Service. It contained about 9,000 images of individual digits, culled from handwritten ZIP codes. To this day, a modified version of the dataset is ubiquitous in computer science curriculums, serving as a benchmark for handwriting recognition systems. LeCun, now the head of AI at Facebook, expressed his gratitude to the Postal Service in an early published technical paper, citing the “very hard tasks” performed by USPS’s engineering department in preparing this dataset for use by AT&T researchers.","completion":"Just a few years before LeCun was given access to the formative ZIP code dataset, the USPS had been forced to acquiesce to AT&T on another front. Despite message volume increasing by a factor of ten in its first two years, the USPS’s ambitious E-COM program—a proto-email system—was discontinued after pushback from the private telecommunications industry. AT&T led the charge, claiming that it was unfair that the “Post Office is being encouraged to provide a kind of service” that “private industry is able to do.” That the Post Office could afford to invest in innovative and promising new technology, even when it was unprofitable, was an outrageous notion. Reagan’s Federal Communications Commission agreed, bringing to an untimely demise what may well have amounted to a publicly owned, state-of-the-art digital communications infrastructure."}
{"prompt":"The handwriting dataset and the “very hard tasks” required to produce it, as well as the preemptive gutting of E-COM, are just two particularly salient examples of an ongoing transfer of postal resources—both intellectual and infrastructural—from the public to the private sector. But providing a public subsidy for private enterprise was nothing new for the Postal Service. Long before Nixon and Reagan, the Post Office was forced to kowtow to the whims of commercial mailers, offering cut-rate postage and special delivery options. And more recently, the USPS expanded its delivery window to include Sundays for the first time in its history—except Sundays were reserved exclusively for Amazon packages, which provided a much-needed revenue stream for the fiscally precarious Postal Service. “We deliver Amazon packages until we drop dead,” read the headline of a 2018 USPS letter-carrier tell-all. Amazon, in effect, built its empire off the back of public postal infrastructure, all the while scaling up its own massive logistics operation, staffed not by public sector employees, but contractors and subcontractors.","completion":"Decades of austerity have driven the Postal Service into a state of submission, depending for its continued sustenance on the goodwill of the same private companies it helped get off the ground. Despite this, the USPS continues to serve as a keystone of democracy. Last fall, it executed an unprecedented vote-by-mail operation under the tutelage of a hostile Postmaster General. It continues to serve as a vital conduit of information for the more than 20 million Americans without internet access."}
{"prompt":"As postal history demonstrates, time and again, the work of overcoming hard problems like these is rarely just a technical achievement. After all, universal mail service means that the mail must be delivered, hardness notwithstanding, whether by humans, machines, or some combination thereof. And until the fully automated mailstream becomes a reality, some of the hardest problems facing the Postal Service will be solved by keyers at the Salt Lake City REC, five million times per day, one billion times per year.","completion":"Americans will eat about two billion chicken nuggets this year, give or take a few hundred million. This deep-fried staple of the nation’s diet is a way of profiting off the bits that are left after the breast, legs, and wings are lopped off the nine billion or so factory-farmed chickens slaughtered in the country every year. Like much else that is ubiquitous in contemporary life, the production of nuggets is controlled by a small group of massive companies that are responsible for a litany of social and ecological harms. And, like many of the commodities produced by this system, they are of dubious quality, cheap, appealing, and easy to consume. Nuggets are not even primarily meat but mostly fat and assorted viscera—including epithelium, bone, nerve, and connective tissue—made palatable through ultra-processing. As the political economists Raj Patel and Jason Moore have argued, they are a homogenized, bite-sized avatar of how capitalism extracts as much value as possible from human and nonhuman life and labor.  But if chicken nuggets are emblematic of contemporary capitalism, then they are ripe for disruption. Perhaps their most promising challenger is a radically different sort of meat: edible tissue grown in vitro from animal stem cells, a process called cellular agriculture. The sales pitch for the technology is classic Silicon Valley: unseat an obsolete technology—in this case, animals—and do well by doing good.  Intensive animal agriculture, which produces nuggets and most of the other meat that Americans consume, keeps the price of meat artificially low by operating at huge economies of scale and shifting the costs of this production onto people, animals, and the planet. The industry deforests the land, releases hundreds of millions of tons of greenhouse gases every year, creates terrible working conditions at slaughterhouses, and necessitates abhorrent animal treatment on farms, all while engaging in price fixing, lobbying for environmental and labor deregulation, and pushing for unconstitutional anti-whistleblower laws."}
{"prompt":"The problem is that people love eating meat, with global production and consumption growing steadily and little sign of a collective vegan epiphany on the horizon. This makes intensive animal agriculture a wicked problem: something so obviously detrimental, and yet so politically and socially entrenched, that it is unclear where reformers should even start. Cellular agriculture, however, seems to offer a potential socio-technological hack: it could eliminate much of the damage that system causes, without requiring consumers to sacrifice meat.  Long the stuff of science fiction and philosophical musing, cellular agriculture is fast becoming a reality. In December 2020, the San Francisco-based food company Eat Just debuted the world’s first commercially available cell-based meat at the private 1880 club in Singapore. Its form—a chicken nugget—was partly symbolic, partly necessary: the technology isn’t advanced enough yet to replicate a chicken’s breast, wings, or legs. But the entire animal kingdom is ripe for replication. The first cellular agriculture prototype presented to the public was a burger patty created by a research team at Maastricht University in 2013. The company that grew out of that project, Mosa Meat, is now speeding toward market release of cell-based beef. Aleph Farms, an Israeli start-up, has 3D printed a cellular ribeye steak. Shiok Meats out of Singapore is cultivating shrimp without the shrimp. Berkeley’s Finless Foods is tackling the endangered bluefin tuna. And Australia-based Vow wants to diversify beyond the most-commonly eaten species to zebra, yak, and kangaroo.  Most of this development is being carried out by a fast-multiplying number of start-ups clustered in the world’s tech hubs. They are supported by a global network of ultrawealthy investors and venture capitalists who have plowed around $4 billion into meat alternatives in the past half decade, including about $600 million into cultured meat. Richard Branson, Bill Gates, and a slew of other billionaires are investors and hype men for the technology; the Maastricht burger was funded in part by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. But major corporations are getting in on the ground floor, with the pharmaceutical behemoth Merck investing in Mosa Meats and the meat giant Tyson Foods buying a stake in Silicon Valley’s Memphis Meats.","completion":"That private capital is working overtime to disrupt farming with synthetic biology is likely all that both boosters and critics need to know about the technology. Techno-optimists see a future of widely available “clean meat,” as ecologically and ethically superior to the original as solar power is to coal. Opponents see corporate-controlled “lab meat” that slots all too comfortably into a broken capitalist food system.  Both sides have some truth to them, but they wrongly assume that the outcomes have been determined in advance. There was nothing predestined about the forces that drove the food system to ever-intensifying mechanization, labor exploitation, and environmental ruin in the last century; it happened because of political choices both collective and individual. Similarly, we need not be prisoners of tech monopolists slapping grey “vat meat” on our plates. What we need is an analysis of the possibilities of cellular agriculture—what this novel food technology, with the right policies and investments, could make possible for consumers, workers, animals, and the environment."}
{"prompt":"Disassembly Lines To grasp the promise and perils of cellular agriculture, we need to understand the system it might change. Our current animal agriculture policies and practices do immense damage, and uprooting them will require enormous collective effort, but history shows that the system can change radically, even in the course of a generation.","completion":"For consumers, the current food system is defined by abundance and low prices. Americans spend just under 10 percent of their disposable income on food, among the lowest rates in the world, and eat a whopping 270 pounds of meat each per year, including 122 pounds of chicken. But there’s a high price to pay for low costs. Today, billions of genetically indistinguishable chickens live and die in squalid misery in supersized facilities designed around high efficiency and low margins. Three major processing companies—Tyson, Perdue, and Koch—control 90 percent of the American market for chicken meat. The industry either functions as a monopsony, with a small number of buyers imposing prices and conditions on producers, or in some cases is vertically integrated so that Big Chicken directly controls most of the value chain.  This gives the industry tremendous economic power over farmers, workers, and consumers. Farm owners on contract with major processors are forced to compete so hard against one another that many are lucky if they barely break even. Chicken processing is grueling, low-paid, dangerous work on high-speed slaughter lines that kill 140 birds per minute. A 2015 Oxfam report on the industry told stories of workers forced to wear diapers on the line because they were denied bathroom breaks, and of others crippled by repetitive motion injuries. Meanwhile, chicken giants including Tyson and Pilgrim’s Pride recently settled nine-figure lawsuits for price-fixing brought by supermarkets, restaurants, and individual consumers. The size and wealth of these companies has also given them remarkable political heft. One of the most potent recent examples of this came in April 2020 when, at the industry’s urging, then-President Donald Trump invoked the Defense Production Act to keep slaughterhouses open, even as thousands of workers fell ill with Covid-19.  Meanwhile, cramming animals into factory farms and clearing land for more feed crops has increased the likelihood of outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, such as H1N1 swine flu or Covid-19. The system disables and kills even more people through non-infectious diseases: over the past sixty years, changes in diet have contributed to extraordinary increases in the number of Americans with obesity, diabetes, and heart conditions."}
{"prompt":"We arrived at such a grim place for two reasons. The first is the application of capitalist pressures for efficiency and the tools of industrial management to agriculture, a process that has been happening for at least two centuries. The second is that the politics of food in the United States have been shaped at almost every level by agricultural policies that have created an endless trough of subsidies, but barely any labor or environmental regulations. The whole system has been engineered primarily for the benefit of the owners of farmland and huge agribusiness firms, and at the expense of the public.","completion":"Nowhere are these economic and political histories more visible than in the case of meat. Animal slaughter was industrialized by the meatpackers of late-nineteenth-century Chicago, where 40,000 mostly low-wage Black and immigrant laborers slaughtered millions of cattle and swine every year on so-called “disassembly lines.” This high-volume model required standardized inputs—both grain and the animals that ate it—suitable for industrial processing. The creation of those inputs was supported by the US government, which early in the twentieth century launched programs designed to facilitate intensive agriculture—to turn every farm into a factory, as the historian Deborah Fitzgerald puts in. This included providing education and research support through land grant universities, tax breaks and subsidies for both beef and feed, better credit services and crop insurance, and access to improved farm technology."}
{"prompt":"These dynamics eventually led to the advent of factory farms after World War II. Although chickens weren’t a staple of the American diet until the postwar period, they proved to be particularly well suited to industrialization because they reproduce quickly and their size and egg-laying capacity are easily modifiable through breeding. Meat companies set about creating a market for chicken meat through relentless advertising campaigns, and the factory-farming model soon spread to pigs and influenced the development of ever-larger feedlots for cattle. The environmental health scholar Ellen Silbergeld has described this as the “chickenization” of agriculture.","completion":"Smart progressive critiques of this system abound, but most alternatives to it involve trying to hit reverse by breaking up the food giants and downsizing and diversifying America’s farms. But antitrust policy alone won’t address the harms to animals, labor, or the environment of contemporary animal agriculture. In reality, breaking up big operations could simply generate more, if maybe slightly smaller and slower factory farms. As for actually small farms engaged in more holistic agriculture, the theory is that they are more environmentally sustainable, protect jobs, and keep local foodways stocked with juicy heirloom tomatoes and humanely raised beef. But the idea that building an agricultural system around small farmers is economically viable and will benefit the majority of the population is a lovely idea that is often assumed without evidence. Many people don’t necessarily want, can’t afford, or don’t have access to organic, free-range, farm-to-fork meat and produce. What they can get are nuggets. And proponents of going small often struggle to explain how their ideas can be enacted at a scale large enough and at a low enough price to challenge the status quo, and to do so in a timeframe that responds to our ongoing ecological crisis.  Meanwhile, experts in the environmental impacts of the food system mostly concur that we need to eat way less meat. Some propose vegetarian and vegan diets as solutions. Even those that allow some meat eating recommend steep reductions, especially in the Global North. However, there are no signs that anything except outright bans on factory-farmed meat can achieve the required cutbacks, and that, for now, is a political non-starter."}
{"prompt":"This is where cellular agriculture comes in. The thing that could help solve the chickenization of our food system is not pasture-raised hens, but mass-produced chickenless nuggets. A Suitable Medium In 1931, Winston Churchill proclaimed that technology would one day allow humans to “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium.” As recently as the late 1990s, the remark could be cited as an example of the futility of futurology. Over the past half century, though, a rapid development of biotechnology and medical science has made cellular agriculture a reality. Stem cells, the basic building blocks of most organisms, were identified in the 1960s, growing in vitro muscle tissue became possible in the 1970s, and the first peer-reviewed research on the possibility of in vitro meat production was finally published in 2005.  Despite being cutting edge biotechnology, cellular agriculture is a fairly straightforward process. It begins with stem cells, usually harvested from live animals via biopsy. The cells are placed in a bioreactor, a temperature and pressure-controlled aseptic steel vat filled with a nutrient-dense growth medium that is basically a broth of sugars and proteins. Under these conditions, the cells proliferate and differentiate to form tissue. Fresh from the bioreactor, you’ll have an edible, if not yet appetizing substance known in the industry as “wet mass,” which must then be processed in various ways to produce nuggets, ground beef, and so on. Mimicking more complex cuts of meat—a filet mignon, say—requires additional techniques, such as growing muscle and fat cells on carefully-constructed “scaffolds” made of a material like collagen. It’s structural engineering, but at a microscopic level.","completion":"The potential benefits of this technology are manifold. Extrapolating from current small-scale processes is tricky, but most analyses of cellular agriculture suggest that it will use far less land and water, and have a smaller carbon footprint, than beef and dairy. If powered with clean energy—a big but not implausible if—it can become less environmentally impactful than chicken and pork. By cutting animals out of the value chain, it would not only prevent the torture and killing of billions of creatures every year, it would also greatly reduce the risk of diseases spreading from animals to humans (and then on to other humans). Cellular fish, if it could displace conventionally caught fish, could have even greater ecological impacts by protecting endangered ecosystems and preventing the widespread plastic pollution, including items such as discarded nets, for which the fishing industry is responsible."}
{"prompt":"Rendering slaughterhouses obsolete would also end their inherently abusive labor practices. The labor required to culture meat is highly technical and involves carefully monitoring, maintaining and adjusting bioreactors without compromising the fragile aseptic environments that cell growth requires. That’s the polar opposite of the fast-paced slaughter and dismemberment labor that results in, on average, two amputations of hands, fingers, feet, or limbs per week in the US. This means that not only could cellular agriculture factories offer substantially better-paying jobs than slaughterhouses, but that they would also be considerably safer and healthier work environments.  There is a parallel push to develop plant-based animal product alternatives. Given their capacity to use already existing technology, widely grown plants, and operate at scale while reducing price quickly, these food products are a better bet than cellular agriculture to challenge the conventional animal agriculture industry. The market for these plant-based facsimiles is slated to grow to upwards of $75 billion globally over the next five years. But, ultimately, the companies behind them are offering artful imitations that they hope consumers will wind up choosing over meat. Cellular agriculture produces real meat, allowing the technology to take the $1 trillion global meat industry head-on. It does all this by, as a tagline for the alternative-protein-promoting NGO Good Food Institute goes, “taking ethics off the table,” relying on market mechanisms and appealing to consumer choice. That limits its potential to overturn the entire industrial food system—cellular agriculture won’t, by itself, solve the problem of agribusiness concentration or increase workers’ wages—but substantially improves its chances of disrupting factory farming. It’s a moonshot that just might land.","completion":"Cellular Nuggets This vision of cellular agriculture seems like just the sort of boosterism that Silicon Valley loves to inspire and exploit. To a growing number of critics, the enterprise smacks of “solutionism,” the foolhardy belief that technology can sidestep thorny social and political problems. For some scholars of technology, cellular agriculture is yet another exercise in “ecomodernist techno-optimism.” They argue that it is blind to the fact that “actual modernisation has entailed very real, and sometimes violent, impacts for people and societies to be modernized,” as the Uppsala University geographer Erik Jönsson put it. Many would prefer if everyone simply went vegan or vegetarian.  There are valid concerns that Silicon Valley and food corporations could use technologies like cellular agriculture to tighten their control over the food supply and greenwash noxious agricultural capitalism. Current meat culturing techniques and stem cell lines are valuable intellectual property, closely guarded by armies of patent attorneys and non-disclosure agreements. Critics worry that the result will be an industry that replicates precisely the opacity and lack of accountability of what it aims to replace. To them, cellular agriculture embraces the worst parts of the current food regime: mass-produced, nutritionally dubious nuggets sold at homogeneous fast food joints.  There are three responses to these challenges. The first is that the potential benefits of cellular agriculture outweigh all these costs. If the technology can dramatically diminish the production and consumption of conventional meat, even if it does so using the tools of financialized, neoliberal agri-capitalism, this is ethically and ecologically preferable to the status quo. Put differently, to suggest that a world of cell meat and one of factory farms are remotely comparable is to lose all sense of perspective on the food system."}
{"prompt":"The second is that cellular agriculture at scale could help restructure agricultural land use by reducing demand for animal feed, thereby opening up the space for more progressive food politics. If a government-financed land bank purchased even a small fraction of the 800 million acres currently dedicated to feeding animals in the US, it could resell millions of acres of land at favorable terms for bold new uses: establishing agro-ecological and regenerative farms that strengthen local foodways; supporting community and worker-owned farms; providing land to people from communities that have been historically dispossessed and excluded from owning land; returning lands to tribal nations; rewilding and conservation initiatives. Many of these ideas are championed by critics of cultured meat, who often suggest it is incompatible with the holistic, ecological sensibilities of slow, small and local. But all of these ideas become more feasible in a world with commercially viable labriculture.","completion":"Finally, there’s nothing inherent to cellular agriculture technology that favors venture capital or restrictive intellectual property regimes. Those who want cellular agriculture to live up to its lofty potential shouldn’t just be worried about the malignant influence of capital, they should be finding practical ways to limit it. What’s needed is the political vision and energy to liberate this technology from the grips of corporate stakeholders, and to use it for the radical project of improving the human and animal condition around the world."}
{"prompt":"But if cellular agriculture is going to improve on the system it is displacing, then the critics are right: it needs to grow in a way that doesn’t externalize the real costs of production onto workers, consumers, and the environment. There are serious questions about whether production can scale up safely and affordably, and some cellular agriculture practices need to be cast aside. For instance, many companies’ current production techniques, including the ones Eat Just used for its nuggets, use fetal bovine serum as a cell growth medium, which is harvested from the blood of cow fetuses during slaughter. But, now that we have several proofs of concept for cell meat, scale may be as much a social and political question as a purely technical one.","completion":"While some cellular agriculture research is being carried out at public universities with support from NGOs, most research and development is being done privately. Substantial capital is needed for research, development, and commercialization. But that the private sector sees potential in a technology that governments have mostly ignored is fundamentally a political problem. What we need are public institutions that can both nurture cellular agriculture and rein it in with public investment, regulation, and licensing. It is perfectly plausible that private firms flush with venture capital will find ways to scale and sharply reduce the costs of cultured meat. But they will almost inevitably do so by structuring their research programs and supply chains to maximize investor value, rather than social welfare."}
{"prompt":"The challenges to achieving scale and affordability are substantial. A reliable independent analysis for Open Philanthropy estimated that to be commercially viable, cultured wet mass would need to sell at around $25 per kilogram. Current culturing techniques could put it at around $37 per kilogram. This creates a paradox. Cultured meat at its current level of development is best suited to replace the most mass-produced, standardized, readily available meat: the chicken nuggets. But the Eat Just nuggets were $17 a plate, a price that would flop on the mass market and that may have been significantly discounted for promotional purposes. Chicken nuggets are far cheaper than $25 per kilogram, which is closer to what you might pay for free-range beef. To encourage mass uptake of cell meat, it will need to become much cheaper.","completion":"Perhaps the best way to overcome these challenges is to deploy the same strategy that the government used to industrialize farming a century ago: invest robustly in research and development through public universities, national labs, and generous subsidies. Between talk of the Green New Deal and the Biden administration’s ambitions for comprehensive climate change policy, the window for public investment in environmentally responsible technology is unusually wide. Substantial and ongoing government investment in cellular agriculture could be a part of whatever legislation emerges. Think ARPA-E, the government’s clean energy tech incubator, but for novel food products."}
{"prompt":"This could not only prevent the redundancy of small startups developing similar technologies behind closed doors, but also lower barriers to entry into the industry. It could facilitate cooperation with regulators, transparent scholarly analysis, and the establishment of industry standards, such as a moratorium on fetal bovine serum. Federal regulations and licensing agreements should require that cultured meat facilities are unionized workplaces and that qualified workers displaced from the conventional meat industry be given preference in hiring. The intellectual property developed this way would then, ideally, remain in the public trust and be farmed out to the private sector, which would commercialize a food product rather than patent food production.","completion":"Most critical visions of cellular agriculture are dystopian: unaccountable corporate giants force-feeding a captive population with fake meat. Ironically, that describes the food system we already have. A world in which the factory-farmed nugget is replaced by the bioreactor-brewed nugget would be a monumental win for animals and the environment. If tied to progressive industrial and agricultural policy, it could also be a win for labor, public investment, land use, and champions of alternative foodways. Chicken nuggets might represent everything that’s wrong with our current food system, but cellular nuggets can help build a more sustainable future."}
{"prompt":"On November 8, 2018, a live 115 kV line broke off from a transmission tower owned by the Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) in Northern California. The tower was ninety-nine years old—twenty-five years past the expiration of its planned operating lifetime. The wire hit some vegetation and set it alight. The fire rapidly intensified, with ample fuel from dead trees that had been killed off during the recent historic drought. Before a proper evacuation could be organized, the fire roared through the nearby town of Paradise and destroyed it completely. This was the deadliest wildfire in California history. Eighty-five people were killed and 14,000 homes were lost.","completion":"The destruction of Paradise was the result of interlocking trends within capitalism, technology, and ecology—as are other recent catastrophes of power infrastructure, such as the February 2021 outage in Texas that had me revising this essay in the cold and dark. The transmission and distribution grid is arguably the very foundation of modern society. It harnesses, stabilizes, and distributes energy in its most fundamental form: electricity. This is a delicate, complex, and dangerous task that is crucial for public welfare. And yet, across much of the US, the grid is controlled by investor-owned utilities (IOUs) like PG&E: corporations whose core purpose is the maximization of private profit.  As regulated monopolies, IOUs do face certain constraints on how they can go about making money. Nonetheless, the logic of profit maximization generally holds: minimize costs associated with labor, maintenance, and operations, and keep electric rates as high as possible, in order to maximize returns to investors. One direct consequence is that infrastructure is allowed to fall into disrepair. Investigations into PG&E after the devastation at Paradise revealed a systemic tendency to run equipment to the point of failure, rather than invest in inspections and preventative maintenance. In fact, many of the most destructive fires in recent California history have been caused by failing PG&E equipment, which supplied the literal sparks to set fire to the dead vegetation that is accumulating across the state due to historic, carbon-exacerbated droughts. Meanwhile, PG&E shareholders have reaped the benefits. In a 2019 court case, a judge pointed out that the company has paid out billions in dividends over the years while neglecting its maintenance and land management responsibilities.  What if the grid were owned in a different manner—say, by the same rural communities that have suffered so much at the hands of PG&E? What if serving the needs of these communities, rather than enriching investors, was the purpose of a power utility?"}
{"prompt":"In fact, an entity that operates in this manner not only exists, but is present across the US, in forty-eight states and covering a majority of its landmass. These are the rural electric cooperatives (RECs): nonprofit, local, democratic institutions that collectively control 42 percent of the country’s power distribution system and deliver electricity to over 40 million people. RECs were born out of the New Deal in the 1930s, as part of a broader federal push for rural electrification. Private utilities didn’t see any profit in connecting poor and sparsely populated regions, which resulted in large swaths of the country remaining without power. So the Roosevelt Administration stepped in, establishing the Rural Electrification Administration, which worked with rural residents to form cooperatives. These cooperatives were encouraged to apply for government loans and grants so they could build much-needed power infrastructure themselves. The initiative turned out to be wildly successful. Within twenty years, rural America went from having electrification rates of roughly 10 percent to matching the 90 percent and higher rates of urban areas.  But RECs weren’t just designed to bring power to rural communities. They were also designed to be owned and governed by those communities, which to this day are largely poor and working-class. RECs are run by boards elected by the membership, and their revenues come almost entirely from this membership paying their electric bills to the co-op. They are relatively small-scale and localized, with members being neighbors, relatives, friends, and coworkers. They are structured as 501(c)(12) not-for-profit cooperative organizations, which requires them to provide electricity at “cost of service.” Moreover, they must distribute excess revenues back to the membership. This works more like a refund than a dividend: if there is money left over after covering the cost of service, a portion of a member’s electric bill is returned. RECs aren’t allowed to amass profits like IOUs, thus eliminating the temptation to let equipment fall into disrepair for the sake of shareholder returns.","completion":"RECs are a model of what democratic control of infrastructure can look like. Of course, the reality is more mixed. The history of RECs over the past century is littered with cases of mismanagement, corruption, and antidemocratic practices. As the scholar Abby Spinak explores in her 2014 doctoral dissertation, many RECs have stagnated, with relatively few members taking an active interest in cooperative management, thus enabling technocratic bureaucracies to take root.  Nonetheless, RECs have a unique potential for allowing ratepayers to overcome these sorts of problems, and are ultimately an indispensable tool for forging a democratic path to decarbonization. The premise of the Green New Deal is that we can decarbonize as we democratize—that a zero-carbon world can also be a fairer one. But what are the actual building blocks of the Green New Deal? For an answer, we can turn to the old New Deal, and the cooperatives it created."}
{"prompt":"Something of a Revolution In January 2006, Ric Sternberg made what he thought would be a simple phone call to his power provider, Pedernales Electric Cooperative (PEC). PEC is the largest REC in the country, covering over 8,000 square miles of territory west of Austin, Texas. Sternberg wanted to get information on any incentives or programs offered around residential solar systems. To his dismay, it turned out there weren’t any. Worse, nobody at PEC seemed much interested in the topic. When Sternberg broadened his inquiries to try to learn more about the co-op’s governance policies and how rules could be changed, he quickly found himself hitting walls—walls clearly meant to undermine member-owners like him from exercising their rights and obligations. Basic information was locked away, meetings were only open to management and board members, and the board—which was supposed to be elected by the membership—had set up a system whereby the only people who could run for election were those selected by a board-approved nominating committee. What was supposed to be a democratic institution had been taken over by a small group of power brokers.  In response, Sternberg organized something of a revolution, which he recorded and analyzed in a charming amateur documentary. Over the next six months, Sternberg found more co-op members who shared his concerns, and together they formed an activist group called PEC4U. At first, they tried to work within the system by making moral appeals to the nominating committee and the board to allow more people to run for election. When these pleas went unheard, PEC4U escalated accordingly. They used traditional activist techniques to spread the word about PEC’s antidemocratic leadership and build a movement to take back control of the co-op: flyering and tabling at co-op events, canvassing various towns and communities across the territory, and phone banking. They also organized a class-action lawsuit centered on PEC’s opaque administration and exorbitant board salaries, and how it was using its profits from selling electricity. The lawsuit proved to be an especially useful tactic, as it forced PEC to open up previously confidential records of its management and accounting practices. This revealed even deeper issues of corruption that had taken root at the highest levels. The new discoveries, combined with organizing efforts by PEC4U, led to hundreds of angry co-op members showing up at the 2007 annual membership meeting to demand changes. This was a stark contrast to the previous year, when only a handful of people showed up to present softer criticisms and milder demands.","completion":"The unprecedented level of mobilization by co-op members, combined with growing scrutiny from state legislators, cracked open the once-impenetrable fortress of the PEC administration. Key figures resigned or announced their retirement, including the general manager, who had held his position for three decades and would soon face criminal charges for embezzlement and money laundering. Under pressure, the remaining members of the board amended the election bylaws, and in 2008, PEC had its first truly democratic election. Fifty-eight candidates ran for the five contested seats, and practically all of the incumbents were ousted. With the membership back in control of PEC, the gears finally began to turn on the issue that had initially kick-started Sternberg’s crusade: the co-op committed itself to one of the most aggressive decarbonization goals in the country.  Encoded for Democracy What is striking about the PEC saga is just how quickly the administration was overthrown, relative to similar efforts targeting for-profit utilities. It took about two and a half years between Ric Sternberg making his first phone call to the co-op and the total overhaul of the bylaws and the board. Far less ambitious campaigns advocating reforms at IOUs tend to take much longer to succeed—if they ever do."}
{"prompt":"The successful revolution at PEC underscores how RECs encode democratic rights into their very structure. RECs are meant to be controlled by their ratepayers—the co-op membership—through the direct election of board members. This principle is formally enshrined in legislation and in the official legal definitions of cooperatives. Thus, even in situations where crooked administrators try to undermine the democratic process, a mobilized membership has bylaws, charters, and tax codes on their side. This is also why vigorous member engagement is so important to the health of the co-op, and why cases of corrupt RECs are almost always linked to an inactive and apathetic membership.  While co-ops are controlled by members, IOUs are controlled by shareholders. Ratepayers have no say in who sits on the utility’s board, and are several steps removed from exerting influence on policy. Regulation is typically the job of a state’s public utility commission, whose administrators are appointed by governors and confirmed by state legislatures. Grassroots movements looking to reform these utilities are thus faced with a byzantine and technocratic apparatus. An IOU run by a self-serving elite is functioning exactly as intended.  The contrast between RECs and IOUs also hinges on another less obvious, but equally important dynamic: profit. The ability to extract and accumulate surplus revenue has an enormous impact on power relations. The restrictions on profit-making at RECs—enacted through a combination of tax code provisions, government regulations, and member oversight—limit the material base on which a self-perpetuating power structure can be built. Without free access to profits, co-op executives and administrators are constrained in the resources they can use to preserve and expand their privileges. Bad actors in a co-op can skim off the top of day-to-day operations, and after several years they might be able to afford a small yacht or a sports car—but the co-op’s legal and tax status prevents them from turning the entire institution into a vehicle for wealth accumulation or acquiring so much power that they can extend their reach into the state and corrupt regulatory structures. This was the case at PEC. While the co-op suffered from outright criminal mismanagement, the power exercised by the administrators was fragile. They lacked the resources to mount a serious defense of their interests once co-op members started getting organized.","completion":"Compare this to the scandals that have plagued for-profit utilities. In recent cases in Illinois and Ohio, profits from utility operations enabled industry elites to project their power into the highest levels of state government. The IOUs drew on their annual profits—typically in the range of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars—to underwrite a corrupt nexus of executives and politicians, who entrenched themselves in the state and developed ways to extract even more money from people’s energy bills. Across the US, supposed safeguards like regulatory commissions and legislative oversight are consistently undermined by the ability of for-profit utilities to use their accumulated resources to bribe lawmakers, co-opt regulators, and essentially purchase their own legislation.  This feedback loop of profit and corruption is the logical consequence of trying to regulate privately controlled monopolies instead of abolishing them. Even outside of overtly criminal conspiracies, IOUs across the country interfere with state institutions. In California, PG&E has long been a powerful influence within the state government; even after the wildfires of 2018 and 2019 pushed the company into bankruptcy, PG&E was still spending large sums on political lobbying. Since electricity rates must be approved by state regulators, and these rates determine the profits of the utility, the fundamental fiduciary responsibility of the IOU is arguably to invest in controlling the rate-making process by corrupting the officials who oversee it. The most lucrative line of investment is not in maintaining and improving infrastructure, but in securing political power.  A Just Transition The power of IOUs has had grim consequences for the climate. In the last decade, for-profit utilities have engaged in egregious acts of political interference directed at stymying clean energy standards, undercutting the renewable energy industry and protecting fossil-fuel power plants. Even when IOUs have been forced to accept decarbonization, they have worked tirelessly to ensure that they themselves, and their shareholders, reap the benefits of the transition."}
{"prompt":"Given this context, it is noteworthy that the member revolt at Pedernales was sparked by grassroots interest in solar power. In terms of fossil fuel dependence, RECs as a whole are not so different from IOUs—they are highly dependent on carbon energy and are often an ally of the fossil fuel industry. But the structure of co-ops makes it easier for member-owners to demand, and to win, shifts toward clean energy. There are clear means by which ordinary people can put their own interests first, and for the technical questions of power generation and distribution to be connected with questions of social equity. Whether this actually happens is, of course, a matter of whether local communities are mobilized around such issues. But what’s important is that co-ops allow for this opportunity to exist in the first place.  Increasingly, the question isn’t whether the world will decarbonize, but how it will decarbonize—and co-ops are ideal vehicles for pursuing a democratic path to decarbonization. Top-down, technocratic approaches that rely heavily on market logic, such as those pursued by IOUs, tend to favor the rich. Co-ops offer an egalitarian alternative.  In 2010, the membership of Kit Carson Electric Cooperative (KCEC), a REC in New Mexico, voted for 100 percent renewable energy. Shortly afterward, a steering committee that included board members as well as co-op member-owners decided on “community solar” as the ideal vehicle to decarbonize their distribution system. In the community solar model, individuals buy “shares” of an installation and receive the benefits as credits on their electric bill, as if they had the panels on their own roof.  In 2012, KCEC built New Mexico’s first community solar development, a 100 kW system with distributed ownership of its 420 panels. It soon expanded the program more than tenfold, to over 1 MW. (For comparison, a typical residential rooftop system is between 5 to 15 kW). As of 2020, KCEC had almost 20 MW of utility-scale solar, with plans to double that number in 2021, and is aiming to get 100 percent of its daytime electricity from local solar power by 2022.","completion":"KCEC’s decision to embrace community solar wasn’t just driven by environmental considerations, but by social ones as well. The solar power industry is dominated by individually owned rooftop solar systems. This is a rather exclusive technology, as it’s not available to those who can’t afford to put panels on their roof, or who don’t own their own homes. Community solar, by shifting the focus from individual to collective ownership, makes solar power more accessible. That’s partly why RECs have been a leading force in organizing community solar projects. In 2016, seventy-eight different co-ops had programs; today, there are more than two hundred.  IOUs, on the other hand, have at best a mixed record on solar—and an awful one when it comes to collective solar ownership. They are particularly nervous about decentralized solar systems cutting into their profits, and even potentially inducing a “death spiral.” In accordance with laws around “net metering” in most states, excess electricity generated from rooftop solar tends to be bought by the utility at the full retail price, which is substantially higher than the wholesale price that utilities pay to standard power producers. This works well as a means to subsidize much-needed zero-carbon energy production, but also pushes the price of electricity up for utilities—who, in an effort to protect their profit margins, try to increase rates for everybody else, which drives even more people to buy their own solar systems. The utilities could mitigate this problem by investing in their own solar installations, but they have been largely reluctant to do so, due to their close alliance with the fossil fuel industry and their desire to protect their own fossil-fuel generation assets. Instead, IOUs have used their wealth and power to sabotage clean energy mandates and decarbonization initiatives. In sun-drenched Florida, for example, powerful private utilities have lobbied hard against solar, and have kept the state lagging in terms of renewable development."}
{"prompt":"This aspect of IOUs points to another contrast with RECs. KCEC has not sought to unilaterally shut out rooftop systems. Instead, the co-op has initiated a process to discuss and debate the problem, holding public meetings to bring together technical professionals, rooftop solar installers, homeowners interested in solar, environmentalists, and other local stakeholders to hash things out and come up with solutions. It is a perfect example of what democratic control over technology could look like, where different parties with different interests and perspectives—users, developers, platforms—figure out how to overcome problems and conflicts and move forward together.","completion":"Beyond Electricity All across the country, RECs are investing in clean energy. Washington EC in Vermont was pushed by its members in the 1970s and 1980s to move into renewables early, and currently gets half of its power from a landfill gas power plant that it owns. Farmers EC, a small co-op in Iowa, has one of the highest concentrations of solar power in the US—much of it built by a local high-school physics teacher. The Delta-Montrose Electric Association in Colorado is working with local farmers and ranchers to investigate using agricultural waste products for power production."}
{"prompt":"RECs are also moving beyond electricity, making use of their existing network of electric poles to build out fiberoptic networks and connect their rural members to high-speed internet. Perhaps even more ambitiously, some co-ops are stepping into the world of ecology. Roanoke EC, in eastern North Carolina, is running a program to distribute knowledge about sustainable forestry, targeted specifically toward Black landowners and embedded in a framework of racial justice. This initiative is rooted in a longer tradition stemming back to the 1970s, when Black co-op members fought for the administration and its policies to reflect the demographics and interests of the territory’s majority-Black population. So far, Roanoke EC has helped implement land conservation techniques on over 13,000 acres of land.","completion":"An electric co-op entering the world of land management is not quite as random as it may seem. Power transmission and distribution systems require extensive land management in order to ensure that trees and foliage do not interfere with electrical lines and poles, and vice versa. And, as the wildfires in California have shown, land mismanagement by utilities can have fatal consequences, which will only grow in size and scope as the climate crisis escalates. Countering the crisis will require a massive expansion of conservation efforts, and these efforts are unlikely to come from entities that prioritize profits above all else. Rather, the best stewards of the earth are those accountable to a mass constituency, rooted in local experiences and knowledge, and committed to the creation of public, not private, wealth."}
{"prompt":"In the past year, there has been a historic push for unionization within Big Tech, from Amazon warehouses to Alphabet offices. Workers have won landmark legal actions against Uber in the United Kingdom and Deliveroo in the Netherlands. Even as the Covid-19 pandemic and the passing of the anti-labor Proposition 22 in California have painted a bleak future for gig workers in the United States, hope in worker activism has been reignited. The moment has come, it seems, for a global tech workers’ movement.","completion":"Remarkably absent in public and scholarly discussions of this moment, though, have been the experiences of workers in Big Tech’s largest labor markets. Across the Global South, there are thriving tech labor movements building worker power in diverse ways, despite informal employment relations and widespread precarity."}
{"prompt":"Forms of platform labor organizing in Jakarta and Bengaluru reflect some of the varied strategies workers in the Global South have adopted to survive and transform their precarious working conditions—low pay, a lack of standard contracts or benefits, physical danger, and threats of violence. In both cities, mobility platform drivers have found ways to develop social support structures, underpinned by mutual aid, while also investing in collective identity and power. Yet, the form these relationships have taken in both cities vary—a reminder of how important context is to understanding or advocating worker collectivization. These strategies signal possibilities for tech workers in increasingly similar precarious conditions around the world.","completion":"Basecamp In Jakarta, Mba Mar, a ridehail motorbike driver, spends more time at her driver community’s basecamp than she does at home. In this roadside shelter, constructed over the course of a year by her community of ojol, or mobility platform drivers, she dispenses advice to new drivers, charges her cellphone, catches up on news floating around driver WhatsApp groups, and waits for the mobility platform she works for to match her with the next order. Everyday, as she rides her motorbike around the city in her personalized jacket, embroidered with her community’s emblem, she knows she is not alone. Her fellow ojol “have her back.” Mar’s community is just one of the hundreds of platform driver collectives spread across Jakarta. Each has its own membership rules, ranging from moral expectations (members must be honest) to socializing expectations (members must remain an “active” part of the WhatsApp groups, attend all social events of the community, come to the basecamp at least once a week, and so on). Communities hold internal elections and have mandatory monthly member meetings. Some even have membership fees, which go into a common pool of money used to support community expenses. Most communities have built basecamps where drivers meet between orders, some calling these spaces their “second home.” Many issue ID cards to identify members in case of road accidents, and as a way to solidify their sense of belonging. Collectively, they have set up their own joint emergency response services, and informal insurance-like systems that use community savings to guarantee members small amounts of money in the case of accidents or deaths. They have also provided their members with Covid relief, such as distributing personal protective equipment and free groceries."}
{"prompt":"Individual ojol communities are connected to each other via WhatsApp groups and a language of brotherhood, creating a web of mutual aid, solidarity and friendship—organized by drivers, for drivers. There are more than one hundred ojol WhatsApp groups dedicated to different forms of association: groups for communities in a particular neighborhood, a city-wide group for emergency response, a group for driver communities who play football together. Salam Satu Aspal, the motto of the ojol, signals their unity: they share with each other the “Blessings of One Road.” Jakarta’s driver communities began forming in 2016, as mobility platforms Gojek and Grab disrupted the local market. Drivers were seeking support to navigate unfamiliar technical requirements: many were using mobile apps for the first time, the algorithms managing them were difficult to understand, and drivers constantly needed IT support, as phones or apps stopped working. There was also a persistent threat of violence on the road from opang, the traditional motorbike taxi drivers, who for decades had had a near monopoly over daily transit in the city. But, as the popularity of app-based work increased in Jakarta in subsequent years, platform driver communities spread across the city, furnishing drivers with economic and political power.  These groups now have significant control over the streets of Jakarta. They are no longer threatened by the opang, can freely build basecamps, and even direct traffic during “ambulance escorts,” when communities coordinate to make sure the route for any ambulance carrying an ojol is clear. The latent power drivers have developed in their informal collectives has also given them the belief that they can negotiate with the platform companies. Both Gojek and Grab have created robust communication networks with driver communities, sending representatives to basecamps for feedback and discussions on any system changes or app updates. The companies also use community-built information networks, both online and offline, to disperse important messages about upcoming changes in rules. Driver communities often reach out to platform management through a chosen representative to give feedback on changes in the system, or suggest new changes through Twitter.","completion":"In a sign of how influential driver communities have become, both Gojek and Grab now even partner with communities to manage corporate-run shelters—a move that some drivers call co-opting and others call responsiveness. The platforms fund these shelters and develop rules—such as establishing a dress code, or times of operation—which are then enforced by the community members. While the shelters are open for any driver to rest in, the managing community becomes a liaison or middleman for the platform."}
{"prompt":"Indeed, many drivers are confident they can reach higher-ups in the platform through their community structures. “When we pick up the phone, or tweet to the company and tell them we’re part of a so-and-so community, they have to sit up and listen,” one driver told us. “We are not anonymous nobodies—they can’t ignore us.” Power Brokers Life in the Global South has always been precarious since the advent of global capitalism, and many workers have turned to each other to mitigate their vulnerability. The shape their relationships take is, of course, informed by individual context and constraints. In Bengaluru, drivers have developed forms of support and worker power outside traditional unions. But, unlike in Jakarta, they often look to existing power brokers, especially political parties, to help them challenge their working conditions.  In Bengaluru, a substantial portion of app-based workers are migrants from other parts of Karnataka state. Historically, they have been vulnerable to xenophobic attacks from nativist groups seeking to keep the city for locals only. Insecure in their position in the city, Bengaluru’s platform workers rely on ties with relatives, friends of friends, and fellow migrants from their home districts. They look out for each other as the gig workers of Jakarta do: answering distress calls in the case of road accidents, helping each other navigate interactions with the police, and standing up for drivers who are reported to platforms for misconduct. But, unlike in Jakarta, where identity as a gig worker is the sole basis for collective organizing, in Bengaluru workers are bound together by numerous forms of kinship that are based on different combinations of shared caste, religion, or place of origin. Aid and support are furnished within these kinship groups.  App and other workers in the city have built solidarity over the years—but the path to that solidarity was shaped by varying degrees of suspicion and antipathy towards migrants, non-male people, and non-local language speakers. It was also shaped by platform workers’ status as new entrants into the market. In 2016, in the early days of Uber and its Indian counterpart Ola’s operations in the city, drivers faced a lot of hostility from auto rickshaw and traditional cab fleet drivers, because the app-based drivers were technologically equipped to provide on-demand services and not fully subject to existing transport laws, allowing them significantly more freedom in terms of area of operation and permits required.","completion":"Platform drivers were also not given the choice to join existing transport workers’ unions. As in other parts of the country, this was partly because local and regional unions are embroiled in urban, linguistic, religious, and other alliances to sustain their power. In addition, traditional unions were often antagonistic to workers disrupting the existing labor market. As a result, when early conversations around forming an association of app-based drivers began, the drivers who wanted representation sought affiliation and support from the political party in power in the city, signaling that new transport workers’ loyalty to the party could be valuable for future elections."}
{"prompt":"This strategy was informed by the app workers’ awareness that to broker agreements with tech companies (such as getting an increase in the minimum earnings on a ride or delivery whenever there was a rise in petrol prices), engage in visible collective action (such as strikes), and make demands to improve their working conditions, they first had to build relationships with local politicians, government officials, and city elites. App-based driving eventually became the normative, though not dominant, mode of work. Traditional and local workers realized that opposing platform work would harm their own communities, including rickshaw drivers and unemployed Kannadiga youth.","completion":"Since 2016, a number of self-proclaimed leaders and representatives of gig workers have forged many such alliances with city elites, local and national political parties, and social organizations—from nativist, Hindu-majoritarian organizations to broad work-based alliances—to continue to gain power. Strikes or protests against their working conditions are only undertaken in partnership with these parties and power brokers. Indeed, even as worker unions and driver associations have cropped up in every major Indian city in recent years, they remain deeply involved in ongoing struggles over who belongs to the city and who can exercise power within it."}
{"prompt":"Single Fighters Not all platform workers in these cities organize, either formally or informally. In Jakarta, many drivers choose not to be part of communities, becoming instead what are locally referred to as “single fighters.” Membership in communities comes with high expectations, such as being present in the basecamp and being active on the WhatsApp groups. Drivers have reported feeling pressured to miss orders to hang out with the community, or generally being unable to afford volunteering their time for mutual aid activities. While such expectations are not formally enforced, there is an informal code of reciprocity; if drivers become “inactive,” they will eventually be asked to leave the community or will not feel entitled to ask for community support. Often it is the workers who are most vulnerable—due to gender, class, or ethnic positions—who are unable to forgo time and income for the sake of the community.","completion":"Similarly, in Bengaluru, the handful of female food delivery workers cannot enjoy or bank on support from the mostly male app workers’ “brotherhood” networks. The same dynamic plays out in Mumbai. Female workers have a starkly different relationship with cities across South Asia from those of their male counterparts. A lack of clean public toilets, unsafe neighborhoods after dark, and rampant casual harassment on the streets make it harder to work profitably. This is compounded by the fact that app-based demand for food and services rises at the most inconvenient and dangerous hours of the day and night. Relying on male workers’ help also means risking overfamiliarity and the possibility of unwanted attention. Other workers in these cities don’t fit into the identities along which unions and other formal worker associations are organized, or don’t feel a need to organize formally because they already feel embedded in informal networks of kinship.  Many drivers in Jakarta and Bengaluru often do not want to actively agitate for better conditions because they believe that gig work is the best job they are ever likely to have and fear losing it. Other drivers consider gig work as a temporary stepping stone to other jobs, education, or enterprise—becoming street vendors, for example, or opening their own cornershop. Whether and how these workers choose to resist their working conditions is thus shaped by an awareness of their alternatives, or a lack thereof. (The sociologists Rina Agarwala and Jennifer Jihye Chun have shown how the specific circumstances of informal work shape labor organization opportunities.) For many workers in South Asia, these alternatives are not unionized or formalized employment, but more subcontracted, informal labor, such as domestic or construction work, or jobs in small informal businesses where accountability is diluted by brokers between the final “employer” and the workers with few formal contracts."}
{"prompt":"A Continuum of Strategies For many people in the Global South, work has long been isolating and uncertain by design. As “low-tech” workers such as platform drivers build community and collective power, they are able to draw on different local histories of resistance, and different methods for negotiating the social and political tensions in their cities.","completion":"Often, in the analysis of gig worker power by academics and observers in the Global North, an absence of unionization is thought to indicate an absence of worker power. Unions in the Global South, though, are not seen as the only or best way to collectivize in these labor regimes. This is not to argue that workers in the Global South do not unionize or that unions are unhelpful. Rather, they exist on a continuum of strategies to reshape work conditions, build collective worker identity and engage in mutual aid. (The political economists Arianna Tassinari, Matteo Rizzo, and Maurizio Atzeni, among other scholars, have examined in depth the role of unions in precarious work conditions.) Recognizing why alternate modes of organizing exist, and who uses them tactically, may be key to keeping tech labor movements around the world inclusive and responsive to the needs, vulnerabilities, and politics of those who do not have the privilege of participating in visible direct action. To achieve solidarity, and to succeed, the movement must engage with the informality, power asymmetries, and inequities of class and caste that shape the conditions of work around the world."}
{"prompt":"For almost as long as there have been digital technologies, there have been critiques of digital technologies. One of the oldest and most consistent concerns associated with computation is “datafication.” Datafication turns the activity of people online (and, increasingly, offline) into data, that all-important resource that allows companies to discover patterns in our behavior and exploit them for commercial gain.  Consider a simple example. If I walk into the café across the street and buy a coffee using the store’s Square payment system, this transaction is datafied. Information about what kind of coffee I bought, how much I paid, and what time I bought it is gathered by Square and added to the dossier of all my past purchases and the dossier of all the café’s past sales. By datafying this transaction, Square can learn about my consumption patterns and about the café’s business. Square may then use these lessons for commercial gain: for instance, by selling information about coffee purchasing activity in my neighborhood, or by developing risk profiles for commercial loans to coffee shops.  Datafication is a basic part of what makes the digital economy digital; it also features prominently in critiques of the digital economy. But what makes datafication wrong, exactly? Currently, there are two main lines of thought. First, datafication is a form of surveillance that violates our autonomy by undermining the ways in which we develop our sense of ourselves and express those selves in the world. Second, datafication is like feudalism—it traps us in unfair economic arrangements in which we provide our valuable “data assets” or “data work” for free by using the digital services created by tech companies.  Both of these perspectives provide valuable insights into why we should care about datafication. Yet they also have serious limitations. In the digital economy, data isn’t collected solely because of what it reveals about us as individuals. Rather, data is valuable primarily because of how it can be aggregated and processed to reveal things (and inform actions) about groups of people. Datafication, in other words, is a social process, not a personal one. Further, it is a process that operates through a set of relationships. Only by highlighting the collective and relational character of datafication can we understand how it works, and the particular injustices that it produces. This isn’t just a theoretical exercise—it goes to the heart of what’s wrong with our digital world, and what may make it right.","completion":"Autoplay in the Panopticon Traditionally, critiques of datafication have focused on the kinds of violations we identify with surveillance. This suggests datafication is wrong because it violates our “right to be let alone,” to quote Louis Brandeis, the father of US privacy law. Surveillance is a fundamental transgression because it undermines our ability to form autonomous selves."}
{"prompt":"This account of what makes datafication wrong has its popular origins in Michel Foucault’s analysis of the panopticon. The original panopticon was a blueprint designed by the eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. It consisted of a cylindrical prison with a guard tower in the central courtyard. The prisoners could only see the guard tower, while the guard had a view into every prisoner’s cell. While this model was never adopted during Bentham’s lifetime, Foucault used the panopticon as a metaphor for the “political technology” that undergirds the modern disciplinary society. The panopticon’s design structures a relation of power through surveillance: an “unequal gaze” between the all-seeing observer and the observed.  In this view, surveillance, whether it takes the form of a prison or a dataflow, makes subjects legible to observers, and therefore more controllable. In the panopticon, the prisoner never knows for sure if she is being watched. So she must assume she is, with the result that she begins to police her own behavior and to internalize the goals of the prison guard as her own. In other words, surveillance technologies don’t just observe us. They can also change how we act.  Foucault was primarily interested in how the state used surveillance to produce docile and predictable citizens. More recently, however, large tech firms have been using surveillance to produce predictable and profitable consumers. Netflix’s autoplay feature is a good example. For Netflix, one of the most important indicators of user engagement—and, by proxy, customer satisfaction—is watch time: how many hours someone spends on the site. In order to maximize watch time, Netflix ran a series of tests that involved tweaking its interface in various ways to see which changes resulted in more watch time from its users. These tests showed that the best way to increase user engagement was to automatically begin playing the next episode. Netflix’s granular, data-intensive analysis even suggested the most effective “wait time” before the next episode played: seven seconds.","completion":"Through surveillance, Netflix has found a way to modify TV-watching behavior with its own goals in mind. The site nudges a user into doing something that feels good in the moment, but that may go against her better judgment and her own will, if only she had a few seconds more to think about it.  Strengthening privacy rules could mitigate such concerns. Such rules might require companies to obtain meaningful (not coerced) consent or give data subjects more control over how their data is used. These expanded rights would reassert the authority of the individual’s will against the manipulative machinations of technology companies, restoring the autonomy that has been destroyed by datafication."}
{"prompt":"Show Me the Money Datafication doesn’t just involve observing and manipulating individuals, however. It also involves monetizing the data that is collected from them. This brings us to another critique of datafication. If one camp argues that surveillance erodes our autonomy, another emphasizes the unfairness of companies getting rich from our data. The same techniques that influence user behavior also generate wealth for tech companies, thus contributing to growing economic inequality. The data-intensive practices of companies like Google, Amazon, and Facebook have made them and their CEOs fabulously rich, in great part due to how these companies exploit the insights they can gain from their vast stores of user data.  One solution is to pay people for their data. If datafication is wrong because of how it helps companies make money from users without compensating them, then forcing those companies to compensate their users could right this wrong. Gavin Newsom, Andrew Yang, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have all expressed support for the idea. And the proposal gets at something crucial about datafication missing from the surveillance-centered critique: the stark distributive realities of the digital economy.  The pandemic has brought unemployment and hardship to many but has been a boon to tech monopolies. Jeff Bezos’ wealth grew by more than $70 billion in 2020. Paying people for the data they supply to tech companies is one way to recapture and redistribute some of this prosperity. It would spread the wealth made through datafication more evenly among all of those who helped create it.","completion":"Relations, Not Things Both the “autonomy” and the “nonpayment” accounts of datafication make valuable points. But they also miss essential aspects of how datafication works and what makes it wrong. It’s true that datafication can impede our free will. However, an emphasis on personal autonomy can obscure the extent to which the stakes of data collection extend far beyond the individual data subject. It’s equally true that datafication contributes to inequality. But paying individuals for their data won’t eliminate that inequality because it doesn’t address the broader conditions that can make datafication coercive.  In an increasingly digital world, datafication is the material process whereby a great deal of injustice happens. Through datafication, we are drafted into the project of one another’s oppression. This is not a personal process, but a social one. Datafication operates through a set of relationships. There are the relationships between us and the executives and investors who enrich themselves by surveilling us. There are also the relationships inscribed by racism, sexism, xenophobia, and other group-based oppressions, which datafication manifests in new digital forms."}
{"prompt":"These “data relations” are the digital expression of the growing gap between tech’s winners and losers: those who predominantly benefit from datafication’s personalization and efficiency, and those who disproportionately bear its risks. Sometimes these gaps are economic, like those between platform CEOs and the gig workers who make them rich. Other times they are social, like those between Amazon Ring homeowners who enjoy being able to make sure their packages are safe, and passersby that the Ring subjects to heightened risk of violent police encounters. In both cases, data relations materialize relationships of domination between different groups of people.  A recent story by Joseph Cox for Vice offers an especially dramatic example of this dynamic. According to Cox’s reporting, the US military is purchasing granular location data from a popular Muslim prayer app with over 98 million downloads worldwide. The app, Muslim Pro, pings its users five times a day with reminders to pray, uses a compass to orient them toward the Kaaba in Mecca, helps them observe fasting during Ramadan, and guides them to halal food in their area. These features have helped turned Muslim Pro into the most popular Muslim app in the world, according to its maker, Bitsmedia. It has also meant that the app collects vast quantities of detailed location data.","completion":"The revelation that this data is now in the hands of the US military has sparked dismay and condemnation in the Muslim community. But what makes this instance of datafication wrong? Under the autonomy account, the dataflow from a user to Muslim Pro to the US military is wrong because the user is being surveilled by a government whose presence in their religious life may have a chilling effect on their religious activities. Had the user been notified or given the option to opt out of this sale, they would almost certainly have done so. Under the nonpayment account, on the other hand, this dataflow is wrong because users are not being paid by the app or the US military for their data. If the sale of user data is making Muslim Pro money, users deserve some portion of that profit.  Both of these analyses may be partially true, but both are unsatisfactory. Imam Omar Suleiman, a prominent Muslim scholar and the founder of Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, highlights the importance of the broader social and historical context for understanding what makes the Muslim Pro situation particularly harmful. “This is not taking place in a vacuum,” Suleiman told the Los Angeles Times. He notes the long pattern of government “violations of our civil liberties that have preyed on our most basic functions as Muslims”—a pattern that includes not only intensive domestic surveillance, but also the expansion of the drone program under President Obama, which resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths in Muslim-majority countries.  The responses from Muslim community leaders reflect the social—not merely individual—significance of the dataflow between Muslim Pro and the US military. For them, this instance of datafication is wrong because it drafts users—faithful Muslims—into the project of their fellow Muslims’ oppression. It takes a digital means for expressing and enacting their faith and transforms it into a vector for potential violence, materializing the imperial relation between Muslims and the US state. Datafication is a fundamentally collective and relational process, and so are the injustices that it inflicts."}
{"prompt":"Asking the Right Questions Defining datafication in this way doesn’t just present us with a more complete picture of how the process works. It also gives us a way to make datafication more just. Like analog social relations, our data relations may be oppressive, exploitative, and even violent. But also like analog social relations, our data relations may be empowering and supportive and may act as a moral magnifier—enabling us to achieve goals together that we could not accomplish alone.  Thinking of datafication as the digital terms by which we relate to one another clarifies the kind of political interventions that are required. The point is not to define the terms of our individual datafication—by demanding our share of the pie, or shoring up resistance to being rendered legible against our will—but to define the terms of our collective datafication. We may choose to define those terms in ways that contribute to greater equality. For instance, we might apply datafication toward retrieving spheres of life from market governance. Aaron Benanav has described the role that digital infrastructures could play in democratizing production and allocation decisions by substituting the information generated through datafication for price signals. Other urgent public tasks may also require datafication. A detailed accounting of our individual and collective use of natural resources will be increasingly necessary for the efficient and fair allocation of these resources as our environment undergoes accelerating climate change.  What kinds of projects are worth being drafted into? What forms of relating to one another are just? And how do we begin to develop the institutions through which the democratic negotiations of our shared priorities can be facilitated? A theory of what makes datafication wrong can’t provide us with the substantive, and essentially political, answers to those questions. But it can clarify which questions need answering in order to achieve a more democratic future.","completion":"The geneticist Steve Horvath likes to recall a pact he made with his identical twin at the end of high school in the late 1980s—they would dedicate their careers to extending the human lifespan. Horvath stuck to his word. After getting degrees in mathematics and biology, he started building statistical models hoping to answer an intimate, terrifying question: how long do we each have to live before we die? Horvath began his work on that question in the mid-2000s, as a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was working in a relatively new field called epigenetics, the study of how biological processes alter gene expression without changing our underlying DNA. If you imagine DNA as a ribbon of patterned cloth, epigenetic processes can be thought of as a sort of embroidery that accentuates or conceals its design.  To illustrate the power of epigenetics, some scientists point to the differences among females in the colonies of certain ant species, including Camponotus floridanus, the Florida carpenter ant. All the females in a floridanus colony share the exact same set of genes, but their behaviors and lifespans are dramatically different. Some serve as foragers, others as soldiers, living about a year and never reproducing; only one ant rules as queen, laying eggs and living for up to thirty years.  Horvath began looking for epigenetic processes that might correlate with aging in humans. One was a process called DNA methylation, in which small molecules of carbon and hydrogen attach to particular parts of a person’s genetic code, with the ability to activate or suppress the underlying genes. In 2011, Horvath measured methylation in DNA from saliva samples and found that the more cells a person had with a particular methylation pattern at three DNA sites, the older a person tended to be. The sample was small, but the correlation was strong. DNA methylation predicted age to within five years in more than 85 percent of the subjects."}
{"prompt":"To find out how robust this relationship was, Horvath began gathering publicly available datasets that included information about subjects’ age and DNA methylation patterns. By 2012, he had gathered eighty-two datasets with eight thousand samples in them. The data came from a wide range of people of different ages, and from different parts of the body: cord blood from newborns in various parts of the world; brain, stomach, lung, liver, breast, and uterine tissue; sperm; immortalized B cells from people with a rare genetic disease. He even gathered data on chimpanzees.  Horvath used about half of these datasets to train an algorithm to look for associations between DNA methylation and age. Then he tested the algorithm on the other half of the datasets. What he found was so remarkable that several academic journals rejected his results out of hand. The pattern of methylation at just 353 of the three billion or so pairs of DNA nucleotides in the human genome corresponded to a person’s age with 96 percent accuracy, an unprecedented degree of correlation between a biomarker and the process of aging. After Horvath finally convinced a journal to publish his results, other researchers began to replicate them.  Horvath referred to his successful algorithm as an “epigenetic clock”: insert some body tissue, and it would spit out your epigenetic age. He hypothesized that people with a higher epigenetic age than chronological age (the one we mark with birthdays and greeting cards) might be at a higher risk of early death. With a group of fellow researchers, he set out to develop a new algorithm that would analyze methylation patterns at DNA sites associated with mortality and compare them to the age of death of subjects in large longitudinal studies. It turned out that the 5 percent of people with the highest epigenetic age relative to their chronological age were twice as likely to die prematurely as an average person of their chronological age. Horvath and his colleagues called this new epigenetic clock GrimAge, after the grim reaper, because it seemed to have the disturbing potential to tell if you were headed for a premature death.","completion":"This was a scientific breakthrough with an uncommonly wide range of applications, some of them quite unsettling. Almost as soon as Horvath began publishing the research on his clocks, people began to realize their potential to shape domains from law enforcement to healthcare. Scientists started to investigate whether the algorithms could be used to help solve crimes by using genetic material left at crime scenes—blood, hair, skin cells, bodily fluids—to determine the age of unknown victims or perpetrators. Online, a half-dozen or more companies sprang up selling versions of Horvath’s clocks for around $200, promising prophetic insights to largely affluent customers concerned with prolonging their youth. These companies are like 23andMe, but instead of purporting to reveal your ancestral past, they claim to divine, and allow you to intervene in, your biological future."}
{"prompt":"This rush to commercialize epigenetic clocks involves a number of potential pitfalls. Some industries are likely to use the clocks to wittingly or unwittingly entrench various forms of social inequality. Other commercial applications of the clock are based on a fundamental and possibly willful misunderstanding of the science that shifts responsibility for social and structural problems on to individuals. At the same time, this commercialization obscures something more hopeful: the democratic potential of the clocks.","completion":"Distributing Death The industry that has so far taken the largest interest in epigenetic clocks—and where the dangers of those clocks are most clear—is the four-trillion-dollar-a-year life insurance industry. Life insurance offers an important form of financial security to the heirs of people who can afford it. For example, if I die before paying off my mortgage, life insurance might mean my kids can still keep a roof over their heads."}
{"prompt":"The industry’s business model involves using troves of personal and population-level data to bet on how long individuals will live, and charge them accordingly. Underwriters collect data from applicants on things like personal and family medical history, occupation, lifestyle and hobbies, and then gather data on the backend from driving records, criminal records, prescription history, credit reports, and more. Underwriters feed a portion of this data into an algorithm, which helps them determine a risk score that measures how likely an applicant is to die during the term of the policy.  You pay for the risk you represent, no matter its source. This principle is known in insurance as “actuarial fairness.” Those who are young and healthy can get more financial protection for less money, while the older or more at risk of death you are deemed to be, the more expensive and less accessible that protection becomes. Maybe you’re a wealthy suburbanite who likes racing ATVs on the weekend, or a formerly incarcerated person who now works on a fracking rig, or a single mother with asthma living near a superfund site—all of this helps determine your risk score and how much insurance you can access. Life insurance, in short, is a system built on discrimination.  A reliable test for how one’s cells are aging could be a transformative new tool for the industry. It’s illegal to explicitly discriminate against applicants on the basis of race, gender, or other categories protected by the law—life insurance companies used to deny coverage to Black people and women, but allowed masters to insure their slaves—but epigenetic underwriting could make such discrimination possible through a new form of algorithmic redlining. That’s because epigenetic tests can measure chronic environmental and psychological stresses that often map on to race, class, and gender. For example, one study used one of Horvath’s epigenetic clocks to examine blood samples from 392 Black adults and found that high lifetime stress correlated with accelerated epigenetic aging. Similarly, populations living in highly polluted areas, oftentimes the poor, will have distinctive methylation patterns that could allow the life insurance industry to further discriminate based on class.","completion":"There’s a second way that epigenetic tests are likely to be used in the life insurance industry, one that carries a related risk. Epigenetics has been heralded within both academia and the media as the answer to the longstanding nature-versus-nurture debate: proof that our surroundings and behaviors influence us on a molecular level. Using this logic, the life insurance industry—along with companies offering consumer epigenetic tests—is likely to use epigenetic clocks to offer personalized health insights and behavior-modification programs to its customers. High epigenetic age? Trying eating more kale! This could also lead to discount programs that reward policyholders who successfully lower their epigenetic age. Similar discount schemes are commonplace in auto insurance, where companies like TrueMotion allow policyholders to download an app that tracks their actions behind the wheel and gives discounts or makes price hikes based on safe or risky driving."}
{"prompt":"The problem with this, of course, is that nurture is nothing like driving. Nurture is the air quality and poverty levels in the neighborhood you grew up in; where you went to school and what you ate for lunch; the way you were treated by your parents and society; the life stresses you have experienced. Like aging processes, all of this is gendered, classed, and racialized. Despite what the life insurance and other industries might claim about personalized behavior-modification programs based on epigenetic tests, you can’t meditate your way out of structural inequality. But this misunderstanding about the nature of nurture is useful to such industries—it generates profits by shifting risk and responsibility for wellbeing from societies, corporations, and governments onto individuals.  That’s not to say nothing is under our control. Some things surely are, like diet and smoking. Be that as it may, we have very little idea how precisely these choices affect epigenetic processes of aging. A 2016 study by Brian Chen, a scientist who worked with Steve Horvath and is now at a life sciences company that is trying to pioneer epigenetic underwriting, found that the correlation between early mortality and methylation remained even after controlling for lifestyle factors such as exercise levels and smoking status. This suggests that epigenetic clocks capture some aspect of biological aging that is divorced from—and can’t be altered by—lifestyle. As Chen recently told me, “We don’t know, as the scientific community, because the science is so new, what will alter one’s epigenetic clock.” Proof of Harm Though our genes differ, shared experiences and circumstances shape us in similar ways. The life insurance industry may want to use epigenetic tests in a manner that entrenches inequality and pernicious myths of personal responsibility, but the science can also be used to strengthen the case for action on social and systemic problems.","completion":"“The health impact of environmental and social inequalities, phenomena that occur outside the body, is now identifiable, measurable, and potentially treatable within the body,” Charles Dupras, a bioethicist at the University of Montreal, has written. There are many situations in which molecular-level proof of harm could bolster advocacy work and the case for regulations. For example, multiple existing environmental policies—such as the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Toxic Substances Control Act—require agencies to assess whether an atmosphere harms human health, and epigenetic tests could be an important source of proof.  Epigenetic tests could also lead to safer working environments. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the cornerstone federal law regulating workplace safety, employees are entitled to a workplace free from “recognized hazards that are causing or are likely to cause death or serious physical harm.” Mark Rothstein, the Director of the Institute for Bioethics, Health Policy and Law at the University of Louisville School of Medicine, argues that epigenetic tests could capture the adverse effects of everything from toxins at work to a hostile work environment."}
{"prompt":"When I asked Dupras why he believes that we need epigenetics to promote findings we already know to be true—pollution is bad for your health, exercise can help you stay healthy—he said that epigenetics meets the needs of both the social scientist pushing for equitable policy and the biotech company looking to make advances in precision medicine. Sometimes these things seem at odds—we hunt for cellular therapies when we should be working to change the environmental conditions that cause illness in the first place—but there’s no reason epigenetic science can’t help us do both.  As the field matures and we learn more about how our environment impacts our biology, we should be skeptical of market solutions promising individualized interventions. As consumers, we should recognize epigenetic testing for what it is: exciting molecular confirmation of the fact that healthy environments promote longer lives. As a society, we should acknowledge it for what it could be: a discovery that will help us to draw roadmaps toward a better collective future.","completion":"In 2013, a series of posters started appearing across Washington, DC, that declared, “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It,” next to a photo of a Black Washingtonian. “Sean earned an advanced certification in six months. Now he upgrades computer systems for the US Small Business Administration. He uses technology to help people start businesses. So can you.” The people in the posters looked ahead to their new future, smiling. “Fabiane learned Microsoft Office in eight weeks and used her new skills to write, design, and publish her first book. She’s using technology to pursue her dreams. So can you.” The posters told stories about using digital training resources provided by the DC municipal government to get to such futures. New skills and tools would lead to better jobs, ones in which you don’t work with your hands. But it was not just a matter of bringing single individuals across a digital divide, a gap between those who had internet access and the skills to use it and those who didn’t. The dream was bigger: by changing their tools and skills, people could drive the economic growth of the city and change the communities in which they lived. “Marcus earned three computer certifications in less than a year. Now he works as a computer technician with the DC government. He uses technology to improve his city.” Curiously, the internet itself wasn’t mentioned in these testimonies. No one was designing websites or setting up e-commerce portals. The internet in “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It” was not a specific tool, but a symbol of economic progress—the promised land people would reach with the right equipment and the right training.  There is a familiar, attractive story here: get online, learn to code, secure your future. Both liberal and conservative politicians have repeated that story for decades, updating it for the technology of the day, in an attempt to persuade the public that their individual and collective economic futures depend on their access to the right skills and tools. The narrative is so pervasive that it has become political common sense."}
{"prompt":"I call that political common sense the “access doctrine.” The access doctrine decrees that the problem of poverty can be solved through the provision of new technologies and technical skills, giving those left out of the information economy the chance to catch up and compete. Like other forms of political common sense, the access doctrine mixes factual claims with ideological ones. It is clear, for example, that finding a job without an internet connection and a PC is difficult—just try filling out an application to work for CVS, let alone using USAJobs, on your phone. It is less clear that there are plenty of good tech jobs out there, just not enough coders to fill them. Economic reality is more complicated than political slogans might admit. Getting online and learning to code won’t change the rest of the labor market by itself.  What’s more, the access doctrine implies a certain calculus for social worth: your social value diminishes alongside your economic value. Inequality is a feature of a capitalist economy, not a bug, and the access doctrine makes this inequality sensible and navigable. It explains why there is such a gulf between rich and poor, how the poor can find security, and what help they need to get there—all without disrupting the basic shape of these unequal social relations.","completion":"Before Tomorrow Arrives The access doctrine is part of a wider story that explains the relative poverty or economic inactivity of specific populations, regions, and countries through the skills that individual workers possess. For much of the twentieth century, especially after the economic dislocations of the 1970s, representatives of business, education, and government have warned of impending or actual skills gaps, where the education system does not provide graduates with the skills businesses need, and the more specific problem of skills shortages, where US businesses cannot find a specific kind of worker—today, generally engineers and information technology professionals.  Skill is notoriously difficult to define and measure. Nevertheless, the urgent problem of skills gaps and shortages has been given historical weight through the invocation, typically by economists, of skill-biased technological change (SBTC). Advocates for SBTC hold that the prevalence of technology—itself typically unmeasured and underdefined—increases in prevalence and complexity over time, and thus the demands for and wage returns of workers skilled in its design and use also rise over time. The vagueness of skill and technology are empirically troublesome but politically useful. A nebulous threat is always on the economic horizon, explaining that those struggling today do so because they have not sufficiently upgraded—and that they must do so before tomorrow arrives."}
{"prompt":"The skills-gap narrative shifts the responsibility for training away from business owners and toward young individuals at the beginning of their working lives, as well as toward the public institutions that train them: universities, community colleges, and local and state governments. As management researcher Peter Cappelli has shown, what little evidence we have suggests that employers today devote very little time to on-the-job training relative to the postwar “golden era” of long-term, single-firm employment.  Even the evidence for the existence of a skills gap is at best mixed, as is the evidence of positive labor market returns, for individuals or regions, from attempts to “skill up” local workers or import new ones from other parts of the country. Most STEM degree holders work in non-STEM fields—in part because firms are able to outsource high-skilled labor to low-wage workers through digital networks or import them from abroad through programs like the H-1B visa system. The Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently projects that most future jobs will be in low-wage service work like home healthcare and food preparation, not high-wage knowledge work. For most workers, the jobs of the future rely on catheters and cutting boards, work that requires no knowledge of Python or JavaScript and often no more than a high school education.","completion":"But still, the hope survives. At the level of statecraft, placing a political priority on skills training is a positive, forward-looking way to justify cuts to unemployment insurance—because it’s unnecessary if there really are enough jobs available for the skilled—and the general shift of training burdens from firms to schools, libraries, and individuals.  The access doctrine emerged from these earlier frameworks, adding to them the new technologies and skills associated with the internet. It was first articulated in debates in the 1990s over the problem of persistent poverty in a globalizing, deindustrializing US economy whose most profitable frontier seemed to be in using and producing information and communication technologies. In the following decade, in cities such as DC, Seattle, and San Francisco, the technology sector expanded as part of a wave of post-2008 high-wage, white emigration, while Black unemployment remained persistently high, homelessness increased, and working-class wages barely budged. The access doctrine made these problems appear natural and immutable, like an earthquake, and taught individuals and organizations how to survive them.  These problems are complex, but the access doctrine continues to make sense as a simple solution. It makes it seem as though economic opportunities are available to all via the internet, and thus any individual economic struggles are just that—and never the fault of deindustrialization, capital flight, stagnant wages, or a shrunken, punitive welfare state. This is part of the neoliberal revolution, wherein American political institutions have redefined citizenship around market fitness and charged the state with either ensuring opportunities for competition and broad participation in them, or policing those who cannot or will not compete, so as to preserve the smooth functioning of markets. The threat of punishment, of course, falls most heavily on the working and workless poor, particularly Black Americans."}
{"prompt":"Bootstrapping As the skyrocketing inequality of the information economy has become harder and harder to ignore, the access doctrine, manifested in stories like “The Internet: Your Future Depends on It,” has become more and more compelling both to individuals and to institutions. In the process of transforming the problem of poverty into a problem of technology, the access doctrine has transformed the organizations—schools, libraries, governments—addressing the problem.  Schools and libraries, threatened by fiscal austerity or accusations of obsolescence, have embraced the access doctrine as their mission in order to restore their legitimacy, secure much-needed resources, and simplify the host of social problems with which they are confronted daily. They do so because public service organizations are themselves under threat in an environment of overwhelming economic uncertainty and inequality. By turning the problem of poverty into a problem of technology, they reframe their own problems into something more manageable for their frontline staff and more legible to the politicians, donors, and others who might offer support. These institutions teach us how to survive, but their own survival hinges on reproducing the common sense of the access doctrine. In the process, places like schools and libraries begin to look more like tech startups.","completion":"I call the process of organizational restructuring prompted by the access doctrine “bootstrapping”: public service organizations are overwhelmed by the scale of the problems facing them and find their resources and legitimacy under threat, so they turn toward technology provisioning and skills-training programs because these attract economic and political support. When schools and libraries bootstrap, they are often inspired by the way technology startups pivot to new growth models. Ultimately, though, they cannot pivot like startups, because they have different goals, stakeholders, revenue streams, and responsibilities."}
{"prompt":"Because bootstrapping empowers public service organizations that manage the problem of poverty, it is a never-ending process. Any part of the organization’s identity, operations, and personnel are subject to revision. That is why libraries increasingly look like Apple stores. Or why urban charter schools promise a brighter future for working-class students of color if they just learn to code, even if they won’t receive a warm welcome for the relatively small number of jobs in software development. Bootstrapping becomes not just a series of changes, but a new institutional culture, in conflict with older public service cultures. Paradoxically, it is precisely because the access doctrine presents such an urgent problem for these organizations that they will continue with new and different experiments in technology provision or skills training—even if those experiments do not benefit poor people, or marginalize the people the organization serves. Indeed, bootstrapping regularly fails on its own terms, because the institutions it targets are not made for the task.  Still, bootstrapping institutions reproduce the access doctrine, and thus the idea of different sides of a digital divide—with one in need of the other’s help—as part of their general task of reproducing people for capitalism. It is insidious work because the ideal subject those institutions are redesigned to reproduce is an entrepreneur who has no need for schools and libraries; they can learn by themselves, work by themselves, start a tech company by themselves and weather extreme economic uncertainty by themselves.","completion":"A New Hegemonic Bloc Most accounts of the information economy focus on changes in the mode of production—the nature of work, what commodities are produced and where. But there has been just as large a change in the mode of social reproduction, the differentiated process of making people for a particular political-economic moment.  Making the problem of poverty a problem of technology changed how we understand the entire labor market, our navigation of it, and the reward from it—for employed, unemployed, and underemployed alike. The hope that personal computing, the internet, and the skills to use them will power social mobility is the cultural glue holding a deeply unequal information economy together. In this new mode of social reproduction, no one is ever truly on the outside of the labor market—everyone is constantly searching for the skills, technologies, and opportunities that will help them move through it. This is a feature, not a bug, in neoliberal economic development.  Capital cannot make people, but its need for more and different labor power is balanced by an impulse to disinvest from the costs of social reproduction and disrupt or abandon the spaces of solidarity and community that are grown therein. The political philosopher Nancy Fraser argues that this dynamic creates a “crisis of care” in each capitalist epoch. Our current crisis is marked by the state’s retreat from the responsibilities of care and the stagnation of wages for much of the working class, leading to a “dualized organization of social reproduction, commodified for those who can pay for it, privatized for those who cannot—all glossed by the even more modern ideal of the ‘two-earner family.’”  I would add, following the radical geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that the state has not so much retreated from care but shifted those capacities into punishment—particularly for the working and workless poor—and that this is complemented by capital’s retreat from providing training within the firm. Capital has shifted the burden of skills training onto individuals so that they must now have all the skills necessary to succeed at jobs they do not yet have. To carry the burden of skills training, individuals take on debt, access to which is also racially differentiated, in order to pay for college or coding boot camps. If they are on the fringes of the labor market, they are forced to enter a constant cycle of job search, job applications, and skills training—the replacement of welfare with workfare. Police and prisons are tasked with handling those individuals who will not or cannot shoulder these burdens."}
{"prompt":"The ideal economic model for individuals at this juncture is the tech entrepreneur, just as the ideal model for organizations is the tech startup. The ideal entrepreneur is, as the sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom puts it, a “roaming autodidact” who seeks out the unlimited educational opportunities available on the internet. They are self-sufficient, not reliant on institutions of social reproduction. The ideal entrepreneur is a young white male who not only lacks any responsibility to care for others, but also has his own care needs commodified, provided either by an on-demand delivery app or by his workplace.","completion":"The contemporary shift in the mode of social reproduction is based on making more of these ideal entrepreneurs, not necessarily because we need them, but because they supposedly thrive in an environment of privatized care and general macroeconomic uncertainty. The access doctrine secures consent to those conditions. By turning the problem of poverty into a problem of technology, economic security becomes a matter of getting the right tools and the right skills. Individuals must seek out these resources for themselves, and institutions can only survive by assisting them."}
{"prompt":"The function of the access doctrine, then, is not just in its ability to persuade the masses, but in its ability to mobilize different classes and different institutions into a new hegemonic bloc. Hegemony, Antonio Gramsci held, is the substitution of one class’s interest for the rest of a society’s, secured through alliances with and concessions to other classes. Ford’s five-dollars-a-day wage is the classic example: high for its time, but necessary to guarantee participation in the violent grind of the assembly line.  Capitalists cannot simply speak hegemony into being. The access doctrine persists in part through an alliance between the two sections of the professional-managerial class: those reproducing capitalist relations within the firm (such as software engineers) and those doing the work of social reproduction outside the market (helping professionals at places like libraries and schools). Remaking a city in tech’s image requires both an influx of new tech workers from the outside and the transformation of the existing populace in support of that new project.  But unlike those members of the professional-managerial class, who are isolated from the working class they manage, teachers, librarians, and the like are, in the course of their everyday duties, directly confronted with the dual assault on both their own organizations and the livelihoods of the people they serve. In the Washington, DC library and school systems, which I explore in my book The Promise of Access: Technology, Inequality, and the Political Economy of Hope, that class consciousness has led to, at best, ambiguity. But other schools, libraries, and cities are possible.","completion":"Sites of Struggle The power of the access doctrine resists refutation. Politically, it’s ultimately unfalsifiable. Even if today’s training regime does not work, new technologies will always arrive and, for those interested in shifting the risk of economic transition to individual workers, they will always demand new skills. But understanding its role in social reproduction is an important first step in any attempt to act on that sphere of the political economy and, perhaps, to rebuild it in a shape more conducive to human flourishing."}
{"prompt":"Such a movement will require a broad, organized assault on the neoliberal political apparatus. Had I the recipe for such a program, I would gladly share it. However, I am confident that our economy can be, if not remade, at least equalized, and the bootstrapping cycle broken by the people within these institutions.  This will require a split within the professional-managerial class. So-called “helping professionals” must break with the tech workers with whom they shared college dorms and now share apartment buildings. Instead, they must organize at the point of reproduction in solidarity with their patrons and students, based on the recognition that both helper and helped share an interest in preserving the institutions of public service threatened by the access doctrine.","completion":"Strategically, both sides need each other. The helping professionals are few in number, and state and capital can easily paint their protests as a dereliction of sacred duties (e.g., “teacher strikes hurt kids”). They need support from the communities they serve in order to stand up to this political pressure. On the other hand, students, patrons, and their communities have numbers, but lack the strategic position within the mode of reproduction that helpers’ work provides. A protest in support of library patrons is one thing, but a library shut down by its workers is another thing entirely—revealing just how much the city relies on those institutions to function and the sort of power those professionals have. That work is already happening across the country. The Chicago Teachers Union led the way in 2012 (and again in 2019), organizing teachers and parents alongside workers. Recent teacher strikes across the country have used the same tactics to join struggles against school privatization and school policing with teachers’ fights for better jobs and better pay."}
{"prompt":"Centers of social reproduction like schools and libraries are not merely victims of neoliberal reform, but sites of struggle in which counter-movements can be built. The story driving so much of our thinking about poverty—“The Internet: Your Future Depends on It”—did not appear out of thin air. It had to be told over and over, reinforced through computer certifications, progress reports, and planning documents. We built these coping strategies to make overwhelming economic inequality sensible and navigable. But if access today fundamentally means an opportunity to compete, then an alternative should not be so hard to imagine. If the world as it currently exists is one where we must be granted the tools necessary to strive for excellence, to innovate beyond our current dire straits, and to outcompete inequality, then surely another world is possible—one where innovation is boring and excellence is unnecessary, because the good life is ordinary.","completion":"Dr. Keolu Fox is a Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) genetic scientist, and professor at the University of California, San Diego. His multidisciplinary research includes genomic sequencing and editing, and Indigenizing medical research. While the history of genetics has been marred by notions of “normality”—such as Sir Francis Galton’s insistence on a “normal distribution” to justify eugenic ideas—Dr. Fox’s research is flipping the script on norms in genetic science. Many of his projects combine cutting edge technologies, Indigenous data sovereignty and futures, alongside questions of equity and how benefits of medical research are distributed. We sat down with Dr. Fox to learn more about what genetic data is, and the promises and pitfalls of genetic research."}
{"prompt":"What is digital genetic data and how exactly is it used?  I hadn’t thought about digital genetic data until a professor by the name of Maynard Olson brought it up during medical school. When you enter graduate school, you have these retreats that you go on, which is very popular in medical school-ville. I was at a retreat and we were sitting around the fire, drinking whiskey with my department grandpa, Maynard Olson. Maynard is a cool cat. He asks me, “You know what the funny thing about genomics is, Keolu?”, and I was like, “No, uncle, what is it?” He replied, “We’re using technology to take something that’s analog and making it digital.” That led to this whole conversation about what bioinformatics is, where it comes from and what technologies enabled it to happen.  It really comes down to a few characters that really envisioned this. A lot of it happened at Caltech with this guy named Lee Hood. He, in my opinion, is the technologist that enabled the genomic and post-genomic revolution, as well as its evolution. He set out to create and automate a lot of these technologies and is probably the most influential person when it comes to that.  Think about this: a chemical composition that exists, and how we use technologies to literally take something that is chemical in nature—a pattern, a sequence that exists in nature—and how it can be translated into zeros and ones. Or as Uncle Maynard would say, zeros, ones, twos and threes: because AGCT, right? So then you’re now in this whole different world about the way we think about genes as a form of data and how it’s coded, mined, and operationalized.  In your lab, how are you using genetic data?  In a number of different ways—there’s certain things that you can do with it. You can read it—that is the sequencing modality, and there’s all of these different types of sequencing. There was the technology that Fred Sanger created early on in the ’70s and ’80s, which enabled Lee Hood to automate and create the ABI SOLiD, which enabled the Human Genome Project. From there, we have had new disruptive technologies from 2007 to 2010, and we get into this next-generation sequencing mode, and that is the birth of these technologies like Illumina, which is based here in La Jolla.","completion":"That is a very strong reason why I work here—there are certain cities that are these technological epicenters, and La Jolla is one of those. It also has incredible surfing and great burritos and beer—and also has legal weed. So it makes sense that you’re going to get a critical mass of some really interesting characters in this dynamic ecosystem of people that want to innovate in the genetic technology space.  Sequencing is our primary tool, our bread and butter. But we don’t like to just read, we like to write, so we love genome editing and everything that’s come out of the back end of the genome editing revolution. The specific tools that we like to use include base editing or prime editing, and this comes from Alexis Komor, who is in the Department of Chemistry here at UCSD. Base editing is a precise form of genome editing that allows us to make individual nucleotide changes. So we can use both of those tools to do a bunch of cool shit."}
{"prompt":"A new fundamental idea that’s been going on in our laboratory is to try to understand genetic data as a resource. We generate sequences from humans because we want to be able to predict and prevent disease—but then what is the actual value of that data? What exactly did you sequence? That brings us to another set of questions around diversity—not just as a buzzword, but as something that actually has immense value. What you sequence matters, because 90 percent or so of people that are sequenced are of Western European ancestry. The rest of the world, including Big Pharma, now knows that we’ve been looking in the wrong place.  How so?  Well, the most interesting things to me are throwback evolutionary questions. Evolution and natural selection, and what is medically actionable or not—these are not independent, they’re the same thing, right? Think about it this way. Darwin’s finches are this great example of natural selection because they allow us to understand variation in the context of geography. But so does sickle cell disease, and high elevation adaptation in Tibet and Nepal.  Now, let’s take it a step further. I can actually utilize that perspective and that understanding of natural selection to better inform the development of pharmaceutical drugs. As an example: women who are ancestral descendants of communities that have lived for 10,000 years at high elevation in the Himalayas have adapted and have mutations that are advantageous at that elevation—in something called the HIF pathway. That’s a really important mutation for understanding something like oxygen metabolism, and how we might develop new classes of drugs that are involved in cardiovascular disease, or different responses to Covid and respiratory health. Or the next Viagra.","completion":"So you see how these are all just avenues for the development of these new drugs. And if I know that natural selection did all the work for me, it allows me to focus on a biomarker that I can then reverse engineer, and save myself a lot of money from the research and development point of view because I don’t have to try a million different isoforms. I can just zero right into the thing that I want.  When we find a genetic mutation that is associated with protecting against type 2 diabetes, that’s very interesting because might we be able to develop a new drug that is a competitor for metformin that classically doesn’t sometimes work in minority populations. Because on the back side of this, in 95 percent of pharmaceutical drugs, the clinical trials don’t include anybody except white people."}
{"prompt":"DNA Equity For something like user data, Google collects data and makes it profitable. For genetic data, what’s the landscape of different actors like? Do you have open source datasets of genetic data, or is it mostly companies like 23andMe collecting genetic data? A timely question, given 23andMe’s decision to go public. Genomic data by itself is valuable, but it’s not as valuable as genomic data plus an electronic medical health record, or electronic data plus cholesterol data. It needs to have genotype and phenotype. So the metadata that’s associated with genomic data is super, super important.","completion":"There is a lot of encouragement from the federal government, and obviously Silicon Valley and Seattle and DC to have an open data environment. Because once it’s all open, it can be aggregated and used to model and predict and prevent things, right? It’s a double-edged sword, because on the one hand you can see how effective an open data environment was in sharing a lot of the discoveries and insights from this last year of having a pandemic, and then how fast vaccines were developed. But there are always going to be perpetual linesteppers and companies that want to abuse this, right? Vertex Pharmaceuticals, for example, used genetic sequence data derived from cystic fibrosis patients, which they got from the nonprofit Cystic Fibrosis Foundation. Vertex incorporated and recruited patients through that avenue, sequenced their genomes, and then refined the development of this new drug—and then sold it back to those exact same people for $300,000 dollars a year.  To me, that’s super fucked up—I don’t care who you are. That’s a violation of the Common Rule, that’s a violation of the United States Constitution, that’s a violation of human rights. It’s also highly problematic because Vertex is actively taking advantage of loopholes that exist in our broken healthcare system, where it’s estimated that almost 60 million people don’t have access to healthcare. So, you know, it serves them to socially stratify and create this brave new world of health disparities, which is also gross.  These companies, they’re taking advantage of this—and not only taking advantage of it, they have lobbying groups to ensure that their assets stay their assets. It’s pretty dangerous. You see companies like 23andMe sell access to their database, a primitive version of their database to GlaxoSmithKline for $300 million. And then this year you watch Ancestry get sold to the Blackstone Group for $4.7 billion.  That’s a lot of money. It’s very obvious that the value of genomic data is on the rise. With 23andMe going public, you can see that it’s very obvious that the number one commodity on planet Earth is data, and digital sequencing information is a part of that apparatus."}
{"prompt":"There are solutions, though, I should note. Give us some optimism.  So let’s be positive for a moment. It’s easy to point fingers at all of the terrible stuff that happens with capitalism, and we can get stuck in that kind of negative feedback loop really easily.  We have been thinking about different types of solutions. One of them would be for the example of 23andMe. For the people who gave you their genomic information for you to create this company, and you’re selling that information to Big Pharma, and then they’re developing drugs and selling it back to those same people for money—why not give them equity? Why not give them a stake? I feel like that’s a more sustainable model, financially. And would be a new cool kind of stockholder, shareholder-based benefit-sharing model. That’s the way we should be thinking about circular economies. What is just? And when we say equitable and you say equity, what do you mean? When I say equity, I’m talking about financial institutions and structures that allow us to move past the dollar sign and buy back our land. Something like stock shares in 23andMe would enable that, or trusts where that money can go to avoid corruption and cronyism.  In one of your papers, you talk about the “illusion of inclusion” and the NIH “All of Us” project. One of the common arguments about data is that if data is open instead of proprietary, it will benefit the public instead of just companies. But, in that paper, you talk about how we need to rethink what public benefit really means. Could you elaborate on that idea?  First, I would say, whose benefit? Whose greater good? I think that’s the bigger question. If we look at that historically, we know very well whose greater good we’re prioritizing over others, and we know that that’s quite hierarchical, right?  Couching it historically, what does it mean when the federal government uses your tax dollars to pay for a large-scale initiative to sequence one million people’s genomes in America, and that data is open? Does that mean that you, as an average US citizen, are going to benefit directly from that? You know, I think there are probably better uses of taxpayer dollars, maybe breaking up this multibillion dollar project into smaller grants and serving other basic scientific questions.","completion":"But, in the meantime, the reason why this is problematic is because once that data hits the open market, it gets aggregated by these companies like Regeneron and others and is used in the development of pharmaceutical drugs. Meanwhile, the communities who graciously contributed their genomes to this, based on the false pretense of this having an impact on their health, will basically receive nothing.  Think about the history of the Human Genome Project from 2001. If we think about the actual impact of that project on health, it’s been kind of negligible with respect to common complex disease. What do I mean? The number one and number two cause of death in America are heart disease and cancer. If you look at the rates of the number of people in America that have those disorders, it’s pretty consistent. And because that’s the number one and number two cause of death, we have to look at it and say, “Have large scale genome sequencing projects changed these death rates?” Common complex diseases are fucking complex. There are multiple genes at play with multiple mutations and many, many other things. And there are also lifestyle choices and stress and sleep and a number of other things that are independent of the innateness of these conditions. But if I keep selling you innateness, and keep trying to say we need to sequence more people’s genomes because it will allow us to reduce the widening gap in health disparities when we know that there are better uses of federal money… I don’t know. There’s a hundred different things that we could be using to do that.  That’s not to say that genomic technology hasn’t resulted in some pretty incredible stuff—look at this Moderna vaccine. It’s pretty remarkable, but it’s a targeted thing. It is a piece of drug development. It is innovative, but it has a particular goal.  With respect to common complex disease, I would say that it’s been almost an abject failure. For things like Mendelian disease, though, or identifying the cause of Kabuki syndrome and Miller syndrome and these other really, really rare things, genomic technology has been more successful."}
{"prompt":"The whole “All of Us” project is couched on increasing diversity, because we know there’s a dearth of diversity in genetic data—we know that the people who have been sequenced so far in America do not reflect the full spectrum of human genetic variation. It’s a clever trick though: it uses the illusion of widespread benefits to public health outcomes in order to include minority populations so companies can understand their intimate historical relationships with natural selection, and then use those genetic mutations to fasttrack the development of expensive pharmaceutical drugs that are out of reach of those populations.","completion":"And that’s why that paper was in The New England Journal of Medicine: because I was super critical, but I also spoke about the facts, and that’s the only thing they respect. Sometimes you have to be honest. I don’t think that that paper particularly made me a lot of fans at the federal government, but I also think that we need to be critical. Part of science is correcting the mistakes we make and really thinking about what true equity and inclusion means.  “Just-So” Stories There are many popular genetic origin tracing projects that have made a lot of claims around race, biology, and Indigeneity that are pretty problematic. Do these tracing projects have any scientific value? As a genetic scientist, what do you see as the reason for these types of projects?  There’s a lot to unpack there. There’s some complex shit. We actually just created this new exhibit at the Bishop Museum in Hawaii called “(Re)Generations: Challenging Scientific Racism in Hawaii.” A lot of the subtext and inspiration for connecting genetics to race comes from the early days of, like, the Franz Boas, you know, Indiana Jones bullshit, a.k.a. eugenics. We’ve been thinking about phrenology and all these old forms of science.  I think the problem is we consider ourselves totally separate from our past and say, “Those tools of the past, like phrenology and all of these different ways that you measure a human, you know, we’re independent from that now.” Like: “We would never measure the kinkiness of someone’s hair in that way. We would never associate that with race, racism, and social hierarchy.” Meanwhile, what’s going on in La Jolla or the Bay Area is the same exact thing. But it’s really a lot harder to put your finger on those things, because digital data is not something that you can see or taste or touch in that way. So the new form of eugenics and extraction is invisible.  You also have to know that there’s a certain level of certainty and accuracy with the way we return those results, too. Nothing is 100 percent, in the way that the techniques used to survey the genome vary as well. What 23andMe uses or what National Geographic uses is a very low resolution look at the genome. They use a tiny fraction of the actual variation that you have. And then don’t get me started on the way we create categories, because that’s just biased in itself. Come to Hawaii, where we have the highest percentage of people of mixed ancestry in the United States, and show me who’s Hawaiian—good luck. What characteristic are you going to use? Is it skin color? Because that is exactly the same thing that we were criticizing."}
{"prompt":"Could you talk about the connection between genetic determinism and disease likelihood, because one of the things that you mentioned in your papers is “just-so” evolutionary explanations. If you get a high likelihood of a disease on 23andMe, are you just doomed forever? What is a just-so evolutionary explanation? Are you familiar with polygenic risk scores? They’re super interesting. That’s what’s hot right now in our field. They are these algorithms or heuristics that we can use to predict the potential for what we call the pathogenicity of a mutation. We use them to predict whether a mutation is going to be cancerous, or cause heart disease or something like that.  That predictive quality of genomics is something that a lot of people see as the Holy Grail that we’ve been searching for: the difference between predictive medicine and reactive medicine, and that’s definitely where we want to go. Especially with common, complex disease. But when you train every single algorithm on white people’s data, you bias everything, and so none of these polygenic risk scores work in populations that are not white.  Then there’s a second part of it. And this gets to the kind of “just-so” world of it. If you say a mutation is cancerous or pathogenic based on a correlative basis, and you don’t have causative data to show that, that’s problematic, right? You have no proof except the P value, you have no proof except some statistical phenomenon or correlation or racist-ass narrative. And so that has just played out through the field of population genetics forever. There are just all these levels of inaccuracy that get baked into these things and they become real.  One of the most famous examples of this one that I was happy to shoot down was this one that is called the thrifty gene theory. The thrifty gene theory states that Polynesian and Pacific Islander people today have really high rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes because of our history as voyaging people, because if you had these mutations that predispose you to hypercaloric storage on these journeys, it was an advantage. But then once modernity hits, you develop type 2 diabetes and obesity, and it’s because of our genes.","completion":"It’s just so racist because it’s like—no, maybe the reason why we have high rates of obesity is because you took away our access to reefs, to fishing, hunting rights and all these other things, and then you replaced our highly nutritious diet of poi and fish with spam, white rice, and soy sauce. Why are you blaming this on innateness and our evolutionary history? You’re also discrediting our accomplishments as probably the greatest seafaring people in human history."}
{"prompt":"Okay, you said you found this thrifty mutation in 2015 in Samoa. This is the most fucked up story of all. You found this mutation in the gene CREBRF, and you say that it’s a thrifty mutation in fucking Nature. Everybody reads Nature. The gold standard. You said that in Nature and yet you have no functional evidence in your paper other than a mouse overexpression, which is essentially punting it? I can tell when things get appended as an experiment on the back end of a paper, like an auxiliary addition. They were asked by a reviewer to do that to show something—they did this bullshit that basically made the data fit a model. Super sketchy, but they got it through. Which speaks to how racist and faulty a lot of these journals are too.","completion":"Luckily, I was doing my postdoc in genomic engineering and genome editing. And so I said, okay, what if we use Crispr and take their mutation and then create a stem cell line that includes the Polynesian mutation in one population of cells, and then in the other population of cells we don’t include the mutation? It’s called an “isogenic cell line model”—we’re reverse engineering a mutation from natural selection’s point of view and we’re putting it in the cellular model. Now we can starve it from insulin and see what happens, we can measure the mutation’s effect on a range of things that are involved in producing metabolites and actually speculate on it from the point of view of a causative experiment. That’s the cool shit about genome editing for us. We can actually rewrite evolutionary history and empower Indigenous people by using genome editing. Thank you, Jennifer Doudna."}
{"prompt":"But, again, it’s about who uses the tools, right? And, lo and behold, what we’re seeing is very different from that paper. So we’re seeing that that mutation is at a much higher percentage of people that are of Polynesian ancestry that are professional athletes, seeing that it’s associated with bone density, muscle density, and other things—we don’t quite know yet fully, but it’s definitely not a fucking thrifty gene, tell you that much.","completion":"Now the other thing that they did—Steve McGarvey from Brown University—is they tried to file an international patent claim around the mutation and they didn’t include anyone of Polynesian ancestry in the patent claim. And they put it up there. And I think because I went to like every single genetics society and medical society and just buried them since 2018, it didn’t work. Not just me, but others that are from the culture, to my Maori colleagues, my Tahitian colleagues, my Samoan colleagues, my Chamorro, my Taiwanese colleagues, everybody was like: fuck this and fuck you, you have no right to try and commodify this, you know?  That was the moment where I started thinking intensely about IP, commodification and natural selection. It was so close to home and was this weird moment where I was like, “Oh shit. They are going to just keep doing this.” Indigenous Futures In the context of patenting and data sovereignty, could you talk about what you’re doing at the Indigenous Futures Institute at UCSD?  We have begun to think about data as a resource, and we’ve begun to really recognize data as the number one commodity on planet Earth, much like everyone else. And it’s not just us. It’s not a moment, it’s a movement, and so there are tons of different people that are thinking about this in different spaces.  My hope is that people like Deb Haaland, the new Secretary of the Interior who is Laguna Pueblo, will represent our interests. And I’m hoping that as we have these conversations about land and what the Department of the Interior is responsible for, they’ll really begin to think about data as a resource and being responsible for data. Because what that does is it allows Indigenous people to be in control and have governance over our data. And once that happens, that can then be used to buy back land and begin all of these new forms of stewardship and guardianship of land and revitalization of our cultures. So that’s a very holistic way of thinking about Indigenous data sovereignty."}
{"prompt":"What we’re doing at the Indigenous Futures Institute is we’re really thinking about ways to do that. This work is couched within our design lab and engineering school. We’re intentionally trying to make it as multidisciplinary as possible, but sometimes it’s hard to be disruptive and chaotic in academia. But we’re trying our best, you know. We have a range of different focuses, but it’s about codesigning technology with communities and being iterative about that process.  That could range from the story I just told you about what happens when Indigenous people use genome editing to think about our past, or what happens when Indigenous people use machine learning and deep learning to shine a light on the past. It could include automating our archival records. It could also be thinking about creating deterrent and safeguarding technologies to avoid museum collections from sequencing our ancient genomes without our consent. There could be a number of different ways that we use those technologies.","completion":"Then there’s the focus on education, educational tools and creating a safe space for all of our Indigenous and historically marginalized communities of people to come, learn, and be productive and innovative. We have a huge focus on sustainability, whether it’s environmental sustainability or looking towards Indigenous innovation. Within architecture and urban planning, what does it mean when Indigenous communities are in the driver’s seats of those fields? And how do we actually begin to look towards knowledge that is quite ancient for modern solutions?  So that’s it in a nutshell. Some of the people that are involved there are Provost Wayne Yang and Theresa Ambo, Sarah Aarons, Manuel Carrillo. That’s the core group, but it’s very new. We’re also thinking about Indigenous takes on economics. Like, why is your financial projection quarterly? Why isn’t it, you know, ten generations? Does decentralization guarantee equal distribution of power? Who do decentralization and distributed technologies currently benefit, and who should they benefit? The distributed web has become a common buzzword covering everything from the blockchain to peer-to-peer communication protocols and file storage. Decentralized web projects purport to solve the inherent problems with the internet as we know it today, promising to democratize internet governance through distributed ownership and control over web infrastructure."}
{"prompt":"We sat down with Mai Ishikawa Sutton, lead organizer of DWeb Projects with the Internet Archive and cofounder and editor of COMPOST, an online zine about the digital commons, to discuss what the distributed web and DWeb are, community principles as an organizing tool, and the ways decentralization is a verb not a noun.","completion":"Could you tell us about your background and political and technical evolution? I went to UC Santa Cruz for college and was part of a program now called the Everett Program. The program focuses on training undergraduates on practical technologies—like contact databases and website building, branding, social media, things like that—and pairs them with nonprofits who have concrete technical needs. It’s a student-led, student-taught program with the goal of helping students become what we call “social justice tech entrepreneurs.” As part of the program, I went to Malaysia and worked on the technology side of a Muslim feminist organization.  After graduation, I didn’t know what the hell to do with my life, so I dove into readings about internet policy and got involved with net neutrality activism. That brought me to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. My initial role there was to support all aspects of their international advocacy work around free expression, privacy, and intellectual property. I eventually chose to work on activism against international copyright laws. At the international policy level, copyright policies are largely decided through trade agreements—Hollywood and big publishers can essentially have their copyright wishlists enacted into the national laws of countries that sign on to these opaque trade deals. Copyright raises a lot of interesting issues and questions around creativity online: How can we make sure artists are paid for their labor, and how does that determine how people engage with culture online?  At some point, I wanted to figure out how to be on the other side of this equation. Instead of arguing against the endless terrible corporate policies of multinationals, I wanted to fight for positive initiatives. I knew there had to be an alternative, a whole other approach to economic policy. So I left EFF and went to an organization doing solidarity economy advocacy called Shareable. Their advocacy covered the commons as it relates to stewarding everything from land, water, waste, and technology. My work there allowed me to explore this alternative economy: What is the commons? What is a cooperative? What is the essence of these things that people own, share, and steward together?"}
{"prompt":"I always had an interest in applying what I learned to the realm of technology. The platform cooperativism movement was emerging at the same time, and the first DWeb Summit happened in 2016. I attended that summit and came away with this feeling that there was an opening happening: this was a blossoming community of people who wanted to question the ownership of technologies, to question how infrastructure was being built and who was controlling it. And they weren’t just talking about it, they were actively building alternatives.","completion":"So after Shareable I worked on projects that took me in that direction of supporting and building alternatives. I worked at the Oakland Public Library, which completely changed my view on all this. I now focus on projects where I feel like there’s potential to experiment and shape how people think about decentralized technologies—but more than that, build networks of solidarity based on organizational decentralization and interdependence.  Decentralization and distributed systems have had a long history on the internet, but recently it feels like there’s been a focused energy and community forming around particular decentralized technologies. What’s your perspective on the historical context that informs these current movements? Decentralization is a core tenet of the internet and the development of the web, but it’s had its peaks and valleys. Email, which was invented in 1971, is the most solid decentralized protocol that has enabled interoperability in a way that many other protocols haven’t.  There was a long valley of consolidation after that. But then decentralization hit a new renaissance with the filesharing era. As a millennial, the trend that’s most memorable to me was the peer-to-peer networks in the late ’90s and early 2000s like Pirate Bay and Napster. These emerged in response to the way the internet provided great technical affordance to access and remix content, while legal apparatuses like the DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) got in the way of doing that. Laws like the DMCA led to a backlash against big entrenched content publishers like Hollywood—an industry that had not properly contended with the ways the internet undermined their copyright monopolies. There was a big boom in filesharing, using new decentralized tech like torrents, and this helped people to change their thinking around the structure and purpose of the internet."}
{"prompt":"But then for various reasons—one of them being that the original P2P protocol developers didn’t embed privacy into their systems—a lot of people ended up being vulnerable to the legal consequences of using these technologies. This prevented the full potential of P2P technologies from being realized back then.  Fast-forward: since the teens there’s been a widespread trend towards the centralization and monopolization of platforms and social media. I think this new wave of decentralization is in response to that. We can clearly see how mega-powerful companies are trying to define what the internet is for their own benefit and control every aspect of our social interaction. And so people are trying to imagine: what are the alternatives to that?  The rise of the blockchain created a new way of distributing information and infrastructure. But a less talked-about, parallel trend is the rise of community networks. Namely in Spain, Slovenia, and in parts of the United States, there are networks where the last-mile internet infrastructure, from the service provider to the home or business, is owned by the community. This movement highlights how community ownership improves access, and prevents things like data throttling, data caps, and other discriminatory behavior that undermines net neutrality. Community networks demonstrate how internet infrastructure can be collectively owned and controlled in a decentralized manner. They’re an alternative to corporate, top-down, profit-driven services that undermine our privacy and expression online.","completion":"Distributed Community Building In San Francisco, these ideas around decentralization and modern distributed protocols can sometimes be mediated through a particular conversation around this idea of “the DWeb,” which is informed by institutions such as the Internet Archive. How do you think about labels like “DWeb” or “IndieWeb,” and the efforts to build communities around them? I went to the DWeb summit in 2016 and, I have to say, I was not impressed. It felt like an endless barrage of startup pitches by people who looked all the same, standing up on the stage and describing how they’re going to decentralize infrastructure, and how it’s going to save the world, upend this market, and change everything. To me, if decentralization has any political meaning, the people building it have to be very different from the types of people who built the World Wide Web. We can’t just replace the platforms and protocols we have today with other purely profit-driven companies that can only call their product “decentralized” because the technology functions in a more distributed manner. For decentralization to be a remotely revolutionary concept, we need to question the internal logic of the tech industry itself—how people are incentivized to build things, how people are treated in the process, and how the relationships and systems we operate with are controlled. How does decentralization redistribute power? That’s the fundamental question.  There are currently loosely three factions around decentralization. The first one is this idea of “DWeb,” which is probably the most politically agnostic group. The DWeb movement is a pretty big tent—accepting that there are all kinds of interesting decentralization projects with different approaches that can learn from each other.  Then there are the people who want to call it a “distributed web” or the “peer-to-peer web”—there’s a strong emphasis in that community on “distribution” as a way of looking at the governance and ownership of the network."}
{"prompt":"And then the third faction is “Web 3.0,” which is the crypto and blockchain community. They see themselves as part of the evolution of the web and how it is monetized. They see the legacy of the web being extended through these crypto-based decentralization technologies and see their tools as the new engine of the tech economy.","completion":"The Internet Archive’s work has played an interesting role as a mediator and convener of these different ideas. We so far haven’t explicitly excluded certain approaches, though the projects we have highlighted fall more in the peer-to-peer DWeb side of things, rather than Web 3.0. We have curated a dialogue around these trends and elevated open source projects that are more community-driven and are more explicitly focused around having user governance and control.  As part of my role facilitating these conversations, I came to work on the creation of the “DWeb Principles”—to define what the community finds important and wants to identify as its goals, not just in terms of the centralized forces that they are in opposition to."}
{"prompt":"That seems like it gives you the opportunity to curate the conversation around “what we are talking about when we talk about the distributed web.” The DWeb Principles came out of that vacuum of political agnosticism, to identify what it is that we are actually saying when we say we want to “decentralize” the web. We were very explicit that it’s not just another new set of principles that ignore or replace other ones. We cite many other principles, like Association for Progressive Communications’ Feminist Principles of the Internet and the Design Justice Principles. Our principles emphasize that this particular community is concerned with design issues like interoperability, being free and open source, having repairable devices—we tried to really name the things that this community cared about. And having put that first stake in the ground, I hope that will shape the dialogue around what it is that we actually mean when we talk about decentralization and how some of these technologies are being built.  Declaring those principles feels like an opportunity to move the center of the conversation for the people already involved, and supply a different set of baseline assumptions for people newly being introduced to the concept of the decentralized web.  Yeah, exactly. The act of creating these principles is also in and of itself a tool for people within the space to have a dialogue with each other. It’s similar to the kind of inter-organizational statements I used to coordinate as a digital policy organizer. The process of creating them involves a ton of back and forth, and it’s this back and forth that’s so valuable. Creating an environment where people can be in dialogue with each other to assert their values, listen to others, and negotiate the desires of their shared dreams—that’s a powerful tool of organizing! The hundreds of edits across the draft versions are artifacts of this process. One of our goals with the principles was to bring the community of people interested in decentralized technologies a bit closer together. Our other goal was to have a document we can use to introduce people to this space and succinctly describe what we’re about.","completion":"Putting the principles into practice requires recognizing our own needs and addressing them in creative ways in solidarity with others. That is what centralized top-down systems cannot do—create locally-situated networks of communication that emerge out of the imagination of people who live in their unique economic, social, cultural contexts. If decentralized technologies are designed with an assumed universality—that there can be one blueprint for organizing communication across diverse knowledge systems and language cultures—they’ll become just as problematic as Facebook.  The act of creating the principles is useful in and of itself, as an act of community organizing beyond whatever the output is. Even if the output was to disappear, the connections between the people and the organizations will still exist.  Totally! Investors and people in Silicon Valley go to parties together where all this soft power, informal trust-building happens. And it sucks to some degree, but we’re humans and that ability to talk to each other and establish personal trust is really, really important. You need to have new ways of creating alternatives to high-end galas and backchannel investor conversations, and have other ways for people who are trying to build alternatives to talk to each other and build trust.  What Works in Bangalore A lot of the projects that get airtime in conversations around decentralized and distributed technologies seem to be centered in the Global North. What are some ways in which your activism has connected these new kinds of technologies to communities in the Global South?  Before DWeb Camp in 2019, we connected with the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an amazing organization that is essentially a coalition group and advocacy organization that connects progressive and feminist tech-based organizations from around the world. [Ed: DWeb Camp was a four-day retreat in Pescadero, CA, organized in association with the Internet Archive.] Through that connection, we invited ten global fellows from APC’s Community Networks program to the camp. They came from India, South Africa, Brazil, and elsewhere, to facilitate knowledge exchanges about internet infrastructure, open hardware, and community networks."}
{"prompt":"I think our global fellows program really influenced thinking around decentralization—well, it did for me. The leaders in these communities are really challenging ownership of internet infrastructure. Zenzeleni Networks in South Africa, for example, is a nonprofit that helps create cooperative community networks in parts of South Africa that were deeply affected by apartheid. Janastu is an innovation lab based outside of Bangalore building technology for people who are nonliterate to share audiovisual information. For example, they install Raspberry Pis into old phone booths to allow people to record and listen to messages with each other, as a sort of community radio.  I think these types of self-determining technologies that are homegrown and locally-situated are central to the spirit of decentralization. Just showing that’s possible makes people imagine greater possibilities than the mainstream techno-solutionist approaches that just drop technology somewhere with the assumption that it will solve systemic problems.","completion":"We interviewed Darius Kazemi about distributed social networks and his Hometown fork of Mastodon, and one of the big takeaways from that conversation was the idea that every system and protocol embeds a particular ideology and expectation about relationships in the world. Decentralization is a force that pulls you in one direction, but as you mentioned, if privacy or moderation is not embedded in the protocols, it may not have the outcomes you want.  Yes, and most of the well-known decentralized web projects have been started by European or North American cis men by themselves. And so obviously they have ideas about what is important to embed in these distributed protocols. For example, if a distributed protocol relies on associating messages and identity to a device, or stores IP addresses along with messages and none of this encrypted, that is totally not a safe or secure means of communication for people who are government targets. If they lose their device, or even worse, if it’s seized, all of their messages are compromised. If the decentralized tech also captures other people’s IP or device information, their device has effectively become an exploitable honeypot of private information."}
{"prompt":"There’s a degree to which you have to make tradeoffs to create distributed protocols that work, but you need to prioritize certain things from the get-go to make sure that they work for the types of people that you’re building for. Again, a crucial part of decentralization is questioning the universality of technology and technological solutions. What works in Bangalore probably won’t work for a lot of other places. But if it’s free and open source, people can adapt it to their own communities. This assumption that technologies should be universal that everyone should be on one platform is dangerously naive. It flattens the nuances of language and culture and the ways different people engage with information and knowledge sharing.  It’s sad that there isn’t enough money to support all the experimentation we need. Obviously, some types of experimentation get injected with an insane amount of money—think Zoom or Facebook, or new platforms like Clubhouse. It’s like they’re injected with steroids.  But there are so many ways to communicate and share information. There’s not enough creativity around that. Due to the nature of capitalism and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy, only certain types of people have the capital and resources to support certain types of innovation. Investors and backers tend to support technologies that frame problems in ways that they can understand or relate to. Funding shapes priorities, and priorities shape technologies—this is one of the ways ideology gets embedded into the tools we use.  Engage Hypercore! It seems like with your work with Distributed Press, you’re starting with the core principles first, and then figuring out what is useful to build from there. Could you talk a bit about the formation of the project and its goals—what would success look like for Distributed Press? The idea originally came about from discussions between Benedict Lau and I, who both worked on DWeb Camp. He worked on Toronto Mesh, a community mesh network in Toronto, and I met him through my involvement with a community mesh network in Oakland. When we were publishing articles about decentralization ahead of the Camp, it felt wrong to have to publish media about the DWeb on the corporatized, centralized web. We wanted to be able to publish to the DWeb protocols we were talking about, and explore other ways of collective publishing in general.","completion":"When we started to discuss what to build, we didn’t want to start from a place assuming we knew what we were talking about. So we did an ecosystem review, interviewing around a dozen people in the IndieWeb and DWeb movements, the journalist/crypto scene, and researchers in rightwing extremism in social media. We wanted to get a lay of the land and talk to people about what’s actually missing. What came out of this research phase was this idea to build a tool that allowed people to easily publish to different protocols, including the World Wide Web, and to have a way to sustainably monetize their work."}
{"prompt":"As a way to figure out what writers and artists would actually want to use, we decided to create a magazine called COMPOST. It’s an initial use-case for the tool—the magazine is a lab for Distributed Press in a way. We decided to make the project even more meta, and make the magazine itself about the digital commons, while Distributed Press was about doing the organizing and technical work of building shared, free and open source digital tools.  We paid all the contributors for their creative pieces, and we also compensated them for contributing their feedback and ideas about how Distributed Press and COMPOST should work. We felt that building tools for artists and writers to use on the DWeb necessitated having their active input. Our goal is to continue giving artists agency over how this tool evolves.  Distributed Press is not yet a cooperative. Udit Vira, Benedict and I are the core contributors, and we were very explicit about the fact that to move this project forward we had to be able to make a bunch of the initial decisions. Having too many cooks in the kitchen can gum up the process of shipping something out. But we had a series of meetings with the contributors, took their input, and tried to implement their ideas as best we could. We’re hoping that with each issue we will have different cohorts of writers and creators that will shape not just the magazine issues, but also Distributed Press itself.","completion":"There are different ways that we see Distributed Press as a budding digital commons project. It’s a free and open source tool, and we’re also contributing to these distributed protocols and projects upstream—as part of this work, Ben filed tickets with IPFS, Beaker Browser, and Hypercore. When he’d come across things that didn’t work, he’d do the work of flagging issues and suggesting ways to fix them."}
{"prompt":"FOSS (free and open source) projects are typically mostly built on volunteer labor. Not just the technical development, but all the layers around the tech that allow others to use the tools—documentation, onboarding, communication, etc. We want to normalize practices where people are paid for all those types of labor. We think that paying people equitably for emotional and organizational labor is intrinsic to the sorts of projects we want to exist in the world. The three core contributors are paid some, though we’re definitely putting way more hours into this than we’re being compensated for. Unfortunately, that tends to be how it is when you’re getting a project off the ground.  Logic too relies on a lot of unpaid founder labor, but we’ve always paid writers, and our impulse to make the project more sustainable over time has been to find ways to bring in and pay more people for their labor. It’s bad institution-building to rely on an assumption that people will continue to work unpaid indefinitely, even passionate founders.","completion":"Totally. If you want to create resilient systems, you need to prioritize emotional security, and making sure people are compensated is part of that. With Distributed Press and COMPOST we are trying to balance between, on the one hand, bringing in people who might just want to contribute some ideas and a piece to our first issue then have no other commitment, and on the other hand, encouraging people who want to stay involved as we eventually turn this into a cooperative. We want to allow different levels of contribution while always respecting people’s time and compensating them for their labor.  I think that’s really, really crucial. If for some reason we’re not able to pay people equitably or maintain a respectful and safe space for creative experimentation, I’d push for us to scrap the project. I strongly believe that if you can’t hold onto these basic values through the evolution of your project, then it’s not worth anyone’s time. We don’t need another institution that exploits people’s labor and creates toxic work environments."}
{"prompt":"There’s a major problem of founder’s syndrome in many of these projects. I think that’s very tied to ego, when a person becomes too entwined with a project, or vice versa. Personally, I’d like to keep working on COMPOST and Distributed Press for a long time, but I would also love it if at some point I could take a break, and just trust someone else to run it for a while and experiment with it. There’s a balance, right? It feels good to pour your sweat and tears into a project, so it begins to become part of your identity. It’s your baby. But like babies, they grow up and you have to accept that they need to have a life of their own.","completion":"Ultimately, what do you think is the potential of the decentralized web? When I was entering into this realm of decentralization, what appealed to me about it was the fact that different people with different ideologies were thinking about and were attracted to this word. Nathan Schneider said that it’s a “floating signifier”—the term means different things to different people, and they add their own meaning to it in the process.  But decentralization isn’t the ultimate goal. Our networks can’t just be this horizontal blob of people where no one is accountable for anything. I’ve worked in community projects where that was the case and, you know, shit just doesn’t get done. So I think of it more as a verb—by saying you’re decentralizing, you’re questioning the ways that things are centralized. I like to associate it with other words like interoperability, interconnectedness, and accountability.  I want more systems that are self-correcting—you don’t have one person or a clique of people in control that are not responsive to the needs of the system. I think government can be like that—a robust democracy is just one type of feedback loop that can allow policies to shift and adapt to the needs of the community.  Decentralization alone doesn’t really capture that idea. You need to think about the distribution of power within organizations, with different layers of accountability or maybe even some intentional centralization. You can’t just have decentralization across the board. Decentralization alone is not itself a vision of good governance, it’s not a vision of having accountable, safe, fun systems. It doesn’t encapsulate what it is about distributed systems that make them more resilient.  I often personally ask myself: am I working on the right problem? There’s horrific inequity everywhere. People are suffering from inhumane policies that make it impossible for them to live dignified lives. The Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable for billions of life forms. Is the work of building better networks important amidst all this?"}
{"prompt":"I actually do think that’s a worthwhile way to spend my time. If we’re to address any of these problems, we need to have strong, healthy networks of communication. We need to see each others’ humanity, have accurate and reliable information, and share stories, art, and memes to make sense of the chaos and make it all tolerable. The web has already proven that it can do all these things. The solidarity-based, interoperability-championing DWeb movement is about making sure we can continue to communicate and share knowledge, without fear or exploitation. The goal of this work isn’t just to have a robust web. The goal is to create knowledge systems that enable us to survive and thrive on this planet.","completion":"1/ We are, in many ways, badly made. A foal walks within hours. On YouTube, you can watch scores of baby turtles hatch and scrabble right down to the surf. It takes us a quarter century before our minds work properly. They say having kids is like letting your heart walk outside your body. The whole thing seems improbable, how much care a human being needs to survive, but cognitive psychologists say this is the secret of our species. The brain plasticity that makes us so needy also makes us creative, and capable of the kind of play that can make our worlds change.  Remind us of this the next time we are trying desperately to finish an editorial note before the kids wake up and start screaming.  Kids can be hard to see clearly. What are you having? Walking around pregnant is a great way to test the line between oppressiveness and good will, which is sometimes nonexistent—the stranger who immediately, excitedly asks about the gender of your fetus, as if you could know. Kids precipitate intense hope and fear and nostalgia, mix up the past and the future completely, which is why we project so much not only onto “our” kids (who are not our property; if anything, most days, the opposite seems true) but onto childhood as such.  Like everything, all this had to be invented. Medieval Christian theology regarded babies not as angels, but demons. In paintings, even the baby Jesus looks like an old man. The heroes of epics, up to at least Dante’s Commedia, were not young, but middle-aged. Scholars have shown that for childhood to become what it is now—among other things, a protected site and a source of sentiment—a lot of things had to happen, and of course they did not happen for everyone. Some people are never allowed childhoods: to the cops, a twelve-year-old playing with a toy looks like a killer. Other people never have to grow up: to venture capitalists and the business press, the forty-something CEO who messes up just needs more time to grow. There may be little that feels more obvious than the imperative to protect the innocence of children. Yet innocence as a category is anything but."}
{"prompt":"2/ This issue of the magazine tries to move beyond commonplaces, while also analyzing what those commonplaces are about, in the first place. Our authors examine the relationship between youth and technology. Relationships, plural, we should say. Because, as the cliché goes, it’s complicated. One of the first myths to dispel is that only one kind of connection is at stake. The singular reflects the idea that kids are a blank slate: naturals, “digital natives,” the ones whom large scale innovations should target, whether it’s the One Laptop Per Child initiative or Google Classroom.  Some pieces investigate the persistence of history that an emphasis on the youthfulness of technologies and technologists obscures. One writer points out that, although the money in Silicon Valley is often presented as new, much of it is in fact inherited. Indeed, tech’s dynasties raise the question of whether “new” money even exists, if wealth is ever created ex nihilo or only, like a face that travels through generations, changes shape, updates. Another writer looks at algorithms developed to manage the dispossession of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century, and how this same technocratic regime of laws and logics are now used to apportion shrinking water supplies in the climate-apocalyptic West. It can be unsettling to recognize the continuities of systems of oppression, how often our tools have simply been updated to remain the same.  But sometimes, more disruptive updates slip through, the kind that repurpose the system. The purpose of a system is what it does, cybernetic theorist Stafford Beer reminds us. When the state trains you in STEM for a communist utopia that never arrives, it turns out you can use those skills to hack the planet. It turns out, if you want to get a glimpse into the torture chambers of the War on Terror, you can set the geolocation on your Tinder app to 19.9031 N, 75.0967 W: Guantánamo, Cuba. Some of the young guards may turn out to be like you: bored, lonely, in love, ambitious, uncertain, hoping for a change. They won’t stay long. This does not make their role warehousing those whose own youth has disappeared into the blacksite less horrifying; it makes it more.","completion":"Other contributions in this issue look at various attempts to protect young people from technology. These include parents and teachers, but sometimes also the kids themselves. Sometimes the kids long for less technical times, when the world felt more open for self-discovery, when you had to go cruising, instead of having the TikTok recommendation algorithm tell you you were gay. The tech industry tends to claim the mantle of youth in order to pretend it has no history and to bolster its ownership claims over the future. In this issue, we speak with recent college graduates who have gone into tech and have come to doubt these narratives, but who still want to use the power that the industry lets pass into young hands for good. Notwithstanding the lucrative business of defining and branding distinct generations, we find that one feature of youth today is that there are far too many kinds of kids to generalize about."}
{"prompt":"3/ As we close this issue, schools across the United States are starting back up in person. For many kids, the pandemic turned schooltime into screentime. Other kids stopped going to school at all. At night, after we finally get our own kids to sleep, we open our New York Times push notifications. They are frightening. In August, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that nearly one in five new Covid-19 cases were children. A number of them have developed “long Covid.” Former star athletes are sleeping all day. Former star students cannot focus. It is hard to know how good the data is. It feels impossible to know what to do.  They say children are the revenge of grandparents: in them, we come back to haunt ourselves. If we didn’t sleep, they don’t. If we whined all the time, they do. Kids are where we see the past return. But they also carry our hopes for the future. They make us feel that certain things can change, that maybe we can do better next time. The pandemic has made abundantly clear that we are all interconnected spatially. Kids help us see how interconnected we are temporally. Now now now now is their favorite saying, second only to Again! They are reminders of our shared vulnerability, of how each generation makes the next. We promise we’ll do better next time. Next time, we’ll get it right.","completion":"Coming of age is never easy, but coming of age in Silicon Valley is especially weird. Between applying for Thiel Fellowships, courting VCs, and getting recruited by Palantir at the career fair, today’s young tech workers are entering a world deeply marked by the previous generation’s mistakes. But they’re also joining the industry at a time of genuine disruption, with business as usual facing challenges from below. Unprecedented numbers of tech workers are organizing their workplaces and new algorithmic justice movements are achieving real victories. What does that mean for young people going into tech? Reboot is a publication and community for young technologists, primarily students and new graduates. Its aspiration is to reclaim techno-optimism from the techno-utopians—a counterpoint to the endless parade of “tech for good” initiatives, where solving systemic crises is only ever an app away. We sat down with some members of Reboot—Jasmine Sun, Jasmine Wang, and Alan Luo—to help understand how the next generation of tech workers sees their work and their future. We talked about lying to VCs, learning to “pass” in Silicon Valley, and how to find a sense of agency in a world of crisis."}
{"prompt":"Let’s start by having each of you introduce yourself.  Jasmine Sun (JS): I’m currently a tech worker at a startup. I grew up around the tech industry on the Eastside of Seattle, but I was always more interested in the humanities and social sciences. Then I went to Stanford and got immersed in Silicon Valley. I was shocked by the amount of money and power and prestige flowing through the Valley and ending up in the hands of very young people—even some of my freshman-year classmates. Often, the young people didn’t know what to do with all that responsibility. But it also felt like an opportunity to me. I had an interest in social justice, and while I was initially interested in going into academia or law, I started to think it would be higher leverage to apply that interest in social justice to the tech world.","completion":"Jasmine Wang (JW): I was born and raised in Alberta, Canada. The main industries there are oil and gas and agriculture—no tech. There were no computer science classes offered in my K-12, except for a typing class in elementary school, and a class in junior high where I learned how to use Google Drive, if those count. In university, I started out studying comparative literature and doing nonprofit work. I went to my first hackathon in my first semester and built a website for the nonprofit I had founded. I was really moved by the scale at which people were dreaming in technology, as well as seminal texts I was reading in the digital humanities class I was taking, and it was an easy decision to transfer into computer science the next semester. I had the sense that I needed to move to Silicon Valley to have a real pulse on things, and worked hard to get internships there, and ended up living in the area for about two years all together. It very much felt like I came of age in the Valley—a lot of my worldview and value systems were deeply formed by that experience.  Alan Luo (AL): I started programming at a young age. I was always interested in making video games because I played them growing up. My first exposure to the industry was when I published something that I made on Reddit, and it went a bit viral on Hacker News. It was this program that you could use to generate art. Then someone reached out to me to ask whether I wanted to freelance for them. So that was my first job in high school. What immediately struck me was how much money I was receiving for the work I was doing—there was nothing else like it. So then I went to Columbia, and did one year there before the pandemic hit.  Jasmine (Wang), you said you founded a company. What was that experience like for you? There’s a lot of cultural emphasis in Silicon Valley on the young founder. How did you navigate that? JW: Founding is an interesting thing. When you are a founder, the mission of the company has to be your personal mission. You are not able to recruit talented people or get venture investors on your side if you can’t convince them that you’re going to put the best ten years of your life into a company. You have to bleed, sweat, and die for this thing to exist. You need to persuade everyone that your startup is deeply aligned with your value system and worldview, or people won’t take a bet on you."}
{"prompt":"I think it’s deeply unhealthy. I think it has caused a lot of mental health problems that founders are not able to talk about, because it would hurt their prospects at raising another round and hiring people, not to mention keeping bread on the table. That’s the thing: as an employee, you can just show up and do the job, to pay the bills. As a founder, you still have to pay the bills, but you can’t divorce yourself from your work on an ideological level. Even if you’re super burnt out, you can’t check out—you have to keep performing that founder role. This wasn’t the case for me, but I imagine that for younger founders labeled as some sort of wunderkind that this dynamic would be even more damaging—especially if the company fails, as most do.","completion":"AL: The way people view you affects how you raise money. That is definitely true. JW: I remember a conversation I had with a mentor of mine where I told her, “I only want to say things that are true.” To me, words and language are almost the only things that we have; they’re so precious. They’re how we dream and make commitments to each other. And my mentor laughed at me, in all kindness. She said, “Never start a company. You will constantly have to say things that are not true to you, if that is what is required for the company to exist.” There’s also actual danger with saying things that are not true to you—the cognitive dissonance is so painful that you shift your self-concept for saying those words to make sense. It’s the same reason why manipulation tricks, like getting someone to do a favor for you to make them like you, work."}
{"prompt":"JS: I am uncomfortable with lying in general, even when it isn’t harmful, or if it’s just an exaggeration. I had a couple of advisory conversations recently where I was asked whether I would ever do Reboot full-time as a nonprofit. I told them, “Oh, I feel like I couldn’t get the money to do it.” And they were like, “No, you can get the money, that’s easy. But in order to get the money, you have to say you’re gonna scale Reboot to 20,000 people and 200 schools.” On the subway home, I was just like, do I want those things? Would I enjoy the version of Reboot where I was trying to scale it 100 times?  JW: I want to make a distinction. When I use the word “lying,” I mean saying things that are not true to one’s self. And this doesn’t have to be an outright lie. It can be something that is factually true, but misaligned with who you are.  I remember calling some friends as I was getting ready to raise a round. Their advice was: “Act like Mark Zuckerberg.” Apparently Mark had a reputation of being disrespectful to VCs and telling them he didn’t need their money. That shocked me. And I think it’s because being disrespectful goes against my core values. I’ve never intentionally disrespected someone. And also, I couldn’t imagine telling VCs I didn’t need their money. What a concept. Of course I need their money! What sort of world are you coming from? Like, how can you not need money? And then I was looking at Zuckerberg and realized, oh yeah, his dad gave him a $100,000 loan to help start Facebook. He didn’t need other people’s money—at least not in a food-on-the-table type way.","completion":"Second Languages You all had to learn to present yourself a certain way in order to be maximally appealing to the gatekeepers of the industry, whether it was VCs who might fund your startup or companies that might hire you. But how did you learn to perform these roles? Was it just a process of trial-and-error, or was there a more systematic way that you taught yourself the cultural protocols of the Valley?  JS: When I first got to college I had imposter syndrome, because I met so many people who were child prodigies. They were on magazine covers. I hadn’t done anything. I felt depressed. I also noticed that everyone in Silicon Valley was speaking a language that I didn’t understand. Like literally, I didn’t know what the words meant. So for a year I read a bunch of books that seemed to be the Silicon Valley canon: Zero to One by Peter Thiel, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I read whatever I thought other people were reading. Because I didn’t have a network yet—I didn’t have a way to learn directly from other people. But I wanted to know how the Valley thought."}
{"prompt":"JW: I didn’t know anybody in the Bay Area when I came here. I didn’t even know what books I was supposed to read. So I joined as many different communities as I could. I thought they could give me what I was missing. It can be hard to find that information, because there are so many limits in terms of what is chronicled. Most of the stories about Silicon Valley are written by very particular people who live very particular sorts of lives. There are so many stories that are not chronicled, like those of women and people of color. So you have to go find those stories in different contexts—more high-trust contexts, not public forums but Signal and phone calls.","completion":"Ultimately, I felt like I had to learn the right language to pass in the Valley. A lot of what you need to know is what you’re not supposed to talk about. In tech, you don’t really talk about money or power. Everyone’s default is, “I have no idea how much anyone earns.” Everyone dresses approximately the same and lives in approximately the same way. But some people wield much more power—orders of magnitude more.  AL: A lot of queer culture is oriented around being very “out.” But something’s at stake, so you might want to twist your words to get what’s best for the company. I don’t know if I care about participating in mainstream queer culture anymore, because it’s just not made for Asians. I want to be representing me, I don’t want to be queer for the sake of being queer. So if there is a version of like, Sino-queerness, which draws from traditions of Taoism and the existence of two spirits within the body or whatever, that’s the version I want to be creating.  The Bamboo Ceiling JW: Technologists are told that they only need technical competence, which is incidentally convenient for the bureaucratic governing class. This is perpetuated by the model minority myth, which says you only need to be good at STEM to have a good life, and that to be a good citizen you should keep your mouth closed. But the reality is that those skills only go so far. People talk more about the “bamboo ceiling,” but it’s always been there: Chinese-Americans might have technical competence, but they often don’t have the social capital needed to rise into C-level positions. Those are positions that require a lot of networking, a lot of buy-in, and often build off of generational privilege. Seeing which founders get funded and what they look like—that’s all about social capital, not engineering prowess. But then you look at those founders’ engineering teams and it’s a very different demographic makeup."}
{"prompt":"JS: My mom told me many times, “If you’re good at math, you’ll be good at everything.” I’m not good at math. And I had a lot of issues around my failure to be good at math growing up. It made me feel like I was failing in general, because my parents, and all their friends, and all their friends’ kids, were good at math.  But yeah, the reason Asian kids get ushered into STEM careers, like being a doctor or being an engineer, is because you usually don’t need social or cultural capital to succeed in those roles. There’s a certain set of things you need to learn to join those professions, and they’re open knowledge. You go on LeetCode [an online programming education platform] or you study for the MCAT. There’s not too many hidden codes about how to get those sorts of jobs.","completion":"Whereas being a VC is 100 percent hidden codes. There’s no playbook on how to get into VC. And if you don’t speak English well, or even if you just don’t know the social landscape, you can’t break in. I remember when I learned about cold emailing my freshman year of college. It blew my mind. I had no idea you could just email somebody and they would respond, because I couldn’t understand why they would talk to me. Now I love cold emailing—it’s the best thing invented. But you need that confidence.  The reason that I’m so interested in sociology is because I have been so baffled by the non-explicit networks and the other social components that go into creating technology products. Silicon Valley claims that it’s all about technology, that the product sells itself. But Silicon Valley is where I learned how much networking mattered, and how much it mattered to speak a language—which is very incongruent with what the Valley tells itself.  JW: My mother spent her entire life programming and she remained just an IC [individual contributor], and was never promoted. Once, she was fired out of the blue. It was simple to swap in another engineer for her. It seems much harder to swap out a general partner at a venture firm. That person’s power is rooted in relationships that are harder to build—less fungible. You can build technical skills by yourself, but social capital is predicated on so many other things. Who do you know? Where did you grow up? Do people like the sort of person that you are? Do you ‘pass’ to them as someone who’s in their social class? Are you able to afford the hobbies that give you access to the right people? In the Valley, people go to Equinox, Barry’s, and Burning Man—there’s all these stories about founders and VCs meeting at Burning Man. It costs thousands of dollars to sustain that lifestyle. So all these invisible things that accrue social capital take a lot of real capital and time to build. If you’re building technical skills, you can literally sit on your computer and do it alone in your room, and then go somewhere and get employed. But that also makes it less robust, in some sense."}
{"prompt":"Coming of Age JW: Broadly, what we’re talking about here is coming of age. Some of the questions we’re struggling with are the same ones that young people have been struggling with forever. “What are my values?” “How do I prioritize between those values in order to ensure my personal stability and the stability of the work that I feel like I need to do?” “What conflicts do I attend to?” “How do I take care of and steward the lineages that are important to me?”  But we’re also asking those questions in a particular historical moment. So what’s changed for our generation? And how does technology fit in? What is unique about our time? AL: I’ve been talking to my parents a lot. And they said, “Yeah, we knew this was going to happen, because this is what happened to our generation, when we were growing up in the Cultural Revolution. Every single one of us went through the exact same thing that you’re going through now. We started off being idealistic, and eventually realized somebody somewhere else was profiting from us.”  Because I spent so much time on social media, I just didn’t talk to my parents when I was younger. I wish I had, because then I would’ve heard those stories earlier, and maybe could’ve avoided certain situations. Social media put my head elsewhere. It uprooted me from my family and my history and placed me into a strange soup of fellow Gen Z’ers. My values have been shaped by that soup, not my parents or my lineage.","completion":"JS: I’ve been moving in the opposite direction when it comes to idealism. I was not idealistic for the vast majority of my life. I am a skeptic, and critic, by default. I think it has to do with coming of age while reading and being influenced by a left-wing academic world that has a lot of pessimism and negativity. In that world, the assumption is that anything you build is going to get co-opted. Everything fails, so there’s no future possible unless we burn it all down. And we probably can’t burn it all down.  I feel grateful to that world, because it gave me the capacity to understand power and systems. At the same time, it deprived me of a sense of personal agency because it doesn’t believe that things are worth trying. I see the same hopelessness in many of my friends and peers. They feel disillusioned by Big Tech—or really, by capitalism. They’re not very happy on a day-to-day basis. They’re depressed about climate change but feel they can’t do anything about it. Or they hate their job and think the company they work for is terrible for the world. But they also need to pay rent and have no idea what else to do. I also have friends who go into academia. And when I ask them why they’re doing it, they say, “Harm mitigation.” I’ve heard this from multiple friends. They’re like, “Every job is so flawed—it’s either the private sector or the nonprofit industrial complex. So I’m just going to go into academia, because I know that the university is not perfect, either. But it feels like it does the least harm.”  It’s a very pessimistic point of view. I want to reclaim a sense of agency. I think we need more idealism."}
{"prompt":"What are kids doing on the internet, and what is the internet doing to them? These questions have preoccupied parents, teachers, and the media for decades. But all too often the conversation is clouded with condescension and panic. Obviously, there are issues here worth exploring, and we wanted to find a way to do so without indulging in the usual caricatures and fear mongering. So Logic editor Ben Tarnoff spoke with Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and an expert on young people’s mental health and social media. She explained what exactly the kids are up to, and how their elders get it wrong.","completion":"There’s a lot of concern out there about the effect of social media on the mental health of young people. But this concern isn’t new. It belongs to a broader historical trend. When the internet was first becoming popularized in the 1990s, the media ran a number of stories fretting about kids going online: they could access pornography, be entrapped by predators, and so on. A prominent 1998 study from Carnegie Mellon University that got a lot of attention at the time claimed that spending time online made people lonely, depressed, and antisocial. Decades later, we’re seeing similar themes in the popular narratives around young people and the internet. How would you describe the current iteration of this discourse? What are the continuities and discontinuities with the 1990s? The major difference is the kind of media we’re dealing with—social media. Social media enables the sharing of a greater volume and range of content (e.g., live-streamed videos, high-quality images, and so on). That said, the discourse around “kids online” today is similar to what it was in the 1990s, because we see the same lack of dedication to understanding what young people are actually doing on the internet. I speak to teachers, parents, policymakers, and I name apps they’ve never heard of. I talk about things they’ve never heard of. And I think to myself, “How can you sit there and be afraid of what kids are doing online when you haven’t fully tried to understand it?” So the internet has changed, and the kinds of things that kids are doing on the internet has changed. But the reluctance to understand what kids are actually doing—and to take seriously their pleasures, as well as the harms that might arise—has not changed.  One continuity with the 1990s is the presence of a moral panic that prevents people from seeing clearly. If you’re in panic mode, you’re not capable of perceiving what kids are actually doing with the technology. But, as you point out, the technology itself has changed: social media has transformed the internet, as well as how kids interact with the internet."}
{"prompt":"Exactly. I give lots of talks at schools and I’m usually invited to talk about the “dangers” of social media. But I always say, “No, that’s not my job. I can come, but I’m not going to do that.” And what I’ve found in every single school is a disconnect between how seriously the kids take the things they do online versus how seriously the adults take it.  For example, most schools in the UK have a “meme account”—a social media account that posts funny memes about the school, its kids, and its teachers. It’s anonymous: schools rarely find out who set it up. Teachers usually take it very seriously: they contact the parents; sometimes they contact the police. But when you speak to the kids, they say it’s just banter, it’s just humor, it’s just fun.","completion":"The kind of concern from elders you’re describing is often expressed in a mental health idiom—that kids shouldn’t be engaging in certain online behaviors because it’s bad for their mental health. And clearly, there are certain online behaviors that are bad for one’s mental health. For example, you’ve written extensively about social media communities that promote anorexia and other eating disorders. But sometimes the mental health frame can be stretched too far, to the point that all sorts of online behaviors are unfairly pathologized. And this can lead to counterproductive interventions by parents and other authority figures, who discipline kids for doing things that might be harmless or even beneficial. I mean, there are lot of kids out there—particularly queer kids—whose life was quite literally saved by the internet. How do you strike the right balance? How do you find a way to identify genuinely destructive behaviors online without overpathologizing? This question reminds me of the favorite piece of research I’ve ever done. It was for an article I wrote with Dr. Anthony McCosker, where we analyzed all the Instagram posts that were tagged as “#depressed” within a certain timeframe. One of the most fascinating things we found was that when people were having discussions related to mental health, they were using pseudonyms 76 percent of the time."}
{"prompt":"In recent decades, we’ve seen a greater destigmatization of mental health. People use terms like depression much more frequently than they used to. But I wonder how far destigmatization has really gone, if 76 percent of people don’t feel comfortable talking about the lived realities of depression while using their real name. As you said, the internet can clearly be a life-saving space. And much of its power comes from the ability for people to use a pseudonym on a major platform like Instagram to talk about depression. That’s why it can be counterproductive when platforms try to enforce enhanced identification measures like real name policies.","completion":"Real name policies are motivated, at least in part, by the idea that the ability to be anonymous or pseudonymous on the internet is a major contributor to online toxicity. But what your research reveals is that the same anonymity or pseudonymity can be a life-saver, since it enables kids to discuss mental health issues they wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing otherwise. And there may not be an obvious real-world space where they could have those discussions."}
{"prompt":"Precisely, it’s a double-edged sword. One of the things I’m talking to kids about in my current research is how they feel about “secret-telling” apps like Secret, which let users communicate anonymously. (I should note early on that, technically, they’re communicating pseudonymously, since anonymity is incredibly difficult to fully achieve in practice, but I’d like to use the word “anonymous” here—because they do.) These apps have been the subject of intense scrutiny by the press and some parents, particularly due to their connection to cyberbullying. What kids often say is, “I don’t really like secret-telling apps. I think they can be toxic. They scare me. I only use them because my friends do.” And then I say, “Imagine a world where there’s no such thing as a secret-telling app. Imagine a world where there’s no such thing as anonymity. Are you happier? Are you safer?” And they go, “No, you can’t get rid of it!”  What they’re telling me is, “How are my friends going to ask questions about their sexuality?” “How are my friends going to announce to the world that somebody is being racist to them and they don’t know what to do?” “How are my friends going to ask what to do when someone takes an inappropriate picture of them?” “Who else can I talk to about aspects of adolescence, like sex?” Kids need these spaces. They need to be anonymous. And that’s why—at least for the kids I spoke to in my research—they rarely use social media with their real name, instead relying on what they often call “nicknames.” So they’re simultaneously reliant on anonymity as a safety mechanism but, at the same time, they’re fearful of it. And I wonder whether they are fearful of it because they are told to be fearful of it.  It’s clearly a good thing that young people are able to find some solace in these online spaces. But I also wish we could be supporting them better. I mean, I want them to be able to go online and have these conversations. But I also really want them to have access to professional therapy and other mental healthcare. Talking to strangers through an Instagram hashtag is fine, but it shouldn’t be the main way for kids to get help.","completion":"Absolutely. And this is the problem with the whole “social media is bad for kids” discourse. Is it social media or is it, perhaps, rising poverty levels, global warming, or increasing polarization? Is it maybe these things as well? I hear this sort of thing from kids all the time. “Why are you so worried that we created a meme account? Why aren’t you worried that I can barely get out of bed in the morning?” It’s a form of victim-blaming that feels very familiar. I’m reminded of the “avocado toast” discourse: the notion that many millennials can’t afford to buy homes because they spend too much money on expensive artisanal avocado toast. Similarly, it’s easier to blame teenagers’ anxiety and depression on their use of smartphones instead of looking at the deeper issues that are causing their anxiety and depression—as well as recognizing that, in some cases, a smartphone might be the best outlet they have for dealing with the problems. Not a great one, and not nearly as good as fully funded mental health services. But it’s what they have."}
{"prompt":"You know, “Phone Saves Teen’s Life” doesn’t make for as good a headline as “Pro-anorexia Memes Drove Girl to Death.” What is The Daily Mail going to publish? It’s going to be the second one.  But it’s a difficult balance. People often think I’m too defensive of social media. And maybe I don’t say it enough, but yes, there are some awful things on social media. Content moderators have one of the worst jobs in the world because they have to look at diabolically bad stuff for hours and hours every day. And yes, kids have seen some of that stuff.  I recognize that. But the reality is that social media is highly contextual. You need to look at how social media is being experienced by a particular person in a particular moment. It seems to me that the press in particular prefers a solid, clean-cut answer: that social media is totally fine or completely evil. But it’s neither. We need to get better at thinking of social media as something that is deeply complex.  Balancing Acts You mentioned content moderators. Let’s talk a bit about how content moderation, as implemented by large tech firms, shapes the conversations that young people have about mental health in online spaces.  In your 2018 article, “Community Guidelines and the Language of Eating Disorders on Social Media,” you reproduce some images of women’s bodies from Instagram and explore whether the images promote eating disorders. “Yes, the people’s bones are outlined and emphasised in the framing of the images,” you write, “but when do they become too bony, to the point where these images are read as the promotion of anorexia or similar?” A human content moderator, or an automated content moderation system, might have trouble looking at these images and determining definitively whether they were “pro-anorexic.” How should we think about these challenges?  I’m on Facebook and Instagram’s Suicide and Self-Injury Advisory Board. It’s an unpaid role, and I really enjoy it. I contribute to meetings about once or twice a month, and what they generally do is give us example imagery—for example, an image of a person with a slender body and visible rib cage—and ask us how it should be moderated. But a talking point we reach in more or less every meeting is that we need far greater context: the caption, the comments, the other posts in a user’s feed, and so on.","completion":"That’s something I struggle with. Nobody—no company, no moderator—should be looking at an image of a person and deciding if they are too thin or if their size promotes eating disorders. We’ve had decades and decades of feminist history, and this is the point we’ve reached! We shouldn’t be doing that to anyone of any gender. It shouldn’t be happening.  What you need is context. You need the caption. You need the comments underneath. You need the qualitative data. You need a deep understanding of the situation in which that image is being used, especially when it comes to posts about mental health. And that’s why we’re always going to need humans to do the work of content moderation. We have to find ways of making their work easier, but we need them.  To your point about context, those images of women’s bodies from Instagram might be circulating within a hashtag devoted to supporting people who are trying to overcome their eating disorders. In that context, the content might be playing a beneficial role.  Exactly."}
{"prompt":"But how can big tech companies afford to do that sort of nuanced, context-specific moderation at scale? It’s obviously much more time- and labor-intensive. And if you’re Facebook, you can’t maintain the profit margins that your investors demand while paying for high-quality content moderation across a social network of more than two billion people.","completion":"Something I’ve learned from Jillian C. York and Tarleton Gillespie’s work in particular is that it’s very hard, probably impossible, to moderate content at scale. To take the example of the Instagram images, let’s say the content moderator decides that a piece of content is in fact promoting eating disorders. Okay, it breaks the rules, so what do you do? If you remove that user’s account, you’re also cutting off their support system. People often call on social media companies to do more about X, Y, and Z. But what that means in practice, given the scale at which these companies operate, is account deletions, blanket bans on hashtags, that sort of thing.  So scale also incentivizes platforms to look for low-effort, cookie-cutter solutions when moderating content. If you’ve got lots of users and a relatively small number of overworked, underpaid content moderators, it’s easier to delete a bunch of posts or deactivate a bunch of accounts. But if someone’s having a mental health crisis online, that’s not going to do anything to address the crisis. In fact, it probably makes things worse."}
{"prompt":"Right. Again, context matters.  Another good example is the online fallout after the European football championship. Here in the UK, our team played Italy in the final. It was pretty monumental, because we haven’t been in the final for fifty-five years. The game was close. It went to a penalty shootout at the end, and the three players who missed the penalty shots were Black. The UK lost. You can only imagine the extent of racism directed at these players afterward. It was horrific.  On social media, racist posts often used monkey emojis to refer to the Black players. So people began calling for social media companies to take action. Some folks asked, if you can slap a warning label on every post about Covid, why can’t you slap a warning label on every post that uses the monkey emoji to be racist? The problem is that context is everything. The same emoji or word can be racist in one context but then in another context might be a vernacular within a community. That’s why we’re always going to need humans to do content moderation.  There was an interesting post on Twitter recently from a former content moderator. They were talking about how there were so few pathways for promotion and progression. Moreover, moderators at large social media companies often get no say on policy, despite the fact that they’re the ones doing the work. So yes, we need to improve their working conditions, and we need to find automated ways of taking the most traumatic content away from them. But we should also be transforming their very job description. They should become specialists in particular subject areas, so that they can better recognize context and better interpret nuanced content.","completion":"What else do you think should be done? We need transparency. But we also need to be specific about the kind of transparency we’re asking for, instead of just saying to these companies, “Be transparent.” This is something I’ve learned from Nic Suzor’s work, in particular. I’ve been wrong about this issue in the past. A few years ago, I said platforms needed to publish lists of banned hashtags, because there’s a lot of discrimination present in the hashtags they ban. But often when you ban a hashtag, people just move the conversation to a different hashtag. So publishing a list of banned hashtags can make it easier for people to come up with workarounds. That’s one of the many reasons why we need to be careful with what we’re asking for when it comes to transparency.  One form of transparency we really need is around content moderation guidebooks. In my view, we need to see most, if not all of the rules that content moderators are using to make decisions. It troubles me that these are hidden from the public, and therefore hidden from scrutiny. And maybe I’m being too idealistic here, but I believe it would make a big difference if researchers had access to those rules and could make evidence-based recommendations for their improvement.  You’ve written on how feminist thought can inform our approach to content moderation, and to young people’s mental health on the internet more broadly. What in particular do you draw from the feminist tradition, and how does it bear on the question of where we should go from here?  One of my biggest influences both in academia and in life is Dr. Carolina Are. She’s an academic, activist, and pole dance instructor, and often posts images and videos of her pole dance tutorials on social media. Carolina is constantly having her account suspended, then reinstated, then suspended, then reinstated. She gets told that she’s broken the guidelines and then, a day later, gets told it was a mistake.  The reality is that social media companies often don’t know where they stand on issues like female nudity. That’s why they’re so inconsistent. What they want to do is to come up with one global rule. They want to have a single guideline about female nudity that they can globalize across the entire platform. But female nudity is an issue that is viewed so differently according to the country that you’re in, the region of the country that you’re in, the religion that you belong to. Many different elements factor into it. So, to have one international rule on an issue like that is impossible. On certain things, generalizability isn’t possible."}
{"prompt":"If there’s one thought on the subject of mental health and young people on the internet that you’d like our readers to carry out into the world, what would it be? Again, I would push back against the “real-name web.” Lots of people have made the argument before me but it still stands. The kids I’ve spoken to feel so much safer on social media if they use a pseudonym. Pseudonymity has so many benefits for them and, while it will always carry risks, there’s a wealth of evidence telling us that the benefits outweigh the harms. We need to listen to the kids. We need to believe what they’re saying, and create a digital world that doesn’t alienate their ideas.","completion":"Ex nihilo is one of those concepts that makes you immediately suspicious. When someone claims to have made something out of nothing, there is almost always an inconvenient history that they intend to eclipse. The fantasy that before us there was nothing has a great deal of ideological power. The creator ex nihilo gets to claim some faint emanation of divine power—the wealth creator and the job creator are treated as distant cousins to the capital-C Creator.  The same is true for the idea of terra nullius. When tech came to a stretch of Northern California along the San Francisco Bay, it reframed the world it found as a bunch of apricot groves, a rail line, and not much else. This kind of pioneering story abounds in Silicon Valley. It’s not just the architecture, which seems to pretend that nothing was there before whatever spaceship of an office park landed in a given lot. Rather, it’s the environmentalist facade of an industry whose dirty beginnings—above all, in the known carcinogen, trichloroethylene, long used to clean semiconductors—have dotted Santa Clara County with a record number of Superfund sites. It’s the way, looking at the names of the wealthiest people in the Valley, you get the sense of wealth that’s been created by this generation rather than inherited from previous ones. Of course, the Zuckerberg-Chan dynasty may one day amuse the Bay Area’s society columnists with their coke-fueled antics at the annual Cotillion Debutante ball. Maybe X AE A-XII Musk will one day run for governor of California like so many scions before him who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.  But for now, this wealth feels new. And the newness is part of its allure, its legitimacy. Stories abound about how Silicon Valley’s newly rich don’t know how to spend their money, or how they spend it on absurd things. There is something reassuring about that framing, suggesting as it does that these protagonists are new to wealth and privilege, that wealth is foreign to them."}
{"prompt":"Years ago, I became fascinated with the question of how “new” the money invested and made in Silicon Valley really is. It has fascinated me in part because it is on some level an unanswerable question: how do you decide whether money is really “new”? Even asking the question, asking where money came from, teases out some inconvenient continuities, and a different understanding of how this industry and the place it has made its home came to be.  Supertankers of privilege Silicon Valley is good at persuading people to accept its self-perception as fact—a useful tactic, since a lot rides on that perception. In 2014, Forbes ran an analysis showing that “the wealthiest people in the country are increasingly self-made, leaving behind an era when dynasties inherited and concentrated wealth.” The leading indicator, they pointed out, was tech, where “more than 94 percent of the tech billionaires created their fortunes themselves.” (The numbers were much lower for sectors such as manufacturing.) How did Forbes determine tech wasn’t dynastic? The authors ranked Silicon Valley’s super-rich on a 1-10 scale. A “1” on their scale denoted “inherited fortune but not working to increase it”; a “4” meant “inherited fortune and increased it in a meaningful way”; a “7,” “self-made who got a head start from wealthy parents and moneyed background”; and an “8” was self-made but “came from a middle- or upper-middle-class background.” To rank a “10,” you basically had to be left in a basket on a river.  The results of the analysis aren’t particularly surprising. It turns out tech is mostly, by these calculations, “8s.” After all, that’s what the methodology was basically created to deliver. Anyone involved in tech in the last forty years who wound up as a billionaire likely grew their fortune significantly. You’d have to be an idiot, or actively trying, not to. But even beyond that, the methodology is profoundly telling. There is the unspoken assumption that growing one’s wealth was somehow the opposite of being dynastic. There is also the idea that money only grows due to some immense effort—in fact, their one example of a “1,” Laurene Powell Jobs, is evidence of how hard it is to avoid growing your wealth once it’s reached a certain level of absurdity. And the suggestion that anyone “6” and above “truly made it on their own” is staggering. When a certain “billionaire” ex-president ranks in the middle of your scale, the off-ness of the scale seems to be the point.","completion":"The most interesting questions about wealth transmission in America, however, happen within the “8s”—that is, among the twenty million millionaires as opposed to the 600 ro so billionaires in the US. Forbes set up their method around the idea that dynastic wealth and wealth multiplying from one generation to the next are mutually exclusive, as though taking an eighty million dollar fortune and turning it into a billion-dollar fortune is somehow the opposite of the dynastic transmission of capital. There’s one kind of story about capitalism being told when you highlight how Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard (and, um, Quibi), is a self-made billionaire who ran for governor of California as just “Meg.” And another when you think about the fact that she comes from two Boston Brahmin families, and one of her sons bears the almost comically dynastic name Griffith Rutherford Harsh V. (“Griff,” as he’s known, is the direct descendant of a revolutionary war general, so if anything the “V” is lowballing it.)  Rather than a story of disruption and discontinuity, the story of Silicon Valley can be told as one of family legacies. Rather than upjumped kids in hoodies upsetting the staid operations of capital, it’s wealth doing what it always does—attracting more wealth. Think of the way Aaron Sorkin chooses to frame Mark Zuckerberg’s rise in The Social Network: here Mark Zuckerberg in a sloppy hoodie, there the Winklevoss twins—“men of Harvard,” constantly in blazers, and, as portrayed by a duplicated Armie Hammer, radiating inherited privilege from every pore. That doesn’t seem exactly untrue to life. Born in the Hamptons and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Winklevoss twins surely led a life of privilege before coming to Harvard. What’s perhaps more remarkable is Sorkin’s insistence that slovenly, mousy Mark Zuckerberg, who was raised in Westchester County, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, is somehow not just less cool than them, but socioeconomically distinct. What Sorkin insists on framing as Old Money versus The New Economy, in actuality, was more like two supertankers of privilege colliding (or, as Forbes would call them, “8s”)."}
{"prompt":"The idea that industry creates wealth out of nothing is one that US capitalism compulsively projects onto whatever segment of the economy is particularly new and shiny. Part of this idea is the notion that new elites disrupt older systems of wealth and privilege. The deck gets reshuffled, old systems of privilege get upended. The promise contained in such an idea seems deeply connected to American notions of equality. If wealth, power, and legitimacy comes from upending the old order, if fortunes are remade with each generation in different fields, the thinking goes, then there is something deeply anti-dynastic and possibly even egalitarian about wealth generation in this country.  From The Summit to Sand Hill Road When you’re dealing with the San Francisco Bay Area, the question “where does the money come from?” is the obvious but perhaps less interesting one. San Francisco made its wealth in gold, San José in silver—or in supplying those trying to get rich off gold or silver. Generations of ranchers made vast fortunes on giant estancias carved from the land of the many peoples and nations now collectively known as the Muwekma Ohlone, and then from the territorial loot of the Mexican-American War. San Francisco was, and still is, a banking town—and with the advent of highways, the groves and fields up and down the Peninsula became subdivisions where home values skyrocketed. The Department of Defense invested in the region, funding whatever technology might help defeat the Soviets. When Silicon Valley started making unimaginable amounts of money, in other words, it did so in a place already awash in cash. The more interesting question is: where did that money go?  If you tell the story of Silicon Valley as the story of children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, it becomes a story of money changing shape: shipping wealth becoming real estate holdings, becoming office parks, becoming bitcoin. When you tell the story this way, it’s less about mansions overlooking the Mission or the Presidio, but rather of The Summit atop tony Russian Hill.","completion":"There are open and literal connections between the old guard and the new. Dede Wilsey, for example, a fixture of the SF social scene, was old-money dynastic to the point that she frequently claimed that the 1980s soap opera Falcon Crest was modeled on her clan. Her son Trevor Traina is a serial founder, whose successes (do you remember CompareNet?) mostly occurred during the first boom. Walter Haas III, the latest scion of a billionaire dynasty that goes back to the founding of Levi Strauss, is himself a founder.  There are also emerging dynasties that bring together different corners of the Silicon Valley cosmos. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, for instance, is the daughter of John Arrillaga, Silicon Valley’s biggest commercial landlord and a Stanford mega-donor; she is married to Marc Andreessen, creator of Netscape and partner in the VC fund Andreessen Horowitz. Beyond such matches made on Sand Hill Road, there is the role family wealth has played in Silicon Valley’s preferred funding model, where family money is all over, and yet at the same time quite difficult to detect."}
{"prompt":"From the outside, Silicon Valley can seem a rather mysterious engine for value generation. At the center of that mystery is so-called “venture capital.” Even within the venture capital pipeline there are more and less public segments, and wherever the mystery is most mysterious, the pipeline at its most opaque, there seems to be a pretty good chance, in the end, that the black box contains nothing but family money.  When the former US Ambassador to NATO, General William Henry Draper Jr., founded Draper, Gaither & Anderson in 1959, it was the first venture capital firm on the West Coast. Draper modeled the fund on the outfits that invested family money for the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, the Carnegies, and other industrialists out east. Draper, Gaither & Anderson’s initial investors included the Rockefeller family and the Hellmans, founders of San Francisco–headquartered Wells Fargo Bank. Stanford’s then-provost Frederick Terman convinced DG&A to set up shop at 851 Welch Road, immediately abutting the university’s campus. The historian Leslie Berlin has pointed to the clear marching orders DG&A was receiving from the Rockefellers: no real estate please; rather, the point was to connect Rockefeller cash with high tech.","completion":"With time, the Drapers turned venture investing into a dynastic concern of their own. William Henry Draper Jr.’s son William Henry Draper III cofounded Sutter Hill Ventures, a legendary private equity firm based in Palo Alto. Draper’s grandson Tim Draper, before becoming famous for constantly proposing to split the Golden State into a number of smaller states that would allow Californians to shop around for their ideal California, founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which was an early investor in Baidu, Tesla, and, more controversially, Theranos. Tim’s daughter Jesse, who starred in several Nickelodeon shows, also runs her own venture fund, Halogen Ventures, which invests in companies founded by women.  The Friends and Family Round Dynasties like the Drapers may not be the norm in Silicon Valley, but they’re not uncommon either. Family money shapes Silicon Valley companies, even if it does so in ways that are less readily apparent than the big bets of famous investors. That’s partly because family money gets in before anyone gets famous. VCs advise aspiring startup founders to raise money with a “friends and family” round even before turning to angel investors. “Friends and family” is entirely private, it’s decidedly small-bore, and it leaves very few traces unless someone sues (and there’s an entire cottage industry in Silicon Valley making sure that no one does). Absent a Theranos-sized fuckup, there’s usually no way to know if a founder’s parents, who both happened to work for Goldman Sachs, invested a critical $200K to help Junior get his business off the ground."}
{"prompt":"When it comes to angel investors and venture capital funds, while much of their money comes from endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, and the like, one major source is “family offices.” That is a euphemism for investment funds run for one or sometimes a handful of immensely wealthy families. As the historian Tom Nicholas points out in VC: An American History, the structure of modern venture capital investment grew out of the need to formalize family offices in the 1920s. According to an April 2021 Financial Times report, there are over 7,000 family offices worldwide (a 40 percent rise from 2017 to 2019), managing about six trillion dollars in assets. The trend line has been pointing up ever since the financial crisis of 2008. And, as Crunchbase reported in 2018, family offices seem to be increasingly keen on investing in startups directly: pivoting, as it were, from contributing to VC funds to behaving like VCs in their own right. A 2020 report by Silicon Valley Bank suggests that over 90 percent of family offices prefer to get involved in the early stages of venture investing (meaning Seed or Series A).  In Silicon Valley, many family offices were founded to manage the fabulous wealth of the tech billionaires themselves (for instance the Omidyar Network, which manages investments on behalf of the family of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar)—so relatively recent money. But some money is positively ancient. The Rockefellers’ family office, Venrock, was a crucial early investor in both Intel and Apple Computers. The Bechtel family, having made a fortune in construction going all the way back to the Western Pacific Railroad, incorporated as Bechtel in San Francisco in 1889. The family is as old money as they come in San Francisco—Bohemian Club, generations of Stanford alumni, the works. (I am—fun fact—writing this essay sitting across from a building on the Stanford campus that bears the Bechtel family name.) Their family office is called The Fremont Group, which was once run by former US Secretary of State and longtime SF high society fixture George P. Shultz. Through Trinity Ventures, founded in 1986, the Bechtels also invested directly in companies like Extreme Networks, Blue Nile, and mommy-supplier extraordinaire Zulily.","completion":"One partner at a venture capital fund told me that, in his experience, VCs turn to family offices when first starting out. Big as family funds can be, the inflow of capital represented by, say, a pension fund or a university endowment is both much bigger and much more reliable. Family offices generally do not get access to what a big university endowment gets access to. The only way family offices get to play in a hot new fund is to have invested in the firm’s funds back when it was just starting out. That means that on the whole family money comes into play early in the process of fund formation."}
{"prompt":"Between the “friends and family” round, the family office’s role in fund formation, and their preference for early-stage investment, the family is Silicon Valley’s ultimate incubator. Combine that with the fact that friends and family rounds tend to be extremely informal, and that family offices are barely regulated by the FDIC and SEC, and you notice that the system is perfectly set up to clothe family wealth in the trappings of an open market.  The only time you get even a slight glimpse is when things go seriously wrong: when companies collapse, when people go to jail, when very wealthy people sue each other. When Theranos collapsed, it became pretty clear that wealthy families—from the Waltons, to the DeVos family, to, yes, the Drapers—had been Theranos’s main backers. Other Theranos investors, like George Shultz, while not mega-rich themselves, were fixtures of the family office world. In general, it seems that very little of the billions in valuations that evaporated had come to the biotech-startup in the way most startups make their money—one reason why Elizabeth Holmes was able to get away with her deceptions for so long.  Disembodied and Reconstituted If family money is everywhere in Silicon Valley, albeit almost undetectably so, there’s one place where anyone making money in the Valley looks to pass it on to the next generation and to the generations after that: real estate. The federal estate tax exemption is $11.7 million as of 2021, and just owning two or three buildings in the right zip codes in the Bay Area means you leave just a trace in the federal ledgers when you die. IRS agents thus have a box seat for the way Silicon Valley moves its dynastic project forward.  The thing is, they’re not seeing tech wealth show up in estate tax filings quite yet. As one agent told me, in most of the cases the Bay Area offices handle, “wealth is made through buying real estate, or indeed by inheritance. Some may dabble in high tech investments, but only after making money another way.”","completion":"Some of this has to do with the fact that most techies are still young. But some of it probably has to do with the fact that the wealth that migrates from one generation to the next isn’t usually in stocks anyway. Where the IRS is seeing tech show up is in gift tax enforcement, which is handled by the same office. Techies, the IRS agent says, “are young and wealthy and hearing from the lawyers in the area about how to start gifting” their money. That means the fabulously valued stocks likely change shape into something else—among other things, real estate.  If anything, real estate has probably outperformed tech since tech moved in. Silicon Valley as a collection of companies has experienced boom and bust, but as a physical location the stretch of the San Francisco Peninsula between Burlingame and San José seems to have known only one endless boom. That boom has been extremely narrowly distributed: buying some Tesla stock is not attainable for most, but still a hell of a lot more attainable than owning property in Mountain View. Real estate is still the greatest repository of dynastic wealth—and the greatest source of intergenerational immiseration.  Even before a single semiconductor company moved in, the Valley made some families very rich and ensured that others would be deprived of their spin of the wheel. As the historian Stephen Pitti has noted, as Santa Clara County developed, the powers that be were concerned to attract more residents to the area, where the mining economy had largely given way to an overwhelmingly agriculture-based economy. They were concerned that not enough white people would stay in the area, and that too many Asians and Latinos might. As a result, small farming tracts were readily made available to white Americans and immigrants from Europe (Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese), while Mexican Americans were kept “as a naturally mobile, low-wage labor force.”  With each subsequent generation, those small parcels had a way of generating ever more massive amounts of wealth. The well-documented explosion in home values in the area is almost entirely due to an explosion in the value of land. The inequality fostered by the nearly feudal land distribution promoted in the County has given rise to the escalating differences between the area’s rich and poor."}
{"prompt":"Almost every campus up and down the Valley has a story like the new Apple spaceship: the Glendenning Farm, slowly sold off to developers in the middle of the last century, until Hewlett Packard plopped down its headquarters (long called the “apricot division”), eventually selling it to Apple. Some of the local landowners seem to have gotten stiffed by the bargain, but the rapid development also created massive wealth for some. Richard Peery and John Arrillaga bought up massive tracts of land and became two of the largest commercial landlords in the Valley. Justin Jacobs Jr. plopped down the cheap, interchangeable concrete tilt-up buildings, which still make up a majority of the low-flung Silicon Valley office parks.  Most centrally, the area once occupied by the large estate maintained by the railroad barons Leland and Jane Stanford transformed itself into Stanford University, an investment behemoth and still Silicon Valley’s largest landowner. On the surface, this transformation seems perhaps the most unusual in the Valley, but it might be the most representative. Stanford University represents a frustrated dynastic project: named after Leland and Jane’s son, Leland Jr., who died a year before the university was founded, it is home to his gravesite and is dedicated to his memory. Disembodied and reconstituted as a tax-exempt entity, indivisible by the vagaries of family squabbles and immune to the decadence that might have befallen actual generations of Stanfords, Leland Stanford Jr. has dominated the area more effectively than any dynasty made of flesh and blood could have.  And that seems to make unfortunate Leland Stanford Jr. something of a patron saint for the entire area, where wealth has enormous inertia and nevertheless constantly changes shape. There is an old comedy bit where Chris Rock distinguishes between being rich and being wealthy. “Rich is some shit you can lose with a crazy summer and a drug habit,” he jokes. “You can’t get rid of wealth.” Through all its transformations—from precious metals to land to superconductors to photo-sharing apps—Silicon Valley seems determined to prove that last part right.","completion":"The Colorado River snakes southwest from fifteen thousand feet high in the Rocky Mountains, down through plains and desert to present-day Mexico and the Gulf of California, draining a vast watershed of 250,000 square miles. Indigenous peoples—the Navajo and the Hopi, the Zuni and the Ute, and dozens of other nations—have been living alongside the river and its tributaries for centuries. Beginning in the 1820s, Anglo settlers began seizing water and land in the Colorado River Basin, and by the 1870s, the Colorado River Basin region had become part of the expanding United States empire. The region was reimagined by the US state as what the American geologist John Wesley Powell called “arid earth”: “drought-stricken” lands that supposedly needed to be salvaged through settler control and technology.  In the decades that followed, the newly created US Geological Survey initiated a massive program of data collection to map, chart, graph, and apportion the basin’s water, land, and people. This stream of information—from acre-feet per year of river flow to racist atlases of Indigenous peoples—fed into decisions by US agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation about who should be allowed to live in the basin and use its land and water. This was, in effect, a data analytics program that entrenched white supremacist ideology into the legal and scientific functioning of the US state."}
{"prompt":"Guiding decisions about how to distribute the region’s land and water was the belief that scarce resources should be optimized to foster development and maximize profits for white settlers. This regime of resource optimization persisted into the mid-twentieth century, when it was combined with a newly dominant mode of economic analysis called Input-Output (I/O) economics and programmed into computer algorithms known as linear programming algorithms, which guided the work of deciding how to allocate the basin’s water and land.","completion":"Today, those optimization algorithms, and the settler-colonial logics they derive from, control the distribution of resources on which forty million people throughout the American southwest depend. According to officials in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, and other states, that water system is now collapsing in the face of what the media, in a contemporary echo of Powell’s drought-stricken arid lands thesis, has described as “megadrought” and “water starvation” exacerbated by the climate crisis. That has led to calls for further technological intervention of the same kind that has long enabled settler control. But it is clear the optimization framework—which over the past century has contributed to water shortages, toxic waste from profit-driven energy development, flooding of Native American agricultural land, and enduring campaigns of water appropriation—will not solve the water crisis."}
{"prompt":"There is now an urgent need to abandon that framework and imagine better water futures. Luckily, the resources for this work already exist. In the period when settler-colonial water policy was being entrenched in digital algorithms, a group of young people from the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) were developing critiques of the optimization regime, and articulating a different vision for the Colorado River Basin. That vision can help us support sustainability and justice-centered water policy for generations to come.  Computing Landscapes The story of how the optimization regime took over the Colorado River Basin is a complicated one. But at its core are innovations in policy, law, and technology that enthroned profit as the guiding principle of resource distribution in the region.","completion":"In the nineteenth century, two doctrines guided the US empire’s allocation of Colorado River water. The first, known as the doctrine of prior appropriation, was basically a “first come, first served” rule that privileged the first interests to lay claim to the use of a given amount of water. The second, known as the doctrine of equitable apportionment, split water between US territories. In theory, these water doctrines might have favored Native American water rights, as they did after the 1908 Winters v. United States Supreme Court decision, which upheld the water rights of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation over encroaching settlers. But since then, white settlers have managed to subordinate water rights under the principle of “beneficial use,” which holds that in the case of disputes, water should be allocated to the parties that intend to use it for vaguely defined beneficial purposes. In practice, this has usually meant profits for technological developers and extractive energy industries."}
{"prompt":"That evolution in the principles of water distribution policies was later operationalized in new computing technologies. Beginning earlier but expanding significantly in the 1960s, analysts in laboratories at major land-grant universities like the University of Arizona took the data collected by the US Geological Survey and other agencies and encoded it onto punch cards. Mathematicians, economists, and other technologists then used those cards as the fodder for computer programs that would optimize water distribution for profit maximization.","completion":"The design of these computer programs was derived from the economic technique known as Input-Output modeling. Created in the 1920s by the economist Wassily Leontief in order to optimize the transportation of grain in Soviet Russia, I/O modeling was later used to analyze entire national economies and even to guide US bombing campaigns in the Second World War, thereby advancing US imperialism and rationalizing mass destruction on the world stage."}
{"prompt":"I/O models are based on a table that looks like an Excel spreadsheet, in which columns for materials (such as oil, steel, or coal) intersect with rows for industries (such as agriculture or manufacturing). The basic idea is that an economic system can be measured as the overall ratio of resources used (input) to goods produced (output). In the Cold War period, scientists at Harvard, the Pentagon, and elsewhere developed mathematical techniques known as linear programming algorithms to determine the optimal input and output numbers for a desired objective, such as optimizing resources for military development at the lowest possible cost.  After being successfully implemented in imperial bombing campaigns and New England manufacturing, I/O economics and linear programming algorithms began expanding westward in the 1950s into water management on the Colorado River, becoming the dominant mode of modeling water within a decade. Researchers and students at the land-grant universities were charged with optimizing water distribution across the region. As the basis of their analysis, they carved the diverse land into relatively homogenous virtual quadrants known as “problem settings.” For example, in proposals for the Central Utah Project, initially formalized in the 1960s, the state of Utah was represented as a square divided into a grid of eight to ten smaller squares that obliterated all distinctions about whose land, histories, and water rights the grid overlaid. Researchers then used computer programs to figure out how to distribute X acre-feet of water for Y farm plots across each problem setting, so as to maximize profits and minimize costs for the region’s large agribusinesses and other industries.","completion":"Youth Against the Empire The optimization regime is so entrenched in water policy and technology that, even in the midst of catastrophic climate change, it is difficult to imagine other futures for the Colorado River Basin and proximate regions. But in the late 1970s, a group of Native American students did just that, fighting back against a water diversion program in New Mexico, and providing a model for activism and water management that could guide us today."}
{"prompt":"The NIYC was founded in 1961 as a nationwide coalition focused on environmental justice work and an intergenerational fight against US colonialism and economic extraction. In the subsequent decades, the NIYC argued countless environmental court cases, wrote numerous policy reports, and utilized every political and scientific tool to fight against the settler policy and technologies of the US empire.  One of the tools they used was the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). These statements were created in 1969 by the National Environmental Protection Act to help guide government decisions on new development projects. In the Colorado River Basin region, developers manipulated the EIS format to justify the impacts of their projects in light of those projects’ beneficial use—in other words, to show that the profits outweighed the environmental costs.  In 1976, student youth members of the NIYC of Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote their own anti-colonial EIS for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They recognized that the EIS was a powerful policy medium that could be repurposed for environmental justice work. They were attempting to intervene against a recent data-driven decision about the allocation of water from the San Juan River—a major tributary of the Colorado River—as part of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project. The project was supposed to take water from the Navajo Dam and Reservoir, created in early ’60s, and use it to irrigate land in San Juan County in northwestern New Mexico.  The students supported the irrigation project in principle—as a founding member of the NIYC, John Redhouse, said in another context, “we’re not anti-development, we’re just anti-exploitation”—but they were concerned that Native oversight was lacking, and that the project would thereby undermine Navajo self-governance. They focused their EIS on the New Mexico state government’s opaque decision to divert 330,000 acre-feet of water from the Navajo Dam, which they pointed out was just one among countless decisions made without robust structures of Native oversight.","completion":"In their statement, the students recounted how Native American water rights had been diminished since at least the early twentieth century by the doctrine of beneficial use. They pointed to the ways that dominant data-driven decision-making processes had been used to disavow Native American claims to water, and questioned the specific hydrological data employed to make the decision in this case. They decried the influence of corporate agriculture in the decision, as well as recent changes in the Navajo Council that weakened possibilities for total self-sufficiency from US resource governance. They also provided a clear vision for Navajo self-sufficiency, which included breaking away from the domination of US agribusiness to create a system of food production and distribution organized into small family farming and local Navajo food-producing cooperatives.  Perhaps most importantly, they demanded transparency and power in the decision-making process, so that they could assert their voice within the Native council, and break from US water management and the technological regime of optimization. This has become a central tenet of contemporary Indigenous Environmental Justice and Indigenous Data Sovereignty resistance movements: the right to collection, ownership, and application of all data about Indigenous peoples, their lifeways, and territories.  Crisis Epistemology Water justice requires acknowledging historical pasts as much as imagining new futures, but optimization frameworks flatten past, present, and future into calculations of profit-driven time."}
{"prompt":"Optimization algorithms are misleading in stories about water in other ways, too. In upholding extractive economic systems, they formulate water crisis as a future problem and ignore the fact that this crisis has been caused by centuries of settler and capitalist control. Scholar Kyle Whyte has named this false description of climate change as new and urgent as “crisis epistemology.” This anxiety is evident in “megadrought” media descriptions of the Colorado River that warn of impending collapse. In response, technological developers and policy makers are granted unchecked decision-making power that reaffirms optimization-led economic systems.  Environmental Impact Statements continue to dominate in water development policies. Standard EIS reports utilize optimization algorithms, Monte Carlo methods, and other predictive statistical frameworks. This means that dominant water policy assessment tools are designed with the same optimization logics that they are supposed to check. Against this, the NIYC’s anti-colonial EIS is a model of environmental assessment that breaks optimization’s stranglehold on water policy, and privileges intergenerational sustainability and water rights. Their approach centers the needs of the people over the profit of technological developers.  The NIYC’s environmental justice work over the past seventy years—including their 1976 intervention into the Navajo irrigation project water diversion decision—and their unparalleled expertise in water policy, water-related technological development, and agriculture, underscore the critical importance of local organizing and wider coalition building, as well as centering youth perspectives, in formulating water futures written by the people. There is already enough information in these past interventions to write justice-centered policy and support livable water futures for the Colorado River.","completion":"In October 2019, an op-ed in a student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an allegation that rippled across campus: it claimed that the university’s administration had quietly appointed a war criminal as the new head of campus safety and security. The man, retired army colonel John Bogdan, had spent two years running the notorious detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay."}
{"prompt":"The student who wrote the op-ed didn’t have to look far to find traces of Bogdan’s record. The colonel’s LinkedIn profile noted that, between 2012 and 2014, Bogdan had been “responsible for the safe and legal custody of 166 opposing force detainees.” Those detainees were young and middle-aged Muslim men who had been extrajudicially imprisoned during the so-called War on Terror. Further internet searches revealed that while Bogdan was warden of Guantánamo Bay, he had implemented a regime of intrusive genital searches, had detainees on hunger strike intravenously force fed, and had allowed guards to use rubber bullets on hunger-striking detainees. One lawyer for detainees has written that Bogdan’s Guantánamo was characterized by “displays of power for power’s sake.” Although Bogdan’s actions likely do not constitute war crimes under international law, the UNC Charlotte Chapter of the American Association of University Professors later argued that those actions “clearly violate human decency and the spirit of the Third Geneva Convention and other protocols for the treatment of prisoners.” Almost immediately, the op-ed set off a campaign to have Bogdan fired. A group of several dozen students, consisting primarily of campus Democrats and Young Democratic Socialists of America members, began searching for more evidence of what Bogdan had done at Guantánamo. They formed a group chat on GroupMe to strategize and share articles about Bogdan’s past, and a Twitter feed to publicize their discoveries and rally support. They called themselves the Coalition to Remove John Bogdan.  Members of the coalition soon found themselves clashing with the university’s administration over Bogdan’s role on campus, and struggling to convince their Zoomer-generation peers—most of whom were born after 9/11 and were children during the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars—that the man who ran the Guantánamo detention center shouldn’t be the head of campus security. At the same time, the coalition members were trying to educate themselves about what had transpired in the detention facilities. In the decade after 9/11, Guantánamo was perhaps the most potent symbol of the abuses and excesses of the US national security state, but its place in the public imagination had been receding since Barack Obama’s second term in office. “I didn’t really know anything about it,” one coalition member recently told me over Zoom.","completion":"The coalition members’ understanding of the base was almost entirely mediated by digital records, “Guantánamo” Google searches, Wikipedia skims, and tidbits teachers had told them along the way. But the version of Guantánamo that public schools teach and that tends to live online is very narrowly defined: a hundred-year-old naval base on forty-five square miles of US-controlled land and sea at the southeastern tip of Cuba. Though the identities and experiences of the people detained at Guantánamo have now been reported, catalogued, and even cinematized, a political and technological veil has been cast over the past and future of most former guards. The result is a Guantánamo that is always far away: the people there are never coming here, to America.  That myth has made formulating the right questions about truth, justice, and the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay incredibly hard to do. Bogdan’s presence at UNC Charlotte raised exactly those questions. He was the rare exception of someone who had emerged from behind the veil."}
{"prompt":"A Pinpoint on Google Maps Although Bogdan had listed his Guantánamo experience on his LinkedIn profile, knowledge about most of the guards that return from Guantánamo is extraordinarily hard to come by. This is largely the result of decisions made by the Pentagon, which worked for years to ensure that most guards’ identities, decisions, and actions would not be documented in public archives.","completion":"The Guantánamo that emerges online tends to be a pinpoint on Google Maps, a small strip of land through which all kinds of people—private contractors, intelligence agents, soldiers, sailors, policymakers, lawyers, journalists—pass through, disappearing in discourse once they leave the base. Google Images almost inevitably turns one’s attention to the physical detention camp, too. Searches produce a checkerboard of orange jumpsuits, snapshots of current detainees, splatters of camouflage. Over the past decade, the first page of results has evolved to include photographs of protesters in the mainland US, but even those images point back to the camp: many protesters have decided that the best way to remind civilians of Gitmo’s continued existence is to dress up like detainees. In the digital archives of major US newspaper outlets, there is a parallel pattern. Almost all the photographs accompanying stories about the detention facilities show a similar montage: hurricane fencing and barbed wire; American flags and the backs of military personnel; the small, beige-colored trailers containing men deemed too dangerous for US soil.  Political discourse about Guantánamo has also centered on the prison and its detainees. If the Zoomers at UNC Charlotte had looked for Guantánamo on C-SPAN.org, they would have scrolled through decades of videos of congressional representatives, national security lawyers, lieutenants, and journalists regurgitating the same five or six questions. When will Guantánamo close? Where will the detainees go? What might happen to the detention facilities if they are ever emptied of people? What is it like to see Guantánamo with your own eyes? What horrors might befall America if detainees were to be housed and tried in US federal criminal courts instead of military commissions? Wikipedia articles about Guantánamo echo these frames, and have become repositories of contested knowledge about the detained. Footnotes include Supreme Court cases about habeas corpus petitions, links to lengthy Pentagon reports on the detention facilities, memos written by ACLU lawyers arguing for the immediate closure of the prison, and a rich archive of investigative news articles that try to detail human rights abuses at the prison. In much of this writing, the passive voice lurks in the prose, quietly obfuscating precisely who is ordering that detainees be force-fed, who is implementing groin searches, who is doing the detaining."}
{"prompt":"Archivists, activists, and journalists have pushed against this erasure, and initiatives such as the Guantánamo Public Memory Project have endeavored to trace the lineage of the place. Reporters from some countries whose citizens have been imprisoned at Guantánamo have tried to document who did what, when, and why, and individuals released from the detention facilities have written about their experiences. Some of the most rigorous coverage of the prison is unsurprisingly written in Arabic. But language barriers have made this knowledge relatively inaccessible to English-speaking monolinguals living in the United States.","completion":"Some guards have chosen to identify themselves on Twitter and other social media platforms. One even started a gym in Philly. But most keep quiet. There is no public list, no Excel spreadsheet of former guards. Instead, there is a persistent informational void about who the individual guards were, who they harmed, what ideologies motivated them, and where they went when they left the camp. Contrary to what Google Maps might show you, Guantánamo runs on the dreams and sweat and blood and logics of people like John Bogdan—former guards and wardens who are now scattered across the United States."}
{"prompt":"Fact Sets Once wardens and guards leave Guantánamo, they tend to go quietly into the night of civilian life. The uproar over Bogdan’s appointment at UNC Charlotte was an anomaly. Members of the Coalition to Remove John Bogdan met in the GroupMe chat and in the library late at night to imagine a campus without him. They amplified their cause by tweeting and chalking the streets. In their written statements, coalition members drew heavily on reports written by Amnesty International and other organizations that had made a concerted effort to track and trace the wrongs that Bogdan’s Guantánamo had wrought. There was plenty of documentation of what was done to detainees. Reports from Human Rights Watch noted that a federal district judge had ordered Bogdan to explain a standing order that called for the use of restraint chairs during the force-feeding of detainees. But there was little information about who apart from Bogdan had been involved in doing it.  It is fair to say that the administrators of UNC Charlotte did not imagine their campus would become the site of a battle over the legacy, meaning, and future of detention facilities that are over a thousand miles away. After the coalition began drawing attention to Bogdan’s alleged crimes, the university’s chancellor issued what he called a “fact set” to defend Bogdan’s reputation and employment history. But the document also went many steps further, legitimizing Guantánamo as just one of the US military’s hundreds of bases.  Bogdan fought back as well. In an interview with a local reporter, he pushed the thesis that “the mission here is not far off from the military.” He declared, “The mission of the Army is to fight and win the nation’s wars. And you do that by developing a team, and teaching and growing and building the future of the nation. That’s exactly what universities do, right?” Around the same time, university administrators instructed the social media team associated with the admissions department to block the coalition on Twitter, so that prospective students were less likely to come across their arguments against the colonel.","completion":"Ultimately, the coalition couldn’t translate their understanding of Guantánamo into a campaign that resonated with most of their fellow students. In part, the Zoomers had faced the challenge of teaching themselves and their peers what the military prison was and why it mattered. More importantly, perhaps, in setting out to learn about Guantánamo, they were never going to encounter examples of other struggles like theirs. In fact, there has only been one analogous case relating directly to Gitmo: since 2009, Berkeley law students have repeatedly called for the dismissal of professor John Yoo, who gained the nickname “architect of torture” for his role in justifying harsh CIA interrogation techniques deployed at Guantánamo. The students’ Google searching had led them back in time, to a period during their childhoods when Bogdan was running Guantánamo, but it brought them no closer to a blueprint for how to hold people like Bogdan accountable in the present."}
{"prompt":"Tindering Gitmo If Guantánamo is more than a physical detention camp, if it is also a network of people and ideologies that have successfully implemented the continuous extrajudicial detention of individuals, then how can researchers, reporters, and future generations trace its contours online, and formulate questions about what justice with regard to Guantánamo might look like? In 2015, as a master’s student in comparative literature, I emailed the Joint Task Force Guantánamo, requesting to see the prison’s library. I was informed that only reporters could go, so I began a foray into freelance journalism. To go would be to see, and to see would be to understand, I told myself. Among other things, I set out to learn how the arrival of T-Mobile cell service had changed life on the naval base. I hoped I could convince US civilians that Guantánamo was not so far away—what the Bush administration had described as “the legal equivalent of outer space” was, in fact, connected by multiple fiber optic cables to the state of Florida.  As I interviewed guards stationed at the base, I discovered many of them were millennials like me. They were mostly twenty-somethings, some actually younger, many of whom scuba-dived on the weekends, acting as if warehousing Muslim men was part of their patriotic duty. At the same time, I could not shake the feeling that everything I saw in the detention facilities, where I was surveilled and accompanied by a handler most of the time, was a curated performance. To understand Gitmo, I realized, I would need to find a different way backstage.  For the past five years, I have relied on different open-source intelligence methods to explore the porousness of Gitmo and to follow the people who move through it. I spent one year watching the Joint Task Force scrub its own official Twitter feed of hundreds of tweets. (They subsequently deactivated the account, and I took over the handle.) I sat quietly for years with the knowledge that geolocation-based smartphone apps were a window into a military culture that most civilians will never see, and nodded my head when people told me that fitness trackers like Strava could reveal someone’s location on a military base. I knew that Strava was just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t need to go to Gitmo to speak with personnel there; I could just turn on my phone.","completion":"I considered different platforms—Facebook, YouTube, Reddit—where current and former guards might hover. All seemed too public—except Tinder. And so, in the summer of 2017, I plugged in a little personal information about myself on the app, geolocated to Guantánamo, and began to chat with men who were stationed there. I ended up swiping right on private contractors, members of the Military Police, sailors who were just passing through the port. Meanwhile, I sat in my small apartment in Massachusetts trying to understand what precisely I was trying to understand about the detention facilities.  What I began to see through Tinder is that Americans would pass through the base and eventually return stateside. My new digital strategies were leading me to reckon with the fact that guards themselves were constantly returning after their rotations to communities throughout the United States, many slipping back into civilian life. Guards came, guards went, rinse, repeat. Through swiping, I could ask these people what they saw on the ground, and I could do what I had largely been unable to do at Guantánamo—learn their names, gain records of their faces, outline their moral codes, inquire what the detention facilities represented to them.  The responses I gathered included disavowals and defenses of the national security state—a diversity of perspectives absent in much of the public record. At the same time, I was trying to document the identities of former guards, though at a certain point I recognized that this alone wouldn’t cause me to reckon with the vastness of the US national security state represented by Guantánamo Bay. As the scholar A. Naomi Paik argues in her book Rightlessness: Testimony and Redress in U.S. Prison Camps since World War II, Gitmo is part of a longstanding and ongoing US project to create physical and legal black sites. A few truths told on Tinder couldn’t make for a global reconciliation.  Home Truths It took the UNC Charlotte students’ campaign, which I first heard about in late 2019, for me to reckon with my own lack of imagination. I had been so intent on using social media to map the identities, ideologies, and movements of former guards that I hadn’t considered what might transpire if their identities were to be widely known. The Zoomers had first learned about Bogdan’s history through LinkedIn—and then they led a concerted effort to fire him."}
{"prompt":"But when I speak to members of the Coalition to Remove John Bogdan and other former UNC Charlotte students, I always find myself circling back to the same question. After unearthing this knowledge about Bogdan, if they didn’t think he belonged on their campus, where did he belong?  One UNC Charlotte alumna, who now works in the national security sector, responded, “I think what shocked me was the ease with which someone that had such a high-profile position like that was able to come back and seamlessly reenter society, and that was it. I guess I just assumed they’d go to like RAND or Deloitte or somewhere like that.” Another Coalition member, now an alumnus, said the question of where Bogdan should be removed to had been stumping him from the start. “My initial reaction was to say that John Bogdan is not fit for any sort of civilian job,” he told me. “But then, I don’t necessarily want people like John Bogdan in our police or military either.”  It struck me that what the students lacked was a model for justice that goes beyond any single warden or guard. This was partly a consequence of the algorithmically curated information they encountered online, but it is also the result of a widespread refusal by American society as a whole to confront this issue. As the students leave their campus and scatter across the United States, like former guards returning from their rotations, they’ll have to decide if they, too, want to leave Gitmo behind.","completion":"In the spring of 1989, a virus began attacking computers in Europe, the United States, and Asia. During every sixteenth run of an infected executable file, the virus overwrote a random sector of a machine’s hard disk and manifested the phrase “Eddie lives… somewhere in time” on the monitor. A signature declared the virus’ origin: “This program was written in the city of Sofia (C) 1988–89 Dark Avenger.”  Dark Avenger was the most prolific of a number of hackers that emerged in Bulgaria in the late 1980s and 1990s. In December 1990, The New York Times reported that the Eastern Bloc nation had become a major infection vector in the new information economy. The late John McAfee told the newspaper, “I would say that 10 percent of the sixty calls we receive each week are for Bulgarian viruses.” By another estimate, around ninety out of the 300 then extant viruses for IBM machines originated from the country. In 1997, Wired called Bulgaria “the heart of darkness.”  How could a small socialist country become ground zero for so many digital epidemics? The conventional narrative of Eastern European communism is one of technologically backward states that failed to enter the information age, locked behind an impenetrable Iron Curtain that prevented both people and ideas from circulating. In Bulgaria, however, the electronic industry’s success was considered a key component of achieving the state’s ideological and economic dreams. The Bulgarian Communist Party hoped that the computer would usher in a communist utopia. Automation would streamline planning through a nationwide information network, and man would be free from menial tasks. More pressingly, the party was betting that computers could revive an economy that had once been the second fastest-growing in the world, but was floundering by the 1980s."}
{"prompt":"This vision was partially fulfilled: by the mid-1980s, socialist Bulgaria was producing up to 47 percent of all computer hardware within the Eastern Bloc, from Berlin to Vladivostok. But the country still suffered from negligible growth rates and low worker productivity, in part due to the party’s inability to implement the technology its factories were producing. State-produced hardware, computers, and numerically-controlled machines often languished unused due to a shortage of necessary software.  As this problem played out over the course of the 1980s, the party vested its hopes in a mass education effort to transform what turned out to be the last children of socialism into the first electronic generation. These kids would be trained to create the software that would allow the party to automate all it dreamed of automating—from chemical production to managing pension databases. Beginning in 1983, Bulgarian children as young as twelve were enrolled in a state-run program of technical tinkering. High schools and universities were transformed into laboratories of the future and factories for the regime. While learning BASIC, Bulgarian children were to advance themselves as intellectual laborers and truly creative citizens of a newly scientific socialist world, in order to become the future governors of much more complex production and social processes.","completion":"In reality, however, the 1980s generation of Bulgarian children found themselves becoming cogs in an economy that continued to suffer shortages, bottlenecks, and scarcity—all of which contributed to the collapse of the communist regime in 1989. When that happened, the technological skills and entrepreneurial desires the state had cultivated in its children were rechanneled into viruses and the first software enterprises of democratic Bulgaria.  Hackers like Dark Avenger were thus the most notorious product of a failed political and cultural experiment with a long afterlife. The death of the party’s dream pushed much of the 1980s generation into an ideology that was fiercely opposed to socialism, but still wildly utopian. Many of these kids eventually emigrated to Silicon Valley and other hubs in the global information economy, bringing with them a strongly capitalist version of the communist’s dream: liberation of the human spirit through technology."}
{"prompt":"Tinker and Spy Karl Marx once quipped that under communism man would be a fisherman in the morning and an artist in the afternoon. By the 1960s, the Bulgarian Communist Party believed that automation had brought Marx’s vision to the cusp of realization. Thousands of engineers were trained in the country’s universities, and cybernetics became a watchword for the party’s economic programs. Computers would streamline information flows, provide objective information on the economy, and allow planners in Sofia to accurately predict the future. The Politburo trumpeted that “science would be a productive force.” Just a generation before, that idea of Bulgaria’s future had seemed unthinkable. Back in 1944, when the party assumed power as Stalin’s Red Army rolled over the Danube, this small Balkan state was largely an agricultural producer. In the nascent field of international development, Bulgaria was considered an example of the region’s “trap,” which could only be escaped through large-scale investment. That is precisely what the Soviets brought, in the guise of breakneck Stalinist industrialization. Throughout the 1950s, the country assumed the Soviet economic model: central planning, smokestack industries, and a growing industrial proletariat squeezed into the cities.  By the 1960s, however, Bulgaria’s extensive growth period was tapering off, and the country was suffering a debt crisis. On the advice of Bulgarian engineers trained in western Europe, the party turned to electronics as the good of the future. As the party’s leader, Todor Zhivkov, put it, “We couldn’t industrialize with tomatoes and eggs.” Heavy state investment was combined with Japanese licensing and a prodigious espionage program to create the Bulgarian computer industry. By the 1970s, dozens of Bulgarian factories and institutes were churning out CPUs, mini-computers, and peripherals, such as ES-1020 mainframes and IZOT hard drives. Most of this technology was licensed or reverse-engineered after the Bulgarian intelligence services had procured it in the West; from its inception, the nation’s hardware industry was based on spying and tinkering, rather than true domestic innovation. The golden goose was the hard disk, which Bulgaria almost monopolized in the Eastern Bloc.","completion":"The 1980s were marked by continual heavy investment in robotics and personal computing, bringing the automation age into the office and onto the factory floor. Imperfect as it was, Bulgarian automation did take hold to some extent—around 200,000 workers in a country of eight million worked in the electronics sector, the second largest industrial workforce in the country. Its IBM 360/370-copies, Winchester hard drives, and an Apple II clone known as the Pravetz, found their way into socialist enterprises throughout the Global South. Bulgarian computers flew on the Soviet space station Mir, were used for nuclear research in India, and equipped Mozambique’s nascent statistical authority. Though often slowly, and in a piecemeal fashion, automation entered car production processes and cement factories, monitored milk levels in collective farms, and increasingly suffused social and government services.  Unfortunately, Bulgarian products often fared badly on the global capitalist market due to their sometimes shoddy quality. Rather than looking at its economic principles such as central planning as a potential source of the problem, the party focused on the “subjective factor.” In their view, it was the Bulgarian worker rather than the system that was to blame—shirking responsibilities, pilfering the petty change, and sleeping on the job. Only the computer and robot would solve this problem, by eliminating the human strategies of survival in the shortage economy of socialism, where personal links and the grey market were key to procuring scarce goods. These were the peculiar conditions within which the next, truly computerized generation, would have to grow up."}
{"prompt":"The Man-Machine-Environment The organization that prepared most Bulgarian children to be the model communists of the future was the Dimitrov Communist Youth Union (DKMS). In 1984, the DKMS started publishing Computer for You, a monthly magazine for the new generation. The magazine’s first editorial told these kids that “we will aim to offer you knowledge, experience and creativity from the interesting world of ‘her majesty’ ELECTRONISATION.”  Her majesty was indeed marching through children’s lives. In 1979, the party had directed twenty-seven schools across the country to implement experiments in computer education. But it was the personal computing revolution that opened the Bulgarian school to electronics. In 1983, the Sofia High School of Electronics received its first fully equipped classroom of eighteen Bulgarian PCs, and informatics became part of the school curriculum.  Within a year, there were over 300 PCs in Bulgarian schools, and the numbers continued growing. Education software was used in language training, mathematics, and science lessons, alongside BASIC classes. Eleventh grade was reconstructed to include units such as “an introduction to cybernetics” and “production automation.” Computer for You contained architects’ plans for new classrooms that treated students like cyborgs—“integration into the school environment is effective only if it ensures optimal functioning of the Man-Machine-Environment system,” a cybernetics engineer told the magazine.  If the economy was going to be composed of man-machine systems, schools would be, too. New educational methods were developed under the auspices of mathematician Blagovest Sendov, who had participated in the creation of Vitosha, the first Bulgarian computer, in the early 1960s. In an article for the magazine, Sendov called the computer “a fantastical object” and deemed it the new age’s defining metaphor. Bulgarian socialism, he said, would be defined by the “mind to be molded—on the computer model.” The new society was one of informational glut, and kids had to learn to “continue learning” throughout life—to sift through information, synthesize it, and see the connections between different areas of human endeavor. Learning the language of computers—what Sendov called “the second literacy”—was to become the crux of every school’s curriculum.","completion":"Children were also enticed into the new dream through a network of computer clubs operated by the DKMS. The first appeared in 1984 in the capital of Sofia; by 1987, there were over 530 of them throughout the country, from the largest cities to many villages. They contained over 4,000 PCs, as well as small, domestically produced robots, which students could program to perform various tasks, such as moving small loads between two tables. Annual nationwide “Informatics Olympiads” were held throughout the country, and Bulgarian computer clubs also popped up in the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, Ethiopia, and Vietnam. The DKMS estimated that over 600,000 students and young workers used the computer clubs every year."}
{"prompt":"By 1985, the first student-run enterprise in computing was already helping to solve the country’s economic problems. In the course of just a few months, Avantgarde, a collective of high school and university students from Sofia and the city of Plovdiv, had created sixty games and twenty educational programs for classrooms and the computer club network. They also cooperated with state factories, creating specialized data processing packages for the economy: graphic editors for design studios, electronic databases for enterprise personnel record-keeping, troubleshooting programs, and more. The young engineer that oversaw Avantgarde noted that, by 1986, there were software enterprises in many provincial cities, while over fifty economic entities in the state economy were interested in either ordering or co-developing software packages. In the typically staid language of the time, he saw all this as “linking more closely with the ideological preparation… of the young population, in the spirit of the realities that determine the technological transition of socialist Bulgaria into the 21st century.” And as Computer for You more rhapsodically put it, “The intellectual revolution is in the hands of today’s students.” Viral Load Ultimately, Marx’s vision of hunting in the morning and debating in the afternoon never arrived for socialist Bulgaria. Eastern Europe was swept up in the grand changes of 1989, and the Bulgarian Communist Party initiated a palace coup the day after the Berlin Wall fell, removing Todor Zhivkov from power and starting down the road to democratic elections. Yet the country’s intellectual revolution had nevertheless occurred: the cyborgification of Bulgarian youth had succeeded, on both a technical and a cultural level.","completion":"Two years before the fall of communism, in an effort to stave off the collapse of the economy, the party had begun introducing modest economic reforms. This included limited forms of private enterprise, and Bulgarian youth formed some of the country’s first legal private companies. Many children found it easy to make this transition to market capitalism—as Computer for You pointed out, young programmers in particular were already operating in the conditions of freedom that the state was now proclaiming. Much of the software being used by major firms had come out of those children’s brains. The state’s airline, Balkan Airways, used the Syntez program from Burgas-based software firm Busoft, where a tenth grader awed journalists by pulling up flight schedules and reservation systems in Bulgarian and English. Young developers had automated hotel reservation, office correspondence, and wage databases, and demonstrated their inventions at the Plovdiv international exposition in 1985, which was themed “the creations of young inventors.” As the Bulgarian economy faltered at the end of the decade, young Bulgarian programmers lost their job prospects along with much of their creative freedom. In this crisis was born the other face of socialist Bulgaria’s computer revolution—the virus. The first mention of “computer viruses” in Computer for You came in April 1988; in effect, the magazine let young programming enthusiasts know what a virus was, and that it could be copied, improved, and spread. Because most Bulgarian computers were shared by dozens of people in classrooms and computer clubs, it was easy to get hold of a virus and infect a machine inadvertently. Viruses also suited the logics of reverse-engineering and copying on which the Bulgarian computer economy was already running. Why not tinker with a digital pathogen and send it out into the world beyond Bulgaria? After all, you knew it would work virtually anywhere, because your Pravetz was compatible with an Apple! Starting in early 1989, computers as far away as the USA and Thailand were infected with Bulgarian viruses. Some were minor irritants, such as the “Yankee Doodle” virus, which simply played the eponymous melody on your computer. Other viruses were what Bulgaria’s first anti-virus expert, Vesselin Bontchev, called “technopathic,” with one causing over one million dollars in losses to an unidentified East Coast company."}
{"prompt":"During socialism, young people with hippie haircuts or punk fashion had often been persecuted by the Bulgarian police. But the regime’s software industry had nevertheless allowed and even encouraged self-expression, and this was reflected in the almost libertine spirit of Bulgaria’s virus culture. To gain access to the Virus eXchange, a dial-in bulletin board system set up by a university student in November 1988, you had to provide one new virus to a growing collection of over 300; the site proclaimed itself “a place for free exchange of viruses and a place where everything is permitted!” This ethos would shape the last socialist generation’s political commitments, too.","completion":"The Long Drive West In his powerful trilogy, The Information Age, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells argued that the USSR and the socialist world system failed in part because they never fully made the jump to a post-industrial, post-Fordist, and “informational” organization of the economy—based not on the rustbelt industries of manufacturing, but on the shiny offices of the flexible service sector. In Bulgaria, the economy continued to be dominated by smokestack enterprises and the nascent computer sector was expected to subsidize other, failing industries.  But the failure of the techno-socialist utopia which created Bulgaria’s first generation of coders and founders continues to inform the ideas of Bulgarian tech workers. Those who moved to tech companies in the West left the socialist elements of the party’s political project behind, but retained its techno-utopian ideals. That utopianism found a new ideological home in the libertarian culture of Silicon Valley. Momchil Kyurkchiev, the founder of the Silicon Valley firm Leanplum, which makes a mobile marketing platform, recently told a Bulgarian television station that he sees important similarities between the US today and his childhood in early 1990s Bulgaria: if you don’t struggle, you don’t succeed. It is daring entrepreneurship, he added, that separates the winners from the losers. Indeed, the “drive West” of Bulgarian computer programmers, as the onetime scientific secretary of the Institute of Technical Cybernetics in Sofia called it when I interviewed him, has not produced many critiques of the West. If anything, it seems that Bulgarians’ professional success in Silicon Valley has confirmed many in the belief that they had the right acumen, but were born into the wrong social system."}
{"prompt":"Today, Bulgaria has among the European Union’s poorest economies, but the country nevertheless boasts a robust software industry. The post-1989 generations continue to flock to the sector as a guarantor of relatively high wages. According to Eurostat, the European Union’s directorate for statistical information, in 2018 Bulgaria was third in the EU in terms of information and communication technology’s share of gross domestic product. There has even been one high-profile, home-grown software success story: in 2014, the Sofia-based firm Telerik, which creates tools for web development, was sold to a US company in a deal worth $262 million. Svetozar Georgiev, one of the company’s four founders, recalled in an interview with ZDNet that he first taught himself to program on a Pravetz-16 that his father brought home in the late 1980s.  Notably, many of the programmers who stayed in Bulgaria and now work in its software sector vote for center-right parties that promise fewer social services and more competition in all spheres of governance and economic life. According to these parties, the solutions to the country’s major problems—widespread corruption and a bloated bureaucracy that drive Bulgaria to the bottom of every index, from economic growth to media freedom—are technological. Bozhidar Bozhanov, one of the chief candidates for Democratic Bulgaria, a centrist political alliance, is an IT entrepreneur who posits that only forms of electronic governance and digital tools of citizen-state interaction can lessen the bureaucracy, corruption, and opaqueness of Bulgarian politics. Their “six month accelerated program of digitalization” calls for everything from electronic signatures for all citizens and electronic registers of all businesses that have received Covid relief funds, to telemedicine, distance learning, and “electronic justice” which aims to lessen the obstacles to registering complaints and dealing with the opaque judiciary. Anything that stands in the way of this “electronic governance” is to be removed, branded a holdover from the bygone era of yesteryear. In their view, Bulgarian democracy needs transparency, and only electronic tools are able to produce it. This call holds at its heart the party’s aim to downsize the state administration, laying off state employees who much of the public see as corrupt and inefficient. Digitalization’s march can only be achieved through human unemployment.","completion":"By the same token, the health of the IT sector is the prism through which parties’ policies are being judged. The country’s effectively regressive flat tax on income and profits, introduced in the late 2000s, is considered one of the pillars of the current IT renaissance. As the journalist Daniel Vasilev put it before the country’s March 2021 elections, any call for progressive taxation would be “deadly,” because it would cause investors, especially those in the computer sector, to flee Bulgaria. State investment in the sector is also discouraged by those on the center-right; the only thing the state should do, in their view, is remove regulations facing entrepreneurs. The labor code must also be reformed, they claim, because it is currently preventing a flexible market, by which they really mean the introduction of zero-hour contracts and precarious gig work.  Of course, the belief that all the problems of a corrupt Bulgaria can be solved through the perfect tools is not that different to the Bulgarian Communist Party’s old dream that central planning through electronic brains would create communism. In both cases, the state is to be stripped back to a minimum. Perhaps today’s technological and political entrepreneurs, like their socialist predecessors, may find out that a new generation raised in conditions of financial crashes, pandemics, and political deadlock may draw different ideological conclusions to what the new status quo intends."}
{"prompt":"@gucaslelfond“I’m so confused because there is this girl who is really pretty and nice and such a genuine person and I want to be friends with her but I’m really nervous?” narrates a freckled, teenaged-looking girl. “Weird. It’s almost like I like her but I’m not gay, so I don’t get it.” She shows the pages of an old notebook as a caption completes the joke: “Reading my ‘straight’ diary from middle school LMAO.”I’d spent a few weeks on TikTok by this point, consistently amazed by how quickly the app seemed to sense my taste. We know little about how TikTok’s algorithm works. A cagey corporate blog post titled “How TikTok recommends videos #ForYou” mostly just explains that it watches the way you engage and gradually tailors the stream of videos to your interests. My feed had already begun to fill with “queer” content—music from queer artists, videos of queer couples, and the like—but nothing explicitly about identity. This video took me by surprise. By this point, I had a vague notion that I was attracted to men, but had only shared this with a few close friends. I still felt confused and ashamed. I’d just begun to think about how my potential queerness may have played into previous friendships—when the video showed up in my feed, I surged with a sense of uncanny recognition. Suddenly, TikTok seemed like a portal, a place where I could more firmly figure out who I was. At the same time, I felt deeply uneasy. As videos about queerness became more common on my feed, I started to feel uncomfortably exposed: How could TikTok know I was bisexual before I fully knew it myself?  For decades, queer people in the United States have been subjected to surveillance. In 1950, Congress issued a report titled “Employment of Homosexuals and Other Sex Perverts in Government” after covertly investigating federal employees’ sexual orientation. The report declared homosexuality a mental illness and homosexuals a national security risk; employees suspected to be gay were immediately terminated. The practice was common among private employers, too. Although some states eventually had statutes prohibiting employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, it wasn’t federally outlawed until June 2020.","completion":"Of course, the monitoring also extended to social spaces. Throughout the ’60s, police raids were a frequent ritual of the queer New York nightlife scene. Police officers regularly lined up gender-nonconforming folks and sent those who failed to wear the mandated three pieces of “gender appropriate clothing” to jail. And trans people are still subjected to such scrutiny on a daily basis—in the bathroom, on the playing field, at TSA.  In this environment, queer people have long worked to craft subtle ways of controlling their own visibility, signaling queerness to each other while remaining undercover to the mainstream. You can see it in customs like the “hanky code” of the ’70s, by which gay men used a system of colored bandanas to covertly flag their sexual preferences. By the ’80s, some of those symbols—the rainbow flag, the pink triangle, the lowercase lambda—became well-known markers of the rising gay liberation movement. Meanwhile, queer people were still seeking intimacy in out-of-view venues—bars, parks, piers. They found community after dark in liminal urban spaces, communicating through lingering eye contact, subtle head nods, the slight twitch of a knowing smile.  Once the digital age arrived, internet anonymity supplanted the cover of night. Sites like Tumblr and Reddit acted as queer watering holes, as teens across the world poured themselves into blog posts and suggestive GIFs that allowed them to safely bare their souls and build community across distance. In these instances, the platforms were just that—platforms, on which queer people could, using re-blogs and upvotes, determine what mattered to them."}
{"prompt":"Now, that brings us to TikTok, perhaps our generation’s closest analogue to those earlier platforms and venues. We imagine, however, that something is missing. We’re still finding community and expressing ourselves through shared signals, and (through monitored engagement) by choosing what becomes popular. But ultimately, on TikTok, it’s the algorithm that decides what gets seen and what doesn’t—when we’re visible, and to whom. The practice of coding once intended to maintain discretion has been flipped on its head, incorporated into a system of self-submitted surveillance by an enigmatic AI. To quote writer Eugene Wei, “When you gaze into TikTok, TikTok gazes into you.” @anabellejohnstonI realized I was queer when I kissed a girl at tennis camp at the age of thirteen. (Or rather, when she kissed me and I liked it.) Although I felt different than I did seven seconds before, no one around me could tell that I had changed. In true Gen-Z fashion, I turned to the internet to learn what queer people looked like and how they went about finding each other. After concluding a pixie-cut would be the surest way to subtly scream “I’m gay,” I spent most of the following years searching for other queer people. I floated through GSA, cuffed my jeans, and eventually “came out” to avoid the constant guessing game of interpreting furtive glances. When I downloaded TikTok during my freshman year of college, the algorithm quickly clocked me. The steady stream of videos about thrifted clothing, cottagecore, and Phoebe Bridgers—along with explicit hashtags such as #wlw (women loving women) and #bisexual—loudly let me know: you’re on “gay TikTok.” But could I call this a “queer community?” The idea of queerness that I stumbled upon was completely disembodied; divorced, even, from sexual identity. It had been optimized—boiled down to a specific sartorial aesthetic, hashtag, and list of micro identity labels—all in the name of being maximally legible to a machine learning algorithm. In some ways, I felt seen. But not entirely. While “gay TikTok” served me hashtags like #FemmeBoyFriday—which compiles videos of presumably straight boys dressing up in skirts and dresses for views and cultural caché—what was missing was the forlorn glances, sweaty palms, awkward pauses, terrible first kisses; the stumbling inherent to self-discovery. Meanwhile, a popular meme illustrates the other perspective: “When she start rubbin’ on your thighs but you only gay on TikTok.”","completion":"We will never intimately know a pre-internet queerness. By the time we reached adolescence, Tumblr was already in decline. While we recognize and appreciate the sacrifices made by previous generations that have given us the freedom to be visibly queer, it’s difficult not to romanticize prior forms of queer community, be they in physical or cyberspace. The way those spaces preserved the agency of queer people feels particularly significant.  Ultimately, TikTok’s algorithm has one goal: to hold our attention long enough to serve us more ads. The organic formation of “gay TikTok”—and all the content niches—likely serve those same business goals. There’s agency in finding community and meaning in each other’s content, as queer people have been doing with commercial media for decades. Still, there’s an unsettling imbalance of power: while TikTok learns things about us that we may not even share with close friends, its own inner workings are inscrutable. The app can see us, but we can’t see it back.  This opacity has already proved concerning. In 2019, an investigation by German publication Netzpolitik found that, in certain countries, TikTok had established a list of “special users” (queer, disabled, and fat people) whose videos were regarded as a “bullying risk” by default and capped in their reach, regardless of content. TikTok claims the list has since been retired. Still, the app’s algorithm and affordances automate and shape the ongoing co-production of what it means—and how it looks—to be queer in ways we can’t fully control or discern.  For many young people, TikTok serves as more than an app; often, it’s a site of self-discovery. And the pressure to fit into a prescribed image of queerness can easily lead you astray. But our forebears remind us that queerness is about self-definition and the freedom to continually redefine. In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José Esteban Muñoz warns against the way that pop culture representations of queerness ossify it, writing, “What we will really know of queerness, does not yet exist.” In other words, while the algorithm may be able to determine what we like, we can’t let it define who we are or predict who we will become."}
{"prompt":"A faceless, soft doll in red or blue; a wooden rattle; a mirror; kinetic sand; a rainbow silk scarf. For many families, this particular genre of children’s toy—often sold on Etsy, via targeted ads, or through subscription kits—may arrive benignly and incidentally into a child’s repertoire of plastic dolls, metal trucks, and rubber balls. But for other parents and their families, they are part of a larger system: an elaborate pedagogy meant to steer every aspect of a child’s life—including diet, environment, and even play. In these philosophies—popularized by “alternative” schools such as Montessori, Reggio Emilia, and Waldorf—such whimsical recreation is also a tool of parental control prescribed to ward off an ultimate threat: technology.  Today, “alternative” schools, which focus on “hands-on” learning and spiritual development, are largely considered niche options reserved for the very wealthy—although their reach quietly extends far beyond Silicon Valley and Park Slope. In pop culture, they may most commonly be recognized as the tech-free schools where eBay’s CTO and other Valley executives send their kids, supposedly driven by esoteric knowledge about the threat of the products their companies make. (Knowledge which, as scholar Morgan Ames has pointed out, doesn’t actually exist.) It’s more likely that these parents are anxious over a question faced by most parents today: What exactly does technology do to our children, and how do we protect them from it?  Parents’ individual answers to that question fall on a spectrum. Some, in the words of child icon Elsa, simply “let it go,” allowing tech to be a much-needed parenting aid. Others champion ameliorating measures, from limiting screen time, to delaying cell phone ownership, to using parental controls on the TV. But for a subset of parents, like many of those who employ “alternative” schooling, the answer is tech refusal—banishing it altogether. And where this kind of adamancy is present, other extreme politics often lurk just out of view. Such is the case with Waldorf and its underlying philosophy, a longer history of which reveals ideological ties to fascistic thought and racial hierarchies.","completion":"Although it represents one extreme, the roots of this niche pedagogy can help us understand the whole spectrum of anxiety when it comes to technology and parenting. Particularly, its history makes clear how the quietly interlocking panics surrounding the technologies of screens and vaccines connect to dangerous notions of purity; ideas that—just as wooden toys tend to appear in ordinary homes—have often made their way into the mainstream, mostly unnoticed.  Stagnant Souls In 1919—against the backdrop of the Spanish Flu, countless political uprisings, and the aftermath of World War I—Rudolf Steiner founded the first Waldorf School, located in Stuttgart, Germany. Having grown up as the son of a railway worker, Steiner’s childhood had been shaped by the violent rise of modernity, and he was determined to save future children from the same fate. Intended as a school for the children of the workers at the Waldorf-Astoria cigarette factory, two-thirds of the students were children of factory workers; the last third were children of Steiner followers."}
{"prompt":"By that time, Steiner had gained prominence as the charismatic leader of an occultist movement he called “Anthroposophy,” underpinned by an original, esoteric philosophy replete with a comprehensive theory of reincarnation, spirit worlds, and higher realms. Waldorf was Steiner’s translation of Anthroposophy into pedagogy—down to the curricula and classroom design. It was, in essence, a pedagogical laboratory for an alternative spiritual life, one imagined as free from modernity while tied intimately to its labors and afflictions.  The Steiner model, or “Waldorf schooling” as it became more commonly known, in part preserved traditional education in the present to safeguard it for the future; students spent time outdoors to learn from nature and worked on handicrafts. But it also used approaches that were archaic even for the time: children were categorized into supposedly preordained temperaments based on the typology of humors (phlegmatic, melancholic, sanguine, choleric) that had fallen out of the medical canon centuries prior.  A system of guided movement called “Eurythmy” also played a large role in this counter-training, not just as physical education, but as medico-spiritual intervention to care palliatively for the kids. In that first year of the school, students likely would have practiced a specific pattern from Steiner’s growing repertoire, which he taught widely to address the pandemic that raged outside: “The Immune Sequence.” By coordinating sound, dance, and intention, its practitioner was thought to become their best, truest self, and therefore physically immune.","completion":"At the time, medical technologies and interventions, especially vaccines, were rapidly advancing. But Steiner believed that they made one “lose an urge for a spiritual life.” He argued that illness was not just the result of pathogenetic spread or due to microorganisms. There was an extra-material reason for illness to present in its host: karma. According to Steiner, not all souls were created equal. As with the temperaments of children, the wider outcomes of this life are already written by the actions in previous incarnations, which corresponded to the supposed “evolution”—or “devolution”—of race.  Put bluntly, Steiner saw the white race as the race of the future—the highest form of being, the endpoint of reincarnation, and therefore the most naturally immune. Meanwhile, melanin showed the susceptibility, karmic impurity, and “stagnation” of a soul. These stagnated souls were, for Steiner, one way illness spread—to be faulted not just for their own static sickness, but that of society. The problem posed an endless feedback loop: society ruins the soul and ruined souls, in turn, degrade society. Care of the individual soul—via the body and the mind—was to be the cure, the solve, the salvation.  Additional schools followed in Germany, The Netherlands, and England. Then, in 1928, the first Rudolph Steiner school opened in New York City as a private school, which still operates today. Of course, Steiner’s set of beliefs made Anthroposophy ripe for uptake in the emerging Nazi Party. Although the Nazis temporarily closed nearly all Waldorf schools in their control, many of Steiner’s followers—including his widow—had close ties to the Party, where the occultist-karmic philosophy was taken up, both strategically and in deeper belief: both systems of thought worked to bring the world into “harmony” and achieve “regeneration.”  Today, the connections (and disconnections) between Nazism, fascism, and this spiritual science are somewhat of an academic debate. According to the historical scholarship of Peter Staudenmaier, much of Steiner’s works and literatures were “cleaned up” to delete mentions of race when translated into English. That’s mostly how the ideas are implemented today: While every Waldorf school differs slightly, Steiner’s initial approach remains largely intact—from typologies, to daily Eurythmy, to anti-vax sentiment—with mentions of race simply excluded. But Steiner’s theories of illness, race, and technology all come from the same well, no matter how obscured in or by the present. His notion of the ideal child endures: The perfect kid is one who is pure."}
{"prompt":"Fantasies of Purity And purity, it turns out, can be marketed and purchased. There are now roughly 125 Waldorf schools nationwide and more than 3,000 internationally, according to one Waldorf executive. Where Waldorf exists as an alternative, parents who see themselves as progressive—even Left—have sought it out, some in spite of larger philosophical differences or outright disbelief. “Private schools almost by definition have to craft stories that appeal to privileged strivers anxious about their children’s futures,” Morgan Ames wrote of Waldorf schools in 2019 for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Some of these stories recount how their graduates’ creative brilliance was spawned in their school’s tech-free environment. Related ones ply anti-contamination themes, and fetishize the purity of childhood.” These stories frame technology as a constant threat, presenting Waldorf schools as bubbles of safety, oases within the desert of the modern.  Waldorf is not alone in the pursuit of a tech-free environment. There have been many movements and philosophies that attempt to achieve purity by cutting off access to technology, specifically media, and they don’t all bend towards fascism or even apoliticality. Tech refusal looks quite different in the context of utopian projects like the back-to-the-land movement of the ’60s and other forms of communal care focused on raising children in nature, including the MOVE Family and the international “unschooling movement” of the ’70s. In the hands of the Left, the rejection of technology can be a radical act of carving out a space of resistance within capitalism and systems of repression to imagine a deeper liberation. But, following Danya Glabau in Real Life, “As a metaphor, purity easily translates from necessary practices to exclusionary principles.” Where the aspiration of purity becomes dangerous is when principles entail protecting one’s individual child at the expense of a child next door.","completion":"Steiner’s adherents, whether they are “Waldorf families” or in the Anthroposophical movement, or both, subscribe to a sense of predestined exceptionalism that Laura Portwood-Stacer argues is frequently behind the rejection of media and technology—including vaccines. Such principles can lead believers and their fellow travelers to reject “herd mentality” and compromise herd immunity in the process. While Waldorf philosophy aims to protect new life from various social ills, it has become a literal incubator of viruses that, like its greater ethos, organically seep beyond its walls—whether in the case of a Waldorf school at the epicenter of a measles outbreak in New York or now, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Estimates vary, but some suggest 60 percent of Waldorf children are unvaccinated against infectious illness for which there are routine childhood vaccines. Where states grant exceptions for religious or philosophical reasons, rates of refusal are even higher.  The endurance of this resistance is disquieting precisely because of the ways that this notion of purity feeds into unbridled exceptionalism—especially as it takes new, viral forms in our present. Today, 15 to 20 percent of Americans believe in some form of the QAnon conspiracy—another system of belief that, like Anthroposophy, has ties to fascism and the occult—while vaccine rejectors claim that taking the shot is antagonistic to bodily autonomy, and even argue in some cases that it causes sterilization. In turn, some vaccine rejectors are referring to their eggs or sperm as “vaccine free”—triumphantly stating that they are the only key to any possible reproductive future precisely because their bodies stayed pure of medical technology. These ideologies reject the basic, collective reality of modernity and late stage capitalism, as if by doing so they might manifest a different future, one that furthers the comforting—and ultimately racist—fantasy of purity.  It makes sense that Steiner’s philosophies are frequently read as anti-modern. But perhaps this is the other side of modernity. To buy into these teachings is to search for alternative spaces within techno-culture, turning the school into a pastoral enclave that can be carried home with children in the form of rules for families and domestic space. In cherry-picking Steiner’s philosophy to exclude these other insidious forms of purity ideology, Waldorf schools have, in the words of scholar Wendy Chun, “updated to remain the same.”"}
{"prompt":"During our ongoing pandemic, at a Waldorf School in Upstate New York, middle schoolers and high schoolers continued to meet regularly outdoors to practice Eurythmy. According to a blog post by the school, they decided to focus on one pattern of movement to address this latest health crisis: “The Immune Sequence.” 1/ In June 1945, a committee chaired by the physicist James Franck raised the alarm about the Manhattan Project’s development of nuclear weapons. The document they produced, known as the Franck Report, urged President Truman not to use the atomic bomb against Japan. Instead, Truman should demonstrate the bomb’s destructive power by dropping it on a desert or a barren island—or he should try to keep the bomb’s existence secret for as long as possible. Otherwise, the scientists warned, a global nuclear arms race would ensue, with catastrophic consequences for the planet.","completion":"The authors of the Franck Report had worked on the Manhattan Project. But rather than siphon the scientific knowledge they had accrued in developing nuclear weapons out of the lab and into the commons in order to build a mass movement, they waited until the final hour to pen a letter, addressed to a government that would never heed their call. The scientists understood the stakes of nuclear weapons better than anyone. But in making a moral appeal to the American empire, they demonstrated a profound misunderstanding of the social and political context the technology was developed in service of. Two months after they wrote the report, atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki."}
{"prompt":"I was reminded of those physicists in December 2020, in the wake of Google’s high-profile termination of AI ethics scholar Timnit Gebru. Her firing was the final step in management’s systematic silencing of her scholarship, which came to a head over a paper she coauthored called “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” The paper offers a damning critique of the energy demands and ecological costs of the sorts of large language models that are core to Google’s business, as well as how those models reproduce white supremacy—and codify dominant languages as default while expediting the erasure of marginalized languages. Thousands of Google workers, as well as supporters throughout academia, industry, and civil society, rapidly mobilized in defense of Gebru, writing an open letter to Google executives that demanded both her reinstatement and an apology for the egregious treatment she received.  Like the Franck Report before it, however, this open letter represented a grave misunderstanding of the politics of AI and was in no way commensurate with the threat we face. The technologies being developed at companies like Google present major stakes for all of humanity, just as the invention of nuclear weapons did in the previous century. They are strengthening concentrations of power, deepening existing hierarchies, and accelerating the ecological crisis. More specifically, big tech corporations are extracting labor, ideas, and branding from Black people, and then disposing of them with impunity—whether it’s scholars like Gebru or Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama organizing against plantation conditions.  Racial capitalism’s roadmap for innovation is predicated on profound extraction. AI is central to this process. The next flashpoint over AI is inevitable—but our failure to respond adequately is not. Will we continue to write letters appealing to the conscience of corporations or the state? Or will we build a mass movement? As Audre Lorde said, we cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools. We cannot stop Google from being evil by uncritically relying on the G Suite tools it developed. We cannot uncritically champion the most popular among us, as if social capital will resolve the colonial entanglements reproduced in much of what passes for research in the field of technology studies. An atlas ain’t no Green Book, and we cannot afford to pretend otherwise. What we can do is to build a better analysis of the context of racial capitalism in which extractive technologies are developed. We can share knowledge about the ways in which such technologies can be refused or have their harms mitigated. We can forge solidarities among workers, tenants, and technologists to help them organize for different futures. We can light alternate beacons.","completion":"2/ Dismantling racial capitalism and displacing the carceral systems on which it relies requires an understanding of how technology produces “new modes of state surveillance and control,” Dorothy Roberts argues. Part of the challenge is that these new geographies of policing, regulation, and management are largely invisible. We experience the immediacy of our Amazon package being delivered without seeing the exploitative labor conditions decreasing the distance between order and arrival. This is not a function of insufficient effort—it’s an indication of how successful big tech corporations have been in concealing the sources of their power. In his essay in this issue, Julian Posada provides a detailed account of Venezeulans performing the tedious, low-paid labor of data labeling on which AI depends—labor that is hidden beneath Silicon Valley’s minimalist user interfaces and promises of automation. The circuits of racialized capital link us ever more closely together even as the pandemic has deepened our sense of alienation.  Understanding how tech has reorganized labor, and developing a strategy to break free, is not easy. It cannot be done with the narrow technical training that produces computer science PhDs—the recent appending of ethics courses notwithstanding. It requires an interdisciplinary analysis in partnership with impacted people who are on the forefront of digital experimentation. There is no way around doing this work."}
{"prompt":"In theory, Black study is the intellectual method and tradition that is best positioned to lead such an analysis. As SA Smythe clarifies in these pages, Black study does not mean Black Studies™ —“a hegemonic and ethnonationalist interdisciplinary framework that was heavily funded by the government” during its founding in the 1960s. Instead, drawing on the work of Robin D. G. Kelley, Smythe defines Black study as “the deeply invested commitment to Black people, Black life, Black possibility, and freedom dreaming.”  The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists was founded by former Manhattan Project scientists in 1945 after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Its iconic doomsday clock is currently set at one hundred seconds to midnight. This reflects the risk posed to the world from nuclear weapons, climate change, and, notably, “disruptive technologies.” Black study would have us trouble this notion of catastrophe as a singular event or a state of exception. As Smythe explains, exclamations of “How is this still happening and it’s 2021?” show that we’ve been bamboozled and hoodwinked into thinking time has marched linearly forward towards modernity. Smythe insists that the reason we find ourselves in what scholar Bedour Alagraa calls “the changing same” is that we are in fact still in 1492, circling the drain of the ongoing catastrophe initiated by white contact with the “new world.” But this is not cause for despair—it’s an opportunity to ask better questions, like the one posed by Katherine McKittrick in “Mathematics Black Life”: “What if we... begin to count it all out differently?” This desperately needed intervention is constrained by the fragmented character of knowledge production. Within computer science and information studies, race is treated primarily as a social consequence of technology rather than constitutive of technology. In the six years since Simone Browne published Dark Matters, a seminal work tracing the links from the proto-biometrics of the Middle Passage to the present-day use of facial-recognition technology, important scholarship has emerged—including from Gebru, Ruha Benjamin, and Safiya Noble—but not at the urgency and scale with which new technologies are violently renegotiating the social contract. And although Black folks have had no choice but to survive the tools and techniques of social control, technology with a capital T has not been a central object of Black study. Similarly, abolitionist organizers have rightly disavowed technical solutions to the prison-industrial complex as reformist reforms, but have not often recognized how central technology is to intensifying the carceral state.","completion":"3/ What does it mean to Get Out! in the twenty-first century? How do we build fugitive technologies? This special issue of Logic does not seek to provide a totalizing narrative or singular solution. Rather, our goal is to “call in” thinkers and artists from different disciplines—for example, Black studies scholars who are engaged with notions of catastrophe but whose insights have not been yet been taken up by people investigating how technology produces catastrophe, or integrated into the resistance strategies of communities being harmed by new forms of digital experimentation. (The approach of this issue is many times over indebted to Bedour Alagraa’s thinking on “the interminable catastrophe.”) Similarly, how can computer scientists and engineers more effectively communicate to the public not just about the harmful effects of technology but about how these systems actually work and what interventions on the level of software or hardware offer a more liberatory future?  We take the stakes we’re facing seriously while leaving room for our futures to not be overdetermined by white supremacy. As André Brock, Jr. discusses in these pages, our approach to technology does not need to be one of abjectness. “I’m not saying, ‘Oh, I’m on the other side of the digital divide and I’m trying to cross that bridge,’” says Brock. “No, I peeped that bridge and it doesn’t take me anywhere that’s really necessary for me to go.” While we may not offer one path forward, we hope to get in the way of techno-solutionism and corporate-funded initiatives that absorb the most radical elements of the discourse without actually supporting people to go do the most radical thing. Our hope for this issue is that it will be what Seeta Peña Gangadharan, coorganizer of Our Data Bodies, calls “a body of work that cannot be ignored.” I am grateful to the Logic team for letting me hijack their operation, to give us some space where we be imagining, even as the work punctures the myth embedded in the magazine’s name. We offer no singular way of knowing, no hope for messianic deliverance. We be needing logics. This issue is an outlet in which we can explore these logics and meaningfully argue with each other. In a recent interview, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor lamented the fact that “debates that exist in the left have no space to be deliberated upon. People get on social media to either ignore or insult each other’s political ideas and opinions,” she continued, “but I’m saying if we want to be impactful in building a mass movement, to shape and direct politics in this country, then something radically different needs to happen.”"}
{"prompt":"In this issue you’ll find Marxists, Wynterians, Black speculative fiction, poetry written inside a cage, a graphic story about internet shutdowns in Kashmir, abolitionists, and the unaffiliated. In this issue you’ll find many beacons because, like Neta Bomani’s tween zine insists, we need to move beyond The Way. As guest editor, I chose to curate love letters over a manifesto—because I know plans and leaders get captured or beheaded, but we can nourish an otherwise set of relations to each other while we strategize on getting free.  Postscript by Ben Tarnoff One December morning in 2020, I DM’d Khadijah on Twitter. We’d never spoken before, but I’d just read a recent essay of hers, “On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics,” and loved it, and wanted her to contribute to Logic. She said she’d be in touch with some further thoughts.","completion":"A couple weeks later, she followed up by email. What she really wanted to do wasn’t write a piece, she said, but edit a whole issue: I’ve been thinking about concrete next steps to move beyond calling out the failure of the status quo to providing an alternate beacon for people who are looking for space to build and think critically, take risks and specifically room to think about currently under resourced domains ie tech/data policy in the global south, grassroots response beyond the right to refuse surveillance, bringing in agroecology, the core of Black studies (ie not just citations for bias but the epistemic and historical challenges being raised at the forefront of the field) etc."}
{"prompt":"The aspiration for the issue would be to create “alternate beacons”—that is, to present new ways of thinking about and living with technology, drawn in particular from Black thinkers and practitioners, with the hope of moving beyond critique (as much as we love critique) and toward imagining new worlds. It felt perfect for us. I brought the idea back to the Logic group, who shared my enthusiasm. Soon after, I connected Khadijah to our managing editor Alex Blasdel, and the two of them embarked on the long and labor-intensive task of making this issue.","completion":"Why did Logic decide to undertake this collaboration? I don’t presume to speak for the magazine as a whole—Logic is very much a collective venture, of which I am only one part—but I think it’s because Khadijah was giving us a way to evolve, to find new pathways for our project, now in its fifth year."}
{"prompt":"A lot has changed since we launched Logic in early 2017. One of our main motivations was our contempt for popular writing about technology. In the manifesto that led our first issue, we announced that “most tech writing is shallow and pointless.” In the intervening years, however, this statement has become less defensible. As the “techlash” has bloomed, the discourse has become immeasurably more sophisticated. There is now very good reporting about the industry and, with some exceptions, tech criticism as a whole has become less idiotic, more tethered to fact.","completion":"But not everything has changed. Despite the greater sense of clarity and concern, a lawyerly liberalism continues to dominate, and domesticate, the political conversation about tech. Some years back I attended a conference in which a fairly prominent tech policy person said that the best way to solve the various problems underlined by the techlash would be to put all of the “smartest people” from industry, government, and academia into one room and have them figure it out. All that was needed was the right constellation of experts, in other words."}
{"prompt":"So Logic still has work to do. The techlash has altered the terrain, but wherever there is power there is a court, and every court has its courtiers. The new common sense is much like the old; techno-utopianism may have fallen out of fashion, but technocracy of one kind or another is harder to eradicate. The techlash has served as a mass credentialing event for a new class of experts, as “AI ethics,” “responsible innovation,” and similar pursuits attract significant funding and visibility. Many of these experts do interesting work, and everyone needs to eat, but the overall arrangement in which they participate can’t help but reiterate the logic of technocracy.","completion":"What’s missing from this arrangement is the people whose lives are being reordered by technology—or, more precisely, by a particular set of practices as structured and mediated by technology. What’s missing is a view of technology from below, as it is encountered and experienced by living and breathing human beings. There are both epistemological and political stakes here. The feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock once argued that systems of domination can only be fully understood from the standpoint of those they dominate, an insight she drew from Marx (only proletarians can obtain a complete view of class society) and applied to gender (only women can obtain a complete view of patriarchy). We can extend her argument further, and say that today’s technological regimes are most accurately perceived from the standpoint of those they oppress, exploit, and exclude. And this perception is to be acquired not simply for its own sake, but rather in the service of a broader political project of liberation, as it was for Hartsock and Marx. To see technology from below is also to develop the knowledge needed to govern it from below. Every cook can govern, C. L. R James reminds us, and the internet would undoubtedly be a better place if it were governed by more cooks (and fewer lawyers)."}
{"prompt":"This is the spirit that animates the issue that Khadijah has curated. In these pages we see technology through the eyes of sex workers and click workers, of the incarcerated and the disabled. And while there is much injustice, there is also hope, creativity, and joy. There is the great imaginative power of the Black freedom struggle and the Black radical tradition. We are not led to any single set of conclusions and we never arrive at a final orthodoxy. Some circles on the left have long believed that orthodoxy is what makes revolutions. But revolutions are notoriously irregular affairs; their combustion derives from the diversity of their inputs, which interact in unpredictable ways. “The rise of a group of people is not a simultaneous shift of the whole mass,” W. E. B. Du Bois observed, “it is a continuous differentiation of individuals with inner strife and differences of opinion, so that individuals, groups and classes begin to appear seeking higher levels, groping for better ways, uniting with other likeminded bodies and movements.” This issue attempts to seek some of those higher levels and grope for some of those better ways, to do the right kinds of searching and struggle. Logic will do its best to keep lighting beacons in the years ahead.","completion":"There’s been an increasing recognition of how racial regimes are mediated by digital technologies, particularly through things like computational policing practices that target communities of color and automated hiring platforms that exacerbate employment discrimination. But so far, the discourse about “algorithmic bias” largely treats race as an aftermath of technology, as a downstream effect. Further, it treats race as a problem—race is the way you add up the bad things that technology does to people. Race is a way to measure harm.  Both premises need to be challenged. Racial regimes aren’t downstream of technology—they’re present from the very start. They centrally shape the design, development, and deployment of the computational systems that govern our lives. And the obsession with calculating race as a function of harmful impact institutionalizes Black people as objects of suffering without agency or political subjectivity that extends beyond advocating for social remedy.  To overcome the limitations of the algorithmic bias discourse, we need to ask a completely different set of questions about technology, drawing on the traditions of black thought and black freedom-dreaming. To help formulate these questions, and begin to sketch some possible answers, issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman talked with SA Smythe, an assistant professor in the Gender Studies and African American Studies departments at UCLA. Smythe is a poet, translator, and scholar of black European literary and cultural studies and Black trans poetics, and is deeply invested in the coalitional project of black life, black study, and relishing nonbinary experiences across the diaspora. Abdurahman talked to Smythe about abolition organizing on Turtle Island, statecraft as reproduced in humanitarian technologies, and orienting toward “otherwise possibility.” The joke I always make is that techno-capitalism puts people who have never taken the humanities in charge of humanity. In that vein, the driving motivation behind Beacons is thinking about how we “call in” Black studies and abolitionist organizers into this technology discourse. Even as I say that, I want to be careful to not reify technology as the property of white, cisgender male tech bros straight outta Silicon Valley because we are all already using, interacting, and modifying techniques and technologies all the time, right?"}
{"prompt":"This time that we are asymmetrically experiencing has been intense and overwhelming due to the convergence of so-called “crises,” which are of course interrelated. So, I’m really grateful to be taking up those questions in this format. I’ve felt insecure about how to jump in and have a conversation about “tech” even though it’s so pervasive and is foundational to much of our relationship to modern life/modernity. How do we think about technologies as various techniques, tools, or modalities for collective liberation or for black freedoms? How do we get humanists and humanities adjacent folks—especially people who engage in various black radical traditions and Black feminist practices—to think more urgently about Technology in the capital T sense? I’m not quite sure, but the invitation is key. Of course, as we’ve talked about this ongoing invitation, with scholars like Simone Browne, Katherine McKittrick, Safiya Noble, and Ruha Benjamin, plus many of the other folks in this issue who have been working against “algorithms of oppression,” data, and technologies of liberation through a Black feminist lens for some time—you’ve reminded me to answer and amplify this call.","completion":"I’m thinking about the movement and solidarity work that I joined in the wake of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and global Black rebellions in the summer of 2020. For the Cops Off Campus Coalition organizing both regionally and locally across Turtle Island, 95 percent of our convening, strategizing, and public campaigning was unthinkable without Zoom, Google Hangouts, or Skype, and apps like Cryptee, Google Docs, Canva, and Lucidchart, inviting one another to amplify our campaigns and build shared demands across different time zones to mobilize people and share resources. This was of course true for the Black Abolition Futures political education group and political organizing spaces in Europe that I was able to re-enter while physically in the US. It’s challenging, trying to think about what we need to imagine liberation tools and technologies beyond our current capacities, particularly when we’re in movement work or, like you, directly confronting these questions of technology on a day to day basis, and considering what otherwise can materially mean and how to bring that to bear in our present.  When we’re inundated with technologies perceived to be “our only hope” à la Star Wars, where that’s the last chance that we’ve got to get ourselves free; that’s where I think we need to take a second to pause and double down on an acknowledgment: that this is precisely the time where we must mobilize for something else beyond our current capacities. This is when I orient towards the replenishable resource of otherwise possibility, a framing I first came across in the work of Ashon Crawley. Anyone telling you that new technological expansion is our last chance, that there’s no other way, or that this is the easiest path if you want to do the work that you’ve set out to do, I think we all need to reflect and think about our intentions, aspirations, and who among us is really out of time. What options do we have access to or must create? Smaller Scales and The Digital Sea What stands out to me is the idea of thinkability. Mariame Kaba says this a lot in reference to abolition. You know, that organizers worked for a very, very long time. And you know, organizers, including incarcerated people and people who were formerly incarcerated, right? Because sometimes there’s a weird binary—the organizer becomes the one who is separate from incarcerated people. But they work to make the idea of abolition thinkable, something that people, in a decentralized way, practice in their own lives and in their own scholarship."}
{"prompt":"When we’re thinking about tech, the idea that you need to be a Black Girl who Codes or have mastered JavaScript and HTML in order to enter into the conversation is hegemonic. On top of that, the kind of digital environments you mentioned relying on in your organization work for Cops Off Campus are so default, that it is very hard to even think about what a different wave would look like.  Exactly this. And I’m thinking about scale—digital, corporeal, and geopolitical scale all entwined together. While holding the need for global political revolution and exchange, I wonder if we might make the scales smaller and have the kind of impact on the ground that might lead toward a shift in digital space. So to put it more concretely: What’s really great about certain kinds of mutual aid is that I can send money to someone right now in Senegal or in Tahiti. It’ll get there roughly at the same time. But I wonder what this means in terms of rapid gentrification and displacement and dispossession of Black, brown, and indigenous peoples. I’m wondering about the capacity for a digital that is the people’s right, belonging to the people on a smaller scale, and without western attachments to property.  What would that look like—if that’s even a useful way to start thinking about it—so that it’s not governed or even governable by a large scale, monolithic, usually evil enterprise? On a smaller scale, say you live in apartment 5B and you need a babysitter, one of your kids has an ear infection. You have to run out and go take care of them real quick. You can’t bring the other kids with you because that will be too hard to manage alone. Is someone available in the building right now to babysit? It would be cool to think from smaller scale mutual interdependence that abolitionists talk a lot about, that doesn’t look like TaskRabbit, that doesn’t feed into the gig economy which provides care as service for compensation independent of human, communal investment and accountability.  One instance that comes to mind is the Watch the Med Alarm Phone project, a self-organized hotline for refugees in distress in the Mediterranean Sea. For example, if you arrive at the Port of Tripoli in Libya and join a voyage attempting to cross the Mediterranean into Europe but the boat capsizes or something goes wrong, you could call the hotline which would then point rescue operations to your relative location and come to your aid.","completion":"On the one hand, this is a project on a relatively small scale, which is unfortunate in this case because it should be the work of governments whose borders are leading to catastrophe. As Harsha Walia says, the border is the crisis. But you know, government neglect is what it is. There are no real mechanisms then, digital or otherwise, that are consistent and hold the community of those rendered refugees or asylum seekers making that treacherous journey.  The ephemera of the large-scale digital space has made it such that, at the end of the task, of the act, there is nothing, you fall off of the cliff from support after the GoFundMe gets circulated. The lives are anonymized and lost in these spaces while we do the (to be clear, very necessary) work of redistributing wealth to the oppressed, away from the Global North, etc. So, I’m wondering what would happen if the digital realm (which feels to me really large and nebulous, like a sea in its own right) can come down to a smaller scale such that we can collectively navigate our way through. Or does that seem idealistic in a non-useful way, because someone will need to administer it and technology is not value neutral in terms of how it produces and exacerbates material asymmetry?  I’m just pausing to think, because I’m like, “both and neither.” Both in the sense that yes, I think that we do need to find better relationships to administer mutual aid or social support through digital infrastructures. I’m not a nihilist or saying, “Cash App is corrupt,” therefore die slow. I think that it is what it is and we have to help our people. I’ve also been in situations, in my own life, where I needed people to help me. I’m not going to be so dogmatic to the point that I’m saying, “Now you are complicit with capitalism because you have a wage and you’re going to send it to me on this commercial app.” But, I guess the “neither” part is recognizing how these apps are infrastructure and are controlling us as populations. I mean, it’s not so linear like that. I think about the algorithmic flagging of fraudulent transactions resulting in any money being sent to Palestinians on these platforms being suspended and frozen without recourse."}
{"prompt":"We are in a situation where we must have mutual aid. We must send money back home. We must send money to Texas when the state has failed to take care of people. But in that must, we’re relying on these apps or these infrastructures that were designed not in service of us. Not to produce that livability, right? So how do we think about whether there is something qualitatively new manifesting in these technologies? What is new about predictive policing? Before the prediction, policing was still bad, still needed to be abolished, right? Is it just automating that same practice or is something different happening? I think about Virginia Eubanks’ comparison between the 20th century brick-and-mortar poorhouse and the present day digital poorhouse that is using algorithms. She emphasizes how the former geographically co-located Eastern European immigrants and Black Americans together—which some argue laid the ground for the Poor People’s Movement—as compared to the algorithmic sorting of the digital poorhouse which preempts that kind of cross racial solidarity or physical proximity. I feel like the way political subjectivities are formed in relationship to a state’s (often concealed) control of people’s movement through space is a theme of your work on Blackness and migration. Are there connections that you’re making in thinking about these examples? That’s really helpful. I love examples since I really appreciate having something to hold on to. Your question about this distinction makes me think of Cedric Robinson’s concept of racial regimes—that which does not want to be revealed, but by the very nature of its revelation, speaks the truth about the mutability of racial representations as historically uncertain. This is why the system of racial capitalism and the flourishing of white supremacy is specifically one of the things that pretends it does not exist, that there is no hand there building on pre-existing cultural forms with new technologies that emerge to retrench those processes. In this way, “new” technology hides the original intent and how those aims differentially structure our realities.","completion":"Last month, when Facebook apps all went down—a possible distraction from the testimony of the company’s whistleblower Frances Haugen before the US Senate—I felt this regime acutely. I was trying to help support planning and get information about my grandfather’s funeral in Jamaica, and I couldn’t reach any of my relatives in the Caribbean and across the diaspora, who all use WhatsApp as the primary mode of communication. For a lot of my family, like millions across the Global South, staying in touch internationally is far too expensive over landlines, and VoIP services like WhatsApp have filled this need. During the temporary crash, I couldn’t figure out how to send money to them. I couldn’t figure out where they were physically so that I could then try to find out which cousin or which uncle or family friend or local pastor had a landline that I could attempt to reach. At that moment, I realized WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, was completely determining my ability to connect with my family, to grieve and support and organize my community in real time, with material consequences."}
{"prompt":"That’s just one personal example among millions, not even just in this particular incident, but consistently and recklessly when we think of, for example, Black trans sex workers being suppressed by the algorithms of most mainstream platforms. While OnlyFans began to ramp up this same suppression that Instagram did, taking down photos that have Cash App links on them, pop stars on the same apps, wearing similar amounts of clothing, are being promoted widely on all of our screens.","completion":"Fourteen Ninety-Two My impression is that black study hasn’t taken up technology as a primary site of analysis. Do you see an opportunity for scholars like yourself to intervene in the discourse of techno-capitalism and liberation?  Black studies folks who are not already invested in thinking through technology as an instrument of capitalism should get on board because, as I mentioned, we’re already thinking about things like racial regimes, hidden infrastructures, and what they do to our material conditions and the ability to survive, thrive, and resist. Bedour Alagraa’s work becomes really key to my thinking on this and so many other things when she talks about catastrophe, the “changing same,” and the retrenchment of shared articulations of our dispossession.  First of all, we need to acknowledge that, right? Acknowledge that fact—that this is a different era, but it is an extension from the deadly worldmaking event of 1492 into what we’re perceiving as our present day. And so there are all of these different kinds of work that Black studies scholars are doing to think about the revelations of the coercive organization of our daily lives, conceiving of how we can even begin to think about resisting, about liberation, about freedom dreaming. I’m convinced it’s really important and the intersections are increasingly being laid bare during this phase of neoliberal late stage capitalism.  What I’m trying to hold onto is precisely the ephemeral understanding that “now is not working.” What we’re knowing as “the now”—the conditions of Western oriented or ontologically Western Space-Time—is not working. And actually, we’ve been in the same moment since 1492. So one of the ways it’s not working is that we think it’s 2021 and that has consistent material implications. On the internet people are like, “It’s 2021. We shouldn’t be saying this joke anymore,” or “How is this still happening and it’s 2021?” And I’m like, this is because we never left 1492. We’re playing ourselves by thinking that the clock being offered to us is actually any measure of a real shift in the time that we (and by “we” I mean black people—Africa and its diasporas) have been hailed into—and even indoctrinated within—to be making these kinds of statements. To think otherwise is calling for a real kind of rupture from the status quo keeping us unfree. I’m talking myself into a bit of a circle because of that “both/and” that’s required, and because I would never say, “Well, no computers for anyone and so I can’t Venmo you some money for your urgent care.” Or like, now I don’t support Facebook, and I delete all of my little apps, so I can’t message my auntie in Trelawney or uncles in the mountains in Jamaica, can’t participate in mutual aid for Black trans kin, sex workers, and migrants in communities that I’m no longer physically living near but still accountable to? We need both."}
{"prompt":"Breathing into otherwise possibility is to me a fundamental, ontological, ahistorical rupture—in the sense of capital “H” history being a Western epistemological framework. It is a total divestment from the current world order. That means that the way that we can organize ourselves (or we even dream about organizing ourselves) in relation to one another is actionable and realizable; not fixed, but possible and dynamic.  I don’t think that enough of us are entertaining the possibility, because of a false binary where it’s like, “Well, I need to survive.” And I’m thinking that part of this survival is orienting to this otherwise—it’s not seeing your survival as just the next meal or where’s the next paycheck. That gets really hard to narrate without sounding like you’re just swimming in privilege, completely oblivious to the material conditions of people who need to know where the next check is coming from or how they can get together for that next meal.  I find myself sort of trapped by my own seductions, by my own desires for us to collectively orient ourselves to a thing without sounding like I’m oblivious and not aware of what people need—to be, to literally exist. But also understanding that the current order and the current perceptions of an allegedly discrete and separate catastrophe or of some kind of linear arc toward something—as opposed to spinning the wheels, “the changing same” and a deep retrenchment or acceleration of accumulation by dispossession and being asymmetrically displaced—is not it.","completion":"Moving Beyond The State I keep bringing up how algorithms are hegemonic, bringing to scale the movement of people through space and producing new kinds of divisions through classifying and sorting people. Because predictive policing is not just about expanding forms of community surveillance, it’s also a labor management tool. We see in welfare, automated decision systems are producing and managing resource scarcity, and then managing those subjectivities. Sometimes this is enacted in a very broad and decentralized way, and sometimes in an intensely violent way that is neither unclear nor metaphorical. From any given vantage point, we cannot see everything, so we need that multiplicity of perspectives.  It’s well documented that predictive policing relies on dirty data sets embedded with the historic overrepresentation of Black and houseless people, thereby redirecting the police to the same geographic sites they’ve always over-policed. What Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and Free Radicals uniquely identified in their Algorithmic Ecology project, was that PredPol was not actually classifying the Skid Row residents as high risk, which is what the traditional argument of dirty data would lead us to believe. Rather than labeling the Skid Row encampments as “hot spots,” PredPol is classifying the perimeters of Skid Row as high risk. In practice, this means that the moment residents tried to move past these otherwise invisible borders, they would encounter higher rates of arrest and police contact. If the LAPD announced a brick-and-mortar wall was to be built as a border around Skid Row, people would riot, right? Academic researchers who primarily rely on privacy rights to critique these technologies eschew the collective or communal harms that resonate with people who are targeted. I worry that residents of Skid Row, abolitionist organizers, and others may disengage from resisting these technologies when it’s rendered unclear how the stakes are much greater than data privacy."}
{"prompt":"Even if we can understand Black Marxism from Cedric Robinson and are engaged with Bedour around not just rearticulating the same modes of catastrophe, crisis, and linear march through history, we’re still not in the refugee camp. I’m not reifying standpoint epistemology, but literally we don’t have access to everything, even at this moment where massive amounts of content is constantly being produced, right? I’m thinking about this “not knowing” alongside the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Special Rapporteur Philip Alston’s report on Human Rights Violations in the United States in 2017. Examining the coordinated housing entry system in L.A., he emphasized that experimentation with public sector adoption of automated decision systems happens on the most marginalized sections of society before being generalized to the rest of the population. We can trace policies mandating fingerprinting for welfare recipients during the Clinton era to Simone Browne’s seminal book, Dark Matters, explicating the proto-biometrics of the Middle Passage in the ledgers and branding of enslaved Black peoples.  So, some of these technologies have been the situation—and at the same time as recognizing that historic lineage or sameness, we have to recognize what’s different in these new forms of surveillance and social control as they are being enacted onto broader swaths of the population.  In tech, to a degree there is a sociopolitical critical analysis, it often coalesces around bias. When you get to geopolicy, the discourse becomes very reliant on statecraft and state terminology because states actually have an analysis of society. They actually have a sense of who different actors are and, in a vacuum of political or theoretical frameworks, state actors are ascending. What stands out to me so much in your work is a rejection of state terminology, particularly as I’m thinking about my family in Oromia in the southern region of Ethiopia and observing how advocates are making moral appeals to the UN or to the US State Department. Human Rights Watch branded a recent report on Eritrean refugees in Tigray with a satellite image from Maxar Technologies. This just stood out to me so much—not that I want to hearken back to the old days of the ’83 famine where they just put starving, nameless black people on the cover—but because this bird’s eye view that renders people into polygons, if they’re even seen at all, and even then it only allows for people to be seen en masse, there is no humanity within it. What does belonging mean in that context? Similar to WhatsApp, many people will justify use of satellite imagery citing it as the sole source of gathering visual evidence during a crisis.","completion":"Neither of us is here to defend the ivory tower, but this is why we need black study. And I’m using that term the way Robin D.G. Kelley points us to, as distinct from Black studies. So not Black Studies™ as a hegemonic and ethnonationalist interdisciplinary framework that was heavily funded by the government, by the State, namely through the Ford Foundation from the discipline’s institutionalization in the Sixties. But black study as the deeply invested commitment to black people, black life, black possibility, and freedom dreaming, beyond institutions and in fact under siege by them. Collectively attending to black study would have us asking a very different set of questions, and perhaps being prepared to bring about very different answers.  This premise about evidence and evidencing is something that black study has taught me to challenge and expose the underlying perceptions of. What am I understanding when we talk about this bird’s eye/drone’s eye/God’s eye perspective is a view of people rendered non-people. That framing is borne from a visual technology that James Scott describes in Seeing Like a State. In managing how and who we’re seeing, this particular apparatus instigates us into a certain organized affect, initiates into a socially reproduced hierarchy—this is effectively what citizenship, nationalism, and patriotism do."}
{"prompt":"A patriot sees a flag burning and they are moved to defend the nation, as opposed to seeing a piece of cloth that they can walk over in the street, right? And that’s because of what it means to belong to the state. You might feel it as an extension of yourself as opposed to what it is, which is the other way around. And so, I think, that thinking with black study, thinking with Black thought, would actually have us question: What does it mean when we’re seeing non-people? What does it say about us if images of the oppressed masses are disseminated, and when we encounter them we can then go, “Oh, I get it, it’s really bad there.” Technologies of seeing and the epistemologies they are informed by need to be interrogated so that when we engage in movement work and defend our communities, we are not benefitting statecraft or reproducing an asymmetrical and oppressive world order.","completion":"Sometimes I feel increasingly militant about not reproducing certain images as evidence because, I mean, we’ve all seen them, right? Black people drowned at sea, black people’s bodies washed up on shore or left out in the street for hours as in the case of Michael Brown and countless others, dozens of black people on, what I guess what passes for a boat with an infrastructure than cannot safely cross the Mediterranean, whose image gets printed on the cover of The Telegraph with the language of “the swarm” with an action shot of black people fleeing in Haiti or in Sudan. We know what gets made to matter and how. Black study reminds us whose narratives, whose stories have weight and amplifies the work that needs to be done without trafficking in the antiblack violence of dehumanizing erasure."}
{"prompt":"In the campaign leading up to Brexit, there were these massive billboards of black people crowded and stacked on a road and referred to as swarms—distinctly animal and non-human language for people fleeing conditions that Britain and other imperial formations have historically wrought. The images featured migrant crossing routes in places like Afghanistan and Libya, but they were being used in the middle of the UK so that people could see it and go, “Oh, that’s what’s happening here, they’re coming across our border, encroaching on our lands.” It was falling into the mind of the white citizen subject being like, “This is happening here,” or “It has already happened here.” Sight as a visual technology, as a mechanism, is already being used and abused in ways that need to be interrogated.  What I know from black study, and what I’ve experienced in my embodiment as a Black trans person and in solidarity with disability rights activists, is that seeing is not always believing, and to interrogate the privileges of sight. What you take through a visual medium and how you privilege that sense is rarely a tool for our liberation. So what then do we rely on instead?  And so for me, the kind of belonging that I hail, in relation to our collective liberation, tries to make that pivot. If not, you and I belong to this nation state because we look similar or we sound similar, because we speak the same language, because we have certain kinds of perceived proximities that the state has organized us into. Instead, we can belong to a different set of commitments wherein I don’t need to visually see your suffering to actually acknowledge it. We can actually orient toward one another and the life we want to lead, so that it’s not born through a series of documents, either visual or textual in statistics, the way that the UNHCR also does, the way throughout Europe, or the way that Frontex manages us and the International Office of Migration also enumerates. Quite simply, it’s an orientation in which we collectively understand that statistics also codify our existence and extract our humanity.","completion":"I don’t need to “see” evidence of the Oromo Genocide or see dead people up and down Ethiopia to know that we need to mobilize a collective response to the violence there. I have friends from Ethiopia. I have people who are in a place, telling me something is happening, and I know that they’re committed to their and our collective freedoms. So I don’t need to know that fourty-five Ethiopians were murdered today or ten or twenty or a hundred. I actually don’t need to quantify that severe loss with numbers and not names or lives or memories if I already understand that the ongoing colonial and imperial illogics are producing a reality deeper than a mere number. We don’t need to fall into the same traps of enumeration, quantification, and extraction for us to bear witness. Yet again, there is a “both/and” there, too. I understand why there are the petitions, I understand the enumerations, I understand the visualizing of these things, but I also find it to be a trap of visibility and representation, because then we’re not belonging to each other. We’re not trying to collectively belong to a possible otherwise. We’re actually belonging into the same metrics of statecraft that are causing our harm to begin with."}
{"prompt":"A hundred percent. I don’t know if you self-identify as a group, but what I have specifically learned from you, Zoé Samudzi, and Bedour Alagraa is thinking critically about visual documentation and the desire of the audience to see or experience this sadistic yet orgiastic enjoyment of black suffering. This desire is both dehumanizing and demands bodies, which is not the same. I also appreciate your demand to distinguish black life and black bodies versus “myself.” We’re rejecting statecraft while sitting in the west and as diaspora. So I’m also thinking about people who are incarcerated or who are living in zones with an intensity of unrelenting violence, what does it mean for them to reject technologies of statecraft? What is otherwise for them? Going back to that Philip Alston point, you know, humanitarian technology is a site of pervasive experimentation. On one level, I appreciate that the UN is so transparent; they actually state in their internal documents something along the lines of “Thank God, unlike the EU, we don’t have GDPR, so we can experiment on these populations and try out these new things before they get generalized to everyone else.” How do we resist being brought into the only kind of relation remaining when we only see back home through a documentation of the suffering by NGOs or other humanitarian bodies, which does not allow for a kind of belonging with refugees or those categorized as “internally displaced?” How can we learn from and be in community with them when technologies of the state have become the throughway? I’m thinking right now of a really dope book, Eric Stanley’s Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. Eric thinks a lot with Black trans feminists, as well as with Angela Davis, about what it means to become ungovernable.  When I used to do work in relation to the UK border with migrant women in detention centers, with a greater physical number of people, we could get heard and things could get done. We could mobilize to stop planes—like those small European detention flights. We could shut shit down in this very material way responding to immediate political and physical needs.","completion":"Part of my reticence with technology is with the sleekness and the smoothness of a user experience across platforms, which doesn’t map onto the beautiful incoherence of human subjectivity. There’s increased regulation in how we present ourselves online. Through this, we’re becoming increasingly governable. One thing to consider is actual revolution, which Fanon and many others have taught us is not pretty, not consistent. It’s not an isolated march or rally. I mean, it’s machetes, it’s fires. It’s ongoing violent struggle meeting the violence we’ve (asymmetrically) been subjected to, that we should think about turning to yesterday, already. I know that because of the global structures that we’ve been slated into and the ways that we relate and the things that we would already have to be giving up, revolution across the world holds different weight. I’m trying to be careful as I’m saying things, but it is something that I think a lot about: what is required and how do we prepare? And I’m thinking about how not to just think about it, but to be about it. How do we actually mobilize in the long game while our life spans are being shortened in real time, while being heavily surveilled and coercively governed, while a lot of our communities are being dispossessed and displaced in real time, and when ecological disasters and climate catastrophe means some of us are already out of time? And, here you go, I try not to talk myself out of the very answers that I think are really what’s to come, are really hard to break open and leap out of—in that Fanonian sense—out of the current world order toward some otherwise one.  Registering Gender The discussion around gender that I have been exposed to feels very bureaucratic. Particularly, I’ve been thinking about being “assigned at birth.” Do you identify with the gender that you’re assigned at birth? From my understanding, this has to do with birth certificates. Ethiopia actually has one of the lowest rates of birth registration in the world. Most people don’t even get birth registration until they get their passport if they’re going to leave the country. But it’s something like 1.2-1.3 percent of all children acquire birth registration, even among the middle class."}
{"prompt":"As I went down this Google rabbit hole, I was like, “Yo, this is dope,” because when you’re talking about black methodologies, of misspokenness and the broken pieces, this is the complete opposite of digital surveillance. Everything is about enumerating, I mean, talk about counting—that is the fundamental ontological principle, and it’s really disturbed when people do not participate in birth registration for statistical regimes. I don’t want to romanticize these small acts of bureaucratic refusal or present them as active political commitments to abolishing the gender binary. There definitely is homophobia and transphobia in Ethiopia—I don’t even know how much those words completely translate, not just the literal sexual translation, but in the way that people conceive of gender. I don’t want to make it sound like Ethiopia is in any way a paragon of sexual freedom or gender identity inclusiveness, but at the same time, there is a way that everything is not so linear. So as this gender binary is being enacted onto people through institutions, bureaucracies, and technologies, people are refusing it in different kinds of ways. How do we make sense of that, not just in relationship to resistance, but between each other? What does it mean to think about gender when there is not that same assigning? Gender is nothing if not bureaucratic. Gender is nothing if not a series of accruals and assignations on a global scale. But, and, also, there’s something to really delight in, I think, in terms of a refusal that doesn’t look binary. I’ve had conversations where it’s just like, “Look at all this gender. Gender comes from the West, so let’s say ‘no’ to gender, right?” And so it’s supposed to be a rejection outright. But the queer and trans people that I know and delight in and struggle with, we can relish our gender too, as well as our relationship to it.  Let’s put it this way: gender is a series of attachments, much like belonging—which is probably why this relates to your question. So technology, perhaps if I can try to make a real quick but rough analogy, not as a process or a series of mechanisms through which you manage labor, bodies, time, and all of these sorts of constructs, but actually as a way of deepening attachments. I’d like to think of “trans” when I think about transnational politics and even transdisciplinary scholarship as a moving across borders drawing from how trans theorist Eva Hayward talks about trans being a series of attachments and modes of relating as opposed to across, because grammatically, trans is supposed to be across and then cis would be on the same side. Instead of crossing a border or staying on the same side of a border, of gender, of geography, and so on, it could instead be a series of attachments to that very otherwise set of possibilities that we’re trying to mobilize.","completion":"To go back to your concrete example with the Ethiopian birth certificates, I think it’s a super cool note to end on, right, because you actually are talking about possibility. No, of course you’re not saying, “Ethiopia is the trans friendliest place on Earth” or whatever. But by nature of these minor refusals that accumulate into a set of possibilities, then we have possibilities there, right? Like 1.2 percent is nothing to sniff at. So now if I wanted to play with my gender or what I understood or perceived to be gender, away from this kind of assignation, and I’m a trans Ethiopian or a person who is—and there are different words to talk about gender variance in different geographical contexts—then I can make some room, make something else possible for myself. And so I can use the very refusal that the masses are enacting to make room for myself.  And then when I’m carving up that space, because how we identify, and how we are identified is always already relational, then I’m making room for an “us” to thrive in that refusal. Again, I think that is linked to the becoming ungovernable that Stanley talks about, the moving in the wake of interminable catastrophe that Alagraa talks about, the thinking away from sort of genocidal politics of enumeration that Samudzi talks about. These are circulating conversations that black study has made, that precisely can be situated in thinking about technology. Now we’ve moved beyond “just” tech, and also to technologies of refusal and how to make those possibilities endure.  A note to the reader from SA Smythe: In response to decades of Black resistance in the US, many publishers have adopted a “house style” where “Black” is capitalized when referring to Black Americans/USians. This conversation was initially recorded and then edited, but SA Smythe spoke with us about the distinction between Black/black in terms of the larger African diaspora and the continent, and what capitalization gestures toward for/as Western grammar. When referring to Black USians explicitly, they usually capitalize the word in response to those important struggles and conventions of naming. Transnationally, the debates/struggles around that aren’t consistent, and thus Smythe considers it useful to be mindful about making those conventions hegemonic from the US, and what that means for collective, global black liberation. For this reason, global black struggles outside of the US, black study (independent from the interdiscipline of Black Studies), etc., are not capitalized in this interview. As La Marr Jurelle Bruce once tweeted: “As long as you’re writing and uttering the word ‘B/black’ with love and toward liberation, we’re good.” That’s the spirit through which this conversation was held."}
{"prompt":"The Black internet has a long history. It has multiple points of origin, as Charlton McIlwain has documented—from Afronet, a BBS network for Black users, to NetNoir, an AOL-based portal “devoted to Afrocentric material,” both of which launched in the mid-1990s. Today, the Black internet has entered the platform era, distributing its riches across Twitter and Instagram and YouTube.","completion":"What would it mean to take the Black internet seriously? What would it mean to see Black digital practices (in all their diversity) not in pathological terms—as hailing from the wrong side of a “digital divide”—but as creative, joyful, affirming? What if the Black internet offers a standpoint from which the rest of the internet can be seen, and critiqued, more clearly? These are some of the questions that guide the work of André Brock, Jr., associate professor of Black Digital Studies at Georgia Institute of Technology and the author of Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. In his work, Brock uses a methodology that he calls “critical technocultural discourse analysis” (CTDA). “It decenters the Western deficit perspective on minority technology use to instead prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented groups of technology users,” he writes, with the aim of conducting “a holistic analysis of an information technology artifact and its practices.” In other words, CTDA asks, why do people do what they do on the internet—especially when “people” are not just white, cis, heteronormative men? Central to CTDA is the idea of the “libidinal economy,” which originates with Freud, was further developed by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and has more recently been taken up by Fred Moten, Frank B. Wilderson III, and other Black thinkers. A libidinal-economic approach emphasizes the role of emotional and psychological intensities in driving anti-Blackness, rather than the more rationalist models of human behavior derived from political-economic approaches. Issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman sat down with Brock to trace the history of disinformation from Reconstruction to the present, and to discuss “the unholy trinity of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism.” How do you see the state of mis/disinformation research? What do you think is missing from the conversation?  Disinformation is only perceived as bad when it serves to disrupt the interests of whiteness and white power. White power sounds strong, but it fits. During Reconstruction, the country found all sorts of creative ways to keep black folk from the polls, up to and including murder. That wasn’t a problem. Du Bois documented this extensively in Black Reconstruction, but misinformation against non-whites is typically a footnote in history texts and media reports as it serves the telos of American democracy."}
{"prompt":"Similarly, when disinformation campaigns began to surface in the mid-2000s around Gamergate—or troll farms attacking Black Lives Matter activists—that wasn’t considered worthy of research. We still don’t have great academic research on Crystal Johnson and Blacktivist—two large internet troll farm campaigns that were trying to convince Black folk not to vote. What we do have, however, is a plethora of highly funded research incorporating both quantitative and computational evidence of how disinformation has affected white voters.  For example, reporting on the 2016 presidential election first framed voters as having economic anxiety. They weren’t white—they were economically anxious. Then folk began to find out that economics wasn’t necessarily the cause they were rallying around. They were rallying around xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, and anti-big government. All those are things that white folk are concerned about. Misinformation research is largely conducted by white folk, and their concerns reify this anxiety about the disruptive power of social media and mass media against the interests of white folk.  The object of inquiry of disinformation research has largely been whiteness and white anxiety. Maybe that reflects the classism of disinformation researchers, who are probably mostly trust-fund babies or the partners of people who work in Big Tech. They’re concerned with these “rabble-rousing” and “ignorant” white folks. The emphasis on QAnon is fascinating to me: it’s taken such a god-like center stage in much of the disinformation research.  Reporting on Black vaccine hesitancy has focused on the Tuskegee experiment. Leaving aside the fact that Tuskegee was the complete inverse of what we’re seeing with the Covid-19 vaccine—in that it was an experiment where treatment for syphilis was withheld, or that the racial disparities in Covid-19 vaccination rates primarily reflects availability and access, not hesitancy—the reporting has omitted how many of the pandemic conspiracy theories circulating in Black communities are tied to anti-Semitic conspiracy theories.","completion":"Do you remember that right in the beginning of the shelter-in-place orders, Nick Cannon came out repeating anti-Semitic shit from Farrakhan about the caucusoids descending from the mountains? Then Viacom suspended his show. Busta Rhymes came out and said something that was anti-vax in August 2021, echoing conspiracy theories from Milton William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse. The way that book in particular has had a chokehold on the Black entertainment industry is well known in our community. Yet it’s nowhere to be found in this academic discourse of rationality, universality, and mis/disinformation.  Disinformation technologizes and scrubs movements of their xenophobic and racist antecedents to say they represent strictly an information misbehavior. Not a cultural misbehavior. That’s part of the problem. If you scrub racism and xenophobia from disinformation campaigns, what you have is what they would like to say: an attempt to overthrow a government through illegitimate means. But what if you add back in the racism? The better antecedent for QAnon is the John Birch Society, but that’s seen as too explicitly racist.  Black folk have contended with internal disinformation forever. Busta is part of the the Five-Percent Nation, which has had a deep hold on New York rap forever, in terms of coercing patriarchal gender roles and influencing Black relationships to the state. But that was just Black folk being crazy, right?  If you add back in the racism, it adds an entirely powerful libidinal element, in the sense that QAnoners are not overthrowing the government because it was working for white people, they’re overthrowing the government because they felt that it was working too hard to entitle Black and brown folk. Working too hard to give them things to which these white folk feel they don’t deserve. It’s an entitlement culture: we don’t want to give them things. We want them to learn how to work for it. That’s been an anti-Black statement since the 1860s. As soon as we got free, they were like, “Oh, well, these n***** don’t work. They’re lazy. We had to beat them in order to get them to work.”"}
{"prompt":"That libidinal economy of the digital seeks to continually restrict information transfer and exchange as an instrumental mode. And by that I mean, it’s strictly the message that’s being communicated, not any of the things which animate that message. So, for the libidinal economy of the digital, we look at productive. We look at efficient. We look at time and space-spanning, right? We look at collapsing traditional order in order to impose modern order. We look at “just in time” manufacturing, which now we understand is a huge problem because corporations sought to “reduce inefficiencies” like merchandise sitting in warehouses or eliminating jobs to demonstrate productivity to Wall Street. As a result we have empty shelves, halted production, and inflation now, but also higher levels of inequality and stress in the decades leading up to this moment.","completion":"Believing in Digital Divides I want to just scroll back to the other question about disinformation for a second. There’s this obsession with how other people behave and what their beliefs are. This white, cis, heteronormative, middle-class idea that spaces are not “diverse enough” demonstrates to me how homogenous academic and media spaces are.  I used to do a lot of restaurant work. You’d be working in the back of the house with this dude who’s forty-five from Bangladesh, somebody else who is undocumented from Russia, a seventeen-year-old washing dishes who only speaks Spanish, and then you’re serving these white customers. So, really, it’s the class of people being served who has a more insular view of the world, not the people in the back of the house—yet that’s the class we’re getting research from. The disinformation discourse is very abstracted away from the conditions, beliefs, and societies it seeks to describe.  When I think about disinformation campaigns, I also think about the digital divide, one of the biggest trends in pathologizing Black people’s relationship to technology. Where’s the space to turn ethnography backwards, onto a field that has gotten a lot wrong? The digital divide stuff has shifted to “information communication technology for development,” or ICT4D. They’re looking at Africa, India, Pakistan, and other places, and saying, “They don’t have the same type of networks we have in the West. So, of course, they’re struggling to access the resources that we take for granted.” It’s just as problematic as it was when they were looking at Black folk here in the States because, like you said, it never turns the gaze around to ask what created these conditions. How and why do these conditions continue to persist? Instead, let’s be liberal and only look at the ways people will either resist or are hailed by these particular technological systems in a way that disadvantages them.  As the president of the Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures stan club, the two main contributions of your book are, in my view, Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) as a process through which to understand these technologies, and the importance of the libidinal economy. This largely seems to have gone unaccepted within the dominant research discourse. Is that your experience, or do you feel like people are engaging with your approach?"}
{"prompt":"[Ed.: The idea of “libidinal economy” originates with Freud, was further developed by the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and more recently has been taken up by Frank B. Wilderson III, Fred Moten, and other Black thinkers. It emphasizes that emotional intensities, such as desire or antiblackness, drive “rational self interest” or political-economic modes of thinking.]  The libidinal approach is still too new. I don’t have the impact on social science research yet because I’m still talking about Black people. That’s my mistake. I didn’t try to claim white people are bad. That wasn’t my concern. My concern was to say, “Look at how joyous Black people are,” which is a very different thing.  I have to give a talk to Microsoft in a month and they’re like, “Well, can you present your book in a way that makes it palatable to white people?” Nah, I can’t. And it’s not going to happen because you need to learn about me as opposed to learning what I do to resist you, which are two totally different things.","completion":"Data science and information science have long been and will continue to be resistant to theories like libidinal economy, but also to theories like critical race theory, because they are resistant to things which are not of them. They think about things which they can reach out and fix, like ethics. Or reach out and bring in, like the digital divide stuff. But they don’t ever want to engage with the question of how they benefit from certain structures, or how to fix the problems they’ve created. They don’t want to do that."}
{"prompt":"So the libidinal economy has a ways to go. I’m really enthused by the uptake that it’s gotten among critical academics like yourself. Somebody said to me in my DMs the other day that it gives you a framework for understanding exactly what was going on, because we didn’t have words for it before. But white folks will always say racism is not in their heart—which is their own libidinal economy, right? They’ll never be encouraged to take it up, because to do so requires that they interrogate themselves and that’s not going to happen.  Do you think Twitter is an accurate gauge for the Discourse™️? Do you have a sense of what readings are driving the adherence to rationalism?  Twitter really is a space where people who don’t read books want to argue with people who write books. That’s tech too, right? I had these students coming through my classes at Georgia Tech who said, “We don’t read this kind of thing. They just tell us to make stuff. They train us how to make it. They’re not asking us to think about it.” Those are the people that Georgia Tech sends into Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Netflix. The people who are trained not to think about things. Lewis Mumford talked about this not on a racial basis, but on a technical basis. He called it “techno-rationalism,” and he said no manufacturer wants a person who has a tendency to engage in anthropomorphic, quasi-rational thinking about the industry that we inhabit. They don’t want anybody to personalize it, because why would you personalize something that’s based on extraction? The only emotion that they valorize is the one where you don’t have a reaction to your extraction. That’s the way we train STEM graduates, and engineers specifically. Then they hear ethics and they’re like, “Oh yeah, I took a course on ethics.” Well, how many courses did you take in your program? Seventeen? I mean, of course you took an ethics class. How do you put critical race theory on top of that? How do you put the libidinal economy on top of that? The whole curriculum is designed not to introduce them to things about the world, much less critical texts. But that’s whiteness. It’s what Charles Mills calls “an epistemology of ignorance.” If they are born not to know, they don’t ever have to interrogate the conditions which led them to their success, because all they have to do is bask in the profit and the privilege. Oh, and enforce the denial of those profits and privileges to people who don’t look like them.","completion":"To put it another way, part of my question about libidinal economy is: what is the why of rationality? Let me ask you a different question. Why has Marxism been taken up so strongly by information science and technology people, but not critical race theory?  I know your resistance to political economy and I understand it to a degree. I don’t know if I read enough information science or things that are self-identified in that category to speak confidently about it. But, I’ll say, Ruha Benjamin put together her collection Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life with scholars who are arguably taking up Black Marxism and the Black radical tradition, including R. Joshua Scannell and Andrea Miller, in a way that I find productive. I wouldn’t claim it’s critical race theory per se, but they’re definitely thinking with scholars like Katherine McKittrick and Sylvia Wynter when they’re writing about drones, for example. The end goal is not to be like, “Aaah, apocalypse coming, all the Black people gon’ die because drones is coming.”  There is an evacuated critical race theory where people will cite Crenshaw, Lorde, and the Combahee River Collective—in that order—and have read none of them, understand none of them, and they’re just referencing in order to #decolonize for corporate diversity— —to just check off the boxes.  The Unholy Trinity To me, there’s a connection between the epistemology of ignorance, philistinism or the refusal to read, whiteness, and techno-rationalism because, like you said, there are seventeen courses. There’s one week of ethics, sure—but those seventeen courses were about race too, in their refusal to address it as an explicit object, right? And not race broadly speaking, but white supremacy as a desire to control the nonwhite world and the natural world. I’ve been reading some good stuff recently, McKittrick specifically, and she writes about whiteness’ desire to control the world in hierarchical ways—to categorize it so that it can be placed in a hierarchy. That’s much more modernity than it is whiteness. But they’re hard to separate. You have the holy trinity, or the unholy trinity, of whiteness, modernity, and capitalism. Modernity wants to take us away from our folkways and traditions and make us more efficient and, as such, it extracts us from humans to numbers. Capitalism is like, “Word, because if we extract these people from their humanity, we can then exploit them for profit.” And then whiteness is like, “Say, word, because I was ready to extract these n***** anyway!”"}
{"prompt":"So, they all work together in concert and it’s really hard to untangle them. Which is the point of the libidinal economy for me, because it goes past modernity’s desire for numerical extraction and capital’s desire for labor. The strongest political economy critiques address capitalism’s desire to exploit humanity, the world, and its resources for profit. The libidinal economy goes past that to say, “Hey, there’s something about whiteness here.” There’s something specifically about anti-Blackness, because we could talk about China and Africa, right? China is not white. They don’t think of themselves as white. They do think of themselves as a sovereign in the world order and are intent on imposing their way of thinking about the world on the world. So, you see them making loans to African nations where they retain property rights over the properties they develop. And the African nations basically just get to host it. They get a little change from which they can skim off, you know, to make their families rich. But China owns all of that and, by extension, they are exploiting and extracting from the natural resources of the continent, for their own game. Is that anti-Black? Absolutely. Is that white?  Well, it’s Han nationalist. I mean, the Uyghurs aren’t the only ones who aren’t Han.  Right, the Uyghurs are not the only ones who aren’t Han. The entire country is made up of multiple ethnic minorities, but it’s strange how the Muslim ones get singled out for that.  Well, also, I would like to abolish the word ethnicity.","completion":"Noooo… [whimpers] No, the term ethnicity must die. You don’t understand, for us sitting in relationship to Ethiopia, they say ethnicity with a hard R. What really is an ethnic group? No, so I’m telling you straight up, Amhara supremacists, they’ll be like, “All those ethnic, ethno-nationalists, all this tribalism…” This is how they refer to Black Indigenous land claims because they want this universal category of Black that is defined by state-based nationalism, in a way that circumvents their own complicity in a system that produces benefit for them at the expense of the vast majority of people, in the wake of the slavery and colonization that happen in Ethiopia. And so, what is an ethnicity? Because the claims that you can make as an ethnic group are very different from the claims that you make as a nation. The former hails a kind of parochialism that I think is different.  The reason why I want to hold on to ethnicity partially is that’s where I got my definition of race from for Distributed Blackness. I fell in love with the sociological explanation of ethnicity. In relationship to Quebec, Everett Cherrington Hughes said ethnicity is not a pattern of traits or behaviors that you can assign to a particular group. Instead, it’s what both the in-group and the outgroup agree that the in-group says does, believes, and behaves. So, it’s a discursive definition and, from there, I feel like it’s important we get the understanding that no ethnicity exists in isolation. It’s always in response to cultural, environmental, geographic, and political factors around them.  So, China is really trying to do the political work of saying there are no ethnicities here, “We’re all one China.” But we can look back at the Freedmen here in Oklahoma who are fighting to be considered part of the Cherokee ethnic group because they got that oil money, and the Cherokee are like, “No, we’re going to go to science and say, ‘You’re not genetically Cherokee, you can’t get this money.’” But the Freedmen are like, “We were raised with you. We have children with you. We have ancestors with you. Therefore, we are part of this culture.” And that difference to me—between race and ethnicity—that is the really tricky thing. It’s always slippery, right? But it’s a boundary that I think makes sense in our world of signifying and meaning."}
{"prompt":"I would say the same exact thing in my explanation of why the term ethnicity must die. The thing is, the work “ethnicity” does in America is perhaps different than in other parts of the world. The most contention is around the category of Hispanic, when they have you fill out demographic forms around race and the options presented are Hispanic or Black—what the fuck is Hispanic? Who agreed to even be from Spain?  What to do about Logic (and Kevin)? Shout out to Logic. I’m appreciative that they let me hijack this shit, right? But I’ve definitely been thinking about what it means to hijack Logic, because “logic” has been so central to the dominant critique of mis/disinformation—that these ignorant, economically anxious white actors are illogical. They’re not pledging allegiance to science and are undermining the Enlightenment rationality that we fought for, that our forefathers fought for—though maybe they shouldn’t have committed genocide against Indigenous people and enslave the Blacks along the way. But they say, “We recognize that, we make an acknowledgment of past harm,” and now let’s focus on logic. So, how do we intervene in the context of this way of thinking about logic, enlightenment, and rationality?  The best thing we can do is establish the validity of alternative epistemological standpoints. What I mean when I say that is that every culture approaches their version of reality differently. Whether it’s geographic, whether it’s genetic, whether it’s environmental, whether it’s political—they all approach it differently. And for the last five or six hundred years, we’ve been forced to endure a world that is structured by a white disavowal of their own embodied consciousness, disdain for women, and anti-Black racism. Those three things are the pillars of what whiteness is, so rationality is a disavowal of not just feelings but also a disavowal of the role that women have in the decision-making process, because women under rationality are considered hysterical.","completion":"If you take women out of the decision-making process, you basically get the thoughts of white men. Under whiteness, white men are valued for their ability to resist their dark desires, their empathy, and their care, because they’re making “unemotional” decisions about how to apportion resources. That comes directly back into the data science that we’re arguing with and about, because, to them, the most elegant code is the code that is beautiful in its simplicity and its aesthetic minimalism. The most elegant code also does things to social situations that seem as if they are situations devoid of emotional resonance.  So we could talk about social welfare algorithms where people are now being asked to fill out entire questionnaires about what type of toothpaste they use, because their answer to that question will be put into a database and used to calculate that they are not deserving of welfare benefits because they have too good a taste in toothpaste. How dare you have sensitive teeth? You don’t deserve Sensodyne, you better go get you some Arm & Hammer toothpaste for a dollar! So it’s this continual asceticism, this denial of the pleasures, or even the denial of the experience of the visceral, of the libidinal. That is one of the core functions of whiteness.  One of the most interesting trends during the early stages of the pandemic was that African countries were not experiencing Covid-19 at the same rates as white Western nations. And it turns out that it was because these folk, since they had lived with chronic deadly diseases for centuries, had built up protocols for infection control strategies. And there are other examples where people are doing fantastic things for themselves, of themselves, by themselves that are not beholden to a Western paradigm.  But, to go back to an American context, how are we supposed to gain control over these information resources in order to institute a different epistemological standpoint? Because one of the other things that whiteness is good at is denying access to those resources, so that we can achieve—I hate the word sovereignty—some sort of valence of being part of this nation."}
{"prompt":"One of the slickest things that I’ve seen over the last thirty years is how good conservative movements are at taking terms like woke and critical race theory, stripping them of all meaning, and then getting them used against us. That interpretive flexibility, I would argue, is whiteness’s greatest resource. And it works well for the libidinal economy of information because the digital itself is flexible. It can promote pieces of information in a way that strips them of their context and makes it seem like they’re universal, when, in actuality, they’re very particular. So whiteness and information technology work well hand-in-hand. Maybe by design. What would a Wakandan information technology look like?  Could you talk a little about what you mean when you say that Distributed Blackness proposes a Morrisonian approach to technology?  That’s Ruha Benjamin’s fault. Ruha interviewed me, and at the end of the conversation, she said, “This is a Morrisonian approach to information technology.” I was like, “What you mean? That’s too big. I can’t take that.” She’s like, “No, if you think about Playing in the Dark, where Morrison spends a lot of time in the first couple of chapters talking about ‘American Africanism,’ or a white identity premised on a negative, inverse relationship with Blackness. You’re making that same conversation—not about literature, but about technology.”  What I’m trying to do is establish what Black people have always done. We have always had to watch the other carefully in order to not get eaten by the other or destroyed by the other. We have to know their ways. We have to know how they work and, in the process, from that outside perspective, what we do is we build a Black inquiry on an analysis of invention—because what’s more invented than whiteness? They made themselves up out of English, German, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian. They made themselves into this category called white—that’s an invention like a mothafucka’, right? But in the process of doing so, they had to center that invention against a Black body in order to make it legible.","completion":"Charles Mills says Blackness is illumination. Y’all been telling us that we need to illuminate what Blackness is for y’all. But Blackness actually illuminates what modernity is. And that’s where I sit. I use my epistemological standpoint, my positionality in and of the world, to critique the world that brought me into being—that’s Morrison. If you think about Sula, if you think about The Bluest Eye, those are all positions, those are all texts interrogating the world from a particular standpoint that has already been destroyed or attempted to be destroyed.  That shit is powerful to me. It’s not a position of abjectness. I’m not saying, “Oh, I’m on the other side of the digital divide and I’m trying to cross that bridge.” No, I peeped that bridge and it doesn’t take me anywhere that’s really necessary for me to go. And let me tell you how fucked up it was, what you did while you was tearing down the ecosystem and destroying the land, and destroying the people who owned that land before you, in order to make this bridge happen so that you could be more efficient and not have to go all the way around to the ford to ship your goods.  So a Morrisonian approach—an American Africanism—is shorthand for basically saying, from this standpoint, from where you stand on the margins of white society, but in your fullness as a Black person (because Blackness is human, regardless of what Afro-pessimists say), what critiques have you made or can you make about whiteness and the world that whiteness has created? A shit-ton, a lot, right? And they’re critiques that white folk are not capable of making because this is their utopia. For all that they complain about it, this is the world that they wanted, the world that they got.  Man, that look on your face. I’d pay money for that.  So, where we at? Where do we locate this Black sense of place when we know that information science is already so dominated by whiteness? Where do we just stand still and where do we act? We got McKittrick writing Dear Science and Other Stories, Ruha Benjamin’s multiple books, and Simone Browne’s Dark Matters. But, on the whole, where is the Black study folk at?"}
{"prompt":"Black studies has not concerned itself with science in any real way. Black studies is more focused on the interpretation of texts, film, video, music, and the like. They have not focused on science at all. You have some historians who have done amazing work, but in general Black studies don’t care.  What McKittrick does that’s really valuable is she talks passionately about how we understand ourselves not grounded in the ways the world told us we should be, but how we understand ourselves as what Black people do. She said Black knowing is feeling, and I was like, “You motherfucking right,” because there’s something about that embodied cognition. When the world is inflicted upon your body, then you listen to what your body says when it’s trying to tell you about the world.  We lack the means of control or even dominance in these tech industries. The best we can do is get an interest convergence with well-meaning white people (WMWPs) and liberal folk to at least trouble their understandings of what the world they’re creating is—whether that’s Black feminist epistemology, whether that’s intersectionality, whether that’s critical race theory, any of those things, right? If we can get them to understand that the harms that they visit upon us are also inadvertently visited upon their children and their grandparents, then we’ll get some action. The problem is we created industries full of white men who don’t care about their momma. Have you seen the movie We Need to Talk About Kevin?  Yes.","completion":"That’s the type of industry we’ve created right now. “I wonder what this bow and arrow will do? Oh, I’m sorry, Dad, I didn’t mean to kill them with it.”  We’ve got three white men fighting to get higher into the low Earth orbit—not even in fucking space, just far enough from the planet so they can float. And their aims are celebrated by the mainstream press because they’re visions of a future where they can escape Blackness. As opposed to dealing with the harms that they’ve created with just-in-time manufacturing and two-day shipping and this surveillance culture that they have fostered under the guise of friendship and community. They don’t want to address those harms because those harms have made them a shit ton of money.  Facebook is a good example. My students always grimace when I say the best way to understand Facebook is that it was a creation of a horny nineteen-year-old with more computing skills than social skills, and this was a way he could get to meet, in the abstract, the women he wanted to be with. Because that’s what Facebook was. It was a network that he built where people would submit pictures of themselves and he could select them at his leisure without them knowing that he was looking at them. Once you start from that understanding, Facebook’s extraction of personal data and sales to advertisers makes a lot more sense. It never has been about community. You can see how poorly they understand community with the way they moderate and run Facebook groups. It always has been about the extraction of something to satisfy the libidinal, whether it’s voyeurism or simply wanting to profit off of others."}
{"prompt":"In the fall of 2018, the residents of Atlantic Plaza Towers, a rent-stabilized apartment complex in Brownsville, Brooklyn, received an alarming notice from their landlord stating that the key fob system to enter the building was to be replaced with facial recognition technology. More than 130 residents opposed Nelson Management Group’s plan to install the facial recognition system and mandate photographs for mailbox key replacements. Atlantic Plaza Towers resident Tranae Moran led the fight, then celebrated the successful defeat of Nelson Management’s plan by founding the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Alliance (OBA). Fabian Rogers, a former floor captain at Atlantic Towers—a volunteer position that involves helping residents in an emergency—has followed Tranae to OBA in order to continue educating their community about the dangers of biometrics and elevate the joy of the Ocean Hill-Brownsville neighborhood. Issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman spoke to Moran and Rogers about what they’ve learned through their organizing work, and how the anti-surveillance struggle fits into the broader fight for environmental justice, social housing, and community reinvestment.","completion":"Can you start us off with the basics? What would you like readers to know about who you are and the work you’ve been engaged with since the peak of resistance against facial recognition in Atlantic Plaza Towers? Tranae Moran (TM): I am a community organizer and community outreach specialist, and my nine-to-five is working with the City’s Tenant Support Unit. I founded the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Alliance (OBA) after assisting the Atlantic Plaza Towers Tenants Association in pushing back against facial recognition technology. After we succeeded in preventing the installation of facial recognition technology in our apartment complex, I wanted to continue the work of educating people about biometric collecting systems and just general tenants rights. I didn’t want to take up too much space in the Tenants Association, so I started the OBA in order to push that initiative forward. So, here we are.  Fabian Rogers (FR): Technically, I think Tranae usually throws the title of cofounder my way, but I’m more of a participant. I’m kind of like an assistant aide of sorts to the Ocean Hill-Brownsville Alliance. But, you know, Tranae would beg to differ, of course. Also, I was a floor captain from Atlantic Plaza Towers, but currently I work as a constituent advocate for New York State Senator Jabari Brisport’s office out here in my Senate District 25. Tranae and I have been able to change the trajectory of our careers, essentially, just from organizing, at no cost at all—just kind of pushing forward until folks finally told us we can make a profit from it.  TM: I don’t want to say a profit; I would rather say make a living out of it. People from our community don’t think of civic engagement and community work as an actual career. No one thinks that just by helping the community, you can make a living doing that. So, this was a very eye-opening experience for both Fabian and I, because we found ourselves doing passion work but ended up making some real impact, and were able to use our lived experience through that to start a career in community work."}
{"prompt":"A lot of articles feature the fight and the resistance that the Atlantic Towers community waged against the implementation of facial recognition technology. I was wondering if you could set the stage for us: What does Brownsville and Ocean Hill look like? What is your relationship to the community and how did that set the stage for this successful battle?  TM: What does Brownsville look like? Brownsville looks like a multitude of things. It’s a very vibrant and resilient neighborhood with a legacy of activism. When the time comes, we are able to come together and make some waves. Just Atlantic Towers specifically, we are a tight-knit community. We’ve been here for generations: elderly folks, young people—it’s just a little bit of everyone. Our Tenants Association is a direct reflection of that: we have municipal workers, we have people who work for MTA, we have lawyers, we have real estate agents, we have teachers, nurses, caregivers. So it’s a very diverse group of people with expertise in different spaces, which means, if we have the right foundation, we can make a lot of positive movement.","completion":"There’s a lot of focus on the negative things that happen in Brownsville. I always say to people, I don’t see a lot of this stuff that you guys say is happening here. It could just be because I am from here and I identify what many other people wouldn’t consider as joy! I know people come to Brownsville and may be a bit taken aback, but I just took a walk to go buy a new pair of headphones because the ones I purchased didn’t work out so well and I’m just like, this is such a joyful neighborhood. Yes, we have things happen, but what neighborhood doesn’t have things going on?  I want to magnify the joy that is present here while giving folks the information they need in order to navigate and not be taken advantage of, because there is gentrification coming here in Brownsville and not everyone has the same access to information. OBA is stepping in to assist with the flow of information.  FR: The other thing to understand is the resiliency and the persistence of Black and brown folks within this community in particular. Fighting back against the narrative that you’re a product of your environment—a lot of Ocean Hill-Brownsville-ites are more than what their environment is. At the same time, a lot of their environment is that which they can’t control. Health disparities come from the fact that Brownsville was industrialized and those remnants of industrialization play a role in environmental violence. Things that you can’t see that make it seem as though Black and brown folks are just born with respiratory issues, when it’s really the environment that we’re living in that plays a large role as opposed to our habits and things like that.  When folks find out about the more invisible things like air quality being bad, or illegal projects affecting the health of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, a lot of times folks become activists and advocates for the community. People live, love, and learn in this community. I think that that’s a staple as to why the culture of Ocean Hill-Brownsville continues to persist despite gentrification and other disparities."}
{"prompt":"TM: Brownsville is made up of the highest concentration of public housing buildings in New York. They are not a priority to the city, if you ask me. There is a lot of neglect happening in these neighborhoods. This neighborhood is a food desert. We don’t have markets. Fresh fruits and vegetables are not easy to find. I mean, we do have a beautiful network of community gardens and local people who contribute their time and energy to those gardens, and help to make our community a more vibrant place. But as far as the city coming in to do cleanups and things like that, we don’t see much of that happening.  Are we creating community spaces for people to take up space in and do whatever it is that they want to do? That is not being done, which is why OBA is committed to creating space for joy, imagination, and vision in Brownsville. Because of the things that people have been through, a lot of them are numb and we have to wake them up first—liven them up with some joy again and de-stressing activities through art—before we can focus on fighting biometric information collecting or the things that take a bit more time for understanding.  Not Just Playing Candy Crush I don’t know if this is your experience, but it’s something I definitely complain about in academic or institutional spaces, when they want to bring in “community,” the currency is “impacted people.” They want you to share a little bit of your trauma, your individual story, and then talk about “organizing”—organizing is anything that’s not writing a paper in the way that they speak. And then they’re done with you, and you can go back to whence you came from until they want to trot you back out again for the pictures and stuff. I’m not even interested in critiquing that. Rather, I want to ask, what does the conversation look like across ourselves and across neighborhood intimacies?  It definitely has stood out to me how OBA has been a collective effort. It’s you leading the fight Tranae, but it’s not like you are the sole hero. Even how you conceptualize what the problem is and how you situate it into both the joyous community and the environmental factors or ecologies of various types of violences that people are subjected to. I really appreciated that. I remember reading all about OBA in 2019, and now we are about to be in 2022 and you guys haven’t just been chillin’ playing Candy Crush. What is the state of OBA organizing, not just with Covid, but over this length of time? What has been like, “Yo, I’m never doing that again,” or “This is what has been really hard,” or however you’d like to reflect on that passage of time?","completion":"TM: We have been refocusing what OBA wants to do. At first, the main thought was that we need to get information out about biometric collecting systems. We need to inform our community about the dangers and why they need to be aware of their surroundings. That is still a major theme in OBA but this has just been a very stressful time, so we have been trying to find ways to make an impact that don’t ask for too much energy from our community. They are exerting themselves in so many different ways, with work, with kids going back to school, and just with navigating life post-vaccines becoming available.  We partnered with AI For the People last summer for OBA’s first public outdoor event on Juneteenth. The community appreciated the music, food, and information about all of the invisible harms. Many people didn’t know about the topics we covered, including the fact that National Grid runs a fracked gas pipeline through Brownsville. Leaks in that pipeline can expose people to cancer-causing and radioactive gas. As Fabian just mentioned, we are already dealing with environmental issues in Brownsville. There is a large community of people who have asthma here and respiratory problems, and now things are being done that will potentially cause more harm to the health of the people in this community.  FR: We’ve been trying to connect dots between different struggles going on between housing justice, environmental justice, and surveillance with Housing Organizers for People Empowerment (HOPE), AI For the People, and Brownsville Green Justice. For example, pointing out how our landlord trying to install facial recognition into our building plays into the grand scheme of housing injustice. Anti-surveillance includes pushing for social housing or housing access vouchers for homeless folks and things like that.  National Grid is building a fracked gas pipeline in Brownsville. It’s one of many different corporate entities monopolizing essential utilities for all New York housing. It’s reliant on the fossil fuel industry and so they make money by building new infrastructure, not necessarily through gas flowing. This means they have to find ways to circumvent New York state law and other state laws in order to continue building infrastructure. And they end up picking Black and brown communities that don’t come off as active or as in tune with what’s going on, or seem to have a sense of wanting to push back. National Grid fails to inform the community and then the community has to be reactive, so you suddenly see a community activate and want to inform themselves, understand what’s going on, and push back against corporate BS."}
{"prompt":"(Re)active Situations Do you see anti-surveillance organizing as a strategy of abolition or defunding the police? How do you situate privacy issues relative to the other issues emerging in the community?  FR: Sometimes it’s not necessarily focusing on surveillance rights, but just looking at how we deal with corporate enterprises. How do you look at a biometrics company like StoneLock that tried to install its facial recognition system in Atlantic Towers? How do you look at the shenanigans that they pulled off and compare it to the strategies that National Grid is putting in place to try to give folks in Brownsville and Ocean Hill a hard time, in terms of trying to build new infrastructure that will then impact folks’ lives for the sake of a profit that they don’t need? In partnership with the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, I’ve gotten tapped into different anti-surveillance groups, including the G.A.N.G.S. Coalition (Grassroots Advocates for Neighborhood Groups & Solutions). They are trying to dispel the myths embedded in gang databases by reframing the issue for disenfranchised communities that are riddled with gang and community violence as a lack of opportunity, a lack of funding, a lack of resources that makes folks desperate and have to take risks in order to make a consistent living.  When you dispel the idea of “folks out here just trying to create trouble” and you look deeper into it, it forces you to question the tactics that the NYPD uses in order to build a database to help with their so-called policing. With this gang database in particular, it’s a database built off of police bias. It’s not built off of fact. It’s not built off of factual information.  When I think of justice, I always try to simplify it to the essential issue. What’s the essential device that allows this issue to proliferate in said communities, and how do we tap into communities to try to address quality of life issues? How do we tap into communities to be able to empower themselves to be the force to stop those pejorative relationships? If you get caught up in the monotony, you’ll lose sight of the fact that a lot of times these corporate enterprises are using the same strategies. It’s a very cookie-cutter system, but because it’s in a different sort of industry, you don’t think of it as such.","completion":"For me and Tranae and other folks that were on our side in terms of surveillance and data privacy advocacy, we had to think about technology in a different way. We had to think about these issues as a housing issue. You often have to think outside of the context of what you’re put in to really be able to dissect the issue and be able to address it, and then be able to translate it to allow folks to feel as though they can be informed, they can be empowered. And then from there, they can be partners and allies, and oftentimes can be leaders."}
{"prompt":"TM: We are very reactive when things happen because there are no conversations being held with our community about changes being made. That flow of information seems to not flow to us in the way that it should, which is where I want OBA to be able to step in. I want us to be a hub. A lot of these technology companies, real estate developers, and all kinds of folks who are just making their way over to Brownsville claim that they can’t find anyone to talk to. I’m just like, there’s so many community organizations doing work in Brownsville. How could you not find anyone to talk to and get insights from? So, you decided to still push forward with whatever this project was, without speaking to anyone in the community or trying to have a town hall or anything, despite the fact that we are very open to all of those things?  Why aren’t these companies speaking to the community-based organizations? I want OBA to be a hub where they know they can come here and speak with community members who have expertise in different areas, so that we’re not just like, “Oh, what the heck is that? We never heard of this. What are you doing here?” Instead, it’s like, “Oh no, we had conversations with these people. We let them know that we wanted this and that to happen, and this is what we don’t want to see.” Those conversations don’t happen. It’s always a too little, too late kind of situation for us, and I want to change that.  I want us to be involved in the conversations that are being had about the space that we occupy. Like, we live here. There are people here that have a brain and they have wants and needs, and they want to see different things in their community. When Fabian was speaking about gangs, how kids end up in those situations is that they want to go outside, but we don’t have green fields for them to sit in the grass and look at the sky and just ponder. We don’t have spaces like that. They come outside of their homes into all kinds of confusion. Young people have to navigate through these communities, digesting what they see and that’s how they learn. And it’s not always the greatest thing when they don’t have someone, or an organization, there to explain to them what they’re experiencing, so that they can make better and more informed decisions about how they want to navigate through the community.","completion":"Housing and (De)Funding The Police As far as the gang database, who gets categorized as a gang? You mentioned that National Grid is putting poisonous gas under the ground, affecting a lot of people. Nobody is calling them a gang, right? But if you’re fifteen years old, Black, with certain colors on, you’re more likely to be identified as a gang member.  Tranae, you mentioned the density of housing projects in Brownsville. People don’t seem to understand that you have a high density of projects, but you also have middle-class home ownership and residents with white-collar jobs. So, even when we talk about community, people within the community have very different relationships to the intensity of surveillance and policing. I also know from my experience, caseworkers live in Brownsville, so there’s people who sit in a lot of different places and have different relationships to policing. How are you thinking through class differences and funding relationships as you organize in Ocean Hill-Brownsville?  TM: In Ocean Hill, there’s a larger amount of home ownership than there is down in Brownsville, which I’ve found to be one of the dividing factors. This is one of the reasons why OBA started and why we have this name—I wanted to bring the two communities together because we are separated due to the infrastructure of Brownsville and the density of the housing projects. We have the same issues, but the intensity of those issues is greater in Brownsville. Ocean Hill will probably be gentrified way faster than down in Brownsville. It’s happening at the same time, but the changes are happening a lot quicker in Ocean Hill.  I’m not finding that everyone wants to defund the police here. The police have actually been very supportive of OBA, thus far, in our events and organizing outdoors. I think it’s about the people and not just police in general, because we have been met with folks not being happy about our presence outside. For example, business owners have called the police but when the police arrive, they’re actually helpful and they like what they see us doing, which is creating space for imagination and joy, and providing information on these invisible harms: facial recognition, surveillance, and fracked gas pipelines in Brooklyn."}
{"prompt":"We want to focus on meeting people where they are, and not on specific topics such as defunding the police, because everyone doesn’t share that vision and we are not trying to divide the community more than it may be already. Everyone has to navigate however it works for their specific family unit. I feel like everyone has that capacity as long as they have the information to do it.  We have not been accepting funding from many organizations. One, because we’re still laying down the foundations for OBA. With the climate of community organizing and community work, and these corporations wanting to put money into the community with whatever other agendas they have going on, I have been trying to be very careful about who we are accepting funding from. We have organizations like National Grid, who are doing great events in our community, but at the same time, they’re running a fracked gas pipeline in Brownsville. They were handing out hot dogs. First of all, why are you giving people hot dogs, anyway? They’re smiling and in community and giving away all these things but, at the same time, they’re being a double. They have these construction workers digging in front of your apartment building, putting all kinds of nonsense into the ground. And they are just going to leave and say, “Okay, we had a great event while you’re dealing with respiratory problems” and who knows what other kinds of health issues because of the things that they’re doing in the community.  FR: An example of resistance we’ve encountered is from homeowners, because Amazon’s Ring doorbell and similar surveillance technologies are marketed to them as basic home protection. One approach that I’ve found helpful is pointing out the corporate relations between a product and possible policing. For instance, Amazon partners with and donates to police departments, and so by buying into the Ring system, you may be indirectly paying into an unnecessary police budget. Trying to build that sort of conversation helps folks understand the bigger picture as to what goes on.","completion":"“Defund the police,” in particular, has always been an interesting conversation because people think, like, “Oh, we’re going to take the badges and weapons away from the police.” It’s like, no, folks just want to defund the police’s excessive budget and refund the community for how strapped it’s been for resources. I’m always a stickler for making simple phrases that can open up a bigger conversation. When folks get very defensive about something like “defund the police,” for instance, I’m like, “Well, I think you should look at it in the context that it’s only half the phrase. It’s more of ‘defund the police,’ ‘refund the community.’” We all make the big arguments about how strapped our community has been since the 1970s."}
{"prompt":"Reaganomics and trickle-down theory started to trickle away the resources that helped working-class blue-collar communities push through by having supportive programs, trade schools, and alternatives to what’s out there. So, we should be thinking about how the police are asked to be a Swiss Army Knife when their training doesn’t allow them to be. A police officer isn’t a mental health expert. That’s just a fact, unless they had that background beforehand and then they became a police officer.","completion":"Folks say “defund the police” because we’ve bolstered a couple of different economies rather than the community. If we see that the police have bolstered their pockets, maybe it’s a chance to look at how we can stop the excessive spending and start to think about how to funnel back money into the community. That’s what happened pre-Reaganomics, trickle-down theory, and things like that. That all gets lost in the chaos of folks getting caught up in a phrase like “defund the police” or “Black Lives Matter.” It’s always the monotony of getting caught up in the moment of a phrase that feels triggering, rather than unpacking the history and the impact and the side effects of systemic changes that end up de-establishing what a community can provide for itself and for others."}
{"prompt":"The tech industry is a monopolizing force, and one of the many things it monopolizes is the means for producing knowledge about it. In the platform era, the machinery of the internet is locked behind closed doors, creating problems for researchers. Companies like Facebook aren’t keen to share data or the other computational resources needed to develop a complete picture of how large algorithmic systems work (and whom they work for). And these companies’ endless amounts of money give them plenty of other ways to derail critical research, in particular by exercising influence over academia and the other places where knowledge about the tech industry is made, as well as by co-opting or silencing individual researchers.","completion":"Given these obstacles, how can researchers both inside and outside of tech companies do the difficult work of research, critique, and resistance? To discuss this and other related questions, issue editor J. Khadijah Abdurahman talked with two leading critical scholars of technology. Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is a MacArthur Genius Fellowship recipient and an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA, where she serves as the cofounder and director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry. She is also the author of the seminal book debunking technologies as neutral artifacts of progress, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. Meredith Whittaker is the Faculty Director and cofounder of the AI Now Institute, and a Minderoo Research Professor at NYU. She resigned from Google after organizing with her coworkers against the company’s efforts to build military AI and its failure to address rampant discrimination and sexual abuse. Abdurahman spoke with Noble and Whittaker about how to do critical tech research, and how to insist on transformative justice practices as we try to dismantle technologies of oppression."}
{"prompt":"Beacons was conceived of in the wake of Dr. Timnit Gebru’s high-profile firing from Google. Similarly, the impetus for this interview was the systematic firing of Black women from academia and industries—those who were essentially fulfilling their duties and showing up as their full selves. On one hand, there’s a question of what is to be done about institutional and corporate power—but the bright lines dictating who are the villains in a David and Goliath story let us off the hook in terms of internal cultures of accountability. Are there different ways to relate to one another and be accountable, as we respond to institutional repression? How are each of you thinking about these questions as we’re approaching the one year anniversary of Dr. Gebru’s firing? Safiya Umoja Noble (SN): The question about how do we hold ourselves accountable is really important. I know that there is always a series of conversations happening among people who work in the field of AI and ethics, which is a big tent of people holding competitive and often diametrically opposed ideas. You have, for example, companies like Google that consider themselves leaders in ethical AI; and then you have the women, the people of color, the LGBTQ scholars, the activists, and the journalists who for two decades have been trying to make their issues about the immorality or the politics of various types of technologies legible.  That legibility has also led to an intense capture by people who are not interested in the radical reimagining of or resistance to these technologies, or in the way that these technologies are reshaping society, consolidating power in the hands of a few, and making the world more socially, politically, and economically unequal. So, it’s interesting to have this conversation on the almost anniversary of the firing of Dr. Gebru from Google. Because watching her ascent to that position of leadership and then her firing, when she named the racist technologies and environmentally consequential technologies that Google is developing, is symbolic of the nefarious intent or willful ignoring of the core issues at stake. It’s symbolic because there are in fact thousands of people who have been organizing for a long time around these issues, trying to ensure that these conversations about AI ethics still keep their kind of political importance and are not just completely defanged and depoliticized. I don’t know, Meredith. What do you think?","completion":"Meredith Whittaker (MW): There are so many ways I can approach this. It’s very personal because Timnit is someone—along with Meg Mitchell and others—who stood up for me when Google pushed me out. So I’m also seeing an attack on support structures within these organizations and an attack on the people with the courage to call out bad behavior. I think Timnit’s firing was an inflection point that you captured in “On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics,” Khadijah. When you published that piece in the wake of her firing, it laid bare the stakes and failures we’re confronting."}
{"prompt":"Before Timnit’s firing, there’d been enough people who were willing to—mainly in the name of civility politics—give Google the benefit of the doubt. Then the company fired Timnit, someone who had been outspoken about the racism inside of Google and who had been doing research that was exposing fundamental problems with Google’s business practices. Timnit called out racism and her work showed that the large language models at the core of Google’s current product and profit strategy are biased, environmentally harmful, and an overall problem. It was when criticism of Google’s racist culture and criticism of its harmful business practices converged that Google retaliated, in what I saw as an almost reflexive reaction. It was clear that leadership just “had enough,” and went on to make an astonishing string of unforced errors. The corporate immune system kicked into gear: “Okay, fuck it, we’re going to make a really bad PR move, which we calculate we’re powerful enough to withstand. What we can’t withstand any longer is the tension of ‘supporting’ AI ethics on one side, and selling biased, extractive, unverified AI on the other; of doing diversity and inclusion PR on one side, and discriminating against Black women on the other.”  Google’s firing of Timnit reverberated through the AI ethics space for many reasons. One, I think, is because the space is so co-opted and so unwilling to look at who pays us, at who our community is—insofar as we are a community. And suddenly, unexpectedly, the field was faced with big existential questions, which in many cases challenged people’s comfortable status quo: can we work with Google and other tech corporations? What are the limits corporate funders actually put on our research, on the research we review as part of our conference program committee roles, on the research of the corporate-employed collaborators we co-author with? Many in the space were largely avoiding these questions which, we should note, are standard in many other fields.","completion":"This moment also illuminated some of the ways that the field is configured. People use the word community—the AI ethics community, or whatever—but a lot of times “community” is just a bunch of people a funder paid to fly somewhere, or a group of folks whose employers are willing to fund them to go to the same conference. The people in these “communities” may have vastly divergent politics and motivations, and these communities are certainly predominantly white, and often very exclusionary. I may be sitting next to someone who’s funded by the Koch Foundation, who believes Facebook is a net good. But we’re both narrated under this umbrella of “community,” and we’re all usually nice and civil to each other because clarifying political commitments in these circumstances has material stakes, and could get you kicked out of the “community.” To put it bluntly, as the leader of an organization, I have to go back home and I have to make sure my people have jobs and health insurance, that I have health insurance, that my family is supported. Of course, there’ll be certain things I do feel I can agitate or call out. But I also have a duty of care that I may be jeopardizing if I go too far, and I feel this tension constantly.  Amy Westervelt has a really good podcast called Drilled, and the first season traces the history of Exxon. At one point the company was genuinely trying to support and understand climate science and climate change, trying to get ahead of it and figure out how its business model could adapt, to potentially provision other sources of non-fossil energy. This approach got traction until the company refused to adapt their business model to the science and doubled down, which initiated a slow process of Exxon pushing climate scientists out of the company, and then turning to climate denial; for example, funding anti-climate heterodox “scientists” and related misinformation campaigns.  We’re in a similar phase in the AI ethics space. Initially, big companies accommodated the ethical implications of AI research, but when it challenged their culture and their business model, they started pushing us out, denigrating us and our research. This is happening right now. But as researchers weathering this transition, we haven’t had that real talk about things like, “Whose money do we take?” Or: “Why is so much so-called tech criticism funded by the companies whose tech is purportedly being criticized?” We’re in the process of a rude awakening. It’s like a limb coming back to life after being asleep—it’s painful for a lot of people."}
{"prompt":"Open Letters to the Apocalypse Part of what I was thinking through when I wrote “On the Moral Collapse of AI Ethics” was—and I’m saying this as someone who has written my own open letter—what to do with this asymmetry between writing an open letter and the stakes of techno capitalism. The open letter that I spend a lot of time thinking about is the Franck Report of June 1945, which was signed by several prominent nuclear physicists who had worked on the Manhattan Project. They delivered it to the White House, saying “Maybe we should just let the Japanese come over and see our capability, and not drop the atomic bomb?” Then, as we all know, in August 1945, you have first Hiroshima and then Nagasaki.","completion":"So we’re facing these tremendous stakes and also have to contend with the civility politics you both alluded to. How do we negotiate the obvious villains of centralized corporate computing capital, while also this negotiation among ourselves? Who is the resistance? How do we identify what that means? What does the coalition look like and how do we start thinking about some of those bright lines?  SN: Well, one of the challenges is that not everybody who is working on these issues relates to themselves as community organizers, or relates to each other inside a politics of accountability, shared responsibility, protection, and support, or has committed to a process of hashing out hard conversations, strategies, and ideas about how to move forward. You see this most profoundly in the fairness, accountability, transparency efforts and movement under ACM—the Association for Computing Machinery, an international educational and scientific computing society—which has really, from its inception, marginalized the more radical political critiques of systems and has sought to pursue perfecting technology and to champion techno-solutionism. Though they might more recently be grafting on a Black feminist quote to open a paper, they’re still seeking to address the fairness questions around tech in terms of better algorithms or better AI.  That’s really different from what others of us are doing, those of us who think some of these technologies should not exist—to your point, Khadijah, that we shouldn’t have the Manhattan Projects of AI today. And then when we look up and see that the whole world has been reorganized through these ubiquitous technology deployments, in every single industry and every sector that are, in essence, snake oil or have profound civil and human and sovereign rights implications. That’s actually a completely different project to be working on in the world.  Part of the challenge here is that researchers have been socialized in academia to be apolitical or to think of themselves as scientists and not as people who have values imbued into the work that they’re doing. That is also part of the problem that we’re trying to contend with around the making of these technologies that are also allegedly neutral and just tools. This is part of the reason why we need feminists and why we need people who are committed and connected to social movements around the world to contextualize our work and to make sense of what it’s working in service of. That’s really important."}
{"prompt":"MW: AI is an umbrella marketing term. It’s not a term of art that describes a specific technique. Companies apply the name AI to data-centric approaches generally, and you never quite know what you’re buying if you’re licensing an “AI” system.  The AI boom of the last decade was not the result of a major scientific innovation in algorithmic techniques. It was a recognition that with massive amounts of data and computing power, you can make old techniques do things they couldn’t do before. The ascent of AI was predicated on concentrated tech company power and resources which had, as their driving force, the surveillance business model.  One thing we rarely discuss is how AI research and development’s dependence on corporate resources worked—and continues to work—to shape and in some cases co-opt knowledge production. In other words, to “do AI” as defined in the current “bigger is better” paradigm, you increasingly need resources that are controlled by these handful of companies. You need access to really expensive cloud compute, you need access to data that is hard and sometimes impossible to get. You can’t just go to the data market and buy it—you often need to get access from the data’s creators or collectors, who are often the tech companies. It’s fair to say that academic computer science disciplines underwent a kind of soft-capture, in which as a condition of doing “cutting edge” AI research, over the last decade they became increasingly dependent on corporate resources, and corporate largesse.  This dynamic led to practices like dual affiliation, where professors work at a tech company but have a professorial title and produce research under their university affiliation. It’s led to tech companies moving whole corporate labs into the middle of universities—like Amazon’s machine vision lab at Caltech. We have a structural imbrication between a massive, consolidated industry and knowledge production about what that industry does. And this compromised entanglement has bled into the fairness and ethics space, in many cases without anyone commenting on it. There are many forces working against our recognition of how captured the technical disciplines are at this time, and how easy it is for them to extend this capture into fairness, ethics, and other disciplinary pursuits focused on the consequences and politics of tech.","completion":"To pick one example, Amazon is underwriting half of the National Science Foundation’s Fairness in Artificial Intelligence grants. And while a few people called this out, the fields concerned went on to apply for this funding, and uncritically applauded colleagues who received it. Whole labs are reliant on Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft funding, and if you raise questions about it you’re endangering your ability to support your postdocs, your ability to obtain future funding, your standing with your dean. Or, you’re endangering your colleagues in these same ways. Dissecting the particularities of what it means to be able to do research on AI and related technologies, and how dependent this work often is on corporate resources, is a project that I think can help develop a clearer political-economic read of tech and the tech industry overall, and reveal the capital interests that are propelling research and knowledge production into tech and its implications.  SN: This is a critical area especially during the time of Covid-19, when we saw how fragile so many of our public institutions are. We really feel that at a place like UCLA, where teaching assistants aren’t paid adequately, it’s extremely expensive to get an undergraduate degree, and the pressures to deliver public education are intense. Many, many systems are broken, and it is very painful to work under those kinds of broken systems.  Meredith, I recognize this tech sector political economy you’re describing. They are capturing not only scholars but policymakers who, in essence, use public money to subsidize the entire industry, both through the research efforts at the National Science Foundation and also by making it impossible for democratic public institutions to flourish, because they don’t pay their fair share. They offshore their profits, and they don’t reinvest them back into communities where they do business in extremely exploitative ways. They just expect the public to underwrite it through tax refunds. How in the world can companies like Apple get tax refunds except through pure corruption? As we struggle in our communities with and in our institutions, we have to identify why those conditions are present. We have to recognize who has monopolized all of the resources and we have to examine the narrative about what’s happening with those resources."}
{"prompt":"I want to ask you about social media and “cancel culture.” In July 2020, Harper’s published “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate,” signed by a number of prominent people, including Noam Chomsky and J.K. Rowling. The letter criticized “an intolerant climate” on the Left, and in particular, “an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.” The following month, in August 2020, The Atlantic published a piece by Anne Applebaum called “The New Puritans,” that used Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter to criticize social media “mob justice.” The irony of invoking the white woman’s public humiliation for being pregnant out of wedlock is that the book was published more than a decade before the Civil War. Black and Indigenous peoples’ ongoing bondage and claims to liberation are as unnamed in the book as they are in today’s epistles of moral panic.","completion":"But how do we negotiate this issue? Is calling people out on Twitter our only mode of addressing power dynamics in the AI ethics space? How can we put forward a vision that is constructive and not just reactive, even though our operational capacity is so low, even though we’re all exhausted, grieving, and torn into so many different directions? What is our vision for transformative justice in the context of knowledge production? MW: Look, I have a lot to say here. First, I think there’s a visibility bias: people see when calls for accountability and redress spill into the public. They rarely see the agonizing work of trying to hold harmful people and institutions accountable behind the scenes. Work that’s too often not only unrewarded, but actively punished. Like many people, I have engaged in a number of accountability processes that didn’t end with Twitter callouts and are not visible to the public. In my experience, Twitter is always a last resort. There are failures upon failures upon failures within these institutions and with the way power moves within them, all of which happen before someone is going to take to Twitter or call on social media as a witness. Timnit taking to Twitter didn’t save her job.  Buried in the moral panic around “cancel culture” is a burning question about how you hold power to account when you’re in an institution that will punish you for doing so. What do you do when your wellbeing and duties of care dictate that you confront and curtail harmful behavior, but you know that any such attempt risks your livelihood and institutional and professional standing? Institutions protect power. Universities don’t want to touch a star professor who’s bringing in press and grants; tech companies have every incentive to coddle the person architecting the algorithm that is going to make them a shit ton of money. These corporations and corporate universities are structured to protect flows of capital and, by extension, to protect the people who enable them. There are infrastructures in place—including HR and most Title IX offices—to make sure that those who enable the interests of capital are elevated and to make sure that it’s as painful as possible for the people who might report anything."}
{"prompt":"This is the backdrop against which we’re trying to figure out how we, as people within these environments, protect ourselves and each other. In my view, the answer to this question doesn’t start with building a better HR, or hiring a diversity consultant. It’s rooted in solidarity, mutual care, and in a willingness to understand ourselves as committed to our own and others’ wellbeing over our commitments to institutional standing or professional identity.  That’s also a question of how we can be accountable ourselves. Especially as people who have institutional power, and who may experience favorable treatment from the same people who harm those with less power. In other words, the more power we have the less we can rely on our experience of people and institutions as an accurate barometer, because there’s every incentive to act the sycophant. This means we need to actually listen to, elevate, believe, and act on the accounts of those with less power, especially Black people and historically marginalized people for whom institutional abuse is compounded. And we need to be willing to put their safety and wellbeing above our institutional and professional standing. This is very hard, but in my view it’s the floor. If you can’t do it, then you shouldn’t be in a position of leadership.  SN: I relate so much to all the things you’re saying. I think we’re in a long struggle around creating systems of mutual care, aid, and support, and that is very difficult. Most of the environments that we’re trying to build those systems within, like academia, are hostile to trying to get work done and get people supported properly. Having said that, we have to keep building these networked communities. We have to be agile and we have to think about how we’re going to create more space for others to do their work.  In my own experience and my own career, I have felt at many times completely unsupported. I have felt like if I could just expand the circle at some point in my career so that more people could be supported, that would be something. The question is, to what degree can we institutionalize that so that all of the possibilities don’t hinge on one person in one space or place, but that we remake entire systems? We want those systems to last and not rely on any one particular person. That’s difficult work and we need to be sharing ideas about how to do that.","completion":"But the problems that we’re working on are very big problems in the world and in our communities. I think about abolitionist traditions: you know, how did a handful of people change the world? Millions of Americans got up every day and made pancakes and went to work while people were being human-trafficked right in front of them and enslaved, beaten, lynched, and harmed on the regular. How did abolitionists, in the face of those conditions, abolish the transatlantic slave trade or change the laws around the enslavement of African peoples? How did others resist the expansion into First Nations and Indigenous peoples’ lands? There weren’t millions of people working on these issues. It was, relative to the population, a very small number of people who worked on those things.  I guess I feel heartened by the fact that if enough people can be coordinated, a lot of change can happen. That is why we have to study history and study social movements to figure out how they did it and how to make it last. Especially for those of us right now living through the rollback of the Civil Rights Movement, we know that those changes can also be precarious. We have to figure out how to make them last.  On Some Global Tech Resistance Academia is coming for our lives, so much of our time is swallowed up into institutional administrative overhead, and also we’re facing major stakes that are global. It’s so difficult to even stay on top of our own “domain expertise,” so how do we facilitate transnational solidarity? How do we think about this work as global? What are the points of connections you identify around intellectually, and politically, in your own work? What kind of infrastructure represents the next steps that could be taken to bolster this kind of transnational research? SN: We have to keep our diasporic commitments intact while we’re doing our work. And of course, we sit here in the heart of the American technology empire. We have a responsibility where we are in this location to press on these companies and on governments to ease exploitation around the world. Many of us understand these questions because we come from internal colonies of the United States, which is one of the ways that sociologists have talked about Black people’s experience in the Americas. Our work is connected materially to other people’s lives around the world."}
{"prompt":"We have to be in community. We have to be in conversation. And we also have to recognize what our piece of the puzzle is ours to work on. While it is true, yes, we’re just individual people, together we’re a lot of people and we can shift the zeitgeist and make the immorality of what the tech sector is doing—through all its supply chains around the world—more legible. It’s our responsibility to do that as best we can.  MW: Yeah, I agree. I’m a white lady raised in LA. I had to educate myself on so much that I didn’t understand, and that process is humbling and ongoing.  My voice doesn’t need to be the center of every conversation. But, okay, if I have a little power and a little standing maybe I can move capital, maybe I can ask people what they need and see what I can do to get it to them, to support and nurture their expertise and organizing and approaches, which may be completely unfamiliar to me, and may not need any advice or insight from me. I’m thinking of the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT). Briefly, it’s a computer-science focused conference exploring fairness in algorithms. Over the years, we have seen increasing calls to examine algorithmic and other technologies in the context of racial capitalism and structural inequality, accompanied by warnings about the insufficiency of narrow FAccT-style technical approaches to the problems of algorithms and tech. So, what was the response? From many people, it wasn’t a re-evaluation of the field, but instead a move to absorb. Like, “Oh, well, how about we bolt an Audre Lorde quote to this computational social science paper.” This response continues to place computer science at the center, with racial justice as seasoning. Even though there are, of course, Black feminist conferences that could use some funding, and that have been deep in these topics for decades before FAccT. So my question is, why is the instinct always to absorb into the core instead of diffuse the resources to those already doing the work?","completion":"I mean, I fuck with that. We need allyship in the form of funneling actual, material support out of these Western institutions. In July 2019, one of us, Khalid Alexander, received a tip from a fellow San Diego community organizer. “You should be paying attention to the city’s new streetlights.” The message continued, “Apparently, they have cameras attached to them.” Alexander lived in one of the many predominantly Black and brown neighborhoods in San Diego that was under constant police surveillance, including by “gang suppression units” that watch, harass, and document residents. He feared that streetlights with cameras on them could supercharge these efforts."}
{"prompt":"Two weeks later, Alexander showed up at a public library for a forum about the streetlights program (which the city named the Smart Streetlights Program). The only other people at the meeting were the presenters: a police captain, a city staffer, and an executive from General Electric (GE), the company that produced the new streetlights. Their presentation began with an infomercial for the technology, a city-wide network of thousands of LED streetlights mounted with cameras that recorded video around-the-clock. The footage was uploaded to the cloud, where city agencies could use software to count cars, pedestrians, and who knows what else. According to the police captain, the smart streetlights were already being used to solve crimes.","completion":"Alexander left the presentation shocked and concerned. Five years earlier, police had rounded up thirty-three Black and brown men from San Diego and charged them with fifty years to life in prison for gang crimes simply because they were included in a police surveillance database called CalGang. The Smart Streetlights would make this kind of state violence more likely—other networked surveillance programs in cities such as Chicago and Los Angeles had led to similar raids—and yet none of the city’s larger civil rights organizations seemed to be visibly fighting the project. The community was going to have to organize resistance to the streetlights itself."}
{"prompt":"Alexander’s first call was to the Tech Workers Coalition (TWC). Much of the technology incorporated into the new streetlights was foreign to him, and he wanted to better understand how it might be used. He also reached out to activists from communities he knew were likely to be targeted by the surveillance—homeless advocates, immigration rights organizers, police abolitionists—and invited them to the next streetlights community forum. At that meeting, held a month later, Alexander and his fellow activists managed to pack the house.","completion":"This was the beginning of a two-year grassroots campaign to rein in the Smart Streetlights Program. By connecting surveillance to a wider set of issues than policing alone, the organizers were able to create a coalition wide enough to win. A lynchpin of their success was not only building a traditional coalition of community organizations from around the city, but also bringing in new allies: workers from the companies and research institutions building these technologies. The methods might be a model for other struggles against surveillance and carceral technologies in cities around the country."}
{"prompt":"The New Bacon The infomercial Alexander was shown at the first community forum boasted that the data produced by the Smart Streetlights were “the new bacon”—they went with anything and could serve almost any purpose that agencies with access to the data could imagine. The other one of us, Lilly Irani, an organizer with TWC, listened to the presentation at the second community forum and realized that surveillance was only one part of what the streetlights could be used for.","completion":"Community members at the forum immediately raised concerns about the technology’s ability to further criminalize San Diego residents. Black and brown-led organizations worried about heightened racial profiling using video streams. Refugee advocates worried that the streetlights could intensify the criminalization of Muslims by using software to analyze behavior near mosques. Homeless rights groups predicted the city would use the streetlights to more quickly find encampments to sweep. Border activists worried the streetlights could help track and deport people by being integrated with systems such as those developed for the Department of Homeland Security by Palantir."}
{"prompt":"A police officer at the forum assured the crowd that the cameras did not record private property, but a computer engineer from TWC was able to force the officer to clarify that the cameras did record private property, which was then scrubbed from the data by a software program. What the city called the “sensors” on the streetlights also included microphones that could record people’s voices without their knowledge. The officer said the microphones were currently disabled, but admitted that they might be used for gunshot detection in the future. When a community member asked how long the streetlights were going to collect information, a city staffer replied that it was “undetermined”; the officer tried to reassure the crowd that “the answer is probably never.” Activists recognized that what the city and law enforcement said it was doing (and planning to do) with the program was beside the point. San Diego has long been an innovator in police surveillance networks. The county’s Automated Regional Justice Information System, which shares surveillance data between more than sixty-five law enforcement agencies, has been in place since the 1980s. More recently, the county had provided facial recognition devices to law enforcement agencies across the southwestern border region until the state passed a moratorium on such devices and the Electronic Freedom Foundation sued to have the moratorium enforced. For years, the San Diego Police Department shared data from its automated license plate readers with Border Patrol to help the federal agency track, detain, and deport migrants, until the practice was exposed by journalists. When it came to the streetlights, the hard part was already done: more than three thousand units were installed across the city. Expanding what that hardware could help officials do would only be a few software updates away. As the officer admitted, the sensors weren’t even covered by civil codes the way similar technologies, such as automatic license plate readers, were.","completion":"And it wasn’t only city and law enforcement agencies that might deploy the technology. All of the data generated by the streetlights would be made publicly available, albeit in an ostensibly anonymized form. A city staffer at the forum explained that this would allow “civic entrepreneurs” to use the data to build businesses to improve the city, including an app to help people find parking downtown. Irani knew this was code for gentrification—the city would give or even sell data harvested from the public, without its consent, to tech companies that would use the data to reshape the city in ways that favored wealthier white communities and pushed Black, brown, and poor people out of San Diego. Irani and Alexander later discovered through a public records request that the city had used Federal Community Development Block Grants, meant for projects that benefit low-income neighborhoods, to fund the streetlights."}
{"prompt":"This range of concerns about how the technology might be used in the future became the basis for the grassroots campaign. Within a month, thirty community and activist groups had joined together in what became the Transparent and Responsible Use of Surveillance Technology San Diego (TRUST SD) Coalition. It grew quickly, in part, because people recognized that the Smart Streetlights surveillance infrastructure spanned the city and could bring anyone into the law enforcement dragnet. The campaign also relied on the working relationships that Alexander had built over years of organizing with different communities.","completion":"Tech workers, too, were an essential part of the coalition. They joined because they did not want to build tools of state violence and oppression. In many public contests over technology, experts from industry and the state dominate conversations by wielding technical knowledge that communities cannot counter. In this coalition, however, the technical expertise of tech workers allowed organizers to counter official claims about what the Smart Streetlights technology could or couldn’t do, and helped them understand how the surveillance applications they feared could in fact be built on top of the existing network. The alliance with tech workers neutralized the city’s advantage."}
{"prompt":"Organizing the Lab Rats The coalition decided to focus on three goals. Articulating these was crucial to keeping the various political and ideological factions within the coalition from splintering over other issues. First, it called for an immediate moratorium on streetlight acquisition, installation, and operation. This would end the immediate threats that the streetlights posed while organizers lobbied for more radical changes to public policy.","completion":"Those changes to public policy were the coalition’s second goal. Organizers sought public participation in the creation of legally enforceable policies over all surveillance technologies used by the city, not just the streetlights. A wide range of technologies beyond the streetlights—known and unknown—made up the surveillance dragnet of San Diego. Worse, surveillance tech could come to the city through donations to the Police Officer Association or through free trials like those offered by facial recognition company Clearview AI. This meant that the City Council did not always have to approve the technologies and the public had no way to see what was in use, unless someone peppered city departments with scattershot public records requests. Council members had not even discussed the Smart Streetlights Program publicly before they signed off on it; that was two years before communities realized a mass surveillance technology was even on the table. Communities needed a legal infrastructure that would alert them to surveillance technologies before they were approved. Rather than playing whack-a-mole to stop individual technologies, the coalition sought transparency, oversight, and City Council authority over all city surveillance technology, existing and future."}
{"prompt":"Finally, the coalition demanded public records showing how the streetlights had already been used and accessed. As organizers studied these records, they discovered that the city had considered monetizing the data and had even explored providing a livestream to the police. These discoveries informed the coalition’s activism and provided fodder for breaking news stories that added momentum to the campaign.","completion":"Because the mayor had championed the program, organizers would need a veto-proof majority of council members to support the moratorium and the policy changes we were fighting for. So the campaign worked to build public pressure on the city council through press conferences, newspaper opinion pieces, public events, and direct lobbying. Organizers broadened their discussion of the issue beyond criminalization to larger concerns about the dangerous power of big tech to engage liberal and conservative elected officials in different ways. In one opinion piece, they argued that San Diego residents had been turned into “lab rats for innovation.” The Mayor’s Office and city officials tried to dismiss the campaign as a small handful of activists with hidden agendas. They also attempted to frame it as ignorant of the technical dimensions of the streetlight program. In November 2019, a tech worker who had experience working on artificial intelligence contracts read the contract the city had signed with GE, and discovered that the city had signed over to the company ownership of the data produced by the streetlights. The data were stored on GE’s servers, and the city merely accessed them through a subscription, which meant the city lacked final say over what the company could do with the data. An anonymous city staffer responded by calling the coalition’s findings “insane lies,” but ultimately the city could not undermine the credibility of tech workers who had built or worked closely on smart cities hardware, artificial intelligence models, and similar technologies."}
{"prompt":"Over the following months, members of the coalition lobbied city council members and found them increasingly at odds with the mayor and the city attorney over the scope and legal framework of the Streetlights Program. In order to channel that frustration into a tactical win, organizers followed a two-pronged approach. First, they expanded their attempts to put public pressure on these elected officials. They held town halls, screenings of the film The Feeling of Being Watched—about government surveillance of Muslim communities in Chicago—and workshops at which we taught community members and activists about the technology and brought them into the organizing efforts. They also did direct outreach to community leaders and journalists.","completion":"The second prong was to write a “surveillance technology transparency and oversight” ordinance. The coalition would hand the draft legislation over to a champion on the city council, who could then present it as a “common sense” solution they could claim as a legislative victory. Organizers adapted their ordinance from ones already in place in Oakland and Seattle. It required city departments to create use policies and impact reports to gain Council approval for any new technology with surveillance capabilities. It emphasized oversight over all such technologies, not just those used by the police. The LED streetlights, after all, had been acquired in the name of energy savings and innovation, obscuring the technology’s connections to law enforcement. The ordinance also created a Privacy Advisory Board to support the City Council with recommendations on specific technology acquisition proposals. Board seats were reserved for representatives from “equity-focused organizations” serving communities impacted by surveillance, as well as information technology and civil liberties experts; anyone with financial ties to companies selling surveillance technologies was disqualified.  Organizers wrote the ordinance to appeal to a wide range of constituencies. Fiscal conservatives liked it because they wanted to reduce government spending. (The streetlight program, budgeted at $30 million over a decade, was already seeing cost overruns.) Liberals who believed in deliberative process appreciated that the ordinance created an independent body to advise the city council and included civil rights oversight. More radical organizing communities recognized that they needed the ordinance in order to find out about new technologies if they were to have any chance of organizing against them."}
{"prompt":"The coalition was lucky to find a champion on the Council who was willing to take the ordinance through committees and do the behind-the-scenes work to get it passed. The Councilmember, formerly a civil rights attorney at the ACLU, also had close relationships with people in the coalition. Meanwhile, organizers kept pressure on the city to shut down the streetlights and adopt the ordinance by organizing people to show up at council meetings and the mayor’s office, and led telephone and email campaigns ahead of crucial votes.","completion":"The coalition also seized upon Covid-related budget cuts to defund the streetlights. Mid-pandemic, Irani assembled a dystopian hackathon with coalition-aligned students to prototype creepy examples of what the streetlight technology could already do. Irani thought the demos would help persuade the Council of potential harms, but the most important outcome turned out to be the discovery that the streetlights didn’t deliver the promised data for city planning. The coalition alerted an investigative journalist, who broke the story in April 2020. By May, the city was proposing Covid budget cuts. The mayor had put library hours on the chopping block but saved the streetlights. The coalition worked with the progressive Community Budget Alliance to mobilize residents to email and call council members and demand they defund the streetlights. San Diego Climate Action also joined the effort, since the lights, operated under the Sustainability Department budget, had redirected funds to a broken, greenwashing surveillance system. In the end, the Council refused to fund the system.  Tools for Struggle In May 2020, the mayor made a last ditch attempt to hand over control of the surveillance system to the police and fund it using an obscure budget pool that City Council didn’t control. The coalition was able to show through old legal memos that this funding strategy was likely illegal and held a press conference to make the point. The mayor fought organizers for months, but finally, in September, he surprised everyone by announcing that the Smart Streetlight sensors and networks would be turned off until an ordinance was created to oversee the surveillance technologies run by the city.  In November 2020, a year after the campaign began, the Council unanimously approved the oversight ordinance. The ordinance makes visible technologies that usually operate out of public view, mounted on light poles and cop cars, or running in the circuits and servers of hardware, software, and data brokerages. It slows down technology acquisition and gives communities time to learn and organize resistance. It puts community members with negative experiences of surveillance in a role where they can build knowledge about technologies and educate others. Though some argue that such ordinances create legitimacy for surveillance technologies, they also create a mechanism for people to organize refusal where there currently is none."}
{"prompt":"But ordinances like these are not a panacea. They are tools for struggle and refusal, but do not guarantee resistance to surveillance. Without vigilant organizing, including alliances with technologists and elected officials, even community advisory boards may rubber stamp policies and legitimize surveillance technologies. This struggle also shows how cities do not control the technology of companies they contract with. As the coalition in San Diego worked to get the ordinance passed, it put the fear in city council members by explaining how the NYPD lost control of its data to Palantir. Then, the same thing happened to San Diego. With defunding, the city lost access to the streetlights’ surveillance feed. But the cameras continue to record. GE sold off the streetlight network to another company, which sold it to a Florida-based firm called Ubicquia. Ubicquia refuses to stop recording even though the city can no longer access the data. But even this did not stop the police from removing the camera and harddrive in one case to access and share the video.  Paradoxically, it was the process of organizing for the ordinance that strengthened the coalition’s political capacity to challenge emerging surveillance technologies. By political capacity, we mean relationships among community members who trust one another, can teach each other, and can work together; we mean the time that people can spend researching, calling into council, occupying the mayor’s office, strategizing, and running educational forums. More people means more time spent doing these things, and more relationships with people who will get involved in the movement.  In advocating for the ordinance, Irani and Alexander talked to a wide range of people, from anti-racism activists to former soldiers. Each person had different reasons to fear surveillance. People who showed up out of fear of big tech or privacy violations also learned about the criminalization of marginalized San Diegans. Anti-criminalization activists learned a lot about technology and its potential role in further entrenching the carceral state. Many of the people engaged by the coalition took their first steps from awareness to action. But the coalition’s work to resist and refuse mass surveillance doesn’t end with the ordinance. It begins in earnest once the ordinance is in place.","completion":"When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, one of the first steps the strip club I worked at took was to have all dancers wear masks. The club also limited the number of patrons who could be in the club at any one time, following rapidly evolving CDC guidelines. But then, on March 16th, Los Angeles County went into lockdown. What we thought would be only a week, soon became months, then an indefinite question mark.  Stripping is a high risk occupation in the middle of an airborne viral pandemic, and it became clear we would be among the last industries to reopen. We weren’t considered essential workers. Many of us weren’t even properly registered as employees, which meant that we were ineligible for government aid. I was hesitant to apply for unemployment because I wasn’t sure if my club had declared me as an employee, and I was afraid of retaliation if I exposed their less-than-above-board financial situation. Erotic laborers were also initially explicitly banned from receiving Paycheck Protection Program loans. I realized I would have to figure out a survival strategy, part of which was moving my work online."}
{"prompt":"Countless sex workers around the country were navigating similar crises. I’m the president of Strippers United, a coalition of strippers working to create safe and equitable workplaces for strippers across the United States and beyond. As states began shutting down strip clubs during the pandemic, our social media page was inundated with strippers who were suddenly out of work and terrified because they didn’t know what to do next. We began providing mutual aid to strippers facing evictions and imminent homelessness, and helping our community members address the numerous challenges of having to move online.","completion":"One of the biggest challenges came from large social media platforms. As strippers and other sex workers became increasingly dependent on digital spaces to earn income during the pandemic, we were simultaneously in the midst of one of the largest ever digital crackdowns on sexual content. Beginning in 2018, following the passage of the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act and the Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, better known as SESTA and FOSTA respectively, apps like Instagram, TikTok, and Twitch initiated major terms of service changes that prohibited even the mention of basic words to describe our labor.  SESTA/FOSTA was purportedly created to prevent human trafficking and curb illegal sex work online, but the legislation was written without consultation from legal sex workers, and has ended up threatening our work as well. Because of the penalties enacted by the laws, tech companies decided the best solution was to police themselves. Thoughtful moderation would have required paying a human labor force to personally screen every account flagged for sexual content to determine whether or not what has been posted is legal and consensual, but tech companies don’t care enough to pay for due diligence. Instead, they began enlisting blunt algorithms that could hardly tell the difference between a Georgia O’Keeffe painting and a human vulva."}
{"prompt":"Not long after SESTA/FOSTA went into effect, numerous sex workers began reporting “technical issues” when we attempted to upload content that included words such as “sex,” “stripper,” or “pornstar”; the issues disappeared when we removed sex-related language. Even when we were careful, we noticed that more and more sex workers seemed to be getting deprioritized by social media algorithms—effectively censoring our content—or worse. Major Instagram influencers with hundreds of thousands of subscribers found their accounts taken down just because they had OnlyFans links in their bios.  Over the course of the pandemic, even legally recognized sex work was increasingly treated as illegal by social media platforms. (Currently, Twitter is the final stronghold when it comes to major social networking platforms that permit explicit content, and while it is popular with many sex workers, it isn’t right for everyone.) I received multiple warnings from Instagram throughout 2020 and into 2021, notifying me that my account was under investigation and might be taken down for “violations of terms of service,” due to the sexual nature of my content. The pictures on my timeline were no more graphic than pictures posted by celebrities like Doja Cat or Miley Cyrus—but unlike them, I was considered disposable.","completion":"The problem was far bigger than the ability to post selfies. Sex workers are vulnerable small business owners, and many of us who were not already earning money on the internet were forced by the pandemic to move our work online. When sex workers were removed from social media platforms, they lost their audiences and vital sources of income. Apart from the major social media platforms, there are not many popular places to advertise as a small sex-work business. This is not because the labor these workers are performing is against the law: strippers, cammers, pornstars, and many other sex work professions are legally recognized."}
{"prompt":"Things got worse in early 2021, a year after the pandemic began. In March, Mastercard announced it was going to enforce a radical new payments policy requiring even stricter oversight of adult content providers. One of the effects was that independent porn creators lost hundreds of hours of content overnight. A few months after the announcement, the site OnlyFans—whose explosive growth was built on the backs of adult creators—said it would ban sexually explicit content; it only backtracked after an online uproar from sex workers and media outlets, who lampooned the platform for its critical miscalculation of who was actually driving its success.","completion":"As the prospect of being deplatformed at any given moment became more and more likely, many sex workers began to wonder whether we would even be allowed to exist on social media at all. For months, my coworker, Summer Miller, had been trying to sell me on an idea: to build an online platform for us, by us: one entirely owned by the people making the content. Initially, this had seemed to me like a pipe dream because of the high costs of developing a platform, the dangers of federal regulation, and a lack of technical expertise among us. But trying to face the twin crises of the pandemic and SESTA/FOSTA convinced me Summer was right. The only way to really achieve just working conditions was by making sure that content creators had a powerful say in shaping their labor conditions, rather than leaving everything to faceless big-tech teams who are unreachable and unaccountable. To save our industry, to create an equitable workplace, and to protect sex workers, we had to take the industry over from the ground up."}
{"prompt":"Adult Only, Adult Always Summer and I began fundraising for our platform, which we called V Union, in late 2020. The following January, we received a message from Donia Love, the founder and CEO of PeepMe, another nascent platform for adult creators. The PeepMe team was a mix of people already involved in sex work and sex-work advocacy, along with allies in tech development and cyber security who were willing to put their careers on the line to support the enterprise. Their mission was everything we were aspiring to do: “adult only, adult always.” So V Union decided to partner with PeepMe.","completion":"Our aims for the platform are ambitious. In addition to creating a worker-owned cooperative, in which workers have democratic power over the running of the platform and a share in profits, we also want to give individual workers ninety percent of the revenue they generate. Additionally, we intend to donate ten percent of our profits to sex-worker-led community organizations. One caveat we are applying to cooperative ownership is the site cannot be sold off or lose its identity as an adult content platform. We believe this is the only way to create a just alternative to the exploitative business practices of the online adult industry."}
{"prompt":"Launching such a platform has had many challenges. Almost immediately, we were informed by our bank that PeepMe had lost its account because it was the bank’s policy not to serve “prurient” businesses. We have tried to partner with three different software development teams, but each of those collaborations has hit roadblocks due to SESTA/FOSTA and the threat of criminal liability for content hosted on the platform. One way to sidestep liability would be to make a decentralized and open source platform, but that would threaten our efforts to make PeepMe a worker-owned cooperative. Another option would be to use a prefab “white label” platform, but those can come with unknown security risks to sex workers and their financial data, and damaging the trust of sex workers would mean undermining the foundation of what we are hoping to achieve. There are also difficult questions about how to make PeepMe profitable and for whom: Do we sell the business to the community of users at some point, exiting the business for profit? Do we build a cooperative platform and then profit by selling or licensing its model to other cooperative platforms? How can we make the platform financially sustainable while lowering the barriers for sex workers to access sustainable, profitable work themselves? Stigma has also affected the ability for PeepMe to spread via word of mouth. During a small mock-fundraising session consisting of close friends and family, many people expressed enthusiasm for the platform and a willingness to donate, but were hesitant to help spread the word because of the stigma around the work. During a fundraising Zoom call, one prospective donor said, “I cannot shout out you guys on my feed. I just can’t because of the way the world works right now.” It’s one thing to personally believe sex workers deserve rights and their own platform, it’s another to relay that to coworkers without getting accused of sexual harassement and inappropriate conduct.","completion":"One thing that hasn’t been hard is finding sex workers who want to join the platform. Using Strippers United’s large Instagram presence and its connections to other sex work advocacy groups across the world, we have had great success doing outreach to adult creators. In particular, we have heard from many people who no longer trust OnlyFans and who understand the importance of a platform built by and for sex workers."}
{"prompt":"Frustratingly, though, we can’t yet serve all the sex workers we want. SESTA/FOSTA constrains us in similar ways to big tech corporations; unlike those companies, we have the appetite but not the capital to litigate our case. This means that, while we can legally host cam models, online strippers, porn stars, and other sex workers whose labor isn’t technically criminalized, we still can’t host full-service sex workers, who are ultimately the most at-risk members of our community. It is a heartbreaking compromise that I hope won’t last forever. For now, we’re aiming to protect who we can, and we hope to provide a sanctuary occupation—one accessible to people regardless of citizenship status, ability, education, race, and gender—for more and more people as our reach and visibility grows.","completion":"Currently, PeepMe is a team of about ten people, plus our tech team. Our goal is to raise $650,000 to launch and maintain the platform until it becomes self-supporting. So far, we have received $60,000 in donations, which means we can now afford to continue paying a cybersecurity specialist, a social media manager, and for account services that the founders were once paying out of pocket. We’re slowly succeeding in building something that once felt impossible.  Ultimately, I have a vision of a sex industry that is owned entirely by sex workers. Brick-and-mortar strip clubs, major porn studios, camming and porn-streaming platforms, adult fan sites—they should all belong to us and only us. The sex industry has been controlled for too long by people who make money, hand over fist, from our labor, without taking on any of the social or carceral risk that sex workers take on. They have exploited us, because they are able to due to societal stigma and criminalization. Anti-sex work abolitionists have capitalized on this exploitation to enact laws that have made our labor even less safe. The only way to change the system of exploitation is to put power into the hands of the workers. PeepMe is a bold step in that direction. We still have a long way to go, but we won’t be coded away."}
{"prompt":"If you’re interested in donating to our efforts to create the first ever cooperatively owned adult fan site, please sign up for our newsletter at peep.me. Since the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic, María’s house has been run like a factory. Every day, her family of six synchronizes their routines so two people are always behind a computer. María, her husband Rodrigo, and their children, Daniela (20), Andrés (18), and Camila (13) are among the unknown number of Venezuelans who, after years of political and economic crisis exacerbated by the pandemic, now try to make a living by annotating data through crowdsourcing platforms. Using two Canaima laptops, which the Hugo Chavéz government provided a decade ago for school children, they tag images and videos, transcribe text and audio, search for information online, and send videos and pictures of themselves to developers at companies and research institutions in Europe and North America. The developers use this data to train machine learning algorithms, like the ones that do facial recognition, moderate content, and guide self-driving cars.","completion":"The family’s activities all revolve around data production because this is their only source of income and, according to María, they have to “focus on the same objective to survive.” She and Rodrigo do most of the work, although she also takes care of many domestic duties. Camila, Andrés, and Daniela work part time on data annotation while attending high school and university. Only María’s youngest child, Sebastián (7) is able to focus exclusively on school. Although most crowdsourcing platforms’ terms of use state that each account must be run by a single adult, often the only hard requirement to set up an account is for someone to prove that they are at least eighteen years old by taking pictures of an identification card and their face, and praying that a third-party facial recognition verification system called Onfido detects a match."}
{"prompt":"The platform the family works for pays them a few cents per task, in cryptocurrency. They are only allowed to transfer the money to their online wallet once they have made at least the equivalent of ten dollars. After working every day of the week, they usually earn around twice that much, but recently they have barely made the minimum. “Last week, we couldn’t cash in,” Maria told me. “We couldn’t even make five dollars in total.” Her family dreads the day when the tasks will stop coming, the computer breaks, or they will lose access to the internet and electricity. Ofelia, another data annotation worker, who has diabetes, depends entirely on the platform to purchase insulin. “I would die without this income,” she told me. “I would literally die.” Income from data annotation is essential to Ophelia, María’s family, and the other Venezuelans who do this work because hyperinflation has made the official monthly minimum wage in the country worth only a few dollars, which is not enough to afford staple foods to survive even a week. That has rendered most jobs paid in bolivars, the national currency, unsustainable. After years of economic mismanagement due to government corruption and its economic dependency on oil, Venezuela has a goods and services shortage and has inflation levels that are consistently among the highest in the world. This situation, combined with its existing internet infrastructure, has made the country an appealing target of crowdsourcing platforms. In the absence of a robust social safety net, workers often see these platforms as their most reliable source of income in US dollars.  Before the pandemic, María and her family were migrants in neighboring Colombia for a year. María worked at a beauty salon while her husband Rodrigo worked selling coffees in the streets. The children all studied in the public education system. These were difficult but more stable times for the family. When the pandemic hit, María lost her job and, with deserted streets, Rodrigo couldn’t find many clients. With no other choice, they decided to return to Venezuela. “Here we had to look for options, and a friend recommended the platform to us,” Maria said. When the pandemic stopped in-person teaching, it meant that her three eldest children were stuck at home too, and could also perform data annotation work. In dozens of interviews with platform workers in Latin America, many of whom are or were migrants, I have heard similar stories: they were collectivizing platform labor across their household members, with teenage children doing more and more work after the onset of the pandemic.","completion":"In these ways, the political and economic crisis in Venezuela, as well as the pandemic and remote schooling, have turned out to be productive for data annotation platforms, their clients, and the venture capitalists that back them. (These crises have also generated profits for companies selling information to carceral states: Onfido, the identity verification company used by electronic wallets, shares the identity and facial recognition data it collects with the United Kingdom police.) The thousands of companies and research institutions that develop artificial intelligence are using platforms to find cheap outsourced labor, especially from low-income economies, for global markets in which data and labor are sold as commodities. One of the results is a race to the bottom in which wages get lower and lower as competition between platforms—and their ability to find pools of ready labor even among people living in refugee camps—goes up."}
{"prompt":"The invisibility of the workers in this process, and the myth of “one user, one account,” which permeates the technology industry, are at the center of many tech companies’ business models; in many cases, they pretend that their products are entirely automated and devoid of human intervention. In fact, the most popular data-annotation platform in the United States and India, Amazon Mechanical Turk, is named after an eighteenth-century automaton that deceived spectators by seeming to play chess autonomously while concealing a human player inside. From the clients’ perspective, workers are just users or, even worse, less than robots: “To be successful at this job, you have to think like a machine,” said one of the platform administrators to Cecilia, a worker I interviewed.","completion":"Once we see through the single-user facade, we can begin to appreciate the ways in which workers and their networks have gamed data annotation platforms and collaborated to mitigate the crises they face. These survival tactics can be important resources for other workers and communities facing similar exploitation. At the same time, though, these tactics indirectly serve to prop up the neocolonial labor practices of the platforms, their clients, and venture capital. In order to challenge these larger forces, we not only need to hold companies and research institutions accountable for the value they extract from “indivisibilized” workers. More importantly, we need to support emerging community-based alternatives to data annotation platforms—alternatives built by the people actually subject to this highly extractive form of work."}
{"prompt":"Survival Tactics In the suburbs of Valencia, in Carabobo State, data-annotation workers like Alfredo must increasingly rely on their own efforts to survive. “Our water comes from a pump,” Alfredo told me recently. “Every block of houses has a well, and every day the community designates someone to operate the pump to fill those wells.” The country’s ongoing economic and political crisis has caused the state and traditional businesses to become less present and effective in peoples’ lives; with little support from their local institutions or from employers, workers have increasingly had to rely on families and local communities for survival. Many of these communities manage water and waste disposal locally as common goods and services. These community-based services are necessary so workers can be ready for work, but not always robust or safe; for example, workers in communities that have had to resort to private waste incineration have been poisoned by smoke pollution.  Community support is also critical online, where workers share resources and organize with others through social media platforms like Facebook and Discord. Originally, the data-annotation platforms themselves created internal online groups to communicate with workers; however, these groups were heavily policed by moderators from the platforms. On one occasion, Roberto, a Black Venezuelan, wondered why Onfido’s AI could not manage to match his face and ID to validate his account. The moderators responded by expelling him from the online group. “I was astonished,” he told me. “I was expelled for asking a question!”  This kind of policing prompted many workers to form their own groups. Through my interviews, I found groups where workers would seek help learning how to complete tasks, complain about the platforms, and, on one occasion, organize a strike: members of a major Facebook group for data-annotation workers in Venezuela tried to convince their peers not to work for a few days, inspired by colleagues in the Philippines who, according to the organizers, successfully improved their wages by refusing to work. Despite the organizers’ efforts, most workers and their families were so dependent on the platform income that they couldn’t join the strike.","completion":"Through my interviews, I also found that some workers are part of smaller, closed groups on text-based apps like Telegram. These groups have a few dozen members with fees of a few dollars per month. (It was through Rogelio, the administrator of one of these groups, that I interviewed María and her family.) These sort of online professional associations were built for workers to help each other, to generate trust, and to access currency traders, who exchange virtual dollars and cryptocurrency for bolivars. In these groups, workers share resources, like bots that alert them when tasks are available, and guides that explain how to solve tasks more efficiently. I was told that one group pooled their savings to pay a programmer in Spain to code one of these bots for them.  Workers also use the groups to buy and sell accounts on the data-annotation platforms. New platform workers are not allowed by the platforms to perform many annotation tasks, and it takes a great investment of time to gain access to the best work. As a result, there is an informal market for the highest, “level 3” accounts, which are sometimes sold individually for roughly ten US dollars, or in packages of at least as many as ten."}
{"prompt":"Online worker groups can also transcend the virtual—for example, when a fellow member cannot work from home and needs a place to go, or when a member tries to take advantage of another one. A worker named Rodolfo told me about a colleague who refused to pay after receiving login details for ten platform accounts. “Hopefully, the moderators have personal information of every single member, including addresses,” he told me. “They contacted the seller physically and realized that she had lost access to electricity and couldn’t complete the transaction.” Trust in his fellow workers is essential in a context where online scams are common.","completion":"These forms of community support are vital to workers, but they also put the onus on workers to make the data platforms’ business models sustainable. But even then, workers are disposable: when a platform can no longer drive down wages in a particular country, they can simply look to other places and other crises."}
{"prompt":"Beyond the Visible Since platforms are not usually physically and administratively present in the countries where workers are located, they can relocate quickly. I have conducted quantitative research on the web traffic of ninety-three crowdsourcing platforms and shown that some of those present in Venezuela are now targeting workers in Kenya. This repeats the same model used by non-data-annotation gig work apps, such as Uber, which launch in a country with incentives that make workers dependent on the platform and then remove those incentives once they create dependency.  Making workers and their communities more visible may be one way to demand these platforms change their business models. But pointing out the collective exploitation at the heart of data annotation should also be used to pressure the platforms’ clients, including developers, management, and individual researchers, as well as investors, shareholders, and university administrators. In order to do this, we need more efforts to document the origins of datasets, third-party audits on AI models to assess their compliance with local and international labor standards, and assessments of the working conditions of platforms.","completion":"However, as the scholar Noopur Raval argues, making workers and their communities visible is not enough. Since the economic incentives for platforms and their clients will remain, major actors in the data-annotation pipeline need to be directed to change their practices through regulation. In addition, in the place of exploitative multinational gig work platforms, companies and research institutions that require annotation need to support local initiatives from unionization to cooperative ownership of locally created platforms."}
{"prompt":"In fact, there is a burgeoning ecosystem of platform companies owned and managed by workers. These companies have the potential to be more sustainable alternatives to the mainstream gig economy platforms. The Platform Cooperative Consortium lists 506 co-op projects in thirty-three countries. Many have emerged in sectors like ride-hailing and delivery, but the market for cooperative data annotation remains untapped. It is also worth mentioning that local impact sourcing companies, where data annotation occurs on-site by employed workers, could represent a more reliable alternative, in terms of data quality and labor conditions, than many platforms currently in the market. Ultimately, only solutions that recognize the communal nature of work and economic justice can have transformative effects on the lives of workers like María and her family. Inequality in platform labor is not an issue of individual workers, but networks of people who resist the paradox of a technology that innovates for some by exploiting others.","completion":"The first time that I borrowed someone else’s voice I was six years old. After surviving two years in care-less foster homes, I had recently moved in with a family I loved and hoped to be a part of permanently. But, I worried, would I really get to stay? At the time, with no other recognizable means to communicate, I used the trailer for the film Angels in the Outfield to ask my most pressing question: “Dad, when are we gonna be a family?” I knew exactly when the kid popped the question, and when I saw him turn to face his dad, I’d hit STOP on the VCR. It took a number of tries before my parents learned to hear me, but eventually they did and began reassuring me that I was there to stay."}
{"prompt":"We soon began creating a number of tools to communicate with each other. Cameras became our main translators. My parents took pictures of everything: activities, places, people, foods. They used the photos to make sure I understood them and to teach me how to make choices by picking photos of what I wanted. I could escape a plate of cauliflower by bringing them a logo for KFC. Each photograph was labelled with the printed word, so I could learn sight words and begin to understand what they were saying. Still, not everything could be captured in a photo. I needed other means of communication to say “stop” when my dad tickled me and I needed to catch my breath, and a way to say “bathroom,” when I needed to pee NOW. And so we developed a basic sign language to convey essential messages. Instead of insisting I join their speaking world, my parents learned these new languages with me.","completion":"When it was time to start regular kindergarten at my neighborhood school, I brought my languages with me. Before long, my classmates and I were all using photos and learning to spell with our fingers. But participating in school also required new technologies. I started using a simple voice-output device like the single-switch BIGmack and Cheap Talk 8 that allowed me to play pre-recorded messages in either my mom’s or dad’s voice to answer questions during class. Because I had learned to communicate in these ways, I was taught to read and write, first with laminated sight words and later with a seventeen dollar label maker from Staples."}
{"prompt":"By the time I entered middle school in 2003, written English had become my dominant mode of communication, and I began to develop a public voice. As my language got more sophisticated, so did my devices. The Gemini—a large laptop device with a touchscreen that was a quarter of my weight—allowed me to create a countless number of expressions with any degree of sophistication. In ninth grade, I got the Dynavox, a smaller but similarly heavy equivalent to the Gemini, with a clearer mechanical voice. It had a hard drive prepopulated with thousands of phrases, but they didn’t sound like me. With one finger, I laboriously programmed in as many of my own phrases as I could.  For more private conversations, I far preferred the silence of written words. I brought my labeler with me everywhere, using it to converse with friends and process trauma with my therapist. It wasn’t until the tenth grade, when I got my first laptop with text-to-speech software, that I had one lightweight device that allowed me to communicate silently or speak with a digital or recorded voice.  These are only some of the different technologies and modes of communication that I have used over the past two decades to gain entry—and be heard—in speech-based society. Speech-generating computers and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices, like the Gemini and Dynavox, have allowed me to contribute to discussions about my people, as well as the world around us. Because they are easy for hearing-based communities to comprehend and sophisticated enough for us to convey complicated ideas in an apparently timely and efficient manner, communication technologies have given me and other alternatively communicating people a voice to be heard by large groups of people over space and time. But those technologies have also worked to define—and confine—us through their economics, their software, and the ways in which they reinforce ableist culture and notions of how communication ought to be structured.","completion":"AAC devices have been around for over seventy years, yet most nonspeaking people in the US still experience widespread segregation in school and throughout their lives. I am one of only two alternatively communicating autistics to be fully mainstreamed from kindergarten through college graduation. One of the problems is accessibility. In our society, the Gemini and the Dynavox cost $12,000 and $9,000, respectively. Even at $500, an iPad with text-to-speech software is still unattainable for many disabled adults on social security, who receive $770 per month to cover all of their living expenses.  Even for the relatively small number of us who can access these technologies, we are too often left to rely on prerecorded, preordained messages—to speak only the devices’ language. In our speech-centric, hearing-privileged society, speakers are unquestioningly assumed to be able-bodied, self-reliant individuals whose vocal cords effortlessly produce spoken words and whose ears naturally decode spoken language. AAC devices have been designed to mimic this narrow “ideal.” According to research, 90 percent of what a person says in a given day is made up of repetitive, automatic phrases. AAC devices are populated only with these generic messages.  This ableist design assumes speakers know best what others should say and limits the kinds of relationships nontraditional communicators can form. The technology also renders invisible how much effort and time it takes to communicate this way, and it requires nothing of the speaking, hearing world. When we choose not to use AAC devices—with their stiff, generic, confining, and inauthentic prerecorded messages—society usually stops offering us other ways to connect and instead declares us “uneducable,” “untrainable,” “asocial,” “unempathetic” and “willingly walled off from the world.” I have come to think of ableism as the cultivated garden of a speech-based society. Many assistive technologies assume the disabled are outsiders, striving to inhabit that cultivated garden. These technologies don’t change the world we live in; they just allow a few of us to climb up and over the garden wall, helping us pass or pose as independent, able-bodied, speakers. Once in the garden, we are seen as validating the status quo, further fortifying the very walls that many of us hope to dismantle with other technologies, other modes of communicating, other ways of being."}
{"prompt":"Hearing in Red We do not have a ready word for the kind of flexible communication that I practice. Instead of calling someone who uses this kind of flexible communication a “multimodal communicator,” as I choose to do, people like me are labelled “nonspeaking.” People use the verbal/nonverbal binary to render nonspeakers unheard and therefore invisible. In a speech-centric, hearing-privileged world, we are always seen as disabled, lacking. “Success stories,” maybe; “inspirations,” perhaps—but always on others’ terms. What would it mean to build technologies that create opportunities for more multimodal communication and the dense interpersonal connections such communication offers? For the past five years, I have been working through a combination of art and activism to imagine what these other modes of communication might be. My starting points are the modes of communication that I used as a child. There was an interdependent flourishing that formed around the technologies my classmates and I used in my early school years. These technologies were more multisensory, more communal, and in a sense more democratic; in pictures, sign language, and tangible sight words, my parents, teachers, friends, and I were all learners, all teachers. Using these alternative, communal languages, others in our classroom considered “at-risk for school failure” found their own pathways to literacy: some learned to spell with their fingers, others learning English as a second language used photographs as helpful translators, and visual learners found that pictures grounded in meaning what fleeting, spoken words could not.  A decade and a half later, I had another insight into multimodal communication. In 2016, I was late into my undergraduate thesis in Anthropology, before I realized I was writing an autoethnographic study that completely left out the contributions of people who prefer nonalphabetic languages and that remained largely inaccessible to the majority of nontraditional communicators, who are never taught to read. A high achiever in mainstream education from kindergarten through college, I had come to communicate almost entirely in written English. What, I wondered, might I have lost in the process? I began engaging with the visual artwork of various autistics, eventually compelled by the drawings, paintings, and sculptures of seven artists to write a poetic series. By the last poem, modes of communication had begun to blur as I proudly tell five-year-old impressionist artist Iris Grace that “I’m no longer visual exactly; nor am I verbal. When I type, my fingers speak / with an accent.”","completion":"Around the same time I was finishing my thesis, production was also wrapping up on Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t be a Lottery, a documentary about my life, which I co-produced and narrated. In the first four minutes of the film, I use a myriad of technologies—my laptop and Dynavox, trees, walls, backpack, other people’s bodies and voices, film, literacy, and a combination of spoken poetry and animation—to maneuver my way past communication and physical barriers at my high school. That opening sequence is something of a model for what I imagine communication might be like in a world that doesn’t privilege speech over other, more interdependent, modes of communication."}
{"prompt":"The strongest example of this multimodal way of communicating are the parts of the film when my poetry and the oil-paint animations of the British artist Em Cooper converse with each other. In Cooper’s constantly flowing work, no image is static. Figures emerge briefly and then merge into the background, before re-forming into other figures; everything blurs into everything else. In a dynamic that seemed to reproduce the differences between speech-dominant cultures and more multimodal ways of connecting, other animators who were approached to work on the film took my words too literally, pairing the lines “The ear that hears the cardinal hears in red” with a cartoon cardinal and “The eye that spots the salmon sees in wet” with an animated salmon. Cooper’s brushstrokes, by contrast, were full of color, motion, and texture, occasionally offering a fleeting trace of vines, volcanoes, waves, or flags—metaphors I had used elsewhere in my writing to describe myself or challenge the world we lived in.  Cooper and I never thought we were taking everyone in the audience to the same destination; instead, we offered people multiple pathways into a world in which everything is interwoven, where motion, rhythm, pattern, color, sound, and texture freely interact, offering endlessly unfolding possibilities. I recognized, however, that this was a rarefied means of communicating; not something that could always be open to me, let alone anyone else. Four years later, at the outset of the pandemic, I began to ask myself how technology might allow us to create new communities in which diverse bodies, voices, and language might come together, as they had in my collaboration with Cooper, and thrive, much like we all had in kindergarten.  Cut off and segregated in my own home, I turned again to poetry and technology to create some alternative pathways: co-teaching multigenerational, global, and intersectional poetry writing courses for beginning poets, and collaborating with three fellow poets based on the artwork of the artist Malcolm Corley, who is also autistic. In both the courses and the collaboration, speakers and alternative communicators came together to make work that challenged the supremacy of speech-based culture. Traces of our entanglements live on in a chapbook, Studies in Brotherly Love. In the introduction, poet Claretta Holsey describes our modes of communication this way: “We crafted poems that speak to us and to our causes: awareness of performative utterances, as communication can and does happen outside of written text, outside of simple speech; embrace of Black vernacular, its rhythm and blues; recognition of the Black family as a model of resilience; respect for nature, which awes and overwhelms; respect for the body, made vulnerable by want.”","completion":"Imagining that technology alone can liberate us is a bit shortsighted and, in some ways, disabling. But, if we imagine the cultivated garden of a speech-based society is the only way of being, then the communication technologies we build will continue to keep us stuck in an inclusion/exclusion binary, in which some beings are seen as disposable and others not."}
{"prompt":"Ontology of God Big Mike says I read that dogs don’t have a sense of time       a minute  is like an hour an hour like a day              a day like a minute. The continuity is skewed & time is placed without thought into various boxes. I think  what it must be like to be a dog because                 yes       I be  with my dogs in this massive cage              trying to exhaust every thread of thought surrounding time. Maybe that’s why we say things like Oh, [name]?  Yeah that’s my dog & use dog as a placeholder for when we secret the names of those involved              in the robbery stabbing         extortion.                We want to shake off the slough of our numbered bodies            hieroglyphs                in our skin sluiced onto the floor.  We want to live in a space free of calendars & clocks & the minutes              we must share              but the high fruits are not ready to fall from this life. Not yet. Ciph & Civ claim God body & who am I to tell them otherwise                when we all want to claim master                            key to lock                    silo to grain & again own the con- tents of our own dufflebags & spoken languages without restraint. Still when I call Doc he says What’s good God? & tells me about my god- daughter           her mews & her small body taking hold of the world around              her. When I buried my faith I didn’t dig deep                        no           I didn’t & from the dirt sprung forth a woman I asked her                      I said What is your name? & she just smiled past me      which left me confused. When I woke up I went to commune with the poodle down the hall who quietly trotted  around while her master played cards.","completion":"Bodies of Water There are no empty vessels when everything has proper weight.  — James Wood Sitting in the substance abuse class we talk about moderation                     the therapist                 Elissa loosening the clenched jaws each man has labored for years to claim as his own                            opening the floor to the stories we  claim. The watch-words are criminal thinking & this is commonplace. This is everyday  in the joint                       correction. That’s what this is               correction                           correction in the depart- ment of closely governed boxes.                  Bodies  of water are different                 no longer  signified in themselves                     but              these            bursting symbols                       overflowing with money &  drugs & the women we see in photo-  copied porn. They become our desires transposed amongst the pasts we had assumed  to be ours                       stories we lived in real-time               yet are read fast by this institution as empty glasses                         vessels to be filled  & tossed long into whatever ocean  borders the nation with the most bullets & the most mechanisms to keep us  from loading those bullets. We are thirsty  for any other ocean                 for bodies of water                      not                       weighted with the remnants of these floating cages                            of correction              of anything unseen                               but still policed."}
{"prompt":"Intro I don’t know how I ended up         here       yeah actually I  know. I called it              I made myself a dumb prophet & cuffed my own  wrists like a God who creates  & creates         & creates         too many worlds to wave his hand                     or  whatever he believes he’s doing               over & grant the prayers of his reckless children. He gets  mad because he gets shown up.           He  fails at the feet of his creations. I know how  I got here.         When I first came  down    they tested my criminal- ity by sitting me down  in a small room                        an office             giving me a battery of statements like If my fam-  ily gets hurt I feel the urge  to retaliate & some people deserve to be pun-  ished (that one I laughed at). I was  to answer with agreement                      or strong denial. I must have  passed                             my report read Low Prob-  ability of Reoffense but a sentence is a sentence              & now it’s almost a decade  with more to go & all my files in a drawer full of other  men’s histories                      so many  histories. Do you know the stories       Do you know who  I am       Do you understand  what I am           Can I tell you I’ll try to sing this broken  song    & summon my tribe      ones  who will one day carry me home    & damn            damn       I know  it’s a moonshot but        maybe  you’ll come find me before I lose myself in this jungle.","completion":"1/ What’s in a cloud?  Writers have long used clouds as metaphors for metaphor-making. In Hamlet, Hamlet messes with his girlfriend’s dad, the courtier Polonius, by pointing out the different shapes he sees:  H: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?P: By th’ mass, and ’tis like a camel indeed.H: Methinks it is like a weasel.P: It is backed like a weasel.H: Or like a whale?P: Very like a whale."}
{"prompt":"As always, the play is playing with perception. Can a person ever know what’s real? Is that a reasonable thing to even care about? The point is also that Polonius cannot be trusted; he is a sycophant. Hamlet will stab him dead two scenes later. 2/ Clouds are ambiguous. Liquid solid. Ethereal material. As Shakespeare’s Mark Antony says, their most striking images “mock our eyes with air.” The writers in this issue think about clouds of various shapes. Several address the cloud—that is, the global archipelago of warehouses that collectively coordinate the world’s computing power.   Today, the press tends to talk about the cloud in imperial terms. It is the Valhalla of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Alibaba; it is strongman leaders demanding data sovereignty for their country of a billion plus people. But those who have worked in data centers for decades tell a different story. The cloud, they point out, came into many firms from the bottom up, at the behest of engineers, not management. Yet even those who were there on the ground floor, who worked with “bare metal” and knew what it felt like to cut your fingers on the rails that held racks of servers in place (“a badge of honor”), could not anticipate the new forms of power that the cloud would bring.  The advent of the cloud did not only create the conditions for the concentration of unprecedented amounts of wealth and information in the hands of a few firms. It also changed how rank-and-file engineers worked. The so-called Agile revolution started before the cloud took off. But it gained speed with it. Like previous developments in the computing industry, Agile combined counterculture and cyberculture; it was ostensibly rebellious, but committed rebels to sprinting toward corporate goals.   Other writers in this issue take, literally, to the sky. Aloft, clouds remain difficult to assess. Even as political consensus in favor of trying to reach “net zero” grows, climate scientists will struggle to measure emissions and to compute what it would take to offset them. One trick of the cloud metaphor is to suggest that recording and computation are everywhere, and yet hazy points remain.","completion":"Obscurities remain on clear days. Taking sprawling aerial surveillance programs in their sights, other contributors argue that the obscurity of individuals and organizations who have amassed the power to see everything must be dispelled. They share strategies for gaining information about government and corporate plans. Transparency is always a struggle."}
{"prompt":"Clouds are part of the weather, and another sense of weather is the Romance language one: le temps, el tiempo, il tempo. Time itself. This issue explores other temporalities, and the bodies they are tied to. One writer celebrates “crip time” as an alternative to “flow,” which is not about fulfilling work discipline, but rather about learning to be stuck. Another writer imagines other times altogether. This issue contains the first speculative fiction we have published.","completion":"3/ Throughout human history, clouds have acted as omens. Aeromancy is the art of divining the future from the sky. This issue considers possible futures, without being too predictive; the sky is a complex canvas, and its patterns shift quickly with the wind. I first encountered Agile when I got a job in a library. I’d been hired to help get a new digital scholarship center off the ground and sometimes worked with the library’s software development team to build tools to support our projects. There were about six members of this team, and I noticed right away that they did things differently from the non-technical staff. At meetings, they didn’t talk about product features, but “user stories”—tiny narratives that described features—to which they assigned “story points” that measured the effort involved in completing the associated tasks. They met every morning for “standup,” a meeting literally conducted standing up, the better to enforce brevity. A whiteboard had pride of place in their workspace, and I watched the developers move Post-it notes across the board to signify their state of completion. They worked in “sprints,” two-week stretches devoted to particular tasks."}
{"prompt":"At meetings with the rest of us on the library staff, the head of the development team reported on progress using software that included a dashboard indicating the state of every project. The manager could also show us a graph of the team’s “velocity,” the rate at which the developers finished their tasks, complete with historical comparisons and projections.  This was Agile, I learned, a method for managing software development that had achieved enormous popularity in technical workplaces of all kinds—and, increasingly, even non-technical workplaces (including, as one TED speaker would have it, the family home). Honestly, I was impressed. In my own work, I often felt as though I was flailing around, never quite sure if I was making progress or doing anything of real value. The developers, in contrast, seemed to know exactly what they were doing. If they ran into a roadblock, it was no big deal; they just dealt with it. They expected requirements to change as they progressed, and the two-week time horizons allowed them to substitute one feature for another, or adopt a new framework, without starting all over from scratch.","completion":"That’s the beauty of Agile: designed for ultimate flexibility and speed, it requires developers to break every task down into the smallest possible unit. The emphasis is on getting releases out fast and taking frequent stock, changing directions as necessary. I was intrigued; Agile was different from anything I’d experienced before. Where had it come from, and why? I began to explore the history of Agile. What I discovered was a long-running wrestling match between what managers want software development to be and what it really is, as practiced by the workers who write the code. Time and again, organizations have sought to contain software’s most troublesome tendencies—its habit of sprawling beyond timelines and measurable goals—by introducing new management styles. And for a time, it looked as though companies had found in Agile the solution to keeping developers happily on task while also working at a feverish pace. Recently, though, some signs are emerging that Agile’s power may be fading. A new moment of reckoning is in the making, one that may end up knocking Agile off its perch."}
{"prompt":"Turning Weirdos into Engineers Software development was in crisis even before the word “software” was coined. At a 1954 conference convened by leaders in industry, government, and academia at Wayne State University in Detroit, experts warned of an imminent shortage of trained programmers. The use of the term “software” to mean application programming first appeared in print in an article by statistician John W. Tukey four years later. By the mid-1960s, at least a hundred thousand people worked as programmers in the United States, but commentators estimated an immediate demand for fifty thousand more.","completion":"In the first decades of the programming profession, most experts assumed that formulating computer-readable directions would be a relatively trivial job. After all, the system analysts—the experts who specify the high-level architecture—had already done the hard intellectual work of designing the program and hardware. The job of the coder was simply to translate that design into something a computer could work with. It was a surprise, then, when it turned out that this process of translation was in fact quite intellectually demanding.  The nature of these intellectual demands, along with the larger question of what kind of work software development actually is, continues to baffle managers today. In the computer’s early years, it seemed to some people that coding was, or should be, a matter of pure logic; after all, machines just do what you tell them to do. There was, self-evidently, a formally correct way to do things, and the coder’s job was simply to find it.  And yet, the actual experience of programming suggested that coding was as much art as science. Some of the most advanced programming, as Clive Thompson notes in his 2019 book Coders, was pushed forward by long-haired weirdos who hung around university labs after hours, hackers who considered themselves as much artisans as logicians. The fact that one couldn’t physically touch a piece of software—its storage media, perhaps, but not the software itself—made software development more abstract, more mysterious than other engineering fields. Where other fields could be expected to obey the laws of physics, the ground seemed to be constantly shifting under software’s feet. Hardware was perpetually changing its parameters and capabilities.  Nevertheless, the field of electronic data processing—the automation of office functions, like time cards and payroll—was growing rapidly. The hulking machines designed for the purpose, leased from IBM, quickly became the hallmark of the technologically forward-thinking operation. But they required teams of operators to design the programs, prepare the punch cards, and feed data into the system. Established managers resented the specialized expertise and professional eccentricity of the growing ranks of “computer boys.” They resented, too, that software projects seemed to defy any estimation of cost and complexity. The famed computer scientist Frederick Brooks compared software projects to werewolves: they start out with puppy-like innocence, but, more often than not, they metamorphose into “a monster of missed schedules, blown budgets, and flawed products.” You could say, then, that by the late 1960s, software development was facing three crises: a crying need for more programmers; an imperative to wrangle development into something more predictable; and, as businesses saw it, a managerial necessity to get developers to stop acting so weird."}
{"prompt":"It was in this spirit of professionalization that industry leaders encouraged programmers to embrace the mantle of “software engineer,” a development that many historians trace to the NATO Conference on Software Engineering of 1968. Computer work was sprawling, difficult to organize, and notoriously hard to manage, the organizers pointed out. Why not, then, borrow a set of methods (and a title) from the established fields of engineering? That way, programming could become firmly a science, with all the order, influence, and established methodologies that comes with it. It would also, the organizers hoped, become easier for industry to manage: software engineers might better conform to corporate culture, following the model of engineers from other disciplines. “In the interest of efficient software manufacturing,” writes historian Nathan Ensmenger, “the black art of programming had to make way for the science of software engineering.” Chasing Waterfalls And it worked—sort of. The “software engineering” appellation caught on, rising in prominence alongside the institutional prestige of the people who wrote software. University departments adopted the term, encouraging students to practice sound engineering methodologies, like using mathematical proofs, as they learned to program. The techniques, claimed the computer scientist Tony Hoare, would “transform the arcane and error-prone craft of computer programming to meet the highest standards of the engineering profession.”  Managers approached with gusto the task of organizing the newly intelligible software labor force, leading to a number of different organization methods. One approach, the Chief Programmer Team (CPT) framework instituted at IBM, put a single “chief programmer” at the head of a hierarchy, overseeing a cadre of specialists whose interactions he oversaw. Another popular approach placed programmers beneath many layers of administrators, who made decisions and assigned work to the programmers under them.","completion":"With these new techniques came a set of ideas for managing development labor, a management philosophy that has come to be called (mostly pejoratively) the “waterfall method.” Waterfall made sense in theory: someone set a goal for a software product and broke its production up into a series of steps, each of which had to be completed and tested before moving on to the next task. In other words, developers followed a script laid out for them by management.  The term “waterfall,” ironically, made its first appearance in an article indicting the method as unrealistic, but the name and the philosophy caught on nevertheless. Waterfall irresistibly matched the hierarchical corporate structure that administered it. And it appealed to managers because, as Nathan Ensmenger writes, “The essence of the software-engineering movement was control: control over complexity, control over budgets and scheduling, and, perhaps most significantly, control over a recalcitrant workforce.” This was precisely the kind of professional that waterfall development was designed to accommodate."}
{"prompt":"But before long, software development was again in crisis—or crises. Part of the problem was keeping up with the need for new computer scientists. Universities in 1980 couldn’t fill the faculty positions necessary to train the huge number of students with ambitions to become software engineers. “This situation seriously threatens the ability of Computer Science departments to continue developing the skilled people needed both by our information processing industry and by an increasingly technological society,” warned the Association for Computing Machinery.  The industry’s dearth of qualified developers wasn’t its only problem. Software development itself seemed to be struggling. Waterfall’s promise of tightly controlled management was a mirage. No amount of documentation, process, or procedure seemed capable of wrestling development into predictability. Software projects were big, expensive, and they seemed to be spiraling out of control—huge initiatives foundered unfinished as requirements changed and warring project teams bickered about details. Despite managers’ efforts to make software development reliable and predictable, it seemed, if anything, to have only grown more unwieldy. As the computer scientist Jeff Offutt put it, “In the 1960s, programmers built ‘tiny log cabins,’” while “in the 1980s, teams of programmers were building office buildings”—and by the 1990s, skyscrapers. Yet teams of technologists seemed unable to coordinate their work. Peter Varhol, a technology industry consultant, estimates that in the early 1990s, the average application took three years to develop, from idea to finished product. Technology was supposed to make American business smarter, faster, and more profitable, and yet the most respected corporations couldn’t seem to get their projects off the ground.","completion":"The designation of “engineer,” the administrative hierarchies, the careful planning and documentation: all of this had been intended to bring order and control to the emerging field of software development. But it seemed to have backfired. Rather than clearing the way for software developers to build, waterfall gummed up the works with binders of paperwork and endless meetings.  For their parts, engineers complained of feeling constrained by heavy-handed management techniques. They just wanted to build software. Why were they hamstrung by paperwork? The typical picture of corporate programming in the 1990s is of the existentially bored twenty-somethings in Douglas Coupland’s novel Microserfs, or the desperate developers in Mike Judge’s movie Office Space, whose rage lurks just below the surface."}
{"prompt":"Khakis and Dad Jeans Enter what may be the world’s most unlikely group of rock stars: seventeen middle-aged white guys, dressed in khakis and dad jeans, all obsessed with management. The now-legendary authors of what came to be called the Agile Manifesto gathered at Utah’s Snowbird ski resort in February 2001 to hammer out a new vision for the software development process. This wasn’t their first meeting; they’d been gathering in various configurations to discuss software development for some time, though, until the 2001 meeting, they hadn’t come up with much to show for it. This time was different. Scrawled on a whiteboard was the Agile Manifesto, a set of values that, in the following years, would become nearly ubiquitous in the management of programmers, from fledgling startups to huge corporations. It’s pleasantly concise: We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.Through this work we have come to value:Individuals and interactions over processes and toolsWorking software over comprehensive documentationCustomer collaboration over contract negotiationResponding to change over following a planThat is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.","completion":"The manifesto, supplemented by twelve additional principles, targeted the professional frustrations that engineers described. Waterfall assumed that a software application’s requirements would be stable, and that slowdowns and logjams were the result of deviating from management’s careful plan. Agile tossed out these high-level roadmaps, emphasizing instead the need to make decisions on the fly. This way, software developers themselves could change their approach as requirements or technology changed. They could focus on building software, rather than on paperwork and documentation. And they could eliminate the need for endless meetings.  It’s an interesting document. Given the shortage of qualified developers, technology professionals might have been expected to demand concessions of more immediate material benefit—say, a union, or ownership of their intellectual property. Instead, they demanded a workplace configuration that would allow them to do better, more efficient work. Indeed, as writer Michael Eby points out, this revolt against management is distinct from some preceding expressions of workplace discontent: rather than demand material improvements, tech workers created “a new ‘spirit,’ based on cultures, principles, assumptions, hierarchies, and ethics that absorbed the complaints of the artistic critique.” That is, the manifesto directly attacked the bureaucracy, infantilization, and sense of futility that developers deplored. Developers weren’t demanding better pay; they were demanding to be treated as different people."}
{"prompt":"Organizational Anarchists It seems likely that changes in opinions about the nature of software development didn’t take place in 2001 exactly, but in the decade leading up to the authorship of the Agile Manifesto. Consensus was growing—among developers, but also among managers—that software development couldn’t be made to fit the flow-charts and worksheets in which analysts had placed so much hope. Software, as the historian Stuart Shapiro wrote in 1997, is complex in a particularly complex way: the problems are “fuzzy, variable, and multifaceted, and thus rarely proved amenable to any one approach; instead, they demanded hybrid and adaptive solutions.” Not, then, forms and timecards. Moreover, as the workforce of programmers grew by leaps and bounds in the 1990s, companies hired, of necessity, people without formal computer science training. These younger workers likely had less invested in the drive of the 1970s and 1980s to turn software development into a science. The manifesto wasn’t really a shot across the bow: it was more of a punctuation mark, emphasizing years of discontent with prevailing models of corporate management.","completion":"Nevertheless, while Agile had a devoted following, its mandate—the removal of top-down planning and administrative hierarchy—was a risk. It meant management ceding control, at least to some extent, to developers themselves. And most large companies weren’t willing to do that, at least not until the 2010s. Between 2012 and 2015, though, according to the Agile consultancy Planview, more than 50 percent of practicing development teams characterized themselves as “Agile.”  Doubtless, some of this popularity had to do with the growth of high-speed internet connections, which drastically altered the way software got released. Before, it wasn’t unusual for software to be updated once a year, or at even longer intervals. The fact that updates had to be distributed on physical media like CD-ROMs and floppy disks limited the speed of new releases. But high-speed internet made it possible to push out fixes and features as often as a company wanted, even multiple times a day. Agile made a lot of sense in this environment."}
{"prompt":"Facebook’s famous former motto, “Move fast and break things,” captured the spirit of the new era well. It was an era that rewarded audacity, in software development as much as in CEOs. Venture capital firms, on the hunt for “unicorns,” poured record amounts into the technology sector during the 2010s, and they wanted to see results quickly. Competing with startups required the ability to change on a dime, to release constantly, and to develop at breakneck speed. The risk calculus shifted: it now seemed dangerous to stick with waterfall, when Agile promised so much speed.","completion":"Equally, it seems, what it meant to be a software developer had changed. In the 1970s and 1980s, experts held up the systems-minded, logic-loving scientist as the ideal software worker. But over the years, this ideal had failed to take root. The programmers of the 1990s read Wired, not Datamation. If their characteristics can be intuited from the Agile Manifesto, they were intently committed to the highest standards, working quickly and confidently because managers “trust them to get the job done.” They refused to do things just because they’ve always been done that way, turning their minds to “continuous attention to technical excellence.” They weren’t thrown by fluid, fast-moving requirements; instead, they embraced them as an opportunity to “harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.”  The image of the free-thinking nonconformist fits the philosophy of Agile. The manifesto’s authors may have looked like textbook engineers, in button-downs with cell-phone holsters, but “a bigger group of organizational anarchists would be hard to find,” according to Jim Highsmith, one of their number. Particularly in the early days, there was a lot of talk about the challenge Agile posed to the traditional management paradigm. Agile’s proponents were proud of this nonconformity: the framework “scares the bejeebers out of traditionalists,” wrote Highsmith in 2001. “Agile was openly, militantly, anti-management in the beginning,” writes the software developer and consultant Al Tenhundfeld. “For example, Ken Schwaber [a manifesto author] was vocal and explicit about his goal to get rid of all project managers.”  Anti-management, maybe, but not anti-corporate, not really. It’s tempting to see the archetypal Agile developer as a revival of the long-haired countercultural weirdo who lurked around the punch card machines of the late 1960s. But the two personas differ in important respects. The eccentrics of computing’s early years wanted to program for the sheer thrill of putting this new technology to work. The coder of Agile’s imagination is committed, above all, to the project. He hates administrative intrusion because it gets in the way of his greatest aspiration, which is to do his job at the highest level of professional performance. Like the developers in Aaron Sorkin’s The Social Network, he wants most of all to be in “the zone”: headphones on, distractions eliminated, in a state of pure communion with his labor."}
{"prompt":"Management’s Revenge Back at my library job, I kept an eye on the developers, admiring their teamwork and pragmatism. As time went by, though, I couldn’t help but notice some cracks in the team’s veneer. Despite the velocity chart and the disciplined feature-tracking, the developers didn’t seem to be making all that much progress. They were all working hard, that was clear, but there was a fatal flaw: no one really knew what the project was ultimately supposed to look like, or exactly what purpose it was supposed to serve. The team members could develop features, but it wasn’t clear what all these features were being tacked on to. Maybe that problem came from my workplace’s own dysfunction, which was considerable. Still, I began to wonder whether the Agile methodology had some limitations.","completion":"And, in fact, anyone with any proximity to software development has likely heard rumblings about Agile. For all the promise of the manifesto, one starts to get the sense when talking to people who work in technology that laboring under Agile may not be the liberatory experience it’s billed as. Indeed, software development is in crisis again—but, this time, it’s an Agile crisis. On the web, everyone from regular developers to some of the original manifesto authors is raising concerns about Agile practices. They talk about the “Agile-industrial complex,” the network of consultants, speakers, and coaches who charge large fees to fine-tune Agile processes. And almost everyone complains that Agile has taken a wrong turn: somewhere in the last two decades, Agile has veered from the original manifesto’s vision, becoming something more restrictive, taxing, and stressful than it was meant to be.  Part of the issue is Agile’s flexibility. Jan Wischweh, a freelance developer, calls this the “no true Scotsman” problem. Any Agile practice someone doesn’t like is not Agile at all, it inevitably turns out. The construction of the manifesto makes this almost inescapable: because the manifesto doesn’t prescribe any specific activities, one must gauge the spirit of the methods in place, which all depends on the person experiencing them. Because it insists on its status as a “mindset,” not a methodology, Agile seems destined to take on some of the characteristics of any organization that adopts it. And it is remarkably immune to criticism, since it can’t be reduced to a specific set of methods. “If you do one thing wrong and it’s not working for you, people will assume it’s because you’re doing it wrong,” one product manager told me. “Not because there’s anything wrong with the framework.” Despite this flexibility in its definition, many developers have lost faith in the idea of Agile. Wischweh himself encountered a turning point while describing a standup meeting to an aunt, a lawyer. She was incredulous. The notion that a competent professional would need to justify his work every day, in tiny units, was absurd to her. Wischweh began to think about the ways in which Agile encourages developers to see themselves as cogs in a machine. They may not be buried under layers of managers, as they were in the waterfall model, but they nevertheless have internalized the business’s priorities as their own. “As developers, IT professionals, we like to think of ourselves as knowledge workers, whose work can’t be rationalized or commodified. But I think Agile tries to accomplish the exact opposite approach,” said Wischweh."}
{"prompt":"Al Tenhundfeld points out that the authors of the Agile Manifesto were working developers, and that the manifesto’s initial uptake was among self-organizing teams of coders. Now, however, plenty of people specialize in helping to implement Agile, and Agile conferences notoriously tend to be dominated by managers, not developers. The ubiquity of Agile means that it is just as likely to be imposed from above as demanded from below. And Agile project managers, who are generally embedded in the team as the “product owner,” find themselves pulled in two directions: what’s best for the developers on the one hand, and what they’ve promised to deliver to management on the other.  Even as the team is pulled in multiple directions, it’s asked to move projects forward at an ever-accelerating pace. “Sprinting,” after all, is fast by definition. And indeed, the prospect of burnout loomed large for many of the tech workers I spoke to. “You’re trying to define what’s reasonable in that period of time,” said technical writer Sarah Moir. “And then run to the finish line and then do it again. And then on to that finish line, and on and on. That can be kind of exhausting if you’re committing 100 percent of your capacity.” Moreover, daily standups, billed as lightweight, low key check-ins, have become, for some workers, exercises in surveillance. Particularly when work is decomposed into small parts, workers feel an obligation to enumerate every task they’ve accomplished. There’s also pressure for every worker to justify their worth; they are, after all, employees, who need to be perceived as earning their salaries.  “Story points”—the abstraction that teams use to measure the effort involved in particular development tasks—have also lost some of their allure. They began as a way to give engineers some control over the amount and substance of their work. And yet, in practice, they often serve as a way to assess engineers’ performance. “Once you’ve put something in a digital tool, the amount of oversight that people want goes up, right?” said Yvonne Lam, a software engineer based in Seattle.","completion":"The problem isn’t just with surveillance, but with the way the points calcify into a timeline. John Burns, an engineer at a platform company, recalled a former workplace that simply multiplied story points by a common coefficient, in order to get a rough estimate of how long a project would take. Despite the points’ avowed status as an informal, internal measure, managers used them as a planning device.  The Next Crisis Underlying these complaints is a deeper skepticism about the freedom that Agile promises. Agile’s values celebrate developers’ ingenuity and idiosyncratic ways of working. But there are distinct limits to the kinds of creativity workers feel authorized to exercise under Agile, particularly because problems tend to be broken down into such small pieces. “It is clear that Agile dissolves many of the more visible features of hierarchical managerial control,” writes Michael Eby. “But it does so only to recontain them in subtle and nuanced ways.” Yvonne Lam notes that autonomy under Agile has distinct parameters. “People say you have the autonomy to decide how you’re going to do the work. And it’s like, yeah, but sometimes what you want is the autonomy to say, this is the wrong work.” There are so many choices to be made in the course of any software development project—about languages, frameworks, structure—that it’s possible to lose sight of the fact that developers often don’t get to weigh in on the bigger questions.  And, in the last few years, those bigger questions have taken on greater importance and urgency. We’ve seen numerous examples of tech workers organizing to change the direction of their companies’ business strategies: Google developers agitating to kill an AI contract with the Department of Defense, game developers agitating to end sexual harassment. These demands go beyond Agile’s remit, since they aim not to create conditions for workers to do a better job, but to change the nature of that job altogether.  It’s also worth considering how Agile might have played a role in creating a work culture that is increasingly revealed to be toxic for women, people of color, and members of gender minority groups. It’s an inescapable fact that the authors of the Agile Manifesto were a very specific group of people: white men who, whatever their varying experiences, have probably not spent much time in workplaces where they composed the minority. The working group has since acknowledged the deficit in the team’s diversity and vowed to incorporate a larger set of voices in the Agile Alliance, a nonprofit associated with the manifesto."}
{"prompt":"But when you survey a list of Agile-affiliated methodologies, alarm bells might go off if you’re the kind of person who’s faced discrimination or harassment at work. Many people testify to the utility of “pair programming,” for example, but the practice—in which two developers code together, each taking turns looking over the other’s shoulder—assumes that the two coders are comfortable with each other. Similarly, the warts-and-all breakdown of Agile “retrospectives” seems healthy, but I’ve watched them descend into a structureless series of accusations; everything depends on who’s leading the team. And Coraline Ada Ehmke, former community safety manager at GitHub, has described how fellow developers used the code review—ideally a low-stakes way for developers to check each other’s work—as an instrument of harassment. We’ve long known that eliminating bureaucracy, hierarchy, and documentation feels great, until you’re the person who needs rules for protection.","completion":"Could Agile even have played a role in some of the more infamous failures of the tech industry? The thought occurred to me as I watched Frances Haugen, the former Facebook manager turned whistleblower, testifying before Congress in October 2021. If a company sets a goal of boosting user engagement, Agile is designed to get developers working single-mindedly toward that goal—not arguing with managers about whether, for example, it’s a good idea to show people content that inflames their prejudices. Such ethical arguments are incompatible with Agile’s avowed dedication to keeping developers working feverishly on the project, whatever it might be."}
{"prompt":"This issue becomes especially pressing when one considers that contemporary software is likely to involve things like machine learning, large datasets, or artificial intelligence—technologies that have shown themselves to be potentially destructive, particularly for minoritized people. The digital theorist Ian Bogost argues that this move-fast-and-break-things approach is precisely why software developers should stop calling themselves “engineers”: engineering, he points out, is a set of disciplines with codes of ethics and recognized commitments to civil society. Agile promises no such loyalty, except to the product under construction.","completion":"Agile is good at compartmentalizing features, neatly packaging them into sprints and deliverables. Really, that’s a tendency of software engineering at large—modularity, or “information hiding,” is a critical way for humans to manage systems that are too complex for any one person to grasp. But by turning features into “user stories” on a whiteboard, Agile has the potential to create what Yvonne Lam calls a “chain of deniability”: an assembly line in which no one, at any point, takes full responsibility for what the team has created.  The Agile Manifesto paints an alluring picture of workplace democracy. The problem is, it’s almost always implemented in workplaces devoted to the bottom line, not to workers’ well-being. Sometimes those priorities align; the manifesto makes a strong case that businesses’ products can be strengthened by worker autonomy. But they’re just as likely to conflict, as when a project manager is caught between a promise to a client and the developers’ own priorities.  “There’s a desire to use process as a way to manage ambiguity you can’t control,” said María Matienzo, a software engineer for an academic institution. “Especially in places where you’re seen as being somewhat powerless, whether that’s to the whims of upper management or administration. So you may not be able to influence the strategic direction of a project at a high level, but Agile allows that certain conception of developer free will.” The product manager I spoke to put it more bluntly: “Agile tricks people into thinking they have ownership over their work, but from a labor perspective, they literally do not have ownership, unless they have, like, significant stock options or whatever.”  Software development has never fit neatly into the timelines and metrics to which companies aspire. The sheer complexity of a modern application makes its development sometimes feel as much alchemical as logical. Computers may have emerged as military equipment, but completely subordinating programming work to the priorities of capital has been surprisingly difficult. When software engineering failed to discipline the unwieldiness of development, businesses turned to Agile, which married the autonomy that developers demanded with a single-minded focus on an organization’s goals. That autonomy is limited, however, as developers are increasingly pointing out. When applied in a corporate context, the methods and values that Agile esteems are invariably oriented to the imperatives of the corporation. No matter how flexible the workplace or how casual the meetings, the bottom line has to be the organization’s profits."}
{"prompt":"There’s another angle on Agile, though. Some people I talked to pointed out that Agile has the potential to foster solidarity among workers. If teams truly self-organize, share concerns, and speak openly, perhaps Agile could actually lend itself to worker organization. Maybe management, through Agile, is producing its own gravediggers. Maybe the next crisis of software development will come from the workers themselves.","completion":"A previous version of this article incorrectly identified Al Tenhundfeld as a co-author of the Agile Manifesto. The present version has been corrected. Net zero has gone viral. Everyone is announcing their net-zero greenhouse gas emissions targets, from Saudi Arabia to Australia. By the final day of COP26—the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference held in Glasgow in 2021—more than 130 countries had made net-zero pledges of one kind or another, representing about 70 percent of the world’s UN-recognized nations. The private sector has also rushed in: more than 30 percent of the world’s 2,000 biggest public companies have committed to net-zero targets, including Amazon, Walmart, and ExxonMobil.  A global ambition has coalesced. It’s an achievement of sorts. Limiting warming to 1.5°C requires reaching net zero by midcentury, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This doesn’t mean zero emissions; rather, it means that some remaining amount of positive emissions would be canceled out by “negative emissions”—that is, by carbon removals. Negative emissions can be generated by using ecosystems like forests, farms, and oceans to store more carbon, or by using industrial technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) to pull carbon from the atmosphere and store it in rock formations. When these negative emissions balance out the positive emissions—when the amount of carbon being taken out of the atmosphere equals the amount of carbon being put into the atmosphere—then net zero is reached."}
{"prompt":"Under such an arrangement, countries are free to continue burning fossil fuels, so long as they offset their emissions. For this reason, many climate advocates have been critical of net zero as a goal. One common critique is that net-zero pledges won’t stop the continued extraction and combustion of fossil fuels. Further, they’re aimed at a future that’s far enough away that present-day leaders won’t be accountable for what happens. “Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah,” Greta Thunberg told a summit of young organizers just prior to COP26.  It’s true that net zero is woefully insufficient. We also need to be talking about immediately phasing out fossil fuel production. But net zero is still a worthwhile transitional goal, because we don’t yet have all the technologies we need at scale for true climate repair. Climate change is a problem of stocks, not flows: we need not only to stop emitting carbon by switching to renewables, but to reduce the existing levels of carbon in our atmosphere. Net zero alone won’t get us there. Still, it gives us a way to buy time while we develop and deploy the technologies required for full decarbonization.","completion":"Yet net zero is harder than it looks. The difficulty isn’t just political—compelling countries and companies to make promises and abide by them—but epistemological. At the center of net zero is a knowledge problem: How do we know when we’ve gotten to net zero? Answering this question is surprisingly hard.  There are two main challenges. First, there is immense technical complexity involved in accurately measuring both positive and negative emissions. Take positive emissions: how many are embodied in the manufacture of a car? You could measure how much carbon is produced by a single car factory, but a car has around 30,000 parts. Those parts might be sourced from suppliers around the world, each with their own carbon footprint. Further, the parts use different raw materials, and the extraction and transport of those materials carry emissions of their own. And that’s only one factory; there are some 300,000 car manufacturing facilities in the US alone."}
{"prompt":"Measuring negative emissions presents headaches of its own. For example, there are emergent methods for measuring how much carbon is stored in soil that hinge on spectroscopy, satellite-based sensors, and machine learning. But knowing what’s actually going on in the soil is complex, as conditions can vary even across a single farm. Knowing what’s going on with carbon in the deep ocean, as required for some carbon removal approaches, is even more challenging. Industrial technologies like CCS that store carbon geologically may seem easier to measure than biological systems, but, even then, understanding what happens to carbon that is stored thousands of feet underground isn’t easy.","completion":"Even if these difficulties are overcome, however, there is still the problem of carbon deception. This is the second main challenge involved in knowing when we’ve gotten to net zero: the presence of dishonest actors in the system. Think about Volkswagen rigging vehicles to cheat on emissions tests, or gas station chain owner Lev Dermen, who was found guilty of stealing $1 billion from US taxpayers through claiming tax credits for renewable biodiesel that didn’t exist. Behind the office-park facade of net zero lies a seedy hotbed of white-collar crime."}
{"prompt":"The knowability of net zero can’t be taken for granted, then. All those policymakers and executives are making net-zero pledges without a clue for how to see them through. How can these pledges possibly be fulfilled? How can the knowledge problem of net zero be solved? The answer, apparently, is software. Companies large and small have begun to build “platforms” that promise to help organizations meet their net-zero promises. These platforms claim to be able to deliver “decarbonization-as-a-service” through the use of digital technologies that effectively track carbon. They are racing ahead of law and policy and performing de facto governance, creating new proprietary infrastructures for knowing and managing our planet.","completion":"If this new regime fails to reliably measure and monitor carbon—and it very well may—that will be bad for the climate. If it succeeds, that may also be bad for the climate, not to mention ecosystems more broadly as well as human communities. But right now, before the new computational systems are locked in, we may have a chance to intervene and shape them for the better."}
{"prompt":"Initial Tree Offering In 2012, Derrick Emsley cofounded Tentree, a Vancouver-based clothing company that plants ten trees for every product sold. That sounds simple enough, but managing the planting projects turned out to be a challenge. “The hardest part was monitoring and verifying the work and claims we were making,” Emsley told The Hill’s Saul Elbein. Confirming that the trees they paid to plant were actually planted required costly in-person trips and lots of managerial overhead—it meant “traveling there, auditing them, making sure those trees were in the ground having an impact,” according to Emsley.","completion":"So Tentree started developing software to help streamline the process. That software became the basis of Veritree, a publicly available “planting management platform” unveiled in the fall of 2021. When a company that wants to offset their emissions signs up for Veritree, they get access to a user portal that lets them place orders for new tree plantings and displays metrics on their current tree holdings. These metrics are collected by the planters in the developing countries, who use custom-made “collect devices”—essentially modified smartphones designed to work in internet-limited environments—to take geotagged photographs of the trees. The trees get a unique digital token, and become digital inventory, hosted on the Cardano blockchain. Using a blockchain is supposed to reduce fraud by ensuring that trees are only counted once, so that the same forest can’t be claimed by multiple entities—a well-known problem in the world of carbon credits.  Veritree is in its early days, but it hopes to become “an operating system for the restoration economy,” in Emsley’s words. An “Initial Tree Offering” was used to raise money for a “First Edition Forest,” which features trees in Madagascar, Indonesia, Nepal, Kenya, Senegal, and Haiti. The appeal for corporations hoping to make good on their net-zero pledges is obvious: they can invest in a reliable carbon offset program and obtain a real-time picture of precisely how much carbon is being offset, and share that information with the public.  Veritree is far from the only platform hoping to dominate the net-zero space. A wide range of digital services is being developed by companies large and small. Established “Big Four” accounting firms like KPMG and Deloitte, as well as tech giants like Salesforce, are creating tools for Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) accounting that help measure the carbon footprint of firms, among other things. Some companies combine carbon measurement with a portal for purchasing offsets, such as the Atlanta-based startup Cloverly. Still others try to track negative emissions, like Veritree. Agreena, for example, is a Dutch startup that monitors changes in farmers’ fields after they switch to regenerative agriculture, and issues them e-certificates. Companies can sponsor these carbon reductions, and use Agreena’s platform to track them."}
{"prompt":"Atoms into Commodities The creators of these new platforms believe that they can solve the knowledge problem of net zero with software. Given the proliferation of net-zero pledges, this is a profitable problem to solve. But the platforms all approach this problem in a particular way: they turn carbon into a tradable commodity. This points to a broader point: net zero, in its current configuration, is a market-based project. It requires creating a global market where offsets can be freely bought and sold. This market already exists, but it has much room to grow; Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, says it could be worth $100 billion.  Creating that value, though, hinges on turning lively carbon atoms into a smooth commodity. And that task, in turn, hinges on code. The new platforms aim to improve and expand carbon markets by packaging carbon into a reliable product that can be easily bought and sold online. Their value proposition isn’t just about using digital tools to do superior carbon monitoring and accounting, but about disrupting traditional carbon markets by disintermediating them.","completion":"In traditional carbon markets, supply and demand is linked by retail traders who purchase carbon credits from suppliers and bundle them into portfolios, to be sold on to brokers or end buyers. This is an inefficient system, with too many middlemen; it is also rife with fraud. The new platforms want to cut the knot by connecting buyers and sellers—that is, the producers of positive emissions with the producers of negative emissions. Think of Veritree: corporations can purchase offsets by directly sponsoring planting projects in the developing world, without having to navigate a tangle of traders and brokers."}
{"prompt":"The platforms don’t just want to revolutionize existing carbon markets, however. They also want to create new ones. Climate Impact X is a Singapore-based carbon exchange that plans to build a “forest carbon marketplace” that uses remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and blockchain to “open participation to forests that were previously left out of the climate solution.” The idea is that a data-driven approach will lower the barriers of entry for the producers of negative emissions and enable more of them to participate. And, if given the chance, they probably will: there is a lot of money to be made. After languishing for many years, carbon offsets are trading at record highs.","completion":"Risk Factors The rise of a decarbonization-as-a-service sector may make it easier to commodify and exchange carbon. But what if it doesn’t actually help address climate change? There is always the risk that the platforms could be algorithmically flawed—that their software isn’t accurately quantifying emissions, whether positive or negative. But there are also deeper risks, ones that can’t be mitigated by tweaks to the code because they’re inherent in a market-based system."}
{"prompt":"First, ask yourself what any of these platforms want. Continued emissions; more exchange. The platform becomes a vested actor. The company is not oriented toward the phaseout of fossil fuels. Rather, it wants to maintain its own life, its own revenue stream. If you were designing a net-zero platform with the goal of working towards full decarbonization, it would be a time-limited project. But that would be incompatible with market imperatives: nobody wants to start a business with an expiration date. This is why the companies running these platforms will have an incentive to encourage a version of net zero with continued residual emissions—not a version of net zero oriented toward a future that would make them obsolete.","completion":"More broadly, a market-based system cultivates a tendency toward cheapness that’s hard to square with the costs of carbon removals. Why buy a carbon offset for $50 or $100 a ton when you can buy one for $10 a ton? How is a sustainability manager at a company going to justify that to higher-ups or shareholders? Yet that $10 offset is much less likely to be trustworthy, since proper monitoring and verification costs money. Moreover, the most permanent kind of carbon removals, performed through industrial technologies like CCS (Carbon Capture and Storage), still cost hundreds of dollars per ton. Yes, some platforms will attempt to introduce boutique or premium removals. But no matter how sophisticated the platforms for carbon management become, market logic will inevitably push companies away from these more expensive and more robust offsetting techniques, and toward cheaper and less effective ones."}
{"prompt":"Another issue with a market-based system is that offsets can be purchased by any market actor. But talk to any climate scientist and they’ll tell you that to reach net zero, removals should only be used to compensate for emissions from sectors that are hard to transition to renewables, like aviation or agriculture. In an open market, offsets can be bought up by anyone, including entities that have no future in a post-carbon economy such as fossil fuel companies. That’s bad, because we need to allocate removal capacity to sectors that we want to preserve and whose emissions are truly hard to abate. Platforms can make carbon markets more efficient, but they can’t perform the sorting function needed to prioritize the offsetting of particular activities and industries.","completion":"A final problem with a market-based system is that it turns the platforms themselves into black boxes. As profit-seeking enterprises, they must protect their algorithms and data, as otherwise their competitors might gain an advantage. But this opacity obstructs the learning and experimentation process that’s required to combat climate change. We need a broad-based scientific effort to help figure out what works in terms of curbing emissions and removing carbon from the atmosphere. That can’t happen if all the data is locked away on proprietary platforms, hidden from view."}
{"prompt":"We wouldn’t just be entrusting the platforms with data, however. We would also be entrusting them to play a major role in the governance of ecosystems, with significant social consequences. Creating negative emissions is never a neutral, purely technical process—it always involves political choices. For example, communal land title is sometimes seen as a risk to the permanence of carbon credits.  This led to the exclusion of communally held land from one carbon credits project in Cambodia, as research by Sarah Milne and Sango Mahanty has shown. As these calculative practices scale up in digital realms, the repercussions will be turbocharged.  Getting to net zero matters, but how we get there is just as important. Put another way, different attempts to quantify carbon produce different kinds of social relations. Ceding unilateral control over these choices to corporate platforms—letting them decide which kinds of net-zero social relations to make—would be a significant mistake.  Public and Planetary Software is essential for facing the challenge of climate change. We need to build a computational infrastructure for tracking carbon. The impact of humans on ecosystems has been so deep and so complex that digital monitoring and modeling are essential for ecological repair. As Benjamin Bratton writes, “planetary-scale computation” could “contribute to the comprehension, composition, and enforcement of a shared future that is more rich, diverse, and viable.” But right now, we are headed towards a world of proprietary platforms, repeating the same mistakes that we made with the development of the internet.  Shouldn’t knowledge about the Earth’s carbon flows belong to communities and the commons? Shouldn’t the benefits of such data go to the people who are working to remove and sequester carbon—tending the trees, soil, seagrass meadows, and injection wells—and to society more broadly? Shouldn’t the political choices about how to quantify carbon—and, by extension, about what kind of social relations to create in pursuit of net zero—be made democratically, rather than by executives and shareholders?","completion":"We need platforms that monitor our world for the sake of collective management of a shared commons—not platforms that measure our world for the sake of profiting from the data created from it, extracting value from the digital layer the same way that value is extracted from the mines, forests, and soils of our physical world. Plundering the earth and then repeating the plunder in the metaverse is dystopia squared."}
{"prompt":"We could imagine platforms that are so much better: better because they actually get us to net zero and address other sustainability and social challenges. The public sector must be central here. It alone can bear the costs of accurate monitoring of both positive and negative emissions—costs that disincentivize companies from buying high-quality carbon offsets, no matter how many advanced digital tools for carbon management emerge.  Public platforms can also help dislodge another obstacle to climate action: community resistance. We will have to build an incredible amount of new transmission lines, solar panels, wind farms, geothermal facilities, factories, mines, and more to pull off a wholesale transformation of our energy system. But when people don’t understand the contours of the problem, or don’t benefit from the solution, they will oppose such initiatives. We’ve seen already that technocratic climate projects without public input are likely to face hostility from local communities. If such communities aren’t brought into the design process, the energy transition is imperiled.  Better platforms are not a panacea for this challenge, but they could help. Imagine a platform for tracking carbon that isn’t just operating quietly in the background, but is highly visible, easy-to-use, open source, and closely integrated with community planning projects. Such platforms could enable people to collaborate on roadmaps for decarbonizing their town or region. They could integrate data around carbon flows and other ecosystem attributes with real-time visualization tools, in order to anticipate different scenarios and deliberate around possible tradeoffs. The platforms could facilitate a more participatory ecology, and thus generate community buy-in for decarbonization measures.","completion":"More broadly, public planetary data infrastructures would enable the inhabitants of Earth to know their world. Knowledge about one’s environment should be a basic human right. Imagine a world where you could know what’s in your air, what’s in your drinking water, what species are in the forest near you and how much carbon it’s storing, or what the health of your local lake is like. You could use this information not just to gauge the environmental risks you face, but also to discover which companies are degrading the ecological systems you live in and hold them accountable."}
{"prompt":"This isn’t to suggest that every piece of data needs to be public. As the Indigenous scholar Stephanie Carroll Rainie and her colleagues have explained, open data can be in tension with the rights of Indigenous peoples to govern their own data. In particular, it may cause tensions for communities that continue to experience data extraction under settler-colonial frameworks, and who are working to establish their own frameworks. When it comes to knowing net zero, the important thing is that the computational systems for monitoring emissions and carbon flows are publicly or community-owned, accessible to community members, and democratically governed. What this actually looks like on local, regional, and planetary scales needs to be established through participatory processes that will require time and trust.","completion":"Across the Binaries How do we get there? The answer is not fancy. It involves assembling a coalition for public ecological data infrastructures, drawn from several existing communities. There’s the long-standing open source software movement that could participate. There’s also the open data movement in science, and the movement for Indigenous data sovereignty. Environmentalist NGOs are tracking data about emissions, from larger projects like the Environmental Defense Fund’s methane-tracking satellites to databases like the Carbon Disclosure Project. There are a number of people across these fields who might join a movement for open and public planetary data. So why doesn’t this movement exist in a more mainstream way, or even as a common demand at climate protests?  One challenge is the fact that this is an anticipatory mobilization. We’re not mobilizing against something that’s already happened, we’re acting defensively based upon trends that are just beginning to emerge. Proprietary carbon management platforms are still in their infancy; their full impact might not be felt for many years.  Then there’s the cultural divide between the worlds of climate activism and tech activism. Organizations concerned with climate change may be inclined to see the digital as outside their core mission; after all, many people became involved in this space because they loved being outside, not because they wanted to think about algorithms. Moreover, such people may be actively opposed to technological interventions, or understandably dismiss net zero as a narrow, technocratic goal. Meanwhile, people with expertise in algorithmic justice issues might not be tracking developments in the environmental sphere. Their attention is likely devoted to a multitude of other concerns."}
{"prompt":"But each of these communities has critical things to contribute. Climate activists can help us avoid the trap of “platform determinism”—that is, the risk of fetishizing the platforms as mythically powerful actors, instead of centering the choices made by the humans who design the platforms. Such activists also bring expertise in movement building: they know how to put pressure on investors and companies, and how to form relationships with policymakers. On the other hand, those who are working on the politics of data, whether from socialist, decolonial, or Indigenous perspectives, have valuable experience in identifying the problems with data appropriation, access, and use, as well as in creating just data frameworks. And technologists can put their knowledge of quantification and design to work building platforms that are genuinely usable and inspiring.  The knowledge problem of net zero is difficult but not insurmountable. Solving it the right way will require a group effort. We must build data infrastructures that embody multiple ways of knowing and understanding our world, and that help us advance both ecological and social ends, before corporations conquer this space for themselves.","completion":"I wonder what’s taken me so long to pop the question, and why this ritual that’s been performed countless times by so many before me bears down on me like I’m the first woman in history to put a knee to the floor and offer the ring and say the words. She’ll say yes. We talked about it. When we lay beside each other, Aluna gains the power to ease the edge around momentous things, and it’s all in how she finds the right tenor, right whisper, the right circles of pressure to trace along the dips of my neck. I’ve brought all sorts of crises to her before sleep. VR recordings of tragedy filmed that very morning, from hundreds of miles away and through the dissociative lens of a drone’s 360 degree camera. Roaming tent cities trudging across the Sahara that siphon power from abandoned solar panel farms. Ocean slums sprawling off the coasts of Italy, Spain, France, sinking as their fate is decided in boardrooms graced with AC. Sea spray is everywhere it shouldn’t be, and scatters the footage into clouds of discordant pixels—that’s when Aluna pauses our replay, blinks our retinas clear. While the bedroom is at its darkest, we shift to face each other and she tells me what she thinks comes next. Never lessening the blows, but making it all feel approachable, which is exactly how she responded when I asked if we might actually spend the rest of our lives together. And she said yes."}
{"prompt":"It feels like I lost my chance. Tonight marks our first week sleeping on the shelter’s temporary foldout beds. We’d considered my SUV but it’s packed tight with all the remaining fragments of our apartment, the things that survived the flood. We gave it a shot, wedging ourselves between piles of clothing in the front seat, but Aluna couldn’t fall asleep. She didn’t complain once. She made constant shifts in her seat through the night, awkwardly reaching for my body only to be thwarted by the packed detritus of our old home.","completion":"Video floats at the shelter tent’s apex above all our heads. It plays the breakdown from every angle, accompanied by live commentary. First comes a deep whine, then a spear of pressured mist breaking through Boston’s seawall. Rapid growth from needle thin spikes of water to spiderweb cracks. A network of black spread over concrete, and freeze-frame there."}
{"prompt":"They’re calling it unprecedented. It’s become our country’s favorite word. A guy walks between our cots, offering each of us a refill from his chrome thermos. He looks confused yet determined, young enough to be a Harvard undergrad, coming out to volunteer and help the new climate refugees that huddle in the mandated shelters on his campus. We’re a couple blocks from where the flooding occurred and yet Cambridge is absolutely dry.","completion":"“She’s sad again,” Aluna says, like I can’t hear the dog’s cries for myself. It’s an incessant whimper from a few cots down, battling the mutters of a human trying to shut their pet up. If Aluna had her way she’d know the puppy’s name, who is looking out for her, the neighbors beside them who will have to endure her cries. She peers about the tent and watches as much as she can."}
{"prompt":"Since our apartment flooded, my work instruments have been reduced to a loan computer from the company. By the time Aluna and I realized what was happening, our floor swam beneath saltwater. She splayed her arms across the dining table and scooped up a swath of our electronics like a squirrel. Saving what she thought was most important to us, though in real-time, as crisis plays out, that’s so much harder to gauge. You can’t ever be sure of what’s supposed to matter. You grow up with all those educational vids about what to do, how to save yourself, and yet when evacuation sirens blare across the neighborhood all thoughts vacate. Most of us aren’t built for catastrophe.","completion":"I unroll my computer, laying it on my lap. My supervisor has given me some leeway with sign-on times for work due to, well, everything—but I still feel uncomfortable catching up on team messages thirty minutes late. I never imagined that being a climate victim would be so embarrassing. Aluna and I lived in a good neighborhood, made decent money, and were much more used to watching disaster rather than being a part of it. After the seawall breach, I didn’t know what to tell my boss except that it happened, that I wouldn’t wait and burn PTO, that I’d log on as always and work admin. Not out of loyalty to the brand, but to a lifestyle I wasn’t prepared to abandon. Besides, Aluna and I need the money. We haven’t touched our savings yet and we wanna keep it that way, so the work pays for the little things that patch our days together—like walking off campus to purchase snacks from the grocery store. Aluna buys cheap things to distribute among the children here. Her way of keeping up routine as a teacher, since most local schools are temporarily closed and she wouldn’t be much help conducting class from a refugee tent regardless."}
{"prompt":"My team’s been talking about the disaster all morning, filling up our text channel with questions and reports on how bad Boston’s been hit. Bickering everywhere, Garrett says, maintenance pointing fingers at the original construction firm, mayor’s scrambling. Good thing is no fingers pointed our way yet but.. Bottom line is the wall should’ve never failed.","completion":"Unprecedented, unprecedented. Manager claims he doesn’t have much for me to do right now. Our division at Centra isn’t taking the brunt of the heat, none of the inquiries about damaged property or when the neighborhoods might be “fixed”—as if we can cast a spell and suck the ocean back in place. It’s hard to not glance at other refugees (a word I still find so strange to use here, so near my home) who either tap away on their own devices or blink through screens on their internal retina displays. I wonder which of them are filing the next complaint to the company I work for, and if I might swallow enough pride to do so myself. We all seem the type to be ashamed of this all, how we’re good enough to own multiple devices and line the cots with sets of clothes saved from the water, and yet none of us are second-home rich. Not enough resources to avoid the tents, but just enough to feel bad using them."}
{"prompt":"Admin tasks are the majority of my workload at Centra. Garrett and I are specifically in charge of benefits paperwork for the employees working under our relocation division, a reasonable job since the company keeps that section small. While Centra brands itself in all the climate net corporation tropes—commercials aglow with green fields, wind turbines swaying against sunset—the refugee relocation programs we helm are a side gig. That’s how it is with climate nets, a bit of a trend for corporations eager for a brand cleanup. Shove a random percentage of the budget to securing rent-controlled housing in northern, inland cities shielded from the typical forms of climate catastrophe, then offer up leases to a portion of the newly homeless. Great PR, makes the government happy that we do their work for them, and it provides everyone forced to live in tents a shard of hope.","completion":"A couple hours into my work day, Aluna rests a small bag of potato chips on my shoulder and kisses my cheek. She’s fond of a greeting with food involved because I’d probably forget to eat otherwise. As she takes a spot on the bed next to me, Aluna glances at the computer in my lap. “You think Centra’s gonna put us up in a loft or something a little more? Maybe a whole house. They’ve got space out in Colorado or wherever for giving us some land, don’t you think? Full patio, a yard neither of us will know what to do with.” “No thinking for me, love.” I dance my fingertips across the screen. “Only typing.” Aluna grabs the bag of chips before they slide from my shoulder, opening them as she scoots closer. “Liar. You just don’t wanna tell me our spot in the queue, don’t deny it.” Wherever we’re at, it’s probably so far down we shouldn’t think about it. Company gossip has gotten more frantic as it seems that our relocation system has ground to a halt. Centra’s been skimming people off the climate net division and nobody’s left the Cambridge tents with a golden ticket. You’d know if someone got a way out, the excitement and rush they’d fail to hide, but nobody here has escaped."}
{"prompt":"Something we’ve said snared the attention of the man who sleeps a cot away from us. He leans forward, locking eyes with me. His blazer hasn’t come off the whole week and it’s acquired a film of dust. “Hey, I heard ‘queue.’ Can you check my status? Is there a way you can look at that?” With a grimace, I shake my head.","completion":"“Sorry, doesn’t work that way. I couldn’t show you the odds if I wanted to. There’s no access to relocation logs from my department.” “Damn. Come on, really?” He hugs himself. “If you want me to pay for it, I will. Name your price. Money’s not a problem, trust me. I’m supposed to be out of here in a few days anyway, I just want to see the queue for a plan B.” “I don’t work relocation, has nothing to do with me. Like I said, I’m sorry—I really would, but there’s nothing I can do. We all gotta wait.” “Everyone’s fucking waiting. That all we’re supposed to do now? Those guys who got flooded in Miami, too, just sitting there.” The man squats, eyes locked on the rubber mat below us, a kindergarten sky blue. “Nobody’s moving anymore. When’s the last time you heard someone get the golden ticket? Who’s being whisked away to safe cities? Because I don’t know anybody.” It’s not that he’s wrong, it’s just that I have nothing to say about it. There’s nothing I could say that would fix this. As the man leaves us with the ghost of his cologne, Aluna gives my hand a brief squeeze, a pulse."}
{"prompt":"And at night, that dog starts whining more. I could turn on my night vision, but instead I lay in the dark with Aluna wedged by me, still dreaming, sharing the cot’s limited real estate. Around me are rustling blankets, murmurs. Pointless, flitting. These limp sounds rise with the dog’s whimpers, a cross-species call and response.","completion":"I think I can find a relative peace again. At least one strong enough to drift back asleep, salvage some scraps of rest before the day starts. My eyes are shut against the tent’s collective discomfort. It’s the most solitude I’m capable of carving out for myself, and for the past week it has been enough. Enough against the same sighs, the coughs, the sobs that should’ve never traveled so well across this space."}
{"prompt":"The dog’s whining swoops up an octave. I’ve never heard her so distressed—beyond distressed. A shimmering yelp scraping against my eardrums, forcing me upright. Aluna’s hands scramble up my forearm and feel out my skin. There’s nothing left except for the dog and that howl, a guttural pain. Then she’s done. One more bark, cut short and high. She’s left us in silence undercut by shifting blankets. Our neighbors freeze and look about for the source of disruption, as if pinpointing it all might let us drift back to sleep. As if we won’t all sink back to our cots, turn along the taut stretches of nylon, curl around our partners and ourselves to find a steady beat again, something like the mattress you lost back home under tons of seawater, something that was once warm with you and whoever shared life with you. But it won’t be enough to sleep.","completion":"When the morning comes, Aluna returns to bed. I hadn’t realized she left. “She’s okay,” Aluna says, “but shaken. Someone tried to strangle her last night, right here. We think it’s one of us.” Everyone is much too awake. People glare at their neighbors, at the ceiling. In their little movements is stored all the dread that has no legitimate avenue for escape. Our urge for relief isn’t new, though it’s become painfully visible."}
{"prompt":"My work chat is a repeat of yesterday, gossip about whose heads are on the chopping block. Talk of a “rapid retreat” from upper echelons that none of us know how to interpret. I can’t vent to Aluna no matter how much I’d like to, not in front of the other refugees. She drifts back and forth, out into town, buying snacks for the children and a treat for the dog. This is the first time her offers are rejected. From afar, I see parents push her away. Gentle shakes of the head, hands rising up. She’s too far for me to hear how she responds.","completion":"*** I suggest we leave at sunset. She doesn’t know how to take that. We’re exchanging messages over internal displays, eating the rations they’ve started handing out for lunch. Aluna would wait and see as she put it, staying in the shelter, till the next disaster forced us to relocate again. This is no home and yet she can barely imagine leaving it. Maybe it’s the proximity to what we lost that keeps her tethered. Cambridge’s parks, rowhouses, and stores provide a familiar urban texture, and when you drift far enough from the tents it succeeds in lulling you back to normality. It’s delusional. I work where the miracles are made, and the only thing Centra is concerned about is laying people off and minimizing damage for the PR fallout of the broken seawall—a tragedy that they refuse to claim as their responsibility, taking all distancing measures available. It will grow clearer over the coming days that there is no help on the way. Not for any of us. We have to leave the city."}
{"prompt":"And where would we go? Aluna asks. She already mentioned us hitting up friends who live near Cambridge, ones who haven’t experienced climate failure outside of the dearth of food lining the shelves. We’ve held off because that shame flares up. None of our community has the bandwidth for that type of support no matter how much we wish they could provide it. They ask us what happened, if we’re alright, how they might help, and we dodge each question enough to allow them an out. They always take it.","completion":"We can’t go to them, not now. While Boston as a whole might be running relatively fine, the pockets where they’ve shoved us will soon boil over. I sigh and send Aluna a message. Even though we’re sitting across from each other, I find a way to avoid her eyes. There’s a spot little less than an hour out of town owned by Centra. Part of their data infrastructure, and it’s quiet. We don’t need to be there for long… Just give it time for things to settle over here, a few days at most—the SUV will hold its charge, so we won’t have any problems coming in and out. A mini-retreat? She doesn’t even crack a smile. Right before dinner, we get up and leave. Just like that. There’s nothing for us to bring along. All that’s left of our submerged home is in our SUV, sitting beneath platinum LED streetlights."}
{"prompt":"Autopilot’s enabled for this region, though I’m quick to shut it off. The highway’s riddled with flooding issues now, and I doubt the car could keep up. As we exit the parking lot and get on the road, Aluna and I pass the low, inflated lozenges of the refugee tents, pinned to the soil with near-invisible lines of rope. Nearly biological in their aversion to clean, sharp angles, growing out of the flat campus lawns like massive fungi. Logos adorn the sides, all the entities responsible for erecting this crisis architecture. Centra’s branding appears on the tent as a circle adorned with light rays, a flat design vision of a glowing sun. In the encroaching murk, it can’t be easily defined. The sun seems to waver in the shadows, like a pinned spider flat against the outer wall.","completion":"*** There was once a time—probably late ’50s, early ’60s—when vehicular windshield HUDs were an inescapable trend of automotive design. Glowing, transparent skins hemmed glass borders, providing location-specific updates, weather, and navigation tips. By then, every other American had a retina display, though the AR novelty of these car HUDs was pushed as if it were cutting edge. At its core, the overlays are candy-colored, highly restricted web browsers tacked to the front of our vehicles. “Futuristic” was the word that nobody wanted to use, and yet guided every step of the design process. The HUDs exist because, as we near the end of the century, they seem like they should."}
{"prompt":"The glyphs and readouts bordering my windshield begin to disappear. First it’s the weather icon, a cloud eclipsing a crescent moon, winking out. Then all the stats about the car battery. That one’s especially ironic since you’d assume the SUV’s drawing on local, in-vehicle data. Just like all the other visuals drifting away, it warns me of NO INTERNET CONNECTION before vanishing.","completion":"We’ve split from I-90 onto a lone road that twists away from the city, away from the gleam of retina-enhanced billboards that outshine tent villages sprawled beneath overpasses. Density gets a lot lighter out here. Autumn foliage flanks us on either side, swimming up to high focus in the titanium pools of our headlights. It’s been almost half an hour since we passed another car."}
{"prompt":"“If you don’t know where we’re going,” Aluna mutters, “you might want to turn back, Imani. GPS is about to go out.” That’s concerning. It’s one of the few visuals remaining on the windshield. I squeeze her thigh. “It’s not far love. I’ll get us there. Trust me, it’s exactly the right place for us to lay low. There’ll be better connection in the barn too, so we can keep track of how things play out in town. When it seems a bit safer we can drive back in.” “Why would the barn have good connection if it’s abandoned?” “These things never go fully dead.” I keep an eye out for our turn. “That said, though, Centra’s moved most of their servers elsewhere, further inland. They think they’re future proofing. All this one’s used for now is cold storage, backups of backups.” I’ve got no doubt it has to do with the sunk-cost fallacy. Decades ago Centra spent millions to get the server farm up and running, and they can’t bear wiping the whole thing out. Funny how risk averse these corporations get in the face of unstable environmental conditions.","completion":"“Look,” I say, pointing at the growing lights on the horizon, a fluorescent wash against overcast. “That’s the suburb around the corner from it. Not much longer.” “Good ’cause we got no reception at all now.” Aluna’s stare hits that middle space, out of focus. She’s accessing her retinal screen and judging from the grimace, she’s not liking what she sees."}
{"prompt":"“Imani? This isn’t right. No connection whatsoever, we’re completely in the dark. Is there a dampener or something?” “I’m… not sure. I don’t know why there’d be one active around here.” Rising over the canopy is a gas station sign, blaring out to the night. I can’t help slowing past, getting a closer look at the metal bars meshing the windows and door. They’ve got a drone hovering at the entrance, hardened edges and matte black finish implying combat. The few cars in the parking lot give off the same energy. Tints and acute angles. I’m half-convinced we’ll glimpse an insignia of some sort, hopefully one of a private military firm instead of a paramilitary group, like the ethnostate bands that crawl through the Pacific Northwest.","completion":"The homes out here are different too. Most of us try to avoid traveling via highway, so the suburbs have become a rare occurrence in our lives. Last time I passed through was maybe a year and a half ago, and the two-story homes were adorned with the typical New England fanfare of ivy and wrought iron. A handsome weariness. Last time I came through, the internet worked. Now it’s all dark. Bars mesh over every window. It’s a stretch to call this a neighborhood, this collection of fortresses tucked away at the end of winding driveways, peeking through the forest in utter silence. If it were daytime we might even see the antennae they erected to shut down the network. All we’ve got is their absence."}
{"prompt":"“We’re okay,” I say, and Aluna doesn’t respond. I turn down the side street marked with the Centra logo, and we creep down a long gravel path. *** It’s called the barn because it’s a massive, ugly, hulking structure that carves up the forest with gray paneling and harsh floodlights. The electrified gate swings open once it recognizes me and allows us to approach the dead server farm. Maybe not the right word there, dead. The building’s humming with vibrations and light. While there are potholes eating their way across the asphalt, and there’s not a single other car in the area, the place is still on.","completion":"Once we drive past the threshold, the car’s HUD returns in a flicker. Our connection piggybacks on Centra’s network. Aluna settles in the passenger seat. “I’m checking the news.” I park near the barn’s main entrance, two glass padlocked doors. Judging from the imagery of server farms I’ve seen back in the day, the aesthetics of these buildings refuse to change. They remain one step abstracted from a warehouse."}
{"prompt":"“We don’t have to stay here for too long,” I say. “Just a night or two. Just to see if things heat up in town or if we’re good.” She nods along, but I’m not sure if it’s enough. This feels right to me, getting out, so I have to find a way to swallow the guilt. The last thing Aluna wants is to be far from the community, disengaged with helping in all those small ways. I don’t operate like that. Not to say I don’t care, but when I exchange snacks or provide some clothing, I only feel dread. I’m never doing enough. Aluna might find fulfillment in those acts, or she might hide her fear better than I do. It’s not something I’ve had the urge to figure out until now.","completion":"We lean our seats back as far as they go, crushing the remains of our apartment in the back. Each readjustment brings another plastic creak. “Look,” Aluna says, and shares video of Southie. More drone footage, smooth like the camera’s on rails in the sky. The water has already started to lessen. All of our neighborhood’s detritus has mixed in the flood to make the ground invisible. Frothing, dark water, yet so low, getting lower… It feels odd to think of it this way, but the destruction feels pathetic. A quilt drifts from what was once a window. It’s matted with glass and other things, objects I can’t identify no matter how close the zoom gets. Whatever’s been abandoned wades through ruins that we want more than anything to return to."}
{"prompt":"I blink away the footage and turn to face Aluna. “What do you think?” And at first, it seems she might respond as she used to when we slept in a bed together. Aluna opens her mouth and hesitates. Her hand reaches across the cup holders and up my arm, to my collarbone, and finally the dips of my neck.","completion":"“I think we should learn how to be lost. It’s okay, or it’ll have to be. Know what I mean?” “Want an honest answer?” She nods. I catch her hand in my own, feel where the ring should be. I should’ve asked her already. I bought her a ring, and I don’t know where it might be buried. It could be in this car with us or tumbling down a sewer drain."}
{"prompt":"“We shouldn’t be fucked over so fast, Aluna. It’s not supposed to all end so quickly. I always thought there’d be a… I don’t know, a warning? A heads up of some sort. Like, yes, the end’s coming, as it’s been since forever, but here’s a week head start. Or even a day. I don’t know how we wake up and face all of it gone, and whatever. That’s it. We keep going.” “I mean, you just said it. It’s always been coming. The warning call’s blared for decades, and we watched it every night. We just thought we’d be lucky.” We can’t live off luck. One day soon, we’ll have to find a path forward. It’s not something I can think of now. Now, all I see is Aluna, her cheekbones carved through the data center’s security floodlights. For an hour more, we stay up and watch more footage from back home. The tents are not faring well tonight—actual skirmishes popping up, people who never imagined fighting for survival forced to fend for any resources they can get a handle on. I wish a wake up call didn’t involve people getting hurt.","completion":"By the time we start drifting off, we agree it’s not as bad as it could’ve been. Even from the scattered news footage, it’s clear there are people like Aluna among the tents. Lots of little things resulting in countless points of de-escalation. Though we’ll need more to recreate our homes, it’s a start. I think, next morning, we’ll head back."}
{"prompt":"*** I check the back while Aluna’s fast asleep. The trunk, too. Moving as quietly as possible through years and years of our shit, all of it bursting at the seams and threatening to fall across the parking lot. Every exhale is a puff of mist, and I blink to clear my eyes. Journals, clothes, random pieces of silverware, actual physical books, toothpaste, blankets—I bring one out, drape it over Aluna’s body in the passenger seat, then go back to my search.","completion":"I find it wedged on the trunk floor, beneath the corner of a box. It must’ve fallen out of the case. Unmarred, a thin silver ring. After scooting back in the driver’s seat, I hover with the ring tucked in my palm. It grows warm there, in the safety of my hand. I don’t ever want to let it go until Aluna’s ready to take it. So I’ll wait till next morning, and see what she says."}
{"prompt":"Rationalization is a form of compression that lays a grid over our world and attempts to remake it to fit its shape. The goal of rational thought is to break down a complex and infinite reality into small pieces and reconstitute it in a logical system. In computing, rationalization is the process by which phenomena like actions, identity, and emotions are split, stripped, reduced, standardized, and otherwise converted into computable data and mapped within machines.  It is a process of rationalization that allows a company like DoorDash to use computational algorithms to determine “optimal” delivery speeds, and then to discipline its workers for not matching those predetermined outcomes. To believe in the efficacy and reliability of such a system, we must first accept that DoorDash is able to measure and model an intricately layered series of complex relationships—including traffic patterns, consumer desires, worker behaviors, prices, and more—and is then able to draw actionable predictions from all that information. To accept this requires a faith that each part in the complex system is knowable, quantifiable, and fixed. This is the ideology of rationality at work.","completion":"But the world is not rational! The world is, in fact, irrational! It is chaotic, expansive, interrelational, and incalculable. Machines, in particular, are far too rigid in their logic and far too limited in their capacity to meaningfully capture the world. Yet we continue to grant them ever greater power. Across the public and private sector, computer-aided systems of management premised on transactional relationships and the supposed ability to optimize outcomes are being used to guide our interactions. As DoorDash workers will be the first to tell you, these systems shape behavior, remaking the activities and phenomena they are meant to model while radiating innumerable harms—from incentivizing unsafe driving speeds to suppressing wages—as a result.  To resist this reconfiguration and mitigate these harms, we must reject rationality and embrace a fundamentally irrational worldview. If rationality says the world is measurable, knowable, optimizable, and automatible, an embrace of the irrational is a rejection of that ideology. Embracing irrationality allows for multiple interpretations, contradiction, inexplicability. It empowers us to reclaim the act of meaning-making as a collaborative, social exercise as opposed to one that can be automated and forgotten. Ultimately, a program of irrationality requires that we harness the power of our machines through a form of democratic oversight that acknowledges the false promise of rational management and insists that, in the absence of certainty, we must work together to organize society. Irrationality celebrates doubt, because only if the future is unknown will it be ours to build.  Rational Data from an Irrational World Rationalization—the process of abstraction in the service of computational reasoning—has long been a feature of the sciences, math, and philosophy. Of course, tools of theoretical inquiry are often put to practical use by those in power. Beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, labor processes were mapped out rationally to the great benefit of early industrialists. In the postwar period, cyberneticists and game theorists, many employed by the US military, theorized that they could go beyond simple numerical equations or discrete production processes and rationally describe much more complex phenomena using newly developed computing machines."}
{"prompt":"Around the end of World War II, the first general-purpose electronic computers were introduced. The data being entered into these machines was numerical, it was subjected to mechanically coded mathematical formulae, and the output was a solved equation. An amazing innovation, and one that—provided the inputs were entered accurately, and the machine operations properly encoded—returned an accurate and reliable result. An increased focus on feedback soon enabled a process known as “machine learning” through neural networks—a technique that has been revived in the last decade to propel a new AI boom, driven by breakthroughs in computer vision and natural language processing.","completion":"Machine learning sorts through vast amounts of chaotic data and, using adaptive algorithms, closes in on specific arrangements of information while excluding other possible interpretations. But, in order for any computation to occur, a process of rationalization must first create machine-readable datasets. Real-world phenomena must be “datafied” by sorting it into categories and assigning fixed values.  Take, for example, most image recognition software. Whether the goal is identifying handwriting or enemy combatants, a training set of data made up of digital images—themselves encoded arrangements of pixels—is typically created. This initial process of digital image capture is a form of reduction and compression; think of the difference between the sunset you experience and what that same sunset looks like when it is posted to Instagram. This mathematical translation is necessary so the machines can “see,” or, more accurately, “read” the images.  But for the purposes of this kind of machine learning, further rationalization must occur to make the data usable. The digital image is identified and labeled by human operators. Maybe it is a set of handwriting examples of the numeral two, or drone images from a battlefield. Either way, someone, often an underpaid crowdworker on a platform like Amazon Mechanical Turk, decides what is meaningful within the images—what the images represent—so that the algorithms have a target to aim for.  The set of labeled images is fed into software tasked with finding patterns within it. First, borders are identified in the encoded arrangement of pixels. Then larger shapes are identified. An operator observes the results and adjusts parameters to guide the system towards an optimal output. Is that a 2? Is that an enemy combatant or a civilian?  Once this output has been deemed acceptable, the system is fed new, unlabeled images and asked to identify them. This new data, along with feedback on the functional accuracy of its initial output—“yes, that is a 2”—is used to further fine-tune the algorithm, the optimization of which is largely automated. This basic process applies to most machine learning systems: rationalized data is fed in, and through association, feedback, and refinement, the machine “learns” to provide better results."}
{"prompt":"But rational data is an unstable foundation from which to learn. Those initial stages in the machine-learning process when phenomena are translated into code, when the irrational is rationalized and the real world is datafied, demand close scrutiny. And as the phenomena we are asking the software to interpret become more complex—as these systems are tasked with going from recognizing that an image contains a face to recognizing a specific face, to recognizing the emotion on that face, to determining what actions might result from someone in a certain emotional state—the more skeptical we should be of any supposed insights that are generated.  The process of translating the world into code is reductive. There is a similar reduction in the labeling of data into certain categories—there will never be sufficient categories available to represent all possibilities. In an infinitely complex and constantly shifting world, any one-to-one representation is impossible. And anything that is lost in that original training data will be invisible to machine learning systems that are built upon it.  Far from being a neutral process, the creation of training data is fundamentally social and subjective. It requires human actors to determine the available categories and label the data accordingly. The attendant assumptions, biases, and distinctions made by these human actors are necessary to create “rational” data, and once encoded they define the possibilities and limitations of what machine learning systems can “learn.”  To be clear, all forms of knowledge-making are social and subjective, not just machine learning. The difference is that other ways of making sense of the world acknowledge their own fallibility. For instance, in academia, disciplines have developed various techniques for vetting new information, such as peer review. The issues are not always resolved, but there are processes that help create meaning collectively.  The Irrational Program The making of meaning cannot be automated because an irrational world cannot be coded rationally. Machine learning systems, with their immense computational power, can surface novel arrangements of information and offer new forms of perception. But any claims to objectivity made on behalf of these systems should be disregarded outright.","completion":"Moreover, these systems are engaged in actively shaping society to fit the models they create. When the options for human activity are reduced to a set of “optimal” choices made available through a machine-generated recommendation, other courses of action—and thus other possible future outcomes—are eliminated. We cannot allow this reduction to put limitations on the world in which we live. Instead, if these systems are to be salvaged, we have a responsibility to relentlessly interrogate who and what constitutes “data,” how it is made, what patterns we seek within it, and what we do with the insights that are surfaced. These questions must be put to the widest public forums available, and the decisions about how to respond must be made democratically. Then those questions must be asked again and again.  The process of rationalization, and the technology it enables, are social in origin and have a social impact once deployed. Ultimately, we must embrace their collective nature and respond collectively. This means organizing the workers at the point of rationalization and organizing the subjects of datafication to resist until their demands for input into the development of these systems is met. We make technological systems as they make us, and we can remake or unmake them. When we recognize our role in the co-creation of technological systems, and take collective control over that process, who knows what innovations may result? I walk slower these days. Walking used to be about where I was going next: moving fast and hard through space. I paid less attention to the here and now; here was en route to my tomorrow. My old pace matched my lifestyle—stomping through a long Bay Area commute and a calendar packed with business travel. A life filled with too much working.  After my spinal cord injury, that all changed. Now, I walk slower. My engagement with the world is different. I no longer just move through space, I spend time there. I spend time here, now. I use a cane to steady myself. My cane is not only an assistive device, it is a symbolic one. My cane signals to others: the way I am interacting with this space is different, and beware, the way you will interact with me is different, too. Disability has redefined my relationship to many things. Not only with spaces, as I describe, but also with time. I now meet the world differently, with a different body, and this body moves, thinks, and acts at a different pace. This is crip time."}
{"prompt":"“Crip time” describes the alternative relationship many disabled people experience with time. As Ellen Samuels, a disability studies scholar, puts it: “Crip time is time travel.” There are many layers to crip time—from the simple fact that many of us walk or roll through space slowly, to the altered trajectories that unfold over the course of a lifetime. Crip time forces a confrontation with the messy realities of the non-normative, all the ways that our temporal experiences fall outside our expectations. Instead of looking to the norm—the averages, patterns, and trends that fill data-dripping techspeak—crip time provokes us to wonder: What about the peculiar? What about the ad hoc, the irregular, the one-off? What about the unique messiness of the here-and-now? Because I now walk slower than before, I notice much more: uneven and poorly maintained sidewalks, worn-out or missing “six feet” social-distancing floor stickers, the monstrosity of stairs. I notice when places are not built for people like me. But I also notice everyday beauty. A slower pace allows me to see the craft tangled in the mundane. I notice the playful swooping geometry of songbirds and the peppery glitter of tree shadows as they jump across the path in front of me. I have to take breaks and let my body rest. I must care for myself in ways I never did before, in ways I was never taught to. Will I be able to find something sturdy to sit awhile and rest? What will I do if I can’t? Exiting the Flow Where does rest figure in our everyday experiences with technology? I work as a user experience (UX) researcher. As UX professionals, we learn about the psychology of response times and how they relate to human thresholds around human-computer interactions. A machine can move too fast for a person to comprehend, which is not ideal. There is a sweet spot, according to industry expert Jakob Nielsen, to aim for: somewhere between 0.1 and 1.0 seconds is ideal for the system to stay in line with a person’s flow of thought. Ten seconds is the outer limit that a user will wait before getting bored or frustrated in waiting for a system response.","completion":"But why do we get bored or frustrated? In our cult to the gods of relentless busyness, continuous digital activity feels holy. Corporate life pressures us to act quickly. We have become accustomed to high-speed internet connectivity and vast computation processing, all of it occurring with near-simultaneity as our fingers release a tap. We scroll, and scroll, and scroll—our feeds feel endless and our clicks take us seamlessly from one task to the next.  This feeling of being “in the zone” is a psychological state called flow, and has been a design concern since the early days of personal computing in the 1980s and 1990s. Then, the concerns were largely focused on designing workplace experiences that integrated PCs with analog-driven workflows in ways that didn’t create too much friction or drag, the opposite of flow.  Living in crip time means that flow feels rare. Since my spinal cord injury, I no longer rally for a packed work calendar, where meetings bleed together after hours of social interactions over video teleconferencing. Now, I must be strategic. Crip time means I attend some meetings with my camera on, and some with audio only. Others I watch later as a recording. An audio-only meeting likely means I am attending the meeting while pacing, kneeling, or laying down, alternating positions to help relieve the spinal cord pressure and nerve pain that builds up over the course of the day. Watching recordings of meetings later creates lots of drag, as I move between recording files, PowerPoint decks, meeting chats, and relevant emails to make sense after the fact.  But this drag can be meaningful in its own way, too. Just as my slowed-down walking means I notice more in the world around me, my crip meeting practice provides me space where I am able to notice differently. Now that I live in crip time, I am always on the hunt for the red buttons and icons of recordkeeping—digital parallels to the benches and seats I watch for now when I walk. Audio-only meetings mean that I am more comfortable physically—and thus can concentrate more freely on the meeting. I take notes and jam into the conversation when I need to. I focus on the dialogue rather than my appearance via webcam. Watching recordings after the fact, I can approach the meeting well-rested and in a comfortable setting. With the ability to hit pause, I am able to wonder, consider, jot down questions. These are all things that are difficult in the flurry of marathon meetings."}
{"prompt":"It’s not that my crip meeting practice appropriates a kind of alternative productivity tool. Instead, my experiences of disability and of crip time have compelled me to wonder if “flow” is really the metric against which all our journeys of work and technology should be judged. As we enter 2022, year three of the Covid-19 pandemic, this question seems particularly acute. Those of us who are able to work from home have spent month after month booting up, logging on, checking our schedule, and loading our inbox each morning. We are expected to seamlessly enter the flow of remote work at super-highway speed, reproducing pre-pandemic levels of productivity and output, even as we continue to face a world in crisis.","completion":"The lens of disability studies and the experiences of the disabled offer us a different way of thinking about our experience of time. In Feminist, Queer, and Crip, Alison Kafer tells us: “Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires reimagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies… Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” Just as I have come to learn from my own disabled body my new walking pace, the time it takes my body to finish the chores of independent living, I also learn how long it takes my body to bring an article like this together or to finish an important deliverable at work. Where before I let pressures of various sorts build up to optimize my output drive overwork, I now live in crip time. Things get done, just at a different pace. Doing is re-imagined and re-configured, a process driven by my body’s differing, situated abilities, instead of some trend, pattern, or prediction. Achievement is still possible—and I do still achieve—just on my body’s own terms. What are your body’s terms? Satellite imagery has woven itself into the fabric of the internet. We recognize these crisp, high-definition, bird’s-eye-view images most commonly from Google Earth—but we employ them in much more besides: from reporting on stuck shipping containers to getting directions to a friend’s house, to tracking forest fires in real time and scrolling through real estate listings. Given their ever-widening range of commercial, consumer, and civic uses, it won’t surprise most people to hear that the industry that produces them (also known as Earth Observation, or EO) is growing at an exponential rate, and is only expected to expand further in the coming years."}
{"prompt":"Yet despite the prominence of satellite imagery in the geographical imagination of the internet, the imperatives of the industry are much less clear. The corporations that produce them are much less well known, and the military interests that back them remain as murky as ever. The highly visible commercial side of the industry is still deeply intertwined with its classified counterpart, and two companies, Maxar and Planet, have emerged to dominate the industry—supporting civilian functions with one hand, while supplying US defense needs with the other.  Indeed, the ubiquity of commercial satellite imagery gives nearly anyone godlike powers of reconnaissance and surveillance not that far removed from those enjoyed by militaries and intelligence agencies—a fact that causes no small amount of anxiety within the Pentagon. The pervasiveness and power of their imagery compels us to ask: Where do they come from? And how are they being put to use? Launching the Industry The story of satellite imagery begins with military surveillance. The CORONA satellite program was launched in secret by the NRO (the National Reconnaissance Office, whose existence wasn’t declassified until the 1990s) in response to the USSR’s Sputnik-1 in 1958. CORONA ultimately put over 144 satellites into orbit over twelve years. Satellites were soon found to be useful for surveying purposes as well: the oil, gas, and mining industries, as well as climate researchers could make use of satellite imagery in their work. The academic, commercial, and national-security interest in satellite imagery of natural resources culminated in the launch of the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, now called Landsat 1, in 1972. Landsat remains the longest-running satellite imagery program to date.","completion":"Following the end of the Cold War in 1992, private companies were permitted to enter the satellite business in the United States, kickstarting the industry that we know today. But the newfangled EO industry never drifted far from its origins in the military-industrial complex. In 1994, defense contractor Lockheed Martin was granted a license to sell commercial satellite high-resolution imagery. In 1995, the first commercial imaging satellite, OrbView-1, was launched by Orbital Sciences Corporation, in partnership with NASA. Soon afterwards, WorldView Imaging Corporation (later called DigitalGlobe) was given the first contract to build and operate a commercial satellite system. As the industry grew during the 2000s, it created new markets and many of the companies we know today. In 2004, Google acquired three geospatial companies that formed the basis for Google Maps. (One of them, Keyhole, had received funding from the CIA.) As the industry has expanded, the number of satellites orbiting the planet has grown: from one in 1958 to over 3,300 in 2020."}
{"prompt":"Despite the staggering number of satellites, the business of capturing satellite imagery is dominated by a small number of major players. DigitalGlobe and Orbital Sciences (by then called GeoEye) merged in 2013; the resulting corporation, Maxar Technologies, became the largest satellite imagery company in the United States—a monopoly, in effect. Planet, founded by ex-NASA scientists in 2010, initiated a new chapter for the industry, launching small-scale micro satellites that could capture imagery of the entire planet at least once a day. The miniature satellites themselves are called “doves,” ironic given their recently renewed contract with the NRO in late 2021. Planet, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange just weeks later in 2021, has been hailed as an industry disruptor for years. Maxar and Planet have emerged as twin giants of the industry: one supplies high resolution, the other, speed.  The granularity of satellite imagery can be divided into three categories: low resolution (over 60m/pixel), medium resolution (10–30m/pixel), and high resolution (30cm–5m/pixel). The precise resolution of NRO satellites remains classified but continues to occupy the highest rung, while public research satellites like Landsat 1 capture the medium to low resolution needed for climate science. Historically, commercial satellites have been restricted to selling imagery up to 50cm/pixels (lowered to 40cm in 2014, then 30cm in 2015) despite their capacity to produce much higher resolution, as is the case with Maxar’s satellites, in particular. While Planet satellites aren’t capable of capturing the same sort of resolution (they max out at 50cm/pixel), the sheer number of micro-satellites they have launched means that Planet has the largest constellation of satellites ever assembled. As of 2022, Planet’s doves can capture and transmit imagery at least once a day, and this “guaranteed collection” business model is, in part, responsible for their recent IPO.  In other words, if Landsat imagery can capture a retreating glacier, Maxar can capture every crack—and Planet can capture its movement day-in, day-out. The NRO satellites? Who knows what they can do.","completion":"The GEOINT Singularity Thanks to their size and technological advantages, Maxar and Planet have become the go-to suppliers of satellite imagery used to document everything from tornado damage to the 2021–2022 military actions in Ukraine. According to its own statements, Maxar “provides 90 percent of the foundational geospatial intelligence used by the US government,” and was initially the sole supplier of imagery to the US government. Since 2019, the NRO has subscribed to Planet’s services (a contract that was recently expanded). Meanwhile, other companies like Satellogic (which recently partnered with Palantir in early 2022) and BlackSky (contracted to the NRO and NASA) have emerged with similar capabilities."}
{"prompt":"At the same time, the growth of “open source intelligence” (OSINT) and open data initiatives has enabled satellite imagery to be co-opted as both an investigative tool and public good, sometimes even used against the very states and corporations that released their imagery in the first place. Organizations like Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture have used satellite imagery to document human rights abuses, while Bellingcat has done the same for US military bases (both using Planet imagery). OpenStreetMap, an open data project, uses Maxar imagery to create a crowdsourced map of the world (often called the “Wikipedia of maps”). Such civic use of satellite imagery has shifted public access as well, as when Maxar released high-resolution imagery of Israel-Palestine in 2021—imagery that has been historically blurred and kept classified due to US government restrictions.  This fact is not lost on US intelligence professionals, many of whom fear a looming “GEOINT singularity,” in which public geospatial knowledge may equal that which is known by “experts.” But even the Pentagon understands that OSINT is here to stay—and may even be a resource for the military to exploit, as a DoD strategy report from August 2021 suggests. Similarly, the National Geospatial Intelligence (NGI) agency has emphasized the role of private companies in the geospatial intelligence community, and more such government-commercial partnerships are expected to develop in the coming years.  For all its pervasiveness online, the increased production of satellite imagery by companies like Maxar and Planet is not necessarily leading to an increased commercial demand to use it. From a business perspective, the thousands of satellites circling overhead are producing an excess of supply, and demand is still dominated by defense agencies.  Indeed, given how much more advanced NRO satellites must be compared to the commercial industry as a whole (something we have the right to assume, given their classified status—the NRO, for instance, was able to unexpectedly donate two high-resolution telescopes of the same quality as Hubble to NASA), it’s worth asking why the government continues to acquire lower-resolution commercial imagery in the first place. The recent declassification of “Sentient,” an “omnivorous analysis tool” being developed by the NRO, points to their need for vast quantities of satellite imagery to train AI-driven imagery analyses. Could the exigencies of AI be driving the DoD’s continuing support of the industry? On the other hand, buying up imagery could also be a means of controlling the flow of information, pushing the images into the wrong (or right) hands. Could their support be a means of ensuring that satellite imagery is steered in the direction of US military interests?","completion":"In either case, we may not ever know for sure—at least not in the near future. But the questions are a reminder that the commercial satellite imagery industry remains impossible to separate from the military applications from which it arose. They are a reminder that the “supply chain” of satellite imagery—the set of companies and institutions that bring the images from above the atmosphere to the apps on our phones—is not necessarily as straightforward as the notion of “surveillance capitalism” might make it seem. In the meantime, this convoluted mix of civil, military, and commercial actors will continue to fill our skies—and our screens—with satellite imagery."}
{"prompt":"Adapted from Redacted (Taller California, 2021) San Diego is one of the most surveilled places in the United States. Located on the border with Mexico, America’s Finest City is host to one of the largest US Navy bases and a wide array of government agencies that see technology as the key to better managing public infrastructure, tracking the movements of people, and solving crimes. Hidden behind a veil of public safety and national security, the spyware is often invisible to the public.","completion":"For years, officials have been rolling out technologies that they don’t totally understand and with little to no meaningful oversight, turning San Diego into a laboratory for the rest of the country. The residents here did not consent to this development, let alone vote on it—a reality that pits the interests of public planning and law enforcement against the civil liberties and civil rights of everyone else."}
{"prompt":"It’s also common to find that technological experimentation in San Diego serves the interests of private companies with something to sell. General Atomics is one of these companies. In 2020, the defense contractor decided to repurpose its Predator and Reaper drones as the benign-sounding SkyGuardian and SeaGuardian. But before General Atomics could test out one of its drones above San Diego, it needed permission from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The airspace above the city is a highly restricted place, where unmanned aircraft cannot typically fly.","completion":"The San Diego test flight was supposed to demonstrate that the new drone, the SkyGuardian—weighing up to 12,500 pounds, with a wingspan of seventy-nine feet—could safely travel over a dense metro area while surveilling infrastructure and the natural landscape. San Diego and its people would be props in General Atomics’ killer demo."}
{"prompt":"The company described the drone as a “persistent eye in the sky.” It was an unprecedented project that had the potential to open the airways above major US cities to new forms of surveillance. How were regulators evaluating the technology? Had there been any external influence—from, say, the Pentagon or the White House—to force the project through? These were pressing questions, especially because a similar drone from US Customs and Border Protection had experienced mechanical failure and crashed in the waters outside the city in 2014.","completion":"So, in late March 2020, with the test flight about to take place any day, a journalist at the nonprofit news organization Voice of San Diego requested all public records related to the test flight from the FAA, including communications with the defense contractor. Complying with the request wasn’t easy. The FAA has five divisions spread across the country. By design, the agency’s public records response is decentralized. Getting the SkyGuardian off the ground required the work of three different units, each of which needed to produce—and redact—the records in its possession. Voice of San Diego filed a lawsuit to speed up the process and, in September 2020, a judge ordered the FAA to hurry up or face penalties. The pressure was on. The agency had six weeks."}
{"prompt":"The Minimum Amount of Redactions Two months after the original request was filed—well past FOIA’s legal deadline of twenty business days—Rick Perez got the assignment in the FAA’s air certification branch. Perez had been with the FAA since 2011, and his staff was also in the middle of processing more than sixty requests for huge volumes of records related to the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, two of which had crashed in 2018 and 2019, killing a total of 346 people. Perez’s branch consisted of three federal employees and four contractors. The SkyGuardian was just a blip on their radar.","completion":"Perez’s staff consulted with other experts in the agency, ran an initial query with keywords, and then set about reading through the more than 2,500 pages they had identified. During their line-by-line reviews, it became clear that other organizations might have a stake—and a legal claim—to withhold information about the SkyGuardian, not just the FAA."}
{"prompt":"NASA, for instance, had been partnering with General Atomics on the test flight. Both organizations needed to be consulted. Both would drag their feet. And both would then turn around and make cases to the FAA in private that certain documents and communications ought to be treated as confidential. General Atomics argued that some of the information contained in the records was protected by the US Arms Export Control Act, which deals with the sale of weapons overseas. This by itself was revealing: the test flight was not just about showing local officials the ways in which they could monitor infrastructure from above. The test flight was intended as a marketing ploy for international buyers.","completion":"For this reason, Perez discovered, the Department of Defense also needed to weigh in. That slowed the process down even further. In October 2020, he provided the court with an update, arguing for more time—but promised to release everything in his possession “with the minimum amount of redactions.” Here’s a taste of what he produced:  Still, there were some revelations visible between the blacked-out lines. What the FAA released showed that regulators did not believe the drone could fly safely above so many people. Regulators had demanded the company use a “chase plane,” manned with a pilot who could monitor the drone in real-time for any problems. Instead of complying with the request—which might have given the international buyers doubts about the technology’s true capabilities—the company rerouted the flight path and pushed the demo into the desert."}
{"prompt":"But as it turns out, different units within the FAA had similar records in their possession and redacted them in different ways. The FAA wound up producing the same emails in redacted and unredacted forms, inadvertently revealing how subjective the process really is. What to keep and what to omit appeared to be dependent on the momentary feelings and fleeting judgments of whoever was doing the redactions.","completion":"The email conversations show FAA employees casting doubt on General Atomics’ claim that their technology is safe. In one email, an FAA employee notes that the company is “worried about getting an approval” and that time will run out before the permit process can be completed because, “as usual, they have diplomats from the military attending and want to demonstrate the capability.” Secrecy is the way in which government agencies reveal their mistrust of the people. The cloak is needed, you’ll often hear officials say, to keep everyone safe. But safe from what? Or better yet, from whom? Secrecy breeds its own kind of distress, encouraging a fear of the unknown that justifies new levels of authority in a slow-moving but perpetual crisis.  Secrecy and surveillance are two sides of the same coin. Both stem from an attitude that the people atop our institutions know better than the rest of us how to govern and structure society. Both engender mistrust and inhibit collective action. They engender mistrust by encouraging us to outsource responsibility for safety. This inhibits collective action, not only by chilling our speech and association but by ceding authority to institutions we mostly do not participate in.  Do It Yourself Why would I, of all people, want to seek a public record? It could be to learn about an issue that affects you or your community. It could be to find more bulletproof evidence of something you know or suspect that will help with your advocacy work. It could be an entry point into the workings of politics or profit by finding the traces left behind by the companies that interact with the government.\t How do I get started? Don’t be intimidated. We had no idea what we were doing when we got started either. No one is born with this knowledge."}
{"prompt":"Explore the public records universe to get a sense of the mechanics. Public records are informational arcana produced through the rituals of politicians, functionaries, and bureaucrats. It is hard to know what to ask for if you don’t have a sense of how they organize their world and their work within it.  Check online to see if the agency you’re targeting has an open data portal, then start by trawling for topics that you’re interested in. Some public agencies and cities, including Los Angeles, New York City, and San Diego, have websites that allow you to search for the records others have already requested using keywords. You can then dive into the rabbit hole of what’s already been made available. Browsing the records gives you a sense of what kinds of departments exist within those agencies, what kind of records they produce, what kinds of things other people ask for, and how they ask for them.","completion":"What kind of records could address my question? Records may not be available to answer your exact question, but there may be records that give you some pieces of an answer. Possible records include email communications, presentations, memoranda of understanding, policy and procedure manuals, government filings, and contracts."}
{"prompt":"It can help to speak with people who interact with the government a lot. Activists, lawyers, and policy nerds can help you brainstorm based on their experiences requesting and filing documents. Again, browsing existing open records portals can also give you ideas. There is no shame in starting your request by copying and pasting another request you find and submitting it with the tweaks that get at the specific information you want. We do this all the time. You can also check the agency’s website to get a sense of the kind of forms and records they describe working with publicly.  Which public entity has the records I want? Determining this is key. After you figure out what you want to know, figure out who has it. The San Diego Police Department? The National Labor Relations Board? The Food and Drug Administration? Cities will often have a clerk who you can call and talk to—an act of bureaucratic goodwill or perhaps a legal requirement, depending on the state. Networking with others who work on the topic you’re interested in can also help. You may encounter hostility from some agencies, but remember, at least California requires that officials help you route your request to the correct departments.","completion":"The entity should have a website explaining their public records procedure, often with an online form. Plan ahead, as it can take months to get the records you request—and that’s if you’re lucky. The agency may also charge you for requests beyond a certain number of pages. You’re also within your rights to request that they waive those fees."}
{"prompt":"Transparency is a constant struggle. It helps to have allies. Are there organized groups—unions or community organizations, for example—that have a stake in the issue you’re trying to bring to light? They may have background knowledge about the politics behind the records you seek. They may have access to lawyers who can help you navigate local public records laws. They might want to help you make sense of the records you get because it benefits them too.","completion":"Finally, if you want to know more because you want to change something about the way the world works, you’ll need to join with others to make it happen. Being frustrated and alone is a trash feeling. 1 In the beginning, there was the nursery, one of the characters in one of Virginia Woolf’s novels remembers, with windows opening on to a garden, and beyond that the sea. It’s a fun rejoinder to millennia of male chauvinist origin stories about the Word, Father, Son, Holy etc. But that character was lucky. In today’s housing market, how many newborns can afford a room of their own? Forget about one with ocean views."}
{"prompt":"There were predictions, early in the pandemic, that as offices closed and white-collar professionals shifted to working from home, rents in San Francisco and New York would fall. On Instagram, millennial influencers were going off the grid. On Twitter, a new generation of culture warriors bravely admitted that they were sick of pronouns, and unhoused people, and moved to Austin. Keith Rabois kept tweeting about what a cool time he and all of his cool friends were having in Miami.  Even we developed a habit of scrolling at night through Zillow listings in the countryside, if only to avoid reading about the growing numbers of the sick and the dead right before trying to sleep.","completion":"But in fact, the predictions did not come true. Rent is increasing at its fastest rate since 1986. If you want to rent, be prepared to pay a broker 15 percent to advise you on how to bid your own rent up. If you want to buy, good luck. Rising interest rates should cool the market soon. But for now, they mean that, even for those with good credit scores, mortgage rates have nearly doubled since 2020."}
{"prompt":"While we were writing that paragraph, we got a New York Times push notification informing us that the housing shortage is not just a coastal crisis. Boise, Idaho is short at least 13,000 units. Here comes another: Shelters across the US are reporting a surge in people looking for help, with wait lists doubling or tripling in recent months.  It’s getting harder and harder to get in on the ground floor of Maslow’s pyramid. Citizens struggle to find shelter, from sea to shining sea.","completion":"2 But you knew that. About moving to Austin: As we were editing this issue, approximately half of all people in the United States officially lost a right that residents of many states had already lost in practice.  We knew this news was coming. Still, it felt crushing. Watching Nancy Pelosi recite poems, and Joseph Biden and Kamala Harris stammer in response to questions they have had months to prepare for, it is hard to know whether to scream, or to scream."}
{"prompt":"We cannot talk about the theme of this issue without talking about the Dobbs ruling. If for decades the right to an abortion was grounded in the right to privacy, for better and worse the right to privacy has deep ties to home, in the sense of private property.  The idea that a person has the right to keep what happens behind closed doors behind those doors offers important freedoms. The ability to control who gets to know what about you is a crucial precondition of being free to do what you like. Privacy, in the sense of secrecy, preserves personal autonomy. Domestic life has been a central site of aspiration and emancipation for countless people who do not, or cannot, find freedom in public spaces. For many, home offers a refuge from racism and homophobia. It affords the ordinary pleasures of intimacy.  At the same time, however, the powerful have often invoked privacy to conceal their abuses of power. In Ancient Rome, the ideal of all political authority (auctoritas) was the rule that the man of a house exercised over his wife, children, and slaves. In the United States, too, the history of the right to privacy remains inseparable from the history of men treating women and children who depend on them—and white people treating Black people—with impunity.  Generations of advocates and activists have argued that it was a mistake to ground abortion rights in privacy rights. Recent events prove, as if proof were still needed, that the move that seemed strategic in the early 1970s was not in fact strategic. It made abortion rights fragile.","completion":"If the right to privacy has historically been grounded in the right of the man of the house to do what he wants there, people who get pregnant do not get to go home. We are home.  So, as we face the prospect of even more people losing even more—rights to contraception, marriage, and even interstate travel—we have to be prepared to do at least two things at once. We have to build, and connect, spaces of care shielded from prying eyes. And we have to strive for a world where ownership of private space does not decide so much."}
{"prompt":"3 What’s tech got to do with it? Everything. And not only because Airbnb rentals and Zillow’s investment arm are helping drive a housing crisis, sending more and more people to the streets. Not only because, as one tweet we saw lamented, millennials forced to move back in with parents are now Zooming with their therapists like someone reporting LIVE from the scene of the accident! Anti-choice groups have long used targeted ads to direct misinformation to women searching online for abortion services. Now, for peanuts, brokers sell highly sensitive data about the geolocation of patients to would-be vigilantes. But the ways that technology shapes the ever-shifting divide between public and private—your business and your boss’s, or the state’s—run even deeper.  Home is, and has always been, entwined with technologies. Indeed, evolutionary scientists and archaeologists recognize dwellings themselves as technologies, among the tools that make humans human. Our homes enclose and arrange us. They shape our relations and communications, and their traces, in particular ways.  This means that the growing number of technologies that market themselves by claiming to protect the home are in fact transforming the boundaries that define it.  Life360, a smartphone app that tens of millions of parents use to track their children in real time, has been caught selling personally identifiable information about those children’s whereabouts to brokers who will sell it to almost anyone.  Amazon and competitors like Wyze have developed smart cameras that they encourage families to use to monitor their stoops—and other people’s—to keep an eye on Amazon delivery workers and anyone else who happens by. Other smart cameras reassure parents that they can leave their kids while keeping their nannies, and other household workers, under continuous surveillance.  Promising to preserve the sanctity of the private sphere, at the same time, these devices mine the private sphere for content that they disperse to the cloud, to leaky servers from northern Virginia to southern Guizhou.","completion":"4 This issue approaches the shifting intersections of home and technologies without making assumptions—and with an eye to justice.  In one piece, a public school teacher explores how, during the pandemic, edtech firms have garnished millions from public emergency relief funds without delivering on their promise to provide equal access to education. How could they? Students’ living conditions shape their learning conditions, even once quarantines are over.  In another piece, researchers look at how one person’s home becomes another person’s workplace, and still another’s data quarry. Care platforms incentivize parents to cooperate with their data gathering by surveilling caregivers, while making the caregivers more precarious."}
{"prompt":"In this issue we see the sins of the father continuing to be visited, if not on the son, then on other people’s children. Our authors explore how new systems replicate old inequalities. In South Africa, automated credit rating systems built on decades of racist data re-segregate cities; despite formal equality, algorithmic apartheid succeeds apartheid. In the United States, Black families are subjected to obscene levels of surveillance and violence, not only from the state but from private agencies to which the state has delegated its coercive power. Under these circumstances, our author recounts, having a neat house when the family police show up in the middle of the night can be the difference between keeping your children and having your family destroyed.","completion":"Here, and elsewhere, we also glimpse homes as sites of creativity and resilience. Right now, TikTok influencers are making art, or at least satire, out of homes that Zillow makes into content, to entertain members of a generation that is struggling to afford housing. Garment workers moving between villages in China’s Zhejiang Province and Prato, Italy are finding opportunity and resilience in family networks, if also exploitation. So, presumably, will the migrants who succeed them make new kin.  Google Nest and its imitators would have us believe that we can remain kings of our castle, and everyone in it, even when we are away. By contrast, we share the view of the philosopher who said that it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home. You can take us out of our home, but not our home out of us, and for those who are lucky, home may be a site of nostalgia, even if you can never go home again."}
{"prompt":"Baltimore City Public Schools is on a spending spree. The district’s budget is projected to increase $227 million in 2023—an increase of nearly a sixth of its current budget, despite falling enrollment. Greater state funding from the Blueprint for Maryland’s Future Act accounts for much of this increase, but a significant amount comes from federal sources. These federal funds are part of the roughly $190 billion that has been earmarked for education in 2021’s big spending bills: the CARES Act, the Consolidated Appropriations Act, and the American Rescue Plan Act.  So, in the fall of the 2021–2022 school year, my district asked for help in determining where to allocate some of this newfound wealth. High school staff and students were asked to vote between two fully digitized English curricula that the district might purchase. In my ninth grade English class, I projected the flashy promotional videos made by each company, as my students filled out a response survey on their laptops. Both presentations promised that students would be empowered. (If you wish to hear this word every day until you die, become a public school teacher.) Both presentations tried their best to make the everyday activities of an English curriculum—writing essays, preparing for debates, and answering questions on articles and novels—sound exciting.  One of the companies, Imagine Learning, distinguished itself by claiming that, on their platform, students could demonstrate their knowledge of English language and literature by “composing a rap song or creating a TikTok.” Some students seemed intrigued. Others groaned over their laptops. Yet another edtech firm was promising to uplift marginalized students by filling the classroom with the kind of entertainment media they consumed at home.  Such products can make educational content more accessible, especially at home, but they cannot actually address academic shortcomings any more than pen and paper. This is because learning happens through what educators call “productive struggle,” not merely the consumption of educational content. Productive struggle is the profession’s term for problem-solving at a level that is difficult for a student, but possible with effort and limited assistance. Educators refer to this magical window of learning as the “zone of proximal development.” Any education technology that is able to employ entertainment to transcend the difficulty inherent in learning ceases to be educational.","completion":"But even if such a technology is able to elicit productive struggle among students, it still runs up against a deeper challenge: poverty. The real reason that students have difficulty in the classroom is not due to the lack of thoughtful UX design, but because the trauma and instability wrought by the material circumstances of their home and community make engaging in productive struggle difficult. This does not mean that edtech products are useless. But they are not able to address the core cause of educational inequality any more than traditional instruction.  The recent growth in school funding from Covid relief measures gives educators a long-overdue opportunity to confront the material roots of educational inequality. But this influx of public money also represents a potential payday for a fast-growing edtech sector. The edtech market in the US is expected to grow to about $60 billion by 2026, according to an estimate from Global Industry Analysts, more than doubling its 2021 valuation and drastically outpacing the growth of the education sector as a whole. At a moment when governments are committing real resources to public education, companies touting disruptive digital approaches see a gold rush. They plan to win lucrative contracts by promising to solve a problem they can’t possibly solve.  Passed, Present, Failure  When asked about how to address the legacy of slavery in an early Democratic primary debate in 2019, Joe Biden wound his way through a surreal answer that ended with him advising parents to “make sure you have the record player on at night, the phone, make sure the kids hear words.” While many viewers were probably confused by the now-president’s statements, those of us in education knew exactly what he was referring to. He was regurgitating the long-held belief that poor children suffer academically due to the “word gap”—a disparity in the complexity and the volume of words heard by children in rich and poor homes.  Biden’s statement is the perfect encapsulation of a particular tradition in American education. This tradition, rather than trying to address the historic inequities that drive educational disparities, relies on something that is already in nearly every American home regardless of income: entertainment media. From phonographs to television to the internet, the wide availability of entertainment media has led generations of educators to embrace it as a potential salve to problems in American education, despite little evidence of its effectiveness."}
{"prompt":"Early in the twentieth century, the Victor Talking Machine Company led a major campaign to market its “talking machine” phonographs as educational tools. Victor was the first edtech company, touting a wide variety of potential educational benefits from its technology, from learning roller-skating and typewriting to French. Despite these claims, clear-eyed educators quickly recognized the limits of the machine. Writing in 1918, at the height of Victor’s educational marketing campaign, Charles C. Clark, a professor of foreign languages at Yale, argued that the machine “taught only when its master makes it teach.” Citing an example of a friend who failed to learn Italian from recordings that he played every day while eating lunch, Clark noted that only those who would already do well learning through coursebooks could learn with the phonograph, as serious study was needed regardless. Writing six years earlier, a French language professor, Charlotte J. Cipriani, observed that the phonograph could help with French phonetics but could not “relieve teachers and students from the distasteful task of thinking”—in other words, productive struggle.  By the latter half of the twentieth century, the record player had ceded its cultural dominance to television, which brought its own wave of advocates and critics arguing over its place in education. Television became the dominant entertainment medium precisely because, to borrow Cipriani’s words, it relieved viewers of the “distasteful task of thinking.” And, as with the phonograph, educators embraced television not because of its usefulness in pedagogy, but because of its ubiquity in students’ homes. In 1979 an editor for a prominent education magazine, Kathryn LeGrand-Brodsky, argued that “realists” must use television in education because of the “simple fact that children do watch television, and a lot of it.” This is the foundational rationale for using entertainment technologies in education: it’s there, so we might as well use it.","completion":"Achieve 3000 With the mainstreaming of the internet in the early twenty-first century, a new edtech product emerged: the massive open online course, or MOOC. Unlike the phonograph or television, which were entertainment media that could just barely be packaged as educational, the internet allowed for rigorous educational content to enter homes with the same ubiquity as entertainment media. MOOCs promised to break down the walls between home and Harvard, liberating education from its ivory tower. In the early 2010s, optimistic writers and educators heralded the arrival of online courses—often free and taught by professors from elite universities—as a great leveling event. In a 2013 op-ed, Thomas Friedman claimed that “nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty.”  Unlike the phonograph and the television, MOOCs can be rigorous: they have the ability to foster the conditions for productive struggle. Moreover, unlike traditional universities, MOOCs can allow everyone, regardless of income or location, to learn. Still, MOOCs fail to provide the social support that students need to be successful. This explains their very high rates of incompletion: according to a 2019 MIT study, a large percentage of MOOC students fail to complete their courses, including for degree programs. And the broader accessibility of MOOCs has not led to any real equity in education, with participants from very developed countries passing their courses at 48 times the rate of those from the least developed countries.  The rise and fall of MOOCs makes clear that support, not access, is the key to achieving equitable educational achievement. These realities have led many MOOC platforms to pivot to working with traditional institutions to help award expensive online professional degrees. These partnerships have greatly benefited the bottom line of MOOC providers, with Coursera, the world’s largest MOOC platform, valued at over $7 billion dollars. Such figures dwarf the valuations of the major education media companies of the television era, with Disney buying Baby Einstein for only $25 million in 2001, and Hooked on Phonics reaching a peak valuation of about $100 million in the 1990s. With such money on the line, a slew of edtech companies have entered the market in the past decade, often funded largely by public school districts."}
{"prompt":"Among the products at the forefront of the new edtech wave is Achieve 3000. Achieve is one of the programs licensed under Baltimore City School’s Math and Literacy Intervention Programs budget, which shot up from $10 million in March 2020 to a staggering $28 million in November 2021, thanks in large part to the CARES Act. The program features thousands of readings and exercises, presented much like the Netflix homepage, with the newest articles listed across the top of the page in rows of suggested topics with names like “Teen Channel” and “US History.” Its main innovation is that the same articles are written at different levels, so that students will each be given a text on the same topic that is targeted to their developmental stage. As they answer questions correctly, the difficulty of the readings will gradually increase.  For students who are able to focus on the readings, and who have the language skills to engage with the readings, the program works well. The way that the software continuously calibrates the difficulty level for each student helps create the conditions for productive struggle. But for those students who are already falling behind, the program does little to help them advance.","completion":"During the pandemic days of distance learning, if one of my struggling students turned on the camera or microphone, there would almost always be a hurricane of activity and noise going on behind them. If any of my students who were excelling did the same, they were almost always in a quiet, empty room. The few students I taught who were fortunate enough to have their own room, no siblings or children to babysit, and a parent with a job that allowed them to monitor their child’s progress easily at home, excelled on the Achieve platform. Students who did not have such privileges, whose parents worked “essential” jobs, fared about as well as the millions of MOOC students who churned out of their courses. Programs like Achieve work, all things being equal—but things are not equal, and no amount of spending on edtech products can level the playing field.  Making Students Whole Baltimore City Schools and many districts like it around the country are now flush with Covid relief cash. This means they have plenty of money to spend on edtech products. So much money, in fact, that Baltimore decided to license not one but both digitized English curricula that I presented to my students, at an annual cost of over $1.75 million. In fact, the $28 million “intervention technology” budget, which only covers a portion of the edtech products licensed by Baltimore, is greater than the district’s entire “student wholeness” budget for 2022, which provides funds for advising, mental health services, and social-emotional learning. Concerningly, edtech companies are even beginning to encroach into this territory, offering digitized versions of services that could only ever be effectively provided through a human connection.  With only a $750,000, three-year contract, Colorado-based Pairin is a relatively small player in Baltimore’s edtech procurements. However, its contract is a particularly insidious example of an edtech company receiving funds earmarked for social services. For Baltimore City Schools, Pairin made a new product called Plan2BMore, which is meant to serve as a sort of virtual guidance counselor and claims to be customized for the needs of Baltimore schoolchildren."}
{"prompt":"Unfortunately, it does not work.  When my school attempted to get students to use the program in March 2022, it constantly crashed. This was an issue district-wide. More importantly, Pairin represents the attempted digitization of the exact needs that Baltimore should be addressing through hiring counselors, advisors, and social workers, or by providing other services administered under the district’s meager student wholeness budget. Giving guidance to students and helping them set a path for their future is a deeply personal act, and one where a human connection can help immensely. It is also an area where students in Baltimore City Schools, who overwhelmingly do not have parents who have graduated from college and who live in impoverished communities, need far more support than their wealthier peers in the suburbs. Such guidance, along with myriad other social services, could help motivate students to engage in real productive struggle, justifying the investment in products like Achieve 3000. To contract out such work to a faraway for-profit firm sets a worrying precedent for how Baltimore City Schools will allocate its rapidly expanding budget going forward.  Good edtech products have a role to play. But the content that we stream into classrooms or homes is simply not as important as the material inequities faced by students, and a school district’s ability to relieve those inequities through counseling, guidance, and other social services. If school districts and the governments that fund them want real change, they must address the material needs of students at home and in school. Otherwise, they risk becoming yet another pipeline for the transfer of public resources to the private sector.","completion":"At first glance, the bedroom may look like the exact opposite of a political space. If we follow Hannah Arendt’s definition of politics, informed by Aristotle, as comprising any action that is performed in public, bedrooms are quintessentially apolitical. They are where we sleep, make love, tend to the needs of our children, recover when sick, and seek refuge from the outside world.  Yet in our era, this most private of places has been absorbed into the political realm: as a site of our online interactions, as the stage of our self-presentation, and even as a theme of many recent activist campaigns. Exploring this emerging “bedroom politics” stands to reveal something important about the shifting relationship between private and public, and how our political life is being transformed as a result."}
{"prompt":"These changes are affecting the content of contemporary politics. The transmogrification of the bedroom from a place of rest into a space in which people not only sleep but live and work—and, crucially, participate in political conversations online—goes a long way toward explaining both the form and content of contemporary politics. This turn brings both opportunities and risks. On the one hand, bedroom politics may offer an opportunity to re-embed causes that may seem lofty in everyday life. Making the political viscerally personal may help politicize more people. On the other hand, the convergence of the personal and the political may create a situation where we are no longer able to distinguish between the two. Regardless, there is no way to understand the logic of contemporary politics without thinking about the bedroom.","completion":"The Conquest of Bed Traditionally, the places of politics have been squares, streets, conference halls, churches, meeting houses, and party offices. In his influential analysis of the bourgeois public sphere, Jürgen Habermas observes that such sites are the physical equivalents of the news media: they are where ideas circulate. The philosophers Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge argue for the existence of a proletarian public sphere, which coheres around humbler locations like factories, pubs, and working-class neighborhoods."}
{"prompt":"Whether bourgeois or proletarian, however, the public sphere historically excluded the home. This exclusion goes back to Aristotle and other classical philosophers, who believed that the bedroom in particular was the deepest and most protected recess of the oikos (household), far removed from the radical openness of the agora, where the democratic life of ancient Greece took place. Yet even in antiquity, some of the most important political conversations, especially within influential families, were conducted in the household. Further, the home was the only place where (aristocratic) women, otherwise barred from the public sphere, could participate, if indirectly, in political affairs. They could give advice, participate in private discussions, or, in the modern era, act as the patronesses of salons. The home has also played a central role in underground political organizing throughout history: as a venue for secret meetings, where one can escape police surveillance.","completion":"Still, these intrusions of politics into the household remained exceptions to the rule. It is only with the development of modern media—from the printing press in the fifteenth century to the first modern newspapers in the eighteenth century, to electronic media such as radio and television in the twentieth century—that the home became progressively incorporated into the public sphere, and the line between the private and the public began to break down. The first part of the home to be annexed was the kitchen, where the daily newspaper would be read at breakfast time, in what Hegel famously described as the “realist’s morning prayer.” Then came the living room, where, beginning in the 1950s, families would gather around the TV to watch the evening news, in what became a national ritual in many countries. But the bedroom remained intact as a realm of intimacy—a place where people could take refuge from the outside world."}
{"prompt":"Yet with the digital era, even this bastion of privateness seems to have fallen. The popularization of the internet and social media, and the fact that they are often accessed through portable devices like smartphones and laptops, has unanchored media consumption from specific sites. The bedroom is now as permeated by the public sphere as anywhere else, perhaps even more so—it has become, in the words of the scholar Zizi Papacharissi, “the mobile and connected enclosure of [our] private cocoon.” Indeed, research has shown how bedrooms have increasingly become one of the main sites of digital media use. A 2017 study published in the journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics showed that 75 percent of children and 70 percent of adults report viewing or interacting with screens in the bedroom. This situation has led to couples complaining about the fact that smartphone use negatively impacts their sex lives, as well as growing concern that “doom-scrolling” in bed negatively impacts our sleep patterns.  The use of digital media in the bedroom is a reflection of the portability of such media in the era of the smartphone. But it is also a reflection of worrying socioeconomic trends. Rising housing costs and the difficulty to get on the housing ladder means that a growing number of young adults are now living with their parents. According to a 2020 Pew report, 52 percent of US citizens ages 18–29 lived with their parents, up from 47 percent before the pandemic. In the UK, according to the Office for National Statistics, around 42 percent of 15–34 year-olds did the same, compared to 35 percent in 1998. Further, the number of people flat-sharing with friends and strangers has grown, with some reports of a fourfold increase in the 2010s, particularly pronounced among those ages 45–54. This means that, especially in big cities, bedrooms have become mini-apartments: multifunction places where people do not just sleep, rest, and “disconnect,” but where they work, study, and use the internet. For teenagers, meanwhile, bedrooms are the only place in the household where they can engage in online conversations without their parents meddling.","completion":"Movement Homes The places where politics take place have important consequences for both its form and its content. So what are the implications of the bedroom becoming a place of politics? At the level of form, we see bedrooms everywhere in online life. They have become the contemporary equivalent of the speaker’s podium. Bedrooms appear as the backdrop in political TikTok and YouTube videos, as well as in political meetings and talks conducted over Zoom. A widely read 2019 report on the climate movement carried a picture of Paul Campion, a Sunrise Movement activist, in his bedroom in a small apartment in Washington, DC with the caption “the organization’s ‘movement home.’” At the level of content, politics from the bedroom has to some extent become a politics about the bedroom. Issues that are associated with the bedroom—from sickness to sexuality, housing, and mental health—have become more prominent in political debates. In the era of social media, it has become easier to make the issues contained in the bedroom visible, by representing them though pictures, videos, and other multimedia material recorded there.  Bedrooms and beds have appeared in many recent campaigns. They appear in the campaigns of feminist and LGTBQI+ groups as a means to discuss issues of sexual and reproductive rights, as in #MeToo activist Alyssa Milano’s call for a sex strike, a form of protest that by its very nature is located in the bedroom. Similarly, housing campaigns such as Generation Rent and #VentYourRent launched in London in 2016, as well as the Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen referendum in Berlin in 2021, often featured images of beds and bedrooms, and saw people complaining about unhealthy housing conditions and difficulty sleeping. Some scholars have even coined the expression “bed activism” to describe the various campaigns where bedrooms and the act of sleeping are a key theme."}
{"prompt":"This politicization of beds and bedrooms is not altogether new. Famously, John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged a “bed-in,” spending days on end in their bed to protest the Vietnam War. But at the time, their protest was widely criticized as illegible: it was not clear why they would do it in the bedroom. These days, the bedroom is clearly a space where politics takes place.","completion":"Beyond the Bedroom What are the broader democratic implications of bedroom politics? What possible opportunities are opened by it and what potential risks may it involve? Bedroom politics are an attempt to re-embed politics in everyday life. They present an opportunity to politicize issues having to do with sickness, sexuality, housing, and vulnerability that deserve to be part of our political conversations. In our hypermediated world, bedroom politics not only highlight that “the personal is political” as feminist and queer movements have already argued, but also that the political has become deeply personal. Further, bedroom politics gives us a new way to do politics together. In her essay “Sick Woman Theory,” the writer and artist Johanna Hedva claims the bed and the internet as parallel sites of resistance. She pushes back on traditional take-to-the-streets constructions of political activism as able-bodied: “If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political—simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street.”  However, bedroom politics can also function as a catalyst of individualized politics. A politics of the individual asks what the individual, as opposed to the community, should do. People sharing stories and demands from their bedroom may be inclined to act in ways that are solitary rather than solidaristic. Bedroom politics can thus also be read as an example of the broader turn toward narcissism that has been denounced ever since Christopher Lasch’s famous The Culture of Narcissism came out in 1979: a politics that places personal experience above all else."}
{"prompt":"Lyn started babysitting when she was twelve. And yet, despite her nearly twenty years of experience, she recently found herself unsettled while at a nannying job: she was being recorded on camera. Playful activities like building blanket forts, she told us in an interview, became laced with anxiety. “I intentionally think about the angle of the camera,” she said. “I’ll make really bad ones, with a lot of space and holes, so that the camera can still see us.” She devoted time to “making sure my mannerisms and my posture and, like, the way that I’m speaking to these children that, if it’s recorded on the camera, that there’s nothing that would look bad.” Lyn found her job on Care.com, a platform for connecting nannies and other care workers with new clients. Founded in 2006, it now boasts a user base of thirty-one million across twenty countries. Its sweeping size and reach grants the platform an incredible amount of power to shape domestic work arrangements. It not only attracts individuals seeking care support, but also corporations and academic institutions, which provide free and subsidized subscriptions to Care’s Premium tier to their employees through the platform’s Care@Work program.  In its own words, Care.com is “the world’s largest online destination for care. We connect families with caregivers and caring companies to help you be there for the ones you love.” This emotionally laden statement is immediately followed by a coldly formal liability clause: “Care.com does not employ any care provider or care seeker nor is it responsible for the conduct of any care provider or care seeker.” As part of this liability-avoidance strategy, Care encourages its users to surveil the care workers they hire, suggesting on a “Safety” page that clients should “continually monitor your caregiver’s activities.” It makes sense, then, that in our extensive interviews with a diverse cohort of nannies from across the United States who use Care.com (and similar platforms like SitterCity), in-home surveillance was a recurring topic. We found that Care’s business model as an employment platform and subscription service not only explicitly and implicitly encouraged “monitoring”—which often reached uncomfortable levels for the care workers subject to it—but also made it difficult for nannies and babysitters to effectively advocate for themselves or negotiate employment conditions.","completion":"When nannies moved off the platform and into the space of a client’s home, they were often monitored through a variety of surveillance technologies and techniques—not just cameras, but also text messages, paper forms, and even the children being cared for. Cassandra told us that one of her clients expected “constant updates and documentation,” including photographs of the plates of food the children were eating. (All names have been changed to protect the privacy of our interviewees.) It made her feel as though her clients didn’t trust her to feed the children properly—worse, “It also made my job a lot harder, because like, when I’m texting, I’m not good at multitasking,” she said. “So, like, the girls would be trying to talk to me and I’d be like, ‘Hold on. I’m trying to take a picture of your food.’” Care.com’s marketing materials are geared towards parents, not workers. Until recently its website proclaimed, “Your safety is our priority: We are committed to helping you find a caregiver you can trust.” The platform preys on the feelings of protective parents—one of their blog posts intones that “nothing is more important than keeping your children safe from harm”—and pushes two contradictory messages. First, Care’s platform encourages parents to buy more stringent background checks, accomplished through direct contact with the carceral state, ranging in exhaustiveness from a database search of court records at one end, to a “hands-on” investigation performed by a team of “highly trained researchers and licensed private investigators” at the other. At the same time, Care’s messaging to parents implies that background checks are not enough to keep their children safe.  Regardless, nannies told us that monitoring makes them worse at their jobs, not better: it adds to the daily workload, and often prevents them from doing their job without interruption or from taking a break without feeling self-conscious. Indeed, the only party that clearly benefits from constant parental surveillance is Care, which tells families they need to monitor their nannies—painting them as suspicious by default—both discharging its own liability, and profiting from the background checks and membership fees that promise increased security."}
{"prompt":"Ongoing monitoring The Care.com platform is split into multiple apps. On “Care.com Caregiver,” nannies, dog walkers, cleaning workers, and others can sign up, submit to background checks, fill out their profile and upload photos, and search and apply for jobs. Another app, titled simply “Care.com,” allows care seekers to create job postings and browse caregivers’ profiles. With a Premium subscription (listed at $39.99 USD monthly, $89.97 quarterly, or around $160 USD annually), users can also contact caregivers directly—a power that was abused to repeatedly send unwanted messages to one of our interviewees—and to “have access to results of all background checks,” along with other “benefits.” Workers can also sign up for Premium for the same prices, granting them access to “higher ranking in search results,” and a promise that they will be “5X more likely to get hired.” Care Premium also comes with a free annual “CareCheck” background screening, which is required to begin applying for jobs. If workers choose not to sign up for Premium, the CareCheck costs $14.99 USD per year, due when they register.  Care.com’s official materials admit that background checks can be inaccurate, yet two of our interviewees discovered that the platform’s bans are decisive and uncontestable, and the platform doesn’t disclose whatever supposed violation led to the ban. In addition, the platform advises care seekers to purchase additional background checks on their applicants “at time of hire” for increased security. They note that background checks are “not a substitute for conducting thorough in-person interviews, reference checks, online and social media searches, obtaining copies of the candidate’s identification documents, and conducting ongoing monitoring of any individual you hire.”  “Ongoing monitoring,” however, is not simply used to ensure the safety and well-being of one’s children. It’s also a retaliation tactic. Kendra told us that her client ramped up monitoring immediately after she attempted to renegotiate her pay and hours. “She had started asking more of me after that. So it was like, ‘Oh, well, you’re gonna need to step up your game.’ And it was like, ‘You need to write down every single thing that my kid does’… It was almost like a punishment… I had to write down every activity, I had to write down everything they ate, every time they went to the bathroom, every time. Like, everything.” This documentation took place on printed sheets of paper that her client supplied to her, which were inspected before she left the home “to make sure I did a good job.” She described this work as “exhausting, especially on top of having two children to watch. I would have to take time away from them to fill it out.”","completion":"Nannies sometimes don’t know the full scope of monitoring until they start a particular job—and the fact that their jobs are usually performed in clients’ homes puts them at a disadvantage in negotiations. As Marie put it: “People can act whatever way they want to on the phone,” she said. “Until you go into their house, you just don’t know.” She described one interview that stuck with her: “We’re just gonna watch you,” a parent told her. She was instructed to take their baby, a bottle, and a three-year-old downstairs while the parents observed her on a camera feed.  “There is no privacy” Marie felt deeply uncomfortable that the family hadn’t told her before the interview that she’d be monitored. But many nannies resign themselves to surveillance, reasoning that a client has the right to do what they like in their own home. Jade told us, “I didn’t think it was all that big of a deal that they didn’t ask for consent or anything like that. Especially because I wasn’t doing anything that they would be worried about in the first place… When you step into someone else’s home, there is no privacy. That is something that you pretty much have relinquished as soon as you step into that home.” Celia adjusted her behavior for the presence of the cameras. “I used to sit down, back to the camera, and eat very fast because I’m feeling so weird,” she shared. Nevertheless, she concluded, “I know it’s not my house, you know, they can do whatever they want.” Some interviewees quit in search of a better gig after their clients crossed a boundary. Sometimes this works, they told us; “more authentic” working relationships are possible. But at the heart of acquiescence to surveillance is the unequal status of the caregivers and the employers. Turning down needed income is not an easy decision. As Cassandra said, “Sometimes I work up the nerve to ask if they have cameras… it depends on how many offers I’m getting lately… If I’m more, like, desperate to get a job, I just won’t bring it up.”"}
{"prompt":"Platforms like Care.com engage a geographically dispersed and atomized workforce, which has led some researchers to conclude that this and other challenges (such as disparities between workers using platforms to supplement their income versus those using it for full-time work) may have a sobering effect on labor organizing. But we should remember that examples of platform worker resistance are plentiful, including strikes by Deliveroo riders and UberEats drivers. Care workers already gather on Reddit and Facebook to discuss workplace issues and to share resources, job postings, and template contracts. It’s not a stretch to imagine this as a foundation for organizing that could give nannies a say on when, how, and if they are monitored while on the clock.","completion":"According to a founding myth recorded in Forbes, the real-estate listings website Zillow was inspired by the then-new satellite imaging feature of Google Maps. One of the cofounders “wondered if they could put a price on every rooftop they saw.” That dream eventually became the “Zestimate”: a calculation of value, generated by a proprietary algorithm, that Zillow prominently displays against every address in its vast database, alongside transaction histories, monthly maintenance fees, tax assessments, nearby schools, and any other data it’s possible to scrape or otherwise obtain from public records and real-estate agencies. If you google any address in the United States, its Zillow entry will usually be listed somewhere in the first page of results."}
{"prompt":"Where once you might have had to do some research and guesswork to see how much your home cost, the Zestimate claims to make checking in on your home equity as easy as looking up the weather forecast. But why stop at your home equity? A teenager once told me that, at his school, kids would look up the Zestimates of each others’ homes, making fun of kids whose families’ estimated home values were low. I was never able to fully confirm this story as a broad trend, but a quick glance at Twitter and TikTok, which is rife with anecdotes from people whose prospective romantic partners attempted to impress them by sending Zillow links to the properties the suitors owned—and people who did their own Zillow research into the living spaces occupied by potential partners—gives me no reason to doubt it.","completion":"Yet despite the satellite-recon dreams of its founders, Zillow is often wrong, and its estimates can fall drastically short of a property’s ultimate market price. Shortly before the pandemic, Zillow began a program known as iBuying, using its vast troves of housing market data to automatically predict which houses it could buy and flip for a profit. The algorithm was off, and the company suddenly found itself loaded with properties it was unable to profitably sell. In late 2021, Zillow shut down the iBuying program after getting out over its skis, taking a $540 million write down and laying off 25 percent of its staff."}
{"prompt":"This embarrassing loss serves as a reminder that Zillow’s real business is not real estate, but advertising. Sellers and landlords can pay to boost the prominence of their listings, while brokers in a local market can target searchers (who are presumably prospective buyers or renters) with their services. What this business model means in practice is that, while it may be useful for home-buying and low-stakes social surveillance, Zillow is first and foremost a media company, and its formal role as a business that assists realtors and prospective home buyers is worlds away from its practical role as a might-as-well-be-infinite store of information that attracts attention. What makes Zillow so prominent and successful is not that it turns every rooftop into a value, but that it turns every rooftop into content.","completion":"In this house we make memes Like any platform, Zillow has its curatorial middlemen, who can help paralyzed browsers winnow down the near-infinite consumption choices. Just as publications offer concierge services to help viewers pick “What to Watch” from vast streaming libraries and newsletters pick out the best of TikTok or Twitter, a number of Zillow meme accounts scattered across Twitter and TikTok pick out noteworthy listings. Rarely, however, do these accounts offer up great deals or beautiful homes. More often, they highlight “haunted,” “cursed,” catastrophic listings: the shockingly overpriced, the suspiciously underpriced, the bizarrely decorated, the accidentally revealing."}
{"prompt":"Jessica More, who runs the account @Zillowtastrophes across numerous platforms, told me she has a personal algorithm that can predict a good viral Zillow: a high price for a low square-footage, or vice-versa. A good “Zillowtastrophe,” according to More, makes you ask the question, “What was this person thinking?” People seem to respond more passionately to houses that have an uncanny-valley quality—one room or one detail that’s off-balance and creeps people out—rather than houses that are fully off the deep end.","completion":"More’s most-viewed video to date was a Washington home that seemed completely normal, except for the half-height hallways running between the childrens’ bedrooms, and the two half-height crawl spaces hidden off said secret passages which only locked from the outside. The use of extra space is easily explained as storage, and yet this specific implementation got viewers’ minds racing. “Haunted. You can feel the energy just watching the video,” one wrote. Another came at it from a different angle: “Bro that fucking price. What the fuck.” Jonathan Carlson also makes content about Zillow on TikTok. Viewers send him funny, odd listings for real houses on the actual market, and he makes jokes about them, greenscreening himself against screenshots of the listing. “I get tons of submissions where it’s, like, a messy house, but I’m not going to talk about a house that’s in squalor,” he says. “That’s people’s mental health; it’s not for entertainment.” At least twice, someone with firsthand knowledge of the property he’s ridiculing has left comments on his video. “It was bizarre for me but, flip the script, it was also probably weird for them,” he recalls, “seeing someone making commentary on the rooms and the house that they built and lived in.” Zillow had successfully transformed the home into content."}
{"prompt":"A supply-side theory of Zillow meme accounts The collation of publicly available data, as discussed above, is useful for nosy neighbors who want to know how their home’s value compares to others around them. More important than the data, however, is that Zillow features pictures. People interested in a house on Zillow can pull a listing up and see it not just from the outside, but also take a virtual tour of the bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, and basements. If a house has been sold in the past decade, the odds are pretty good that you can scope it out on Zillow.  The surfeit of images is useful to prospective home buyers. But it is equally, if not more useful to social-media platforms. Modern platforms, typified by centralized, algorithmically personalized feeds, and measuring their success in engagement and time-on-site, need content to fill the feeds and draw in users. Yet not everyone is a celebrity or a natural comedian or can undergo a viral-worthy experience every day. Something else has to fill the gaps.","completion":"That’s where Zillow comes in. Zillow is an enormous store of data that users can extract fodder from as needed. In this sense, it is similar to Wikipedia (a consistent source of “did you know?” trivia), YouTube (full of archival footage one can tie to current events or timeless viral videos), or any number of streaming services whose endless conveyor belt of shows and movies can be mined for no-context “reaction” clips and GIFs. It may be that Zillow is a popular source of memes and viral posts not because of some particular voyeuristic American interest in real estate, but simply because it is there, and it has a lot of pictures."}
{"prompt":"The Zillow American Dream On the other hand, surely Zillow’s outsized place in the firmament of internet content has something to do with a particular voyeuristic American interest in real estate. In the 2014 essay “The American Room,” Paul Ford noted that one unstated appeal of YouTube was that it let us see into other people’s bedrooms; a half-decade on, in The New York Times John Herrman saw TikTok providing a similar view of the American job, as users regularly post videos of themselves chopping vegetables, welding metal, and restocking airliners.  Zillow has some of this same appeal: It gives you the ability to peek into spaces you might not normally ever see. If home ownership is the key requirement for achieving “the American dream,” Zillow is the best record we have of what the American dream might actually look like. But where the “American Room” of YouTube was surprising for how unvarying it was—white walls, one window, popcorn ceiling—the American dream as seen on Zillow is hilariously, amazingly wide-ranging: from crumbling farmhouses on dozens of acres to manufactured housing on leased trailer-park land, from urban townhouses with original detailing to suburban ranch houses with sex dungeons, and from bloated McMansions to, well, other bloated McMansions.","completion":"Sometimes the photo lighting is good, sometimes it sucks. Sometimes a house has been staged, sometimes it’s a dump full of stained carpets, overstuffed closet shelves, and rumpled beds. Even the houses with the most baffling design decisions or the creepiest doll collections are, presumably, what someone wanted to live in, or what someone believes someone else would want to live in. Whereas a generation or two ago, we might’ve gawked at the mansions on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or MTV Cribs, now we seem to get as much enjoyment casting a voyeuristic eye on a broad swath of ordinary middle-class homes. Because they are created to sell houses, rather than to engage or entertain bored people scrolling their phones, Zillow listings have an appealing, counterintuitive authenticity. These houses were built for desires and imperatives that lived outside the platforms on which they might now go viral. Who builds or buys an impractical house for the Vine? Then again, who exactly is building and buying houses these days? Internet natives—who are, speaking generationally, often locked out of the housing market by forces outside their control—might now see a modest two-bedroom home with a decent commute as an aspirational dream. “Older folks are much more derogatory about the homes that I share,” More, who hosts @Zillowtastrophes, observed. “Like, ‘I could never live there.’ But younger people, especially on my TikTok more than my Instagram, they find things that they like about even the worst houses.” Zillow’s appeal as a media company is partly rooted in voyeurism and partly in escapism—two of the modern internet’s orienting values. The Zestimate value may be prominent (and may be put to cruel use by school kids), but it’s the photos that make Zillow Zillow. Who needs a metaverse when you can tour millions of real homes from your browser, and see yourself in every one? When I was giving birth to my oldest son, the attending told me it would feel like an elephant was stepping on my chest. They made the C-section incision right below my belly. With the high dose of epidural, my whole body shook like I was having a seizure. Then, a few minutes later, it was over, relieved of ten months of pregnancy and the clinical intrusions that left my body feeling like it no longer belonged to me."}
{"prompt":"I felt a similar sense of relief nine years later, leaving the building located at 6301 12th Avenue in Bay Ridge with my three-year-old Jasyn. Jasyn was originally my nephew but the Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), New York City’s child welfare agency, removed him from his biological mother, my sister-in-law, because she was unable to care for him independently and was offered no meaningful support. Jasyn’s three siblings were also snatched up by ACS and placed with me through a “kinship foster care” arrangement, which means a relative agrees to raise the kids. She used to joke that I had one baby by her brother (my biological son) and four by his sister (her).  At the time, the Bay Ridge building housed the administration of MercyFirst, a non-profit foster care agency. It was also where parents separated from their children had supervised visits. Historically, the building used to be Angel Guardian Orphanage and retained the foreboding presence, surrounded by high metal fences topped with barbed wire. The otherwise derelict ambience threatened to swallow us whole, but now we were finally outside, birthed through the front gate and onto the empty Bay Ridge sidewalk.","completion":"The city government does not directly manage the custody of children removed from their families into foster homes. Rather, it contracts out to nonprofits like MercyFirst for the management, care, and placement of children, under the supervision of ACS. MercyFirst was the agency that oversaw my kinship foster care arrangement with Jasyn. The agency required me to bring Jasyn in for a psychological evaluation. Even though I was annoyed they didn’t allow me to take him to a community clinic, I complied, wanting to just get it over with.  The testing was relatively uneventful and, after an hour, we were finally released back into the world to go home. As I waited for the Uber driver to arrive, I thought about why Jasyn had bit his tongue until he bled during the test. That was unusual for him but I guessed he just felt the weight of the building pressing on his chest as much as I did, and wanted out. The cab pulled up and we walked around the corner to the far side of the building to get in. Jasyn grumbled slightly as I buckled him in. Transitions were always challenging but we had gotten into a rhythm through verbal affirmations and grounding exercises I had learned from his preschool. About five minutes into the cab ride, I got a call from the foster care agency caseworker’s supervisor, Tatiana Nedzelskaya."}
{"prompt":"First, she said, three caseworkers were standing outside when they saw me viciously beating him into the cab. Then she said, no, they saw me from the window punching him brutally in the face and slamming him into the cab. As she demanded I turn around to bring him back to MercyFirst in order to receive a “body check”—where a caseworker or agency medical staff strip-searches the child down to their underwear to check for marks and bruises—I felt the pressure in my chest making it difficult to breathe. At this point, I was sobbing hysterically trying to process the accusations and Jasyn was screaming, terrified by my display of emotions as I’m typically a rather stoic person. I got it together enough to put the Uber driver on speaker, and he affirmed that we had uneventfully gotten in the cab without any beatings. Tatiana was unmoved, demanding I bring him back immediately.","completion":"I hung up on her as I realized this was a setup. A couple weeks earlier, I had filed a formal complaint to ACS, reporting the agency for refusing to finalize the adoption of Jasyn and my other three nieces and nephew without any stated reason. They also refused to allow me to seek private evaluations and services to support their disabilities. For me, adoption meant legally severing our family’s relationship with a family policing system that terrorized us. To be clear, adoption still erroneously conjures the image of do-gooders saving orphaned children in the public imagination, yet it’s made possible through legally severing the ties between a child and their biological parents. We would have pursued guardianship instead if that was an option at the time. But I couldn’t see any other way for us to get out of the system where we were constantly under surveillance.  If I brought Jasyn back to the building, I knew that would be the last time I’d ever see him again. They’d ask to speak to me privately while he was in the exam room and escort him out through another door. It didn’t matter that I didn’t beat him or that the entire story was concocted. While I’d be arguing with them, a call would be made for my other kids to be removed from school on an emergency warrant. I could lose all of them. I couldn’t go back to the agency.  On the Offensive I began to formulate a plan. I called my squad of babysitters to bring my kids back home right away. From there, we all went to the Weill Cornell Pediatric Emergency Room. I explained the accusations and asked for the kids to receive a full medical exam to confirm that none had marks and bruises on their body. The attending physician managing the ER during this shift requested to speak to each kid privately in order to ask them about their home life and whether they had experienced any abuse. I enthusiastically consented. God bless this woman who, in the middle of rush hour, examined five children with ostensibly no medical emergencies, typed and hand-signed individual letters for each, stating they were in good health, all on the official Weill Cornell letterhead that I knew would legitimize my story in court."}
{"prompt":"When we got home, the kids collapsed into their beds, exhausted from the emotional stress, after a full day of school no less. I wanted nothing more than to rest but I knew the day was not over. Once a call is made to the New York Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment—which I assumed Tatiana had done—child protective service agents must respond within twenty-four hours. The knock at the door came at 2:00 AM. If the kids were not in foster care, I would never have opened without a warrant. But I had no legal standing to refuse entry as a foster parent. The kids were contractually the property of New York State and I was just an instrument through which they could supervise their property. In fact, foster parents are the only category of parents legally obligated to open the door to a police officer or a child protective services agent without a warrant. When a foster parent “opens their home” to go through the set of legal processes to become certified to take a foster child, their entire household is subject to policing and surveillance.  So I already knew what time it was as the woman sat at my dining room table asking me a thousand questions and the man wandered around, wordlessly inspecting my house. They both paused to look at me when they noticed I was sitting with a pen, annotating their visit. I made a big show of writing the date and time on the fresh notebook page while I asked them for their full names and why they were here. I knew they wouldn’t give their names or share the details of the accusation. But the performance was critical in the context of family policing, where documentation is a life-or-death matter. It never matters whether you are a good parent or a bad one—the family police look for whether you will roll down and die, or whether you have the skills to catch them slipping.  The agent who remained silent paid close attention as I recounted what happened and how it had been a setup in retaliation for me reporting the foster care agency. The side of the MercyFirst building where Tatiana claimed three caseworkers witnessed me beating Jasyn happened to be completely boarded up, which I proved by opening Google Street View on my laptop and cross-matching it to the Uber receipt showing the exact location of where the cab picked us up. There was no way the caseworkers could’ve seen us on the sidewalk.","completion":"The agents’ eyes glazed over. They told me to put the laptop away. For the next forty-five to sixty days, the agency would investigate whether there was credible evidence that I was a neglectful or abusive parent. Still, the man said, “We don’t take kids from apartments that look nice like yours… This whole thing sounds suspect.” Regardless, they insisted on completing the most dreaded aspect of an investigation: waking up the kids for strip searches to check them for bruises. I marched each of them out one at a time into the bathroom, where they had to remove all of their clothes down to their underwear, including the baby. Caseworkers are not physicians and do not have any training to distinguish a bad patch of eczema from an old bruise, so the inspection of a child’s naked body can always result in removal. Fortunately, they went through the motions with minimal commentary and left. I could breathe again, at least for now.  The next day, I wrote a letter outlining how the foster care agency had directly retaliated against me for making a report against them. I attached the Weill Cornell documents and outlined the areas where I believed the agency was committing fraud or abusing kids in care. As the years had rolled on and the agency had fought me on everything from adoption to therapy for the kids, I had begun to dig into their tax documents, research their board members and funders, and dig up any financial relationships I could get my hands on. I made twenty copies of everything, and then had them notarized and sent via certified mail to all my local and state representatives. I had to be on the offensive now or risk losing my kids."}
{"prompt":"My assemblywoman responded to my letter, and shared it with the commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation. An inquiry was initiated; I heard through the grapevine that the agency had to go through a full audit. As for the allegation of child abuse, I eventually beat the case and received a letter from the New York Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse and Maltreatment saying that the allegation was unsubstantiated. There’s no innocence in family policing—only “We could prove you’re abusive,” or “We couldn’t prove you’re abusive.” Meanwhile, even sealed unsubstantiated allegations remain on file, to be re-opened whenever there’s a new investigation.","completion":"I was financially poor but professionally fortunate to have connections who put me in touch with various family defense clinics in the city to ask for advice about my case. Not a single one was surprised about the false allegations. What they were uniformly shocked about was that the kids hadn’t been snatched up. While what happened to us might seem shocking to middle-class readers, for family policing it is the weather. (Black theorist Christina Sharpe describes antiblackness as climate.) The only aberration of my particular circumstances relative to the everyday operations of the family policing apparatus was that we seemed to elude destruction. Over the next two years, I was able to finalize the adoptions for all of the kids. But I never forgot that the only reason I didn’t lose my family was because I had the resources to make the lives of the people working at the foster care agency a living hell. How many teenage mothers—who were every bit as innocent as me—had they deployed this tactic against and succeeded?  The Digital Poorhouse Every aspect of interacting with the various institutions that monitored and managed my kids—ACS, the foster care agency, Medicaid clinics—produced new data streams. Diagnoses, whether an appointment was rescheduled, notes on the kids’ appearance and behavior, and my perceived compliance with the clinician’s directives were gathered and circulated through a series of state and municipal data warehouses. And this data was being used as input by machine learning models automating service allocation or claiming to predict the likelihood of child abuse. But how interactions with government services are narrated into data categories is inherently subjective as well as contingent on which groups of people are driven to access social services through government networks of bureaucratic control and surveillance. Documentation and data collection was not something that existed outside of analog, obscene forms of violence, like having your kids torn away. Rather, it’s deeply tied to real-life harm."}
{"prompt":"I had no pre-existing interest in the banal details of data collection, but when I read the political scientist Virginia Eubanks’ Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor in 2018, I finally had a framework to understand how our experience was so deeply driven by, and entangled with, the production of data. Eubanks’ notion of the “digital poorhouse”—a complex set of computational geographies for disciplining poor people—was viscerally real for me.","completion":"One of the case studies in Eubanks’ book examining public sector adoption of automated decision making is Allegheny Family Screening Tool (AFST), a predictive risk model used by Allegheny Department of Child Services to screen calls accusing parents of child abuse. The software attempts to predict the risk of child abuse in order to target high-risk households with preventive interventions. So, how is that risk calculated? Utilization of social services is one factor. For example, if the mother has accessed mental health resources through a Medicaid-funded clinic, she would be perceived by the algorithm to be a mother with a history of mental illness. Yet if the same parent accessed (more expensive) private mental health services—which are not contractually mandated to report medical records to the state—they would be labeled by the algorithm as a mother without mental illness. Disability doesn’t inherently make someone unable to parent, but being marked as a disabled parent activates a suspicion about parental competence.  On the surface, an examination of the datasets produced through interactions with social services might appear to tell you something about the people who rely on them. In fact, that is a core assumption of predictive risk modeling tools like AFST, which don’t, for example, see data about the frequency with which child welfare agencies beat, abuse, and kill children. The dominant narrative about child welfare is that it is a benevolent system that cares for the most vulnerable. The way data is correlated and named reflects this assumption. But this process of meaning making is highly subjective and contingent. Similar to the term “artificial intelligence,” the altruistic veneer of “child welfare system” is highly effective marketing rather than a description of a concrete set of functions with a mission gone awry.  Child welfare is actually family policing. What AFST presents as the objective determinations of a de-biased system operating above the lowly prejudices of human caseworkers are just technical translations of long-standing convictions about Black pathology. Further, the process of data extraction and analysis produce truths that justify the broader child welfare apparatus of which it is a part. In her article “The Steep Cost of Capture,” Meredith Whittaker explains how “Tech firms are startlingly well positioned to shape what we do—and do not—know about AI and the business behind it, at the same time that their AI products are working to shape our lives and institutions.” Likewise, family policing agencies are startlingly well positioned to shape (and conceal) what we know about how they operate and the technical infrastructures they produce."}
{"prompt":"The carceral nature of family policing becomes clearer when one considers which families it targets. As the scholar Dorothy Roberts explains in her 2022 book Torn Apart, an astonishing 53 percent of all Black families in the United States have been investigated by family policing agencies. Roberts further highlights how the majority of children separated from their families are for reasons of poverty, which the government criminalizes through the category of neglect. An even closer examination of these facts reveals that impoverished African American families have almost all experienced family policing and have some of the highest rates of removal—only comparable to Indigenous children in certain states.  The production of administrative data is a mechanism through which family policing agencies regulate and manage where poor people are allowed to go and with whom. If you have an “indicated” case (the equivalent of “guilty”) in any of the statewide central registries, you can’t work in a daycare or a school. If you can’t find work in the formal economy because you’re criminalized through the registry, you’re going to have a hard time gaining eligibility for government vouchers subsidizing child care. If you catch a felony due to an allegation of abuse or neglect, you can’t live in public housing. Even if someone else in your household has a felony and you live in public housing, you have to cast them out. If you want to leave an abusive relationship but have an indicated case, your options to leave are often limited to the domestic violence shelter (which is run by the family police) where you have a high risk of losing your child. If your daughter asks you to watch your grandchild while she goes to work and her partner makes a vengeful allegation against her, she can now lose custody of her child for leaving them with you.  Despite its parallels to and partnerships with traditional policing, family courts treat social services as exempt from the constitutional guardrails. In practice, this means that people on the receiving end have no Fourth Amendment protections from unreasonable search and seizure, are not read their Miranda rights, and have no guarantee of an attorney being appointed to them at the onset of an investigation. Meanwhile, caseworkers and those who make allegations of child abuse to the statewide central registries receive qualified immunity. The volume of administrative data produced by family policing reflects this depth of intergenerational intrusion within the domestic lives of Black families. Even unfounded cases are reopened at the onset of new investigations, so for many families there’s no escape from the legacy of family policing. This data, in turn, drives predictive risk models which aim to extend the reach of family policing agencies.","completion":"The leaders of child welfare agencies often situate predictive risk models as a mechanism to move the decision making away from biased front-line caseworkers, toward the scientific and rational decision making of an algorithmic system. These caseworkers are often seen as the source of contaminated data—in no small part because they tend to be predominantly Black and working-class themselves. In 2021, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, a co-developer of the AFST software in Pennsylvania, co-authored a report published by the American Enterprise Institute, a right-wing think tank, arguing that the high rates of surveillance and separation of Black families is due to the higher level of dysfunction and child abuse within Black families, which they explictly attribute to the legacy of slavery and segregation. But there’s no evidence to support Black families are more abusive than other racial groups. In fact, the subjects of the original Kaiser Permanente study on “adverse childhood experiences”—widely touted by proponents of family policing as a scientific justification for intervening in the lives of poor Black people—were nearly 80 percent white and almost half college graduates. The study was novel for revealing how much white adults are hurting and are in need of support. Yet instead of attending to that, it’s been weaponized against impoverished Black families."}
{"prompt":"It’s a Set-up, Kids! When did New York City’s child welfare agency begin implementing predictive risk modeling? ACS is notoriously opaque, and highly resistant to public records requests. So it’s impossible to put together the complete story of how the agency implemented predictive risk modeling. But the broad contours can be highlighted by examining the turn toward automated decision-making following the resignation of former ACS commissioner Gladys Carrión in late 2016. In May 2016, during a panel at the White House’s “foster care hackathon,” DJ Patil, the chief data scientist for the Obama White House asked Carrión what she thought of using predictive analytics in her agency. “It scares the hell out of me… I think about how we are impacting and infringing on people’s civil liberties,” she replied. She added that she ran an agency “that exclusively serves black and brown children and families” and expressed her concern about “widening the net under the guise that we are going to help them.” Months later, Zymere Perkins was murdered by his stepfather. Perkins was a six-year-old child who was known to ACS through several child abuse and neglect allegations made to the New York Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse. Zymere’s mother had a history of severe neuropsychiatric Lupus and intimate partner violence when she met the man who would end up murdering her son. While living with Zymere in a Bronx shelter, multiple family members and staff raised concerns about her ability to care for the child. ACS came and went without providing any help. The mother needed serious psychiatric support, stable housing, and potentially for Zymere to live with a relative. But these are not the concerns of family cops. They are not trained therapists; they cannot provide affordable housing or medical treatment.  In the ensuing public firestorm, Carrión resigned. The new commissioner, David Hansell, promised to transform ACS to ensure that a tragedy like the Perkins murder would never happen again. Rather than reimagine a system that could ensure families like Perkins’ could have survived, however, the new leadership saw his death as proof that all poor Black families are definitionally at risk of murdering their children. Hansell shifted the agency’s resources to identifying and managing this risk, and turned to algorithmic tools to do so.","completion":"Shortly after becoming ACS commissioner in 2017, Hansell commissioned academics from NYU and CUNY to build a predictive risk model for the agency that would identify the likelihood of any given family who catches an ACS case being the subject of another investigation within a six-month period. One of the developers, Ravi Shroff, wrote a paper lamenting the relative scarcity of training data, comparing the approximately 55,000 calls ACS receives each year to the several million calls New York City 911 operators receive each year.  In the wake of the initial development of the predictive risk model, ACS released a “concept paper” emphasizing data collection as a key deliverable for nonprofit agencies like MercyFirst that enter into a contractual agreement with ACS. This highlights how splashy policy reports and white papers are not what principally shapes the implementation of data collection by child welfare agencies. Rather, phrenological tech or datafication is driven by stipulations in funding instruments, which often require the documentation of the behavior of families using specific proprietary software, as well as uploading that data to specific city and state data warehouses."}
{"prompt":"How is the data collected? The nonprofits that are contracted out by ACS to provide prevention services (typically the same non-profits contracted out to do foster care) are given tablets that caseworkers use to collect data during home visits. These tablets are loaded with a subscription software called Safe Measures Dashboard, featuring low-tech “decision aids” such as Structured Decision Making (SDM) and tools for basic demographic data collection, which can then expand the training data for the agency’s predictive risk models.  The software provides a series of structured prompts for caseworkers to enter their data in an attempt to get “higher quality” or “structured data.” Many of the shorthand, rushed notes traditionally taken by caseworkers are deemed unusable by rigid algorithms that cannot make sense of it. Like many devices composing the internet of things (IoT), the tablet includes a GPS sensor that tracks the caseworker’s movements over time in order to detect inefficiency—whether the caseworker is taking too long with a house visit, for example. Surveillance extends not only to the family under investigation, but also to the caseworker tasked with monitoring them. Finally, the data gathered in the tablet is uploaded to a series of city and state data warehouses where it can potentially be used to train machine learning models.  The little oversight of this system that exists is not tied to any kind of enforcement mechanism. Should a family have a meaningful complaint about being labeled high-risk, or having their data used to train a machine learning model without their consent, there’s currently nothing they can do. These systems have been piloted on the most marginalized, but agencies have been relentlessly building up their capacity to unleash these tools on the rest of society. Historically, family policing and experiments with automated decision making systems have been conducted on the most marginalized in society, but rates of investigation on whiter and more middle-class people are increasing. Agencies like ACS promise that they won’t predictively model the likelihood of abuse on the entire population of children in the city they operate in. However, this is just an empty promise and there’s no reason to believe they won’t, given their capacity to do so.","completion":"If I had brought Jasyn back to MercyFirst upon the supervisor’s request, that encounter would have produced administrative data that would legitimize an “order of removal” (the bureaucratic phrase used to describe family separation). Then, it is likely that the ACS investigators sent to our house would have “indicated” the case in the New York Statewide Central Register of Child Abuse. An indicated case would result in the immediate removal of my four nieces and nephews, who were still in foster care, and eventually of my son, who was not. All of these possibilities were documented and collected into ACS’s system of record, ensuring that, even if we escaped, our encounters with the system would remain. Data and predictive risk modeling is not something that exists outside obscene forms of analog violence; it is an inextricable part of it."}
{"prompt":"It’s a crisp Saturday morning in Khayelitsha, Cape Town’s largest black township, and a thirty-something woman named Noxolo wants to buy a home. She spots a property on a local real estate agency’s Facebook page. It looks rather nice for a starter home. But property is so expensive these days, even for a salaried state nurse. To put a foot on the property ladder, Noxolo will need a mortgage.  To get a mortgage, Noxolo must go through a credit check. So she gives her payslips, bank statements, and a copy of her national ID card to the secretary at the real estate agency. Once scanned, all of the documents are emailed to a mortgage originator, who will then try to find a bank to give Noxolo a loan.","completion":"A couple of days later, the answer comes back to the agency in the form of an encrypted PDF. All the banks have declined: Noxolo’s credit score is too low. “She did not qualify,” the secretary tells me as she throws the documents into a large pile of declined applications stored in a box back in the office kitchen. Noxolo’s dream of homeownership will have to wait—at least until she can get her score back on track by settling a late payment owed to a clothing store, which the algorithm picked up right away."}
{"prompt":"Noxolo’s story illustrates how access to housing in South Africa requires navigating a set of filtering mechanisms structured on a continuous flow of data orchestrated by credit-scoring technologies. This data is abundant, and viewing it is easy. All you need is someone’s ID number and a few rands to get a full picture of their financial situation: gross salary, net salary, existing loans, credit accounts, late payments, and so on. These various inputs are used to calculate a credit score that has become, on the formal market, the ultimate arbiter of housing access in South Africa. A good score is crucial for getting a mortgage and, increasingly, even to rent.  Real estate agents, banks, and corporate landlords buy data mined by credit bureaus for the purpose of selecting home-seekers. Screening prospective residents is nothing new in housing, especially for the mortgage industry. But the vetting is now done with scoring algorithms and automated dashboards.  This phenomenon isn’t limited to South Africa, of course. Real-estate technologies are becoming popular in other countries as well, especially the United States. Institutional landlords have entered the single-family rental market, relying on software to automate property and tenant management, as documented by the geographer Desiree Fields. Meanwhile, fintech mortgage lenders tend to perpetuate racial disparities in their lending practices, despite promising to “democratize” finance with technology, as the scholar Tyler Haupert has shown. Moreover, credit-scoring technologies have become increasingly elaborate, relying on more advanced statistical techniques like machine learning and incorporating more diverse streams of data. And, as these technologies have grown in scope and complexity, they have become more socially harmful: as scholars like Martha Poon, Marion Fourcade, and Jenna Burrell have pointed out, the new algorithmic scoring technologies amplify inequalities of race and class.","completion":"All of these dynamics are on display in South Africa. But there’s something distinctive about how they operate there. Algorithmic scoring technologies are especially advanced in South Africa because of their deep historical roots in racist social control. The country’s history of colonialism and apartheid has bequeathed an information dragnet of formidable sophistication and depth to the real estate and banking industries. And this information dragnet has enabled the re-segregation of housing markets in the post-apartheid era of formal equality. Contemporary South Africa thus presents an especially stark illustration of what the sociologist Ruha Benjamin calls the “New Jim Code.” It shows how supposedly neutral technical systems often rely on structures inherited from past eras of formal segregation, and work to produce similar results.  Skeletons of the State From the first days of Dutch settlement in the seventeenth century, colonial institutions in South Africa gradually structured cities and societies on the basis of made-up racial categories. As the ideology of social separation gained ground in the late nineteenth century, the colony of the Cape of Good Hope adopted a racist classification system, used to sort the population into different racial groups endowed with different political rights, with the first modern census in 1865. This in turn generated the statistical data that guided the first efforts at formal segregation implemented by municipal elites in Cape Town at the start of the twentieth century, resulting in the creation of all-Black townships such as Ndabeni in 1901.  In 1913, the all-white parliament of the Union of South Africa, established in 1910 as a self-governing dominion of the British Empire, took a further step by passing the Natives Land Act, which proclaimed urban areas as white. Any Black people in cities were required to carry a permit justifying their presence. The Union also embarked on a new census to count its population using a complex classification scheme that labeled people into main categories such as “White,” “Native or Bantu,” and “Mixed and Coloured.”"}
{"prompt":"Following the triumph of the National Party in the 1948 elections, the South African government began to implement apartheid. This regime advanced the art of population statistics to the next level, aiming to achieve a fully segregated society through strict control of the housing market. As part of the Population Registration Act of 1950, which categorized all South Africans according to race, the government created a centralized population register linked to a new national ID system, where two digits indicated the race of the cardholder according to a four-fold classification scheme.  In a similar vein, the Group Areas Act of 1951, another legal pillar of apartheid, sorted residential areas into exclusive racial zones: for a title deed to be approved, the race indicated on the buyer’s ID had to match the race assigned to the neighborhood. Home-ownership and mortgages were only accessible to those defined as Indian or Coloured—a loosely defined racial category encompassing brown people descending from the indigenous Khoisan, slaves from Africa and Asia, and their white masters—and only in their respective assigned neighborhoods. Black people—people belonging to ethnicities such as the Xhosa or Zulu—were denied property rights in urban areas until 1986, and only allowed to rent state-controlled housing units in designated all-Black townships. Homeowners and tenants whose government-determined racial identity did not match the one decreed for the neighborhood were disqualified and brutally evicted, as exemplified by the destruction of District Six in Cape Town from 1976 to 1981, where bulldozers annihilated decades of racial diversity.","completion":"From an early stage, digital technologies formed an integral part of this state-driven classification of people and places. The apartheid regime loved computers, as the South African historian Keith Breckenridge has shown. IBM computers were used to count and categorize people, to store millions of fingerprints, to issue ID cards, and to centralize databases. The government’s willingness and capacity to classify the population with digital tools survived the transition to democracy. The pretext was the need to identify the beneficiaries of welfare programs. In fact, South Africa pioneered the use of biometric governance: in the late 1990s, the government launched the Home Affairs National Identification System (HANIS), a smartcard program that directly expanded on the population register inherited from the apartheid era. In the name of fraud detection, banks were granted automated access to the HANIS database in 2010, using ID numbers and in-house fingerprint readers for real-time identity verification."}
{"prompt":"The technical infrastructures developed during apartheid and updated by the democratic state endowed the real estate industry with an algorithmic skeleton structured around ID numbers and devoted to the collection, storage, and processing of personal and property data. But to add the flesh, it would take the dramatic expansion of consumer credit markets. This happened in the 2000s, with the explosion of debt-driven mass consumption.","completion":"Consumer Flesh In the late 1990s, the South African government undertook a number of neoliberal reforms that liberalized the economy. By the 2000s, the economy was growing quickly, turning South Africa into a major emerging economy alongside China and Brazil. Despite rapid growth, however, salaries began to stagnate. People turned en masse to loans to meet their consumption needs. The explosion of consumer credit led, in turn, to widespread overindebtedness. Most workers became trapped in a debt hole, at the mercy of loan sharks and microlenders.  The extent of the crisis was illustrated by the Marikana massacre in 2012, with the police firing at mining workers striking for a pay rise, resulting in thirty-four deaths and more than seventy severe injuries. A subsequent investigation revealed that most of the workers were drowning in debt, with loan sharks in possession of their bank cards and ID documents to pressure them. By then, the recession following the global financial crisis had set in, making South Africans even more reliant on credit as economic growth slowed.  The expansion of consumer credit in these years produced an unprecedented datafication of the population, structured around ID numbers. The rapid adoption of information technology by both the real estate and banking industries in the early years of the twenty-first century made it much faster and cheaper for the credit bureaus to generate data about borrowers. Each time a credit account was opened, each time a payment was made or ran late, the credit bureaus collected and stored the digital traces—bit by bit, this activity added up to compose a comprehensive picture of someone’s financial history. Moreover, the National Credit Act, implemented in 2007 in the name of fighting reckless lending, made it compulsory to conduct more thorough credit checks—whether to buy a car, a couch, or a house—and had the effect of further strengthening the position of credit bureaus as data collectors and data providers."}
{"prompt":"As one engineer excitedly put it to me, “South Africa has a wealth of data. We have a lot more data than what is available in some of the other countries.” In September 2021, the National Credit Regulator (NCR), a government agency, counted 26.42 million active credit consumers owning more than 85 million credit accounts—double the adult population. These accounts generate an immense amount of data for the credit bureaus, which real-estate and banking professionals use to determine who gets to own or rent a home, and where.  C and Below During the apartheid era, the racial classification specified on ID documents would qualify or disqualify someone from home ownership and access to housing finance. Redlining was the rule for Black South Africans, who represent about 80 percent of the country today. In the era of formal equality, banks are legally required to cater to everyone. Yet mortgages remain a luxury product. Only people earning more than $1,000 dollars a month—less than 20 percent of the population—can hope to qualify.","completion":"But that’s not all. Avoiding late payments and other negative traces on your credit history is equally critical. In other words, the digital record of your financial behavior must be spotless. Such spotlessness is rare: according to the NCR, bad debt is prevalent in South Africa, with 38 percent of consumers in arrears on debt repayments. Banks now use algorithms to select borrowers based on affordability tests and credit scoring. They source the raw data owned by credit bureaus to feed into a scorecard system that helps them assess mortgage applications. The national ID number is the lynchpin of this process, used both to source consumer data and to access centralized government databases from police and tax departments. As one real estate agent summed it up to me, “Banks: they want your DNA.” During fieldwork, I heard countless stories of clients disqualified by their credit history. One real estate agent told me:  I had a Black woman coming to the office, she was driving a massive 4x4. She was a magistrate, earning like 60,000 rands a month [$3,800 USD]. A very, very nice salary. She wanted to rent a house. I said to my agents, “There is no way she is going to rent. She is gonna buy.” What we discovered: she had a [debt collection] judgment because she had an account against her with Edgars [a popular retailer]. She was a magistrate, but she couldn’t get a bond [loan]! Yet having no history is just as bad. Overindebtedness affects scores negatively, but so does the absence of credit history. Home-seekers must leave digital traces of debt to build up their score. They must be visible to the system."}
{"prompt":"This visibility is not just required for homeownership. It’s also increasingly required to rent. Indeed, South Africa has arguably pioneered the use of credit scoring for screening tenants. In the 2000s, new companies emerged to offer products for tracking tenants’ financial performance and rental history. First offering credit checks in the form of SMS queries using the applicant’s national ID number in partnership with established credit reporting companies such as Experian or TransUnion, these companies quickly evolved—on the legal side, into their own credit bureaus, and on the tech side, into rental platforms. As their customer base grew among real estate agencies, their databases increased in volume. Their dashboards now connect real estate agents to traditional credit bureaus, but also integrate payment data from previous rental leases and check for eviction court orders. Running a full report on someone costs less than $5 USD.","completion":"Segregation 2.0 Officially, there is no racial bias to this system. Racial discrimination in mortgage lending and renting is illegal. But if scoring algorithms are race-neutral on paper, in practice they produce the same sorting mechanisms that the apartheid regime used to maintain a segregated housing market in South Africa.  Credit scores are highly racialized. Bad credit scores are mostly held by Black and Coloured people. This is not only because of low salaries and precarious employment—which lead them to take out loans that they struggle to repay—but also because the real estate passed down through the generations has relatively little value. Housing values remain systematically lower in Black and Coloured townships, a direct legacy of the apartheid era. This hinders the ability of Black and Coloured people to access housing finance, leaving the divisions of the segregated city intact."}
{"prompt":"Conversely, being born into a white family means one may inherit property in the best neighborhoods. Coming from this privileged background enables people to leverage existing equity and family assets to soften the effects of credit screening by reducing the mortgage amount with a substantial deposit, or simply by paying the entire amount in cash. Most of the real estate agents I interviewed in the most affluent, and still predominantly white, areas of Cape Town describe these neighborhoods as a “cash market.” None of them seemed to recall a sale which failed due to bad credit.  On the rental side, the adoption of credit scoring is likewise reinforcing racial inequalities. It is doing so as part of a broader shift of the market towards a more rent-based structure. During apartheid and the early years of democracy, the rental market was considered a risky investment by institutional investors because of a long history of street protests against evictions, rent boycott campaigns, and other forms of housing activism. But by 2010, rising rental prices were making the market attractive to institutional investors, while new technology gave them ways to mitigate the risks of bad or unruly tenants. In particular, they could now conduct tenant screening with credit-scoring software, filtering out anyone who might become a problem. As a rental manager confessed to me, “We don’t take tenants under 622.” Corporate landlords have appeared in Cape Town, Durban, and Johannesburg in the form of real-estate investment trusts, investment funds, and large-scale developers. These landlords like technology: screening tenants with credit-scoring software reduces the risk of late payments, minimizing vacancy rates, and optimizing their portfolio’s performance. As one rental manager explained to me, “We only take A and B type of tenants. ‘A’ means that you don’t have debt, so a very good profile. ‘B’ means that you have debt, but you are a good payer. ‘C’ and below, you are not good.” So far, the holdings of corporate landlords are not extensive: only a few thousand homes. Still, the racial impacts are clear. Extracted from a mostly Black and Coloured middle class priced out from the buyer’s market, rents are becoming a lucrative source of profit for largely white-owned and white-run firms.","completion":"Open Veins South African capitalism has historically been rooted in the extractive industries. Its biggest companies and cities were born from mining: Johannesburg emerged from a gold rush, while Cape Town and Durban grew from the global export of minerals which, to this day, underpins the country’s economy.  Perhaps the datafication of home-seekers represents a new frontier in South African extractivism, transposed to the digital realm. Personal data, mined from the digital traces of people’s lives, has become a valuable commodity. And just as mining companies invest in new technical processes to drill into subsoil in search of new veins, credit bureaus dig deeper into people’s lives in search of “alternative data.” Court archives, tax records, credit accounts from retailers, bank accounts, telephone records, censuses, social networks, tax information—everything is excavated."}
{"prompt":"This extractive logic is, crucially, inseparable from the need to discipline workers and consumers. In the Marikana massacre, the mining conglomerates sent the police to shoot the protesting miners in order to force them back to work. Corporate landlords and banks use subtler means, deploying credit-scoring technologies to encourage consumers to act the right way. This is an important point: such technologies don’t merely record behavior, they shape it. As one rental platform CEO explained to me:  People have adjusted themselves amazingly to… getting access to credit. The product itself has produced a better consumer. The banking system and the rules are producing the results that it wants: a consumer that is aware of its financial position, and that will take responsibility for what they have committed to.","completion":"This may remind you of the famous episode of the popular TV show Black Mirror in which people rank each other on an app after every social interaction. Lacie, the main character, desperately tries to increase her score so she can rent a property in Pelican Cove, the estate of her dreams. (She fails, and is eventually evicted.) Have credit-scoring technologies turned post-apartheid South Africa into a real-life Black Mirror? Not yet. But you may be surprised to learn that the episode was shot in Pinehurst, in the heart of Cape Town’s affluent northern suburbs. The fictional Lacie and countless real South Africans share a common fate: a simple score can prevent them from calling a place home. Previously enforced by public institutions, segregation is now big business, driven by big data."}
{"prompt":"The newly constructed road along the bank of the Xiaoqing River is dotted with advertisements for Taobao, specifically tailored to peasants. “Tired of life as a migrant worker? Why not come home and work on Taobao.com?” read one on a recent trip. Another: “One cup of coffee and an Internet cable; stay at home and become an e-commerce entrepreneur, and your millionaire dream will come true.”  Chuan’s life is very different from what the wall advertisements describe. Formerly a migrant worker in a toy factory in South China, Chuan quit his job in Shenzhen to start an ecommerce business from his home in the Shandong Province with his wife, selling small hand-made furniture and home decorations made by local women. Though doing ecommerce is easier than working in the toy factory, he makes just enough money to support his family of five—far from becoming a millionaire. Besides an internet cable and a cup of coffee, he had to learn how to set up, decorate, and brand his online shop, and his day is packed with taking product pictures, talking to buyers online and on the phone, and analyzing e-store sales statistics. Evenings are also busy: he has to watch online tutorials taught by ecommerce gurus and take online photoshop classes to hone his design skills.","completion":"Thousands of miles away in central Italy, Chinese-language advertisements also decorate Via Pistoiese, the main street of Prato’s Chinatown. The exterior walls of Prato’s Chinese restaurants, hair salons, and supermarkets offer phone numbers that connect one to dorms and even prostitutes. There are no signs at all for Chinese garment shops—due to frequent police raids and increasingly hostile local sentiments, they’ve learned to hide themselves in back alleys.  Yuan, who was born in a village near Wenzhou, a city in the southeastern Zhejiang Province, spent years learning the garment trade and saving money before opening a small workshop in Prato, a town just northwest of Florence in central Italy, with her husband. (Since the pandemic, she and her husband have returned to China.) Besides working on the sewing machines, Yuan took care of recruitment and accounting, while her husband drove a small hatchback for product shipping and cooked for the entire crew. When orders came in, they often rotated on a twelve-hour shift, chatting with employees about the latest TV show or news in China, sometimes barely catching up with each other for days. They had no choice but to outsource childcare to their parents in China. For Yuan and her husband, the highlight of a long workday was video chatting on WeChat with their eight-year-old, and the best time of the year was reuniting with family members in China during their brief Lunar New Year trip."}
{"prompt":"Chuan and Yuan work in different industries, at different scales, and on different continents. (Both names have been changed.) What they share is the experience of being entrepreneurial workers living and working from home on the peripheries of global capitalism. Home-based work has become a familiar arrangement to many people since the start of the pandemic in 2020, but Anglophone media discussion has mostly centered around the experiences of middle class professionals juggling life and work in one space. Home work, in these accounts, is often represented as a new or abnormal phenomenon that departs from the ordinary separation between home and office, life and work, productive and reproductive labor. But as the stories of Chuan and Yuan—and the many others like them—show, home-based work has long persisted on the peripheries of global capitalism, sustaining, yet rendered invisible to, the center in the Global North. Around the globe, home work never disappears; it simply moves around, often outsourced to “less developed” countries or “insourced” to domestic immigrants or workers with lower socioeconomic status.  It takes a Taobao Village Home-based work has a long history in both Shandong Province and Prato, but Chuan and Yuan’s particular experiences and arrangements are closely intertwined with the larger transformation of global production networks. Handicraft production—straw shoes, hand-braided cookware and kitchen utensils, small furniture, and home decorations—in Chuan’s home county in Binzhou dates back to at least the seventh century BCE. Before the export industry emerged in the late Qing period (1636–1912), home-based production had served mostly family use, local market bartering, and some long-distance trading within China. But it was only after China’s economic reform and opening up of the 1980s that the export industry started to boom, meeting global demand for low-price handmade products. Women still made handicrafts at home in river bank villages outside of the county seat, but now they sold their work outside the home for piece rates: first, to collectively owned Town and Village Enterprises, and then, after privatization, to small family-owned and export-oriented handicraft manufacturing firms.","completion":"After the Global Financial Crisis, many migrant workers who had learned to use computers and the internet returned to their home villages, finding alternative opportunities to sell handicrafts online to domestic, rather than foreign, customers. As overseas demand for made-in-China handicrafts weakened, some younger villagers who had worked as either crafters or farmers followed suit. AliResearch, the research arm of Alibaba, coined the term “Taobao Villages” in 2010 to describe three villages where ecommerce self-employment had become a leading occupation; three years later, in June 2013, Chuan’s village became one of the first batch of “Taobao Villages” officially declared by AliResearch.  The virtual economy of handicraft ecommerce targeting urban China’s growing middle class was in the early stages of a growth that would gradually marginalize offline, export-oriented firms over the next decade. The home-based labor regime persisted, but the fruits of digitalization were unevenly distributed. Migrant returnees and a few urbanites who migrated to the villages for the ecommerce gold rush became the biggest winners. They are generally better educated and more attuned to urban consumer tastes, with the most successful entrepreneurs having earned college degrees in design and computer science. Home-based women weavers continued to labor under the same working conditions. While they saw a gradual, albeit slow, increase in earning, they also experienced the additional labor of adapting to the new rhythm of ecommerce production, where consumer tastes constantly shift and fluctuate.  Since then, Taobao Villages and Towns have sprouted across the country, from a handful in 2013 to more than 7,000 as of early 2022, in a parallel to a reverse migration trend of urban migrant workers going back to the countryside. Rural digital entrepreneurship—mostly single-person or family businesses—has become an important drive in China’s post-crisis restructuring of its export-oriented economic model to enhance indigenous innovation capacity, expand domestic consumption, and, more recently, to promote common prosperity and reduce urban-rural disparities. Key to this trend is home-based work. Mobilizing the familial division of labor for the digital economy in a “platformized family production” is a prevalent labor regime in rural Chinese ecommerce, which builds on the tradition of family-based agricultural and handicraft work in the Chinese countryside to reduce cost. In Chuan’s case, his whole extended family is involved: his wife helps with customer service while taking care of their toddler, his dad packs and ships products, and his mom cooks and does other household chores."}
{"prompt":"Wenzhou in the Third Italy The tradition of family-based home work is hardly unique to China or Chinese people. It’s also made Prato a famous textile town since the Middle Ages. In home factories, generations of Pratese families made woolen velvets for the Medici in Florence and the Popes in Rome. At the height of Italy’s post-war industrialization between the 1950s and 1970s, home work was still quite common among Italian workers and entrepreneurs, especially in Central Italy—“Third Italy,” as researchers like to call it—home to countless family-run small and medium-sized enterprises, setting it apart from the mammoth auto plants of Piedmont or the idyllic olive farms of Sicily. Home work was concentrated in light industries like garments and textiles that were the backbone of Italy’s export. To accommodate flexible production and to save costs, the family owners, many of whom recently migrated from the south of the country, built home factories where they and their employees could work and sleep in the same building.  In the 1970s and 1980s, these Italian family workshops temporarily outcompeted mass-production plants in places such as Detroit. However, by the 1990s, Italian companies started to outsource low-value-added manufacturing to low-income countries in Eastern Europe and Asia to cope with rising labor costs and the currency appreciation associated with the change from the Lira to the Euro. At the same time, pressure from labor unions and the declining importance of the textile industry in the national economy led the Italian authorities to gradually outlaw the use of home factories and traditional home work. The new zoning law required manufacturing space to be separated from residential areas, while the labor law, likely one of the strictest in the world, made working off-the-clock almost impossible. Meanwhile, the kids of the family business owners no longer tolerated the difficult home work that brought wealth to their parents; most left the manufacturing sector in this small town and sought easier office jobs in big cities. As a result, Prato, once the prototype of Italian flexible production, went into a recession in the 1990s.","completion":"Just as locals were about to call home-based factories history, Chinese immigrants came to give them a second life. The first wave of Chinese immigrants arrived at Prato in the late 1980s thanks to the opening up of China and favorable Italian immigration laws. Most of them came from the entrepreneurial and adventurous city of Wenzhou. Yuan was one of these aspiring entrepreneurs. Before coming to Italy, Yuan was a rural-to-urban migrant worker and had acquired her technical skills working for several family-run garment factories in Zhejiang. In 1999, she joined her brother, who had settled two years earlier in Prato, to work in an Italian-run garment factory.  After a decade of hard work and frugal living, Yuan saved enough money to open her own garment workshop in 2009. They set up their home factory not just to follow the tradition both in Prato and in Wenzhou—this was also the most cost-efficient way to run a garment business in Italy. The Italian family who owned the house where she and her husband worked left the textile industry in the 1990s, and could not have been happier to lease the property to immigrant newcomers like Yuan. In Prato, she also met and married her husband, a Chinese coworker working at the same factory. Like her, tens of thousands of Wenzhounese migrant workers came to Prato hoping that one day they could also become their own boss. The number of garment businesses owned by Chinese nationals quickly increased from less than 100 in 1990 to over 3,000 in the mid-2010s.  In both Italy and China, as Chuan and Yuan’s experiences show, home-based work regimes persist, usually involving precarious workers, and in industries with thin profit margins where every minute counts and “time off” is almost nonexistent. Despite its essential and indispensable role in the world economy today, the fact that home-based work is often associated with the marginalized—the working-class, women, immigrants/migrants, the elderly—has contributed to its invisibility and its public imagination as being “backward” and illegitimate, if not illegal. And yet, ironically, the informality of home-based work—the blurring between reproductive and productive labor, consumption and production, work and life, office and home, as well as the general lack of labor protection and, not uncommonly, tax evasion—have constituted an “advantage of the backwardness” for people, regions, and nations on the periphery. At the heart of “economic miracles” like the “Third Italy” of Yuan’s Prato, or the boom of “Taobao Villages” in which Chuan participates, is the model of home-based division of labor."}
{"prompt":"Labor Shortage and New Entrants  But if home-based work never disappears, that doesn’t mean it’s a static process, or that the dynamics Chuan and Yuan have encountered in their lives and work will persist. Almost all the women weavers in the handicraft ecommerce villages in Shandong are forty or older, and most of the younger women show contempt for weaving, dismissing it as physically demanding and culturally inferior to digital labor and urban service work. Not all types of home-based labor on the periphery are the same. Some are more desirable than others. Weaving is monotonous and physically arduous; weavers often suffer from chronic back pain and arthritis after a lifetime spent weaving. Handicraft making was also poorly paid. At a piece rate, a skilled female weaver had to work from dawn to dusk seven days a week to earn as much as an average full-time ecommerce customer service girl or supermarket cashier could earn—about $600 USD per month.  This shortage of women weavers already threatens the long-term sustainability of the ecommerce industry. Some village entrepreneurs hope that the rising per-unit price of woven goods would encourage younger women to take up weaving again, especially as they age and find it harder to work in the urban service sector. Others seek solutions in new handicraft styles that require less human weaving labor, or by outsourcing production to less economically developed villages nearby, where labor costs are lower. Ultimately, like many of the challenges Chuan’s Taobao county faces in maintaining the competitiveness of its handicraft ecommerce industry, solving the weaving labor shortage will require a collective effort. Decades of entrepreneurialism in family-based labor, and the recent rise of ecommerce, has drawn some migrant birds back home—but the growing atomization of village culture and intra-village inequality does not bode well for collective politics.  As China’s living standard rose, the labor pool in Prato also started to drain. As a result, Prato’s home factories received new guests. Since the 2010s, the number of Chinese immigrants registered in Prato has stagnated. Just as young people in Shandong despised weaving, young Wenzhounese no longer saw garment work in Italy as an attractive option. Many older workers and shop owners either moved to the service sector (such as cafés and bars) or went back to China. “If you can easily make six to seven thousand yuan [about $1,000 USD a month] by delivering food in Wenzhou, why sacrifice so much to make garments in Prato?” Yuan chuckled in 2015.","completion":"For many, Covid-19 was the last straw. During the pandemic, lockdowns and the consequent economic downturn pushed many garment workshops out of business. Yuan’s company was one of them. She closed her workshop in 2021 and returned to China with her husband. This year, they started a new business in Wenzhou selling “authentic” Italian gelato to a growing number of middle-class consumers."}
{"prompt":"What awaits Prato’s home factories after the Chinese have left? Just as the Chinese workers were looking elsewhere for better opportunities, immigrants from Pakistan and North Africa were filling in the vacancies. A few of them even bought workshops from the Chinese to become self-employed entrepreneurs. Following the Chinese’s footsteps, they will accumulate more knowledge, connections, and capital in the next decade or so, and possibly come to dominate the garment industry, thus adding a new chapter in the centuries-long story of home-based work in Prato.","completion":"With the pandemic gradually fading in intensity, some white-collar workers in the Global North are returning to their offices while others are entering the brave new world of permanent work-from-home. But as Chuan and Yuan’s stories show, there is an alternative history beyond the white-collar sectors in the Global North that reminds us of the manifold inequalities rendered invisible by our uneven global capitalist system. However, theirs are also stories of hope and extraordinary resilience under difficult conditions, stories about social mobility and making sacrifices for loved ones, of exploitation and self-exploitation, and of making do with what one has while fighting for a better life."}
{"prompt":"1/ The internet says that the word “pivot” may refer to a point of rotation in a lever system, a chemicals and explosives manufacturer in Australia, an open source platform for building applications in Java, one of three joints in the human body, a piece of syntax, a dance move. A dancer might pivot on one heel or on the heels of both hands, depending on the dance in question.  The internet says so many things. It says that the English word “pivot” comes from older words that meant pin, point, the place on which something turns. Pue, in Old French, meant the “tooth of a comb.” Before plastics, human beings made combs from diverse materials. Archaeologists have found combs made of bone, tortoiseshell, ivory, rubber, iron, tin, gold, silver, lead, reeds, wood, glass, porcelain, and papier-mâché. In cave-people’s caves, they have unearthed fragments of combs made of stone.","completion":"Future historians will have more to work with. How will they parse our society’s weird kinds of common knowledge? All the things that we know to be things without quite knowing what they are? 2/ To many English speakers who were paying attention to the internet in the 2010s, the word “pivot” became a commonplace. Around the middle of that decade, a number of tech companies, especially Facebook, signaled that they would prioritize video henceforth. Meaning, their algorithms would rank video content higher than word or picture content in users’ newsfeeds, all other factors, like likes, being the same.  The data said that video was more engaging than words, or so Facebook said. A few years later, it turned out, this had been a mistake or maybe even a lie, but it was done. Media companies had laid off writers, in the hopes of creating content that could capture more digital ad dollars, and pivot had become part of a digital ironist’s lexicon.  Horse broke its leg, so we had to take it out back and help it ‘pivot to video,’ said one blog. Pivot meant trying to recover from failure or error, but also became a joke about how you did it, covering for the way others had been thrown under the bus along the way."}
{"prompt":"It made sense in an industry based on scalable software, an industry that had long valued companies in terms of their number of users. If value resides in number of users, why not use them for something else? It was everything we never wanted at Logic.  3/ In October 2016, a group of friends in San Francisco put up a website. The website said we would soon start putting out a print magazine. What were we thinking?  We were thinking, we wanted to make a place for people to publish the kinds of pieces we ourselves wanted to read about technology. We were thinking, we would give ourselves one issue. If, after that issue, we were not losing money, we would keep going. But above all, we were thinking, we needed an occasion to throw parties. In the era of pivot-to-video, it was the only reasonable reason to start a paper magazine.","completion":"The party thing was a joke, but like all jokes, was partly serious. We wanted to bring people together, not only within the pages of the magazine but also in little rooms you had to cram into.  Our timing turned out to be fortuitous, in one sense. The election of Donald Trump, with his open support of various manosphere creeps and white nationalists, and his stated desire to use digital technology to build a “Muslim registry,” caused a lot of people in the tech industry to think differently about what they were building. The magazine ended up developing alongside a new tech worker movement, whose participants and fellow travelers shaped our thinking and often contributed to our pages."}
{"prompt":"And if, in the first months, friends on the East Coast had asked what did we mean, a little magazine that thinks about the tech industry, soon it seemed all kinds of publications were pivoting to do the same. An entire field of tech criticism materialized. It became a modest career. The companies themselves metabolized it in various ways. Revelations about misbehaving executives and algorithms accumulated in the years that followed. Some of the same people who had led the “pivot to video” were now talking about a “tech backlash,” or “techlash.” We did too.  But, even if our little magazine professed irreverence, and occasionally made a point of bursting certain bubbles, our goal was never critique for its own sake. We believed the opposite of hype was not pessimism, which could be its own kind of racket, but specificity. We wanted to pay closer attention to how things work and to the people who made them. Attention is a form of prayer, a philosopher once said.  And it was through this specificity that we forged connections, made a community. This is the better version of pivot: recognizing that human relationships can evolve; that the entities that are linked by a network are rarely static; that there is something about the possibility of connection held out by digital technologies that is worth keeping faith with.  4/ To pivot is to turn, and see the same room from a new angle. The pieces in this issue talk about the many challenges that such change can present. Even when there is a lot of money to be made by promising that offline can smoothly translate into online, life into data, there are residuals and resistances, as when trying to datafy complex systems of information involved in shipping and customs. And some apparently progressive changes are not, in fact; as other authors in this issue argue, the shift from the open web to corporate social platforms, while it granted unprecedented visibility to some social movements, impeded the construction of meaningful collective power.","completion":"This issue also reveals the instances of possibility that come from a new point of view. One piece places hope in neither abolishing nor co-opting data but in re-routing it. Another examines how the pandemic has forced tech worker organizers to look at questions of safety and community in novel ways.  Pivoting can also be a way to look back. This issue will be the last under the direction of Logic’s founding editors. And, at risk of indulgence, it retrospects. It contains interviews and reflections that go into detail about the work of making a magazine. And it contains reminiscences from some people we met along the way, people who helped inspire the project from the start.  With this, we hand things off to the new leadership, who will bring a new focus. Both through their editorial process and their model for producing the magazine, they will aim to draw in voices and perspectives that remain outside, underexplored, and yet essential to thinking about technology in the changing present, to make sure it’s not the changing same."}
{"prompt":"For now, we want to say how much we cherish the readers we have found. We hope you will hold on to what we have made, and care for it enough, to make it something else. When Logic launched following the 2016 US election cycle, it provided a much-needed platform for critical and nuanced long-form reflection on technology. Five years ago, tech journalism—with its origins in product review—largely mirrored the industry it sought to cover. The founders’ goal—to deepen the conversation around technology—has, in many ways, been realized. Since its launch, Logic has published an interdisciplinary network of organizers, scholars, and artists. With the publication of its fifteenth issue, Beacons, it seemed Logic was on the verge of reinventing itself, with renewed commitments to the Global South, the Black radical tradition, and mixed media.  But Logic as an enterprise was also becoming harder to sustain. The magazine has always run on significant volunteer labor—the core team is mostly unpaid—and burnout is a constant concern. The sole revenue source for the magazine has been subscriptions—rather than institutional or corporate funding commonly raised by many non-profit publications—and this has necessarily imposed significant resource constraints. While Logic has always paid its contributors, its small budget has made it difficult to deepen its commitment to publishing poor or historically marginalized writers, particularly Black, trans, disabled, and/or queer writers of color. Limited money has also made it hard for Logic to find a way to evolve into its next phase. Magazines need to evolve past the moment that produced them in order to remain of use. Is there a way for this labor of love to transform itself in order to meet the needs of the next five years of tech criticism?  Vision In January 2023, Logic will transfer leadership of the magazine to one of the founding staff members, Xiaowei Wang, and Director of We Be Imagining, J. Khadijah Abdurahman. This will mark the beginning of the first queer Black and Asian tech magazine. Black, Asian, and queer are not only descriptors of our individual identities but also mark the kind of theoretical and political approaches we hope to infuse this next chapter with. Logic(s) will retain the core commitments of the magazine’s founding while laying the groundwork to radically shift both the tech journalism genre and dominant publishing models. The “Beacons” issue of December 2021 was a pilot model for what this transition will look like: deeply interdisciplinary (poetry, visual art, and sci-fi on the same axis as the long-form essay); an ongoing invitation to fields traditionally outside of tech, which offer a set of methods and tools to think through the social implications of digital technologies and data collection. Two core commitments of this transition are “marrying our thought to the poor” and increasing engagement with international issues—particularly an emphasis on Asia and the African continent.","completion":"“Centering the most harmed” or “focusing on the impact of vulnerable populations” dominates liberal conversations about technology and data policy. However, “marrying our thought to the poor” means a) drawing on the conceptual frameworks of impoverished Black people, marginalized folks, and jobless people as opposed to delimiting them as a site of harm for outsiders to examine, and b) an emphasis on commissioning stories about the public sector adoption of automated decision-making systems like Medicaid eligibility determination, coordinated housing entry child welfare, UNHCR biometrics, and refugee mobile money payments. These areas continue to be under-attended to, despite the scale of their impact and their role as a site of experimentation before being generalized to the rest of the population. Relatedly, international coverage of tech continues to be limited to stories about social media platforms recognizing an insufficient number of languages or heads of state using internet blackouts to suppress dissent—stories that lack a more capacious situating of technologies in their sociopolitical context.  We echo Georgetown’s Center for Law and Policy’s concern that reliance on the terminology “artificial intelligence” and “machine learning” obfuscates the specificity of technologies narrated under those terms. Like Logic’s original founders, we share a commitment to an anti-capitalist framework. We also believe tech criticism must evolve past simply throwing the terms capitalism or white supremacy onto a story like garnish. We aim to provide the editorial support that writers need in order to do the work of developing these connections between finance and locally-rooted expertise, especially from trans, incarcerated, and Indigenous writers. The editing process at Logic has been very rigorous, partly because, unlike The Guardian or similar venues, there’s not simply a pre-existing reservoir of trained writers to tap into. A core part of the publication process is helping contributors develop the capacity to narrate their domain expertise for a popular audience in real time. We plan on addressing this through significantly increasing compensation, providing pop-up writing intensives, and preemptively budgeting for outside accountability facilitators that will be available when any member of the process feels harmed."}
{"prompt":"Future Stories Potential stories or themes we hope to address: examining the impact of digital infrastructure projects like Facebook’s installation of submarine cables in Djibouti, shifts in how mail and other services are delivered by carceral institutions in the US, queer organzing for mesh networks in Appalachia, the revolving door between Safaricom and government digital ID regulators on the African continent, DARPA-funded research at Desmond Patton’s institute, merging algorithmic gang member identification with countering violent extremism algorithms applied to databases on migrant children in the US, changes in federal Medicaid legislation mandating increased interagency data sharing and collection. If you are researching and writing about any of these stories, or have an idea for us, email us at editors@logicmag.io with the topic “Logic(s)” in the subject line.","completion":"Programmatically, in addition to intentionally commissioning more poetry, visual art, and science fiction, we plan on incorporating a regular column featuring high school students to support a more intergenerational conversation. We also plan to run book reviews, which, in this field, tend to be pleasant summaries instead of showing substantive engagement. We will provide a platform, and the necessary editorial support, to pursue this deeply necessary line of engagement."}
{"prompt":"Continuations Khadijah and Xiaowei will be building upon the foundational infrastructure and editing that has been a labor of love by a network of people over the past six years. This includes: Jim Fingal, Christa Hartsock, Ben Tarnoff, Moira Weigel, Celine Nguyen, Jen Kagan, Alex Blasdel, Sarah Burke, Max Read, Aliyah Blackmore, Jacob Kahn, and many others.  The last issue of 2022 is appropriately themed “Pivot.” This issue marks a turning point for Logic, and is about transitions of all kinds. It features reflections on the first six years of Logic by readers, contributors, and members of the core team.","completion":"It seemed like half of Los Angeles had turned out for boat tours at the Port of Long Beach: parents corralling toddlers, couples on dates, even dog owners in line for pet-friendly tours. The port offers free guided tours to the public once a year, a sort of goodwill gesture to the community that has suffered decades of pollution as a result of its activity, and that of the adjoining Port of Los Angeles. After two hours of waiting, I filed onto an erstwhile whale-watching tour boat, where I took in the port’s enormous container ships. Like my fellow tourists, I was excited to get a glimpse of the scale of operations necessary to keep the nation supplied with toilet paper, plastic toys, and every other conceivable good.  Squinting against the sun, I tried to imagine the ships another way: as numbers on a screen, cells in a spreadsheet, dots on a grid. I’d been reading about the information transfer that accompanies the movement of these vessels, and I knew that the scale of this data is nearly as impressive as the ships’ sheer size. Ships like those docked at Long Beach are vital links in the global supply chain, but they’re also floating “data terminals,” as the global maritime industry consultancy Lloyd’s Register put it in 2015. Increasingly, these vessels receive and transmit an enormous amount of information: about their position, of course, but also about weather, traffic, temperature, maintenance, staffing, ocean conditions, and much more. The streams of information are so complex that they threaten to exceed humans’ ability to interpret them. That’s partly why many newer vessels—“smart ships,” in industry parlance—use complex algorithms (some of them devised by Google and Microsoft) to chart their courses. Within the next decade, carriers hope to launch fleets of automated or remote-controlled vessels—“ghost ships,” as they’re sometimes called."}
{"prompt":"Further away from the port, in office blocks and operations centers, fleet management centers house another tranche of data: information about which containers hold which goods, which ships carry which containers, where those ships are headed, and who paid for what. Elsewhere, “quants” with PhDs in astrophysics collate historical data with information about geography, weather, stock prices, and ship movements, searching for opportunities to place stock market bets on global trade.","completion":"At the port, I marveled at the feat of coordination represented by all these containers, all of this loading and unloading. But I also knew something strange about the shipping industry: despite all its technology, global shipping is still infamously paper-heavy. Important documents, like bills of lading and letters of credit, tend to pass physically from person to person, from driver to dockworker to engineer to trucker to warehouse supervisor. While a container moves across the ocean, its accompanying paperwork might literally be flown across the world to meet it.  That’s slowly changing: in the cloistered world of global shipping, a gold rush is taking shape, as companies vie to connect and commodify shipping data. Advanced real-time data about shipping promises to improve the speed and reliability of global logistics. But it could also have other, stranger implications. As ships edge toward automation, the prospect of rich shipping data makes it increasingly possible to imagine a future in which shipping is controlled by machines. And because shipping and banking are so deeply intertwined, better data could attune the movement of cargo near-seamlessly with the priorities of financial markets."}
{"prompt":"An Industry Built on Paper Shipping may be unusually dependent on paper, but it’s not for any lack of data. And there are lots of different kinds, including data about ship locations, ships themselves, what ships are carrying, and the buyers and sellers of ship cargo. Ship locations are relatively easy to come by: anyone with an internet connection can monitor the movement of large ships. The UN’s International Maritime Organization requires large vessels to transmit their location information using a VHF-radio protocol called the automated identification system, or AIS. A Google search will yield numerous portals where you can view ship movements in near-real time.","completion":"Data about what’s happening on ships is increasingly sophisticated, but it’s usually proprietary, held mainly by the ship operators. The newest shipping vessels are covered with sensors of all kinds, monitoring everything from cargo temperatures to fire hazards to hull conditions. On the bow of a ship’s mast, an anemometer might measure wind speed and direction. On the bottom of the hull, an echosounder can detect the depth of the seabed. In the engine room, meters measure the flow of fuel, monitoring the engines’ efficiency and condition. Increasingly, the data is reported back to shore in near real-time: 5G technology and low-Earth orbit satellites have increased the practicability of worldwide connectivity. This is important, since technologists in the shipping industry envision a near future in which one captain controls a fleet of crewless ships from an onshore computer. But detailed as this shipboard information is, it’s generally not available to anyone outside the ship operators."}
{"prompt":"Things get even trickier if you want to get ahold of information about what ships are carrying. That data exists, but it tends to be stored within the software systems of shipping companies and amongst the paperwork of customs agencies—there’s no central clearinghouse for information about cargo. AIS data can tell you where ships are, but it can’t tell you what they’re carrying. In the absence of real-time cargo data, companies like CargoMetrics use historical data and proxy information (about which types of vessels are at sea and where they’re headed) in an attempt to derive information about which cargo is in motion. Figuring out who’s selling to whom is even more complicated. There’s no one organization that keeps track of this kind of transaction information, and supply chains are rife with small outfits that spring up and then vanish from sight at a confounding pace.  So the data exists, but the paper persists. The various stores of information are in separate, locked-down databases, kept apart by competing business interests, incompatible data models, and differing legal frameworks. To make things more complicated, when we talk about the “supply chain,” we’re not really talking about one industry; instead, we’re talking about a stunning variety of disparate players, all engaged in moving stuff: freight forwarders, charterers, drayage companies, container lines, truckers, terminal operators, and chassis providers, to name just a few. Each has its own data, but as often as not, information moves between operators on paper. “It is not uncommon for a shipping document package to contain fifty sheets of paper that must, in some cases, be exchanged between thirty different stakeholders,” reports the Digital Container Shipping Association (DCSA). In the absence of a unified mode of communication, paper patches over the gaps between systems.  The bill of lading, for example, a critical document that describes a shipment and acts as a bill of title, is almost always paper: the DCSA reports that only 1.2 percent of bills of lading were digitally transmitted in 2021. At each stop on the cargo’s journey, the physical document must pass from hand to hand until it reaches its destination. In the UK and some other countries, there was until recently no legal provision for the possession of an electronic title; anyone seeking to prove ownership had to have that ownership on paper. Different countries have different laws, different industries need different information, and different carriers each have their own requirements. During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many flights were grounded, some containers were stuck at ports because the paper documents necessary to release them couldn’t be couriered via airfreight. The global supply chain is a stunning feat of communication and technology, but surprisingly little of that communication is accomplished digitally at the moment.","completion":"So the issue is not that movement isn’t tracked and computerized; it’s that it is tracked too many different ways, in scores of different proprietary systems, most of them locked down. Individual carriers might have granular detail about their vessels’ condition and cargo, but in the absence of a network that stitches all of that information together, the big picture remains incomplete. “You have to connect data from multiple data sources, and to be able to do that, you have to be able to access data that resides within the systems of different carriers, different freight forwarders, different customs brokers,” logistics expert Inna Kuznetsova told the Journal of Commerce in 2019. Paper documents like bills of lading may be unwieldy, but they’re still more convenient to exchange than unintelligible or inadmissible digital records.  Data standards would make a difference: if information could be exchanged in a predictable format, companies could share it electronically. These standards do exist, but there are also significant barriers to their adoption. In 2015, the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) published a set of data models that lay out definitions and specifications for trade documents, designed to be encoded in data exchange formats such as JSON or XML. If a trading partner knows how information will be formatted, it can design a computer system to interpret that data without human intervention. Data standards aren’t unlike the shipping container itself: once everyone agreed on the box’s dimensions, containers could be swapped in and out without any need for discussion. Likewise, if everyone agrees to use the same data standards, information can be handed over as easily as a shipping container moves from cargo hold to truck chassis."}
{"prompt":"The existing guidelines are complex, however—they have to be, in order to account for every possible use—and require a fairly high level of technical proficiency to implement. There’s no single organization or governing body with enough heft to impose standards on the entire industry. Some countries, industry groups, and regulators are concerned about electronic fraud. In some jurisdictions, laws need to be revised to permit electronic documentation. And some carriers and container lines are reluctant to make their data available to competitors because, while standardization could benefit the industry as a whole, individual companies’ data represents a potentially valuable asset. Standards, in other words, are inflexible, and the world of global trade is a chaos of variables.","completion":"Covid has only heightened the urgency of efforts to network shipping data. “Covid was the spark that ignited everything,” Thomas Bagge, CEO of the DCSA, told the Global Trade Review in 2021. “There is a significant number of stakeholders now motivated to change the opaque and antiquated processes that are still common in international trade.” In March of 2022, the Biden administration announced the launch of Freight Logistics Optimization Works, an advisory group tasked with developing a “proof-of-concept information exchange” designed to ease supply-chain congestion. The Port of Long Beach, an advisory group member, pledged to work with defense contractor UNCOMN to create the “Supply Chain Information Highway,” designed to “liberate actionable data across supply chain nodes and organizations.” Dematerialize the Bill of Lading Despite all the complications, shipping’s lingering dependence on paper makes it an irresistible target for tech companies. Numerous startups seek to “dematerialize” the bill of lading and other documents, while others offer platforms that promise to connect disparate streams of data, often with the use of AI. So far, though, the result of all this activity has been an even knottier tangle of data, with no single standard or company emerging as the clear consensus choice. As separate companies seek to optimize logistics sectors like container movement, fuel demand, shipping volume, and charter prices, it gets even more difficult to turn all of this data into a coherent whole. “I’ve got 99 problems, but data’s the biggest one,” writes logistics journalist Eric Johnson. “It’s like the faucet turned on, and no one has been able to slow down the flow.” Data is flowing from every direction, but no one seems to be able to turn all of this information into a unified stream of global activity."}
{"prompt":"Yet the reward for integrating supply-chain data could be immense. To understand why, we need to take a brief tour of shipping finance—a sector that’s as complicated as you might expect in a system that spans the globe. One area of it, called trade finance, addresses the lag time between the issuing of an order (for goods or commodities) and the delivery of that order to the buyer. Sellers often need money to purchase supplies and labor to procure or assemble the goods. Buyers, however, usually resist paying for goods until they’re delivered. To plug that gap, lenders extend loans to either buyers or sellers, charging interest or a fee in return. There are countless variations, of varying degrees of complexity, but the purpose is generally to keep the wheels of commerce moving smoothly by advancing cash to suppliers.","completion":"It’s time-consuming, by modern standards, to arrange these loans. Lenders need to know that their loans will be repaid, so they want to know about the borrower’s finances, market conditions, transport risks, and every other piece of information they can get their hands on. Documents need to be exchanged. People need to sign off. It can take months. But what if all that information could be networked, so that it could be accessed and evaluated in an instant? What if loan decisions could be made algorithmically? What if—irresistibly!—these algorithmic transactions could be executed by “smart contracts” on the blockchain? These transactions could take place instantaneously, but you’d need to have really accurate data about a company’s solvency, its loan history, and the market for whatever’s being transported. You’d need, that is, a lot of data: about what’s being exchanged, which shipments are already underway, about the market in general, and about who’s doing the buying and selling. As we’ve seen, that data exists, but it has yet to be networked."}
{"prompt":"An enormous amount of money is at stake. In 2020, global trade finance had a value of $5.2 trillion, according to McKinsey & Company, and the market is only expected to grow. Moreover, a more “transparent,” legible market in trade finance could herald the entrance of a new set of market players. Maritime finance has traditionally been the province of large financial institutions and shipping insiders. Shipping has long had a reputation for deals conducted in smoky backrooms by insiders steeped in arcana, such as bunker rates, freight-forwarding agreements, and value maintenance clauses. Few non-expert investors have felt comfortable wading into this environment. But what if there was a kind of internet of cargo—an easily legible map of what’s traveling where?  Shipping finance has already absorbed a significant amount of private equity and hedge fund investment, and has spawned IPOs and even NFTs. (A company called Infinity Maritime allows investors to purchase tradable “MetaUnits” that represent a share in a shipping fleet.) If an internet of cargo existed, investments could be much more data-driven, making trade finance an even more alluring target for investors.","completion":"The Shadow Life of Grain What’s more, where there’s debt, there’s a sellable asset. Banks are talking increasingly about securitizing debt from trade finance, meaning they want to package these loans and sell them on to investors on a public market. A container’s worth of grain, for example, might be paid for with a loan that is then sold as a security, or part of a security. As a ship carries the grain across the ocean, the loan could change hands multiple times as market conditions change. Grain prices drop and an optimistic investor steps in to purchase the loan, betting that prices will rise before the ship makes landfall. They do, and the lucky investor sells the loan on, pocketing the price difference.  “Given that global demand for trade finance already outstrips supply by about US$1.5tn a year, we see huge potential for a thriving secondary market to stimulate trade in goods and services,” Surath Sengupta, HSBC’s global head of trade portfolio management, told Global Trade Review in 2019. In this way, grain becomes valuable not only for its existence as grain, but for its shadow life as part of a financial instrument. As the physical grain moves across the ocean, ownership of its debt could ping-pong around the globe."}
{"prompt":"Accurate cargo and commodity data could also provide an invaluable window into the flow of commerce. Imagine if you knew at all times which commodities were headed where. You could determine whether a market is about to be flooded or whether a shortage of, say, wheat means the cost of bread is about to skyrocket. “Shipping holds the no-shit, honest truth of what the economy is doing,” angel investor Doug Doan told Institutional Investor in 2016. Traders with special insight into shipping data could identify mispricing in the stock market—perhaps GE’s stock is too high, given the flood of cheap washing machines headed our way. They could then exploit that information gap to pocket the difference in price. Currently, data analysts can make estimates about ocean freight based on vessel type and economic indicators, but these are just educated guesses. If a database was constantly updated as transactions took place, this real-time data would make it possible for those with access to place more aggressive, potentially more lucrative bets.","completion":"Given the potential value of this information, the question of who will control or have access to the network of comprehensive shipping data is of urgent importance to many players within the worlds of logistics and finance. Currently, the major shipping lines, like Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd, have privileged access to a great deal of detailed information, because data about their customers and cargo is locked into their technology platforms. National agencies, such as US Customs and Border Protection, hold another large swath of data, but it’s not linked with other datasets. A growing number of startups is attempting to harvest and synthesize various sources of data, but to obtain proprietary data would require the participation of ports and shipping companies."}
{"prompt":"Here, China has an advantage: its government-sponsored National Public Information Platform for Transportation and Logistics, or Logink, collects data at a number of participating ports in Asia and Europe. Because Logink is part of ports’ information systems, it absorbs key documents like manifests, bills of lading, and customs documentation, and then integrates these documents with countless other streams of information, such as AIS data and information about historical trends. Logink is such an impressive feat of engineering that its growth is making parts of the US government nervous: Michael Wessel, a commissioner of the United States–China Economic and Security Review Commission, a federal agency, told the Wall Street Journal in December 2021 that Logink represents “a treasure trove of intelligence of national security and economic interest.” The future of shipping could, in investors’ fantasies, be an almost pure expression of financial markets, with automated ships following routes dictated by live market data. Consider if the price of grain falls below a threshold necessary to make a profit from a carrier’s voyage. There’s nothing to prevent a (possibly autonomous!) ship from changing its route and setting course for a more lucrative market. In a world of perfect information, what would prevent an algorithm from revising market and fuel costs mid-voyage, rerouting a ship on the fly, and sending its cargo to a different destination entirely? Efficient though this dynamic system might be, it hardly seems likely to result in more predictable supply chains. On the contrary, events like the stock market crash of 2008 or the “flash crash” of 2010 suggest that global shipping’s deeper integration with financial markets could introduce another layer of instability.","completion":"If one is inclined to doubt carriers’ willingness to cast aside human welfare in the pursuit of short-term profits, the growing problem of crew abandonment offers a corrective. When a ship’s debts are worth more than the ship itself, shipowners have increasingly opted to simply stop paying crew members’ wages and abandon the ship where it is. In 2021, at least ninety-one ships were abandoned by their owners, their crew members still aboard. Seafarers might be abandoned in Mogadishu, as one crew was in 2021, or Umm Al Quwain in the UAE, as another crew was for forty-three months starting in 2017. Stranded onboard without visas or the means to make their way home, seafarers’ ordeals can last for months or years. One crew was abandoned off the port of Ajman in the UAE for eighteen months. These instances of abandonment, cruel though they may be, are simple calculations on the owners’ parts: when value x exceeds value y, perform action z. Full and accurate data would allow for these kinds of calculations on every load a ship carries: algorithmic apportionment of goods, powered by increasingly granular data."}
{"prompt":"Flesh into Fractions In the postmortems of the worst days of the pandemic’s supply-chain crisis, technology experts were quick to blame antiquated communication and information systems. “Supply chain management is facing its own pandemic of outdated processes,” EPSNews reported in 2021. But modern shipping’s abandoned seafarers are proof that more precise data doesn’t always work in favor of the common good. In a way, the seafarers were abandoned because of efficient access to information: to the workers’ detriment, their wages outweighed the current value of the ship. It’s just math. And this kind of math, in which humans are measured against market values and found wanting, seems to be repeated over and over again in the history of global logistics.","completion":"Shipping, in fact, has a special relationship with data. In some accounts, the growth of international trade in the sixteenth century helped to create the kind of information we now call data. Maritime trade generally involves the conveyance of objects over long distances, to unseen trading partners. But how to represent a product’s qualities in mutually intelligible terms, if the buyer can’t judge it with their own eyes? Seafaring merchants had to devise standardized categories that would stand in for the characteristics of particular goods: Tellicherry pepper, for example, or long-grain rice. With this act of categorization, individual peppercorns can be aggregated, made interchangeable, and exchanged for an agreed-upon rate. It’s this kind of quotidian bookkeeping that produces data: particular entities get grouped under one name and added up on a spreadsheet."}
{"prompt":"But sixteenth-century seafarers weren’t just trading in peppers and rice. Historians tell us that the transatlantic slave trade was the engine behind the explosion in global shipping from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. And even as merchants were codifying standards for coffee and tea, they were keeping detailed ledgers of human beings, carefully categorizing them by physical characteristics and market value. “Compilers of slave ship manifests,” writes the historian Jessica Marie Johnson, “participated in the transmutation of black flesh into integers and fractions.”  Logistics, enslavement, and the advent of data are all tangled up in the historical record. And race continues to structure the global supply chain. Many of today’s abandoned seafarers are from southeast Asia, from countries left impoverished by a legacy of colonization. The warehouse workers who handle the goods onshore are disproportionately people of color. The very undersea cables that deliver data between continents retrace maritime routes first mapped by the transatlantic slave trade. And of course, we wouldn’t really have global supply chains, at least not to the extent we do, if the market didn’t award a substantially lower value to the labor of people from the Global South.","completion":"The scholars Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write that logistics is a way to assert ownership. Atop a roiling ocean, rocky terrain, or noisy metropolis, logistics imposes a grid of straight lines. “Logistics aims to straighten us out, untangle us, and open us to its usufruct, its improving use,” they write. “Such access to us, in turn, improves the flow line, the straight line.” The internet of cargo, the supply chain information highway, and similar efforts promise to use data to pave over the world’s contingencies—restive workers, ecological disasters, unpredictable demand. But does logistical efficiency equate with the common good?  For as long as logistics has existed, it has viewed humans and their environment as friction to be eliminated. The enmeshment of logistical data with high-speed trading simply completes a circuit initiated with the inscription of human beings into slave-ship manifests: it submits all that the supply chain touches to the disciplining logic of the marketplace. In its single-minded quest for ownership, logistics has the goal, write Harney and Moten, “quite simply and starkly of preventing us from taking care of one another, from looking out for one another.” It should make us wonder: how sure are we that a speculative market in shipping data will not result in a more unjust world? Are we certain that we want to assign responsibility for distributing goods to algorithms we don’t understand? We have the proven ability to codify logic that demands the performance of atrocity—particularly for those judged subhuman as a result of their race. Perhaps, then, when the shipping and finance industries laud technology’s power to make the supply chain “more agile” and “responsive to market forces,” as the DCSA put it in 2022, we should question what that actually means. Perfect data could allow cargo to move more efficiently, but it would also be more likely to move in lockstep with the inscrutable whims of financial markets."}
{"prompt":"Into the Sea It’s hard not to get a little carried away imagining a future conjured by all of the coming technological changes the industry touts: the world’s oceans transformed into a computer-operated game of Battleship, with faceless autonomous vessels tracing routes dictated by algorithmic finance. In reality, these changes will be piecemeal, probably painfully slow, with a lot of haggling over policy and standards. Parts of global shipping may never digitize. The forces pushing toward a future of data-driven shipping, however, are strong.  Back in Long Beach, our tour boat slid neatly into its berth and I followed my fellow passengers back onto land, dodging toddlers and wishing I’d worn sunblock. I started the walk back to my car, thinking about something I’d learned recently, in Christina Dunbar-Hester’s Oil Beach. In the 1950s, the land around the Port of Long Beach began to slide into the ocean, the result of an intensive program of extraction that pumped billions of barrels of oil from the nearby Wilmington Oil Field. Officials managed to stave off the subsidence by pumping seawater underground, re-pressurizing the eroding land. So all of us here in the port parking lot were treading on ground being held in place by the sea. Logistics had drained the land of its resources and logistics had reinflated it, forcing the ground into Harney and Moten’s “straight line.”  Whether that equilibrium will hold, however, is an open question, since rising sea levels threaten to inundate parts of the port by 2050. The current plan to defend the port entails shoring up infrastructure, hardening the port’s defenses against rising tides and extreme weather. I wondered, though, about the wisdom of this. Instead of doubling down on the system that brought us here, I thought, what if we stopped to ask whether the logistical infrastructure we’ve built is the one we actually want? Data has eaten, is eating, will eat, the world. What do we do about it? There are about as many answers as there are people asking (probably more). But if we set aside those who advocate rolling over with a smile on your face, responses tend to come in two particular flavors.","completion":"The first—let’s call it “data abolition”—disputes the entire question, particularly the “is.” It disputes the inevitability of datafication, in other words, and suggests pushing back, hard, against the practices that are advancing data’s eating-of-the-world and the narratives making that consumption seem so inevitable and complete. The second—let’s call it “data co-option”—argues for datafication as a source of hope. In particular, it maintains that datafication might be co-opted to challenge the very dynamics causing negative outcomes, thereby creating a kind of data resistance, or “data counterpower.” If data is a new register of power, we should work to twist it back on itself.  This second approach underpins what is increasingly referred to as data activism: using data to address injustice. For instance, we can look at the (in many ways) fantastic book Data Feminism by Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein. As the title suggests, Data Feminism is about how data collection and mobilization can be of use in achieving feminist political goals. Data, the authors argue, can be a tool of resistance. A quintessential example of such data activism would be Mapping Police Violence, a tool built not only to track murders by law enforcement in the US, but also to highlight how underreported and patchy the data on such killings is."}
{"prompt":"There’s nothing wrong with data activism, and no inherent contradiction between co-option and abolition: many people hold both views, including myself. You can simultaneously be skeptical about the inevitability of data and pragmatically willing to use it where it appears. The difficulty is doing both in parallel: to deploy data only when it is strategic to do so. Overbalancing—that is, skewing to data—risks having data co-option campaigns being co-opted themselves, naturalizing datafication as beneficial or inevitable. Further, such efforts might not bear fruit. Being strategic, then, requires knowing about data’s usefulness. Where does data activism work, under what conditions, and for whom?  A lot of writing that advocates for such activism is quiet on these questions. In Data Feminism, the authors note explicitly that “data alone do not always lead to change—especially when that change also requires dominant groups to share their resources and their power.” But despite this caveat, there’s little discussion of where data does, or does not, lead to change: not only its potential, but the situations where it doesn’t work. Where does the reliance on data risk the harm of naturalizing datafication, without the benefits of addressing injustice? What are the factors involved in data activism being effective? These are the questions that I want to try to answer. Not through looking at our contemporary moment of data activism in the era of data science, but at the past: at efforts to do data activism before data science was a term. In particular, the history of trans people’s use of data to fight for access to healthcare holds lessons for how to strike the right balance between data abolition and data co-option. What happens when we look not forward, to the hoped-for (or feared) future, but backwards, at the ancestors of data counterpower itself? An Embarrassment of Data But why focus on trans healthcare? The answer has to do with how it became institutionalized (so much as it is) within medicine. Without digging too granularly into the history, the important thing to understand is that when trans medicine became recognized in the 1960s, practitioners partly got involved for research reasons. That is: they were interested in understanding the outcomes of treatment, not only through providing it but through making patients the object of study.","completion":"One consequence of this was the model that treatment has often taken, that of the dedicated Gender Identity Clinic (GIC): a one-stop-shop for evaluation, therapy, hormone prescription, and surgical access. GICs, often based at university hospitals, enabled doctors to control the entire process (and the patients) in a way amenable to research. And while this model has changed to some degree, it is the GIC-based clinicians—with their interest in research, and the accompanying claim to scientific authority—who have tended to end up running the show. In some respects, then, trans healthcare could be seen as an ideal site for data-based change: a putatively scientifically-driven space in which many of the most powerful figures are professional researchers."}
{"prompt":"One nation that follows the GIC-based model is the UK, and my first story starts there, in the 1990s—some thirty-odd years after the clinics were established. Under the National Health Service (NHS), anyone seeking treatment with their local doctor is funneled to one of a (small) number of dedicated, NHS-run clinics around the country. Along with their selves and their medical records, patients bring a promise of funding—a promise that their local branch of the NHS, rather than the clinic, will foot the bill if certain conditions are met.","completion":"The key word is “if.” For starters, NHS branches had (and have) wildly inconsistent policies for what they will fund for trans therapeutics. Some only funded psychiatry; some funded both psychiatric support and surgical treatment; others funded both, but for a limited number of patients a year. To make matters worse, even if funding was theoretically available, trans people ran into the fact that GICs’ low priority to the NHS—and, more broadly, its highly conservative and cautious approaches to trans care—makes for long waiting lists for even initial appointments, let alone treatment. At one point a patient seeking surgery through the Charing Cross GIC in London was held on the waiting list, and then in therapy, for fourteen years. All of this, but particularly the funding deficiencies, was often justified by the NHS with claims that treatment was not important enough to be a high priority, and that care—particularly surgery— did not have a strong enough evidence base showing it improved patients’ quality of life to be funded."}
{"prompt":"Into this stepped Press for Change (PfC), a long-running trans campaigning group in the UK that has fought for, among other things, increased access to medical treatment. Robust data showing positive outcomes for patients would seem to challenge both of the NHS’s excuses for not resourcing it: not only would this data provide certainty on the question of improved patient outcomes from surgery, but it would demonstrate the urgency and importance of providing funding in the first place. So in the mid-1990s, PfC sought to gather just such data. They launched a survey of patient experiences, both online and on paper. In other words, they used data to gather and surface marginalized people’s experiences and desires in order to challenge public policy—a pretty canonical example of what we might now call data activism.","completion":"So what happened? When I sent that question to Claire Eastwood (who organized the survey) through PfC co-founder Christine Burns, the answer came back: nothing. The data was collected, but it was never analyzed. Why? In a word, “capacity.” PfC was, in Claire’s words, “massively overloaded as the [overall] campaign expanded, and … sadly this task got overtaken by other urgent and vital work, and never made it back up the priority list.” As Burns put it, the problem wasn’t an absence of data—they had an “embarrassment of data”—but rather that PfC was “always on the edge of biting off more than we could chew,” and the survey pushed them over that edge. In theory, the data could have been used to make a stronger argument for the efficacy of surgical care. But in practice, making that argument through an analysis of the data was more than PfC had the resources to do."}
{"prompt":"The point here is that the work of data activism is, well, work: work to collect data, to analyze it, to publish, and to use it. If movements have one thing in common, it’s that there are always fifteen tasks for every hour of the day—and the more pressured a movement is (the more vulnerable their members, the more urgent their tasks), the greater the cost of taking on new tasks. What this means is, practically speaking, an inverse relationship between the cost of data activism and the need to address the problem. The more pressing the injustices that activism confronts, the more pressed activists are for resources—and so the less likely there is to be capacity for data collection, analysis, and reporting.","completion":"Who Gets Counted Of course, claims about care efficacy aren’t the only argument used to deny resourcing for trans health and concerns. Another is population, the topic of our next example. Or to phrase it as a question: how many people want gender-affirming medical care? The authoritative answer, for the longest time, was “between 1:30,000 and 1:100,000 people”—and by authoritative I mean that it even made its way into the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) official diagnostic texts. The reliability of this answer matters quite a bit because, to paraphrase D’Ignazio and Klein, who gets counted counts. A low number means an argument for low funding for care, a high number for increased funding—and, if politicians are cynical, an increased need to at least pay lip service to a population’s needs. People, after all, vote.  It turns out the official estimate is not very reliable at all—in fact, it’s almost certainly a dramatic undercount. The reason is its source: it comes from a range of studies done by GICs in various countries in the 1970s. This creates two problems. One: the 1970s was a very different time (mostly in bad ways) for the shape of trans healthcare, and for articulations of trans identity and desire. Two: the GICs doing this work at the time were, to varying degrees, awful.  With few exceptions, GICs across the world have been known (particularly historically) for their onerous diagnostic and selection criteria. Some excluded married trans people; trans people who had ever had children; trans people who were gay, lesbian, or bisexual; or trans men altogether without consideration—and that consideration included literal years of psychological tests, psychiatric interviews, and required life changes, including (at some) a demand that the patient quit their job and transfer to a more “gender-appropriate” one, regardless of the impact this might have on the stability of their life. Paradoxically, many even refused treatment to patients for the sin of having successfully sought treatment through other routes."}
{"prompt":"What’s more, trans people—particularly those with access to community spaces—knew the environments were unpleasant, and often sought care almost anywhere else if possible. The result is that the estimates from GICs were less estimates of how many people wanted treatment, and more of how many people, having exhausted every other option, successfully passed through highly rigid clinical processes. Extrapolating population-level data from those accepted into the clinics is like extrapolating how many people buy cars from purchases at a Ferrari dealership—there’s a lot of filtering going on before someone even gets to signing the paperwork.","completion":"But the answer to “how many people?” matters, and one person who saw that was University of Michigan professor Lynn Conway. A trans woman and renowned computer scientist, Conway decided to make her own estimate, based not on forty-year-old data from the GICs but—thanks to her contacts in and knowledge of North American trans communities—the far larger number of private practitioners. With a wider and more representative sample of treatment pathways, her 2001 research came up with a very different number: not 1 in 30,000 people seeking gender-affirming care, but 1 in 2,500. And in retrospect, these numbers are (quite clearly) closer to the truth. Conway didn’t simply publish them online—she presented them at the biannual conference for researchers and practitioners around trans healthcare, and even published them in a gender studies journal."}
{"prompt":"So when the APA’s Task Force on Gender Identity and Gender Variance met in 2008 to write a report updating its approach to questions of gender, one would expect them to take these challenges seriously. And they did address them: in a footnote, after reasserting the validity of the 1970s numbers. Not only that, but the footnote in question mentioned Conway’s work only in order to dismiss it because it “seems to represent a minority position among researchers, although transgender activists tend to endorse the study.” No methodological challenge; no claim the study was incorrect. Simply wholesale dismissal. Why? Because if the answer were true, the medical researchers would have spotted it before Conway did. Because if trans people agreed with the estimate, it was automatically suspect.","completion":"The reason for this response is fairly obvious: power. Professionals in trans healthcare—particularly at GICs—get a lot of their official power and authority from the perception that they are singular experts in all things trans. The Clarke Institute in Canada, for example, was for the longest time the Canadian government’s sole source of expertise on (among other things) how trans people should be treated in prison. And if those experts admit they can’t even be trusted to count—well, what can they be trusted on? Accurate or not, published or not, Conway’s study challenged clinicians’ authority. It’s interesting to note that in the newest version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (psychiatry’s bible), the APA did provide a higher prevalence (and a caveat that this was likely an undercount), but credited GIC-based researchers with this discovery."}
{"prompt":"What this highlights is that what counts is not only conditional on what gets counted, but also who is doing the counting. On the surface, we’re talking about a prime site for data activism: research-oriented, quantitative questions in the domain of professional scientists. But when the answers come from people whose claim to authority undermines the credibility and the ego of those same scientists, they’re not taken seriously at all. Data alone works only if people are willing to listen: the rest of the time, you need not only data, but a bigger, more fundamental shift in the shape of how decisions are made, and by whom.","completion":"Power Routing These examples might suggest I think data is overplayed as a source of resistance—at least, data alone. And, well, I do. But that’s not the same as saying it’s useless. Sometimes data can make a real difference—not by confronting power but by routing around it. That’s exactly what it does in my third example, which is about a far more personal question: where does one go for surgery? Gender-affirming surgery in the US operated for most of the 1980s and 1990s largely through a small number of independent private surgeons. This created an information asymmetry, extreme even in comparison to the default power dynamic between a patient and a doctor. Surgeons tended to show off the best-case scenarios, and didn’t necessarily have direct access to patient experiences even if they wanted to. Precisely because of the small number of providers, most people had to travel hundreds or thousands of miles for care (and still do)—meaning they usually returned home as soon as possible, cutting into doctors’ awareness of post-operative experiences. Even with the most honest surgeon, their promises around healing time, cost, and outcome were ultimately a guess, and one that patients had to take at face value. If you were lucky enough to have access to community spaces with people who had received surgery, you might be able to get some anecdotal information about some surgeons, but that’s about it."}
{"prompt":"So, in 1996, a trans woman named Michelle Wallace launched the Post Operative Transsexual Survey (POTS). Hosted on her website, which was part of the very 1990s webrings-and-GeoCities-account network that made up a big portion of the early trans internet, the survey ran for around a year. In that time, it got 164 responses—more than most academic followup studies. And Wallace posted the aggregated results online, for anyone to see and use.","completion":"Unlike surveys by surgeons, which might ask vaguely and abstractly about quality of life, Wallace was positioned to ask more concretely about what concerned prospective patients, having been one herself. She asked obvious-seeming questions that were anything but obvious to academic researchers. Were the nurses caring? How quickly could you go back to work? If you had a question for the surgeon, did they make themselves available? The result was a community resource that people who were thinking about surgery could use to get a sense of what their options were, and make their choice based on what mattered most to them."}
{"prompt":"This guerilla data activism worked because it didn’t directly challenge the formal structures of power. Instead, it routed around it—it worked not against, but athwart. Which brings us back to the question of how data activism and abolitionism relate, and what we can reasonably expect of the former.  Vitally, the routing-around approach to data activism avoids a common tension between activism and abolition, in which activism tacitly reinforces the grounding of our understandings of rights, power, and injustice in data-based evidence, while abolition seeks to undermine it. After all, to argue that you should be taken seriously because of your data is to argue that data should be taken seriously. But a central component of POTS was who Michelle Wallace was addressing, and about what. She wasn’t addressing the state or doctors; she wasn’t seeking to ground claims for recognition in data. Instead, data served to inform people within the community it was about. As a result, one of the main tensions between activism and abolition was, if not avoided, then at least drastically reduced.","completion":"Obviously, intra-community change isn’t enough—there needs to be some form of address outside it. But these stories suggest that, taken in isolation or in the abstract, data itself won’t provide that. Certainly, data is a potential tool and technique in enacting social change. But like any other tool, it comes with costs, and is dependent on broader projects. In the absence of those broader projects, its main strength is in pooling community knowledge, not challenging structural power directly. If the goal is to mount a direct challenge, data activism might be a component of activism writ large. But it will only be effective if paired with the same humdrum, menial, and vital tactics—political campaigning, mass movements, media work—that were the bread and butter of social activism long before capital-d-and-s Data Science came along."}
{"prompt":"In March 2022, tech workers at The New York Times voted in favor of unionizing with the Communication Workers of America, 404 to 88, forming the largest white-collar tech union in the US with collective bargaining rights. The Times Tech Guild represents around 600 employees—software engineers, product managers, designers, data analysts, and others—based in cities throughout the US, on a team that has an entirely hybrid workflow.  Tech workers at the Times are not the only ones who have gone hybrid. Since the pandemic, 58 percent of job holders in the US can now work remotely for some part of their job. And when given the opportunity, 87 percent choose to work remotely, or in a mix of in-person and remote work. Big tech companies, in particular, have embraced hybrid and remote work: Apple allows workers to work remotely two days every week, Twitter allows them to work remotely for as much time as they want (even permanently), and Facebook expects that over half of their workforce will be remote over the next few years.","completion":"How has the rise of remote and hybrid work changed the way tech workers organize? To answer this question, we interviewed twenty-nine labor organizers—including full-time employees, contractors, and gig workers—in the US tech industry. What we found is that the pandemic changed the way organizers think about digital safety.  Digital safety is an important consideration in any organizing campaign, not just those in the tech industry. How do you secure your texts, chats, and emails from the prying eyes of the boss? But as the pandemic upended the world of white-collar office work, and everything shifted online, organizers had to adapt. In a more digitized workplace, the role of digital safety changed. Organizers moved from thinking about digital safety in individual and technical terms towards thinking about it in collective and social terms."}
{"prompt":"Organizing in the “Before” Times Political, grassroots, and union organizing have long prioritized face-to-face conversations, and with good reason: it works. Even in the age of mass phone-banking and Twitter, organizers know that meeting people one-on-one and really talking to them can change their minds and mobilize them for action.  Direct interaction can also be safer. The dangers of organizing a workplace are real: people risk losing their jobs, which means losing income, access to healthcare, and, for some, the right to remain in the country. In person, workers can strike a balance between candor and confidentiality. They might intuitively know when and where to carry out sensitive conversations out of earshot of the boss: at the watercooler, an offsite cafe, a local dive bar, or a colleague’s backyard. Chats can start with casual topics, amidst the regular day-to-day grind, and continue into a deeper conversation about collective action. By meeting regularly in person, coworkers can build the relationships that are pivotal to a successful collective action.  Before the pandemic, organizers in the tech industry applied these insights widely. For example, organizers at Kickstarter used to meet at a colleague’s place after work to discuss strategy for their union campaign and to form closer bonds with their colleagues: “We [would] pile into [our colleague’s] studio around the corner from Kickstarter. This would be a turning point, a critical step toward unionization.” — Alex Kennedy, former Kickstarter union organizer (quoted from Kickstarter United Oral History) In this model, since relationship-building happened in person, digital spaces were reserved for coordinating meetings and collaborating on documents. As a result, organizers tended to see digital safety in technical and individual terms. For instance, they might ask coworkers to avoid using their work devices for organizing conversations and to use an encrypted messaging app such as Signal instead. In many ways, they faced a classic information security problem: If my employer finds out I’m organizing, I could be disciplined. How do I keep that knowledge from my employer?","completion":"Screen Time With the pandemic, this in-person-first model of organizing fell apart. For white-collar tech workers, work—and organizing—went online, blurring the boundaries between the two. Organizers lost the ability to talk to their colleagues in person. It became much more difficult for workers to do outreach or to form relationships.  “[We] didn’t have advice on how to approach remote organizing. Casual conversations became difficult—in the office, you could take a walk, get coffee or lunch. [With remote work,] relationships were less solidified—they were more work-focused and tenuous. People tend to be a bit cagey on work calls.” — Media strategist at a software development firm To make matters worse, as the pandemic normalized remote work, employer surveillance became increasingly common. Without the ability to shoulder-surf or eavesdrop at the water cooler in physical workplaces, bosses started to get concerned about drops in productivity amidst the shift to working from home. So, many employers started using productivity monitoring software—several interviewees mentioned that their employers installed tracking software on their work devices after the pandemic began. While this move was purportedly motivated by productivity concerns, organizers feared that the same software could be used to track union-related conversations."}
{"prompt":"Even something as simple as using Zoom to meet with coworkers became complicated. For instance, if a colleague accidentally joined a union meeting from their work account, they would create a record that could potentially be tracked by management. These challenges forced organizers to go back to the drawing board to rethink their approach. They had to reassess how organizing could happen in a remote world, with no precedent to guide them. And as they did, their views on digital safety changed. The pre-pandemic way of thinking about digital safety was too narrow to address the risks that organizers faced in a remote world.","completion":"Community Management What does it mean to organize “off work platforms” when you can only use work devices for your job? What if the only way to reach out to your coworkers is via chat platforms used at your workplace, or on your employer’s Zoom?  Setting standards and expectations for individual behavior was no longer reasonable. Organizers had to find ways to evade the newly extended reach of employer surveillance. They turned to their fellow tech workers to explain the capabilities that management might have when it came to spying on workers, and quickly learned how to fight back."}
{"prompt":"But the boss wasn’t the only source of risk in a remote workplace. Without being able to meet face-to-face with their coworkers, organizers also struggled to build relationships. Before the pandemic, such relationships had sustained collective action campaigns. With the lack of a shared physical space, many of these faded away.","completion":"“It’s harder to do this over a video call than it is in person, because in person you’re gonna see them in the office again in the real world, and it continues to humanize and endear you… When it’s a video call, it’s more structured and a little less humanized.” — Employee at a marketing firm Online, organizers had to find a way to recreate the offline spaces that held collectives together. Gig workers were pioneers in this space, as they had been an all-remote workforce since long before the pandemic: “[Gig workers were] this remote, atomized workforce that had no shop floor or break room, no true ‘workplace,’ and really no clear, obvious way of connecting with fellow workers. We had to digitally recreate the infrastructure that exists in a traditional workplace, a place where workers could come together to communicate together and express outrage about things and their relationship with their labor, their relationship with their company.”  — Gig worker at an online delivery platform Organizers began creating online spaces for relationship-building on Slack or Discord. Knowhow on community management became essential; for instance, workers who had previous experience moderating large online communities had a major advantage. Codes of conduct, community standards, and other social expectations in these new spaces had to be established and enforced. Certain individuals acted as community moderators, warning colleagues about sharing sensitive details in the chat, as well as working to foster a sense of togetherness."}
{"prompt":"“We have a policy of not mentioning names [in our online organizing spaces]… We’re trying to be impersonal, talk about systems and structures. Individuals are only actors in that.” — Engineer at a software development firm “I saw how important it was to build community in general. The place we can do it is the place we can spend most of our time. Since we don’t have a local community [due to the pandemic,] I wanted to dedicate my time to the one I had to be involved with. I felt more motivated at work, showing up for it, and getting to get to know people in this way as a personal thing.” — Employee at a non-profit organization For organizers, setting the tone for conversations became key to safeguarding the wellbeing of the collective. They tried to strike a balance between allowing people to vent about working conditions while also trying to foster an uplifting, hopeful tone.","completion":"Finding Abundance in Moving Together The rise of remote work forced organizers to broaden their definition of digital safety. While technical considerations and individual behavior still mattered—using the right encryption, promoting the right privacy practices—their focus shifted to a more collective and more social understanding of digital safety. Building trust online required creating spaces where people felt safe together, and creating that feeling required, above all, community management: “It was more about a sense of trust with other people that contributed to a feeling of safety than the platform.” — Employee at a non-profit organization While white-collar tech workers are not working from home as much as they were during the height of the pandemic, the patterns of their professional life have been permanently altered. Remote and hybrid work are here to stay. This means that organizers will have to become adept at orchestrating collective action campaigns within distributed teams that may afford little opportunity for direct interaction. The tactics developed during the pandemic will be critical for this work, as organizers seek to build on successful campaigns at places like The New York Times and Kickstarter to push deeper into the sector. An expanded notion of digital safety, one that emphasizes the collective and the social, will play an important role. To borrow a phrase from one organizer, true safety means finding abundance in moving together."}
{"prompt":"Saturday, February 15, 2003 was an unprecedented day in world history. From sunrise to sunset, an estimated thirty million people in nearly 800 cities across the globe hit the streets in a coordinated effort to stop the US-led war on Iraq. F15, as the anti-war protest became known, remains the largest global demonstration in history.  Like all protests, F15 was orchestrated by a movement. And this movement did something unprecedented for its time: it used the internet to coordinate a coalition of hundreds of popular organizations across the world. In fact, the real mouthpiece of F15 was a grassroots network called Indymedia, composed of around 200 local “independent media centers” (IMCs) that published citizen journalism on the web.  Indymedia had launched three years earlier in Seattle during the protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999. Within a few years, it grew to become a global collection of community-run newsrooms devoted to covering social and political issues from a left-wing perspective. Indymedia maintained a global website at indymedia.org, which aggregated content from the many place-based Indymedia sites that were run by the local IMCs, such as indybay.org, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The project was volunteer-run and committed to anti-corporate journalism. And, prefiguring the explosion of social media, Indymedia emphasized user-generated storytelling, as captured by the slogan: Don’t hate the media, be the media.","completion":"On the day of the F15 protests, the headline on the global Indymedia website read: “Millions March Worldwide to Denounce Bush’s War Plan.” The article listed more than eighty protests worldwide, with links to the associated stories from the local Indymedia sites. Following the initial story, there was a regional roundup, which went into greater depth about the protests in different parts of the world, alongside a collage with over 200 photos from across the globe.  “Indymedia, with reports for all of the biggest demonstrations and many of the smallest, wove hundreds of separate actions into a single story,” wrote New York City Indymedia activists Josh Breitbart and Mike Burke in a piece for Clamor magazine. “As popular uprisings from around the world begin to coordinate their actions, [I]ndymedia is proving to be an essential tool for imagining this new community.” As Breitbart and Burke suggest, F15 would not have been possible without Indymedia. It is not a stretch to say that Indymedia gave form to the global anti-war movement in 2003, just as it gave form to the anti-globalization movement a few years earlier."}
{"prompt":"History has sped up since 2003. In the decades since, the world has witnessed multiple interlocking calamities—from the financial crisis of 2008 and climate change-related disasters to worsening economic inequality, a failed response to Covid-19, and the growing authoritarianism and instability of our flawed democracy. We have also witnessed a powerful organized response to these crises across the world—from the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and the Umbrella Movement, as well as the growing militancy of the US labor movement.","completion":"Yet, in the current conjuncture—with mobilizations proliferating—a visionary, graspable, commonsense alternative to neoliberalism seems out of reach. Why? And why, twenty years ago, was the antiwar movement of 2003 more unified in its opposition, more coordinated and connected in its resistance, and more coherent in its analysis than contemporary movements? A large part of the answer is that movements are no longer reported on, and sustained by, a vibrant grassroots media network like Indymedia. Instead, organizers have given up on building their own media infrastructure and embraced corporate social media platforms. In fact, two of the biggest US movements of the last decade—Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter—are known best by their Twitter hashtags.  This reliance on corporate platforms has transformed movement media strategy. Rather than devoting energy to a collective enterprise, individual movement organizations prioritize “getting their message out,” a strategy governed by social capital, competition, and a political economy of clicks. This strategy may sometimes be necessary to achieve certain short-term ends, but it is deeply detrimental to the long-term project of building a meaningful and shared resistance. While we have seen a great deal of movement activity over the last decade, movements have generally been siloed from one another, internally fragmented, and fleeting. This is a direct outcome of their overreliance on corporate social media platforms.  The stark reality is that the media strategy of our social movements has regressed over the past decades. Indymedia represented a far more effective way to use the internet to advance political struggles. While we can’t simply go backwards, any strategy for building a better media strategy requires learning the lessons of the Indymedia era and understanding what was lost in the transition to corporate social media."}
{"prompt":"Don’t Hate the Media, Be the Media (1994–2005) The roots of Indymedia lay in Chiapas. It was there, in southern Mexico, that a Mayan peasant movement called the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) announced its “dignified rebellion” to the world in 1994. While waging a guerilla war against the Mexican state over land and life, the Zapatistas and their supporters also began experimenting with the internet.  In particular, they utilized email lists called listservs that had been created for the movement against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to publicize their message. Soon, they created their own listservs, which they used to circulate stories of their struggle across communities and borders, gaining global support, and successfully shifting the balance of power away from the Mexican state. In fact, the online activities of the Zapatistas were so successful that the RAND Corporation published a report for the US military entitled “The Zapatista Social Netwar in Mexico” (1998). In the report, the authors warned that the Zapatistas were redefining conflict in the information age and that it could have dire consequences, possibly threatening US dominance.","completion":"Unlike the RAND Corporation, which was concerned with the disruptive effects of “social netwar,” the Zapatistas saw the internet as a new participatory medium that could create linkages across space and struggle, forging a singular front of resistance. The Zapatista strategy was captured by the phrase “one no, many yeses.” This principle—centered on the idea that a diversity of movements and visions of emancipation could be connected into a unified opposition to capitalism—offered a revolutionary way to think about the internet. Movements could attract support and build alliances by telling their stories online.  To awaken others to these radical possibilities, the Zapatistas hosted an ambitious global “encounter” (encuentro) in Chiapas in the summer of 1996. Movement people from across the world attended, and, in their closing statement, Zapatista leaders famously declared: “We will make a network of communication among all of our struggles and resistances… This intercontinental network of alternative communication will be a medium by which distinct resistances communicate with one another.”  Activists and media-makers across North America and Europe began trying to bring this vision to life. In 1997, the Freeing the Media Teach-In was held in New York City, which included a virtual keynote address from Zapatista spokesman Subcommandante Marcos, where he reiterated the call to build a “network of independent media.” Two years later, in 1999, the Grassroots Media Conference was held in Austin, Texas. It became a strategy session for launching Indymedia, which went online later that year with the first IMC in Seattle.  The Seattle IMC included a newspaper, radio station, and a video collective. But the cornerstone of the IMC was an “open-publishing website” where media-makers and activists could post their stories to the website, and see those stories appear in real time. Today, such user-generated content is ubiquitous, but at the time, Indymedia’s use of it was transformative. As Matthew Arnison, an Australian software engineer who played a pivotal role in building the site, explained, “It seemed like we were opening this huge flower, and all this passion and energy and stories were just pouring through because they had been locked for so long.”"}
{"prompt":"In November 1999, the Seattle IMC helped cover and coordinate the protests against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle. During the four days of the meetings, the new IMC website received over 1.5 million hits, outpacing CNN for the same amount of time. The protests put Indymedia on the map. The model captured the imagination of activists and journalists, leading to the rapid development of local IMCs from Seoul to São Paulo and the birth of the global Indymedia network.  Indymedia was at once local and global, online and offline. At the base of the network were the local IMCs in cities like Seattle or Buenos Aires, each with their own website. The local sites sent their newsfeeds directly to national sites like Indymedia US or Indymedia Argentina, which in turn sent their newsfeeds to the global Indymedia website. At each level of the network there were editorial teams. The local editorial teams would choose stories to feature from the user-generated content in their open-publishing feeds, the national editorial teams would choose stories to feature from the local newsfeeds, and the global editorial team would choose stories to feature from the national newsfeeds.  Indymedia also had a presence beyond the web, with print, radio, and video projects. And, importantly, in many parts of the world, local IMCs had physical offices where activists and media-makers came together to make decisions, create media, and build community projects. Within five years of launching in 1999, the Indymedia network claimed over 200 locally based “citizen newsrooms,” publishing news (internet, radio, print, and TV) in thirty languages on six continents.  The people who took part in Indymedia saw themselves as participants in the social movements of the day. Paying homage to the Zapatistas, they referred to themselves as IMCistas. Building on the Zapatista concept of “many yeses,” Indymedia emphasized building connections between different movements and struggles. The media infrastructure would be a connective tissue, linking a plurality of voices, histories, and visions into a global “movement of movements” mobilized against capital.","completion":"Hashtag Revolutionaries (2005–Present) Indymedia peaked around 2005 and then began to decline. The biggest reason was the rise of corporate social media platforms. These platforms also deployed user-generated content and the power of networked communication. Their primary goal was not to connect people for the purpose of political struggle, however, but rather to monetize these connections.  Faced with a well-funded corporate adversary, Indymedia quickly lost ground. In the decade between 2004 to 2014, as Eva Giraud notes, nearly 70 percent of IMCs previously functioning were offline or inactive, with others posting just a handful of posts per day. Regionally, that left IMCs across Africa and Asia shuttered, and the numbers dwindling in Latin America, Europe, Oceania, and North America. In roughly the same period, adult engagement with social media grew from 5 percent to 80 percent in the United States. In 2006, Time magazine declared “You” as its Person of the Year, celebrating the growth and influence of user-generated content on platforms like MySpace and Facebook. In 2011, Time’s person of the year was “The Protestor,” celebrating the seemingly ubiquitous digital activist as an agent of change.  This same period saw the emergence of a cycle of social media-powered protests—often known as the “Twitter revolutions.” This cycle began with the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings in 2009 and 2010. The Arab Spring uprisings, in turn, stoked simmering anti-austerity movements across southern Europe and the Mediterranean. In Spain, a mobilization known as the Indignados occupied the main squares of major cities, proposing radical experiments in direct democracy. This, famously, inspired the assemblies that gave birth to Occupy Wall Street in 2011.  While these movements made use of social media, they often also retained elements of the Indymedia model. The Occupy encampments had their own self-organized media teams, which prioritized grassroots journalism and saw storytelling as a means to deepen people’s political commitments and strengthen their bonds with one another. Social media was important, but not yet hegemonic: it was seen as a bulletin board for announcements of upcoming demonstrations and meetings, as well as requests for support."}
{"prompt":"As such, Occupy acted as a bridge between two movement media paradigms, combining aspects of the Indymedia model with the tactical use of social media. But in subsequent years, as Occupy receded, the last vestiges of the Indymedia legacy would disappear. As social media’s dominance grew, it began to take on an ever greater role in the media strategy of social movements, from Black Lives Matter in 2013 to Standing Rock in 2016, all the way through the 2020 uprising against the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery. The dependence on social media came to be total.","completion":"Superficial Solidarities Social media has obvious advantages for organizers. It can be used to galvanize attention around an issue and scale up a protest quickly. New participants can be inspired to take action as activist-commentators at unprecedented speed and scale, and in the process, generate extensive global solidarity. As Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles argue in #HashtagActivism, social media also gives movements the chance to make important narrative interventions. In some cases, movement use of social media can change the very terms used to frame issues, as with the George Floyd rebellion, which ushered in the wider acceptance of “white supremacy” as part of the conversation surrounding police violence.  But social media also exposes movements to many vulnerabilities. The solidiarities it generates are often superficial: movement use of social media can easily devolve into repetitive messaging in echo chambers without collective gains in narrative power—a change in the stories and values that hold sway in society—or a translation to real-world militancy. In all cases, the logic is determined not by a radical politics of participation and organization, as in the Indymedia model, but by the individual user’s decision to follow, like, comment—in short, pick and choose (within the ruse of algorithmic “choice”) which leaders to listen to and which profiles to amplify. This short-circuits the important but slower work of belonging to—and being responsible to—a movement culture. The small doses of interpersonal connection that social media platforms are built to deliver stand in for collective gains of social power.  Corporate social media platforms are governed by a capitalist logic that exists to make profit, while rewiring our emotional and cognitive dependencies toward that end. Social movements may recruit people through social media, but without real relationship-building, without a sense of shared responsibility, the commitments it mobilizes are weak. Moreover, the information that activists share on social media flows within a broader stream of information about anything and everything, which risks distraction, trivialization, and co-optation. On social media, movements must deal with the constant threat of having their agenda and messaging hijacked by corporate interests, politicians, funding foundations, and mainstream media—all of which was on full display during the George Floyd rebellion."}
{"prompt":"A further challenge is that the attention economy of the corporate platforms is inherently skewed toward promoting hateful and divisive politics. As Safiya Umoja Noble shows in Algorithms of Oppression, the algorithms that organize these platforms reflect and reproduce gender and racial oppression. They also amplify oppression by creating fertile ground for oppressive forces. To take one example, Jack Z. Bratich’s On Microfascism documents how contemporary far-right mobilizations are often preceded by the networked “microfascism” of loner men who find themselves through the “manosphere,” a collection of online spaces that encourages the performance of misogyny and racial hatred. These dynamics are foundational to the success of far-right movements in the US and internationally.","completion":"For the left, this means that social media is not simply neutral terrain to be traversed. Rather, it has a structural bias toward hyperindividualism, demagoguery, and reactionary politics. Creating a resilient movement culture that is sustained by strong personal relationships and a spirit of collective action is difficult to do in such an environment.  Most crucially, when movements become dependent on corporate social media platforms, the capacity to build self-determined media power of their own wanes. And without that power, movements that arise quickly often evaporate just as quickly. This was particularly pronounced in the George Floyd rebellion, which initially put police abolition under a mainstream spotlight, only to be swiftly reduced to reformist talking points. Without their own media infrastructure, movements are at the mercy of corporate media systems of one kind or another, which strongly favor the maintenance of existing hierarchies.  Back to Black If one thing is clear from the last thirty years, it’s that media plays an important role in how movements are made. Social media has offered movements some advantages, but on balance, the disadvantages are far greater. It has impeded the ability for organizers to build lasting relationships between different people and between different struggles. As a result, we see a more fragmented and fragile social movement landscape than the one inhabited by the anti-globalization and anti-war movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s. The different levels of coherence reflect, in large part, the different media paradigms. In the Indymedia era, organizers built their own media infrastructure and created a set of organizational structures to govern it. In the social media era, by contrast, the strategy shifted from “be the media” to “get the message out as widely as possible” on corporate platforms.  Today, social media’s dominance in movement communication and coordination means that we lack the ability to build collective self-determination around narrative, news, and analysis. There are indeed important activist media projects such as Unicorn Riot, but they are few and far between, and their capacity is limited by the lack of movement infrastructure. To build a stronger Left, we need to reimagine our media strategy. In particular, we need to learn from the legacy of Indymedia, and recreate an independent media network that can scale from the local to the national to the global while cohering multiple fronts of struggle into a unified opposition."}
{"prompt":"But we can’t simply abandon social media. It is too dominant, too ubiquitous, and, occasionally, too useful. For instance, its use in connecting friends and families in a time of mass migration and refugee resettlement, driven by climate catastrophe and war, remains an essential lifeline. Rather, we should aim to loosen our dependencies on the corporate platforms while also rebuilding our autonomy by developing collectively managed media infrastructures—ones that can sustain a new movement of movements and resurrect the old Zapatista dream of an “intercontinental network of alternative communication.” It’s no longer a matter of choice, but necessity.","completion":"Retros: Intro There is a lot of labor that goes into founding and running a magazine, and few if any guides to help one understand what choices matter and how to consider them. Many times through our growing pains as a DIY publishing project, we talked about the idea of having the equivalent of a “developer blog” to share what we learned, as we evolved from only sort of knowing what we were doing to finally figuring a few things out. We never got around to it, but better to do it retrospectively than not at all."}
{"prompt":"In agile software development, there is a practice of “retros”—structured meetings where the team reflects on what went well, what didn’t go so well, and what to change next time around. On the occasion of the magazine transitioning from one era to the next, members of the Logic founding team took some time to talk through our accomplishments and our failures, and to reflect on some of the key themes that have guided Logic as an aesthetic and political project. We also invited some friends of the project to reminisce along with us. We tried not to be sentimental but did not always succeed.","completion":"In the spring of 2016, I had the privilege of sitting in on early meetings with a number of Logic’s co-founders, Ben, Christa, Jim, and Moira, as they talked through their ambitions for the magazine and tinkered with a mission statement. Like many small publications, Logic came together over takeout containers in various living rooms and at rickety tables in dive bars—there was no budget, no office, no staff, no immediately obvious readership, even though we all suspected, correctly, that the magazine would find its people. This was pre-election, and pre-“techlash”—most mainstream publications were only just beginning to depart from triumphalist and uncritical narratives about Silicon Valley. The founders wanted Logic to be a bridge of sorts: between industry and media, between software engineers and academics. They wanted it to be critical, to interrogate the industry’s history, mores, and ideologies—to say nothing of its relationship to rising authoritarianism and deepening inequality—without losing sight of technology’s humanistic and political potential, its magic. Locally, they wanted to build community; what small magazine doesn’t? This seemed classically idealistic until the steamy, oversubscribed launch party in early 2017, where it immediately became clear that there were a lot of tech workers in San Francisco seeking more rigorous, critical engagement with their industry than the industry would ever offer. As a member of this group, I found the camaraderie cathartic and exhilarating. It is probably an indictment of the broader culture that it also felt so rare."}
{"prompt":"There is more space in the culture these days for thoughtful writing and discourse on technology and Silicon Valley. This is unequivocally a good thing, even when certain varieties of tech criticism inevitably overshoot and miss the mark. What looked like a niche in early 2016 has grown into a beat of sorts: podcasts and newsletters abound. The boundaries of the conversation are stretching. Small institutions survive by staying nimble, and it’s a smart moment to try something new. Logic fulfilled its early mission to build bridges; it seems only appropriate to hand the magazine over to a second generation of editors, who will explore new angles, new passages, new collaborators. I can’t wait to see what they’ll build, and where they’ll go.","completion":"Jim Fingal (JF): For most people, their experience of editing is self-editing: you write a draft of an essay for school and then you spend some time moving the words around until you’re done. But it seems like the process of working with a magazine editor to develop a piece is a much more structured, multiphase, complex activity. I’d be curious to hear more about what that process looks like—and what’s special about how we’ve done it at Logic? Ben Tarnoff (BT): A large part of the purpose of the Logic project has been to bring different constituencies together: to connect tech workers with organizers with academics. But, in order to do so, you need to create connective tissue. And one of the ways to create connective tissue is by developing an editorial process that will make these different groups comprehensible to one another.  Logic, at its best, is a magazine for people who don’t usually read, written by people who don’t usually write. That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but a useful one. We’re not based in New York. We don’t inhabit a clearly defined literary or intellectual scene. Our readership, at least our imagined readership, is composed largely of tech workers (defined in the broadest sense) and organizers, activists, people doing different kinds of political work. This isn’t the typical little magazine audience. And our contributors are mostly specialists of one kind or another—academics or technologists—which means they don’t usually have much experience writing for a general audience, or sometimes even writing at all.  As a result, our editorial process is particularly labor-intensive. That’s not to say that experienced writers don’t need editing, too. They do, but they’re familiar with the conventions, with the rhythms of an editorial relationship. When you’re working with someone who hasn’t really been edited before, you’re teaching them how to be edited in addition to editing them.  JF: One way to make different groups of people comprehensible to one another is to homogenize them—to make them all sound alike. I don’t think that’s what our project is, though. We’re not trying to make an academic sound like a tech worker or vice-versa, but we do want to bring the conversation together into a common register. How do we do that?"}
{"prompt":"BT: We don’t want to homogenize, but we do want to find a consistent tone for the magazine. That’s a struggle, because our contributors come from a range of backgrounds and a range of intellectual traditions. And while we aspire to make our prose as approachable as possible, some pieces are inevitably going to be a bit more advanced than others. There are tech workers who are only beginning to ask the very first questions about the kind of work they do and how their workplaces are organized. Conversely, there are those who have spent years working to develop a sophisticated analysis of those issues. You have to find a way to create a magazine that will be inviting and engaging to those different kinds of readers. That’s hard to do, and I’m not sure we always succeed.","completion":"Moira Weigel (MW): Bringing together these different kinds of expertise doesn’t necessarily imply a hierarchy of expertise. I often fall back on the metaphor of the party, of convening people in space. You want to create an atmosphere that’s coherent but not all the same.  JF: There are fascinating things to be gleaned from people who come from different domains and with different levels of experience with writing. But I imagine that means there are different approaches that the editorial team has to take, depending on the background of the contributor and where they are in their journeys as writers. What are those different approaches? How do you adapt your style of editing to the individual writer? Alex Blasdel (AB): Regardless of the writer, I tend to lean on the genre conventions of the sort of magazine writing that I’ve been trained in. Those conventions exist for good reason."}
{"prompt":"JF: What are those conventions? AB: Maybe the most important one is that the opening section of a piece should do three things. The first is to draw readers in—maybe the opening has some of the piece’s most interesting material or it’s the scene that opens a narrative or it illustrates in miniature the problem that the rest of the piece is going to address. There are infinite ways of pulling readers in. One of our pieces began with an evocative description of the course of the Colorado River. But you need to find a way to dramatize the stakes right off the bat.  The second thing the opening section needs to do is to situate the piece within a broader context and make the stakes explicit. You’ve tried to draw readers in, now you need to tell them why they should go beyond being interested to really care about the subject of the piece. I thought Brian Justie did an excellent job on this in his piece from Issue 13: “Distribution,” by arguing for the significance of the struggles between labor and automation at the US Postal Service, which employs half a million workers and has the third-largest information technology infrastructure in the world.","completion":"Then the third thing an opening section should do is to make some sort of claim for the significance of the piece itself—yes, the topic is important, but why should people read this particular article about it? What is our piece going to offer in the way of insight that other articles can’t? Often, it tells the reader, “I’m going to help you think about this topic in a new and worthwhile way.” Veena Dubal’s piece on the history of gig work in Issue 10: Security is a masterclass in how to do this."}
{"prompt":"Once you’ve done those three things—sparked a reader’s interest, established the stakes of the topic, and made an argument for why the piece itself is worth reading—the rest of the piece basically writes itself. (Not really, lol.) JF: Ben, you have often talked about “the stakes” as a critical consideration for which pieces to commission in the first place. So it’s not just something you try to develop in the editing, but also has to be present in some form in the pitch.  BT: Yes, defining the stakes is crucial because it’s a way to define what we mean by writing that is addressed to a non-specialist. If you’re a specialist, you are used to addressing an audience that shares your interest in a subject. You cannot, in the pages of our magazine, assume that your reader shares your interest in a subject. You have to tell the reader why they should care. And that is a convention of the type of magazine writing that Alex is describing.","completion":"I want to underscore something else that was implicit in what Alex said, which is the importance of structure. He and I share the belief that structure is the alpha and omega of writing, and it’s the one thing that nearly all writers need help with, even very experienced writers.  Thinking is not linear. We don’t think in a straight line. But writing is linear. It’s a sequence of words, a sequence of sentences, a sequence of paragraphs, a sequence of pages. So you have to find a way to wrangle a non-linear thought process into the linear sequences of text. That’s a difficult process, and it’s probably what we spend most of our time working on with our contributors.  MW: As an academic who struggles with structure, I think it’s partly because we’re trained to think of our work as adding our little flower to the field that is our area of expertise. Whereas with Logic pieces, the point is to hold your reader’s hand and run across the field."}
{"prompt":"When you’re writing for a non-specialist audience, and you can’t presume either knowledge of or investment in your topic, you need to create the momentum to take someone on a journey with you. The stakes don’t have to be life or death. But you have to create movement, flow. And that is ultimately an effect of the structure.","completion":"Coach, Cheerleader, Psychiatrist Xiaowei Wang (XW): Part of our audience is tech folks. And one of the genres of computer science paper that they might be used to reading is, “Here’s the problem, and here’s the answer that’s going to solve the problem.” As you’ve been putting together the editorial tone of Logic, how do you react to the idea that every piece has to present a solution to a problem?  BT: I remember having a conversation with Meredith Whittaker some years ago in which she pointed out this tendency among tech people to demand that any diagnosis of a problem be accompanied by a solution. So she’d raise concerns about the social effects of a particular ML system and they’d say, “Well, what’s the solution?” And that was a way of shutting down the conversation. Because the solution they wanted was a straightforward technical one—a tweak to the algorithm, not some kind of complicated political project."}
{"prompt":"We’ve published a range of pieces, and some do point toward possible solutions. But, as editors, I hope we’ve discouraged our writers from claiming any easy victories. If you’re going to propose a solution, we want it to feel earned. We want it to feel specified.  AB: The solution is often the least interesting part. One of the maxims that I use is that you have to start where your readers are. And our readers don’t even necessarily know what the problem is. Why are the genealogies of machine learning datasets a problem, for example? What are the dimensions of the problem? Why have other solutions fallen short? We want as fine-grained a mapping of the terrain as possible.  JF: I know we’ve sometimes discussed the tendency of certain pieces to seek a solution where there isn’t an easy one, a piece that can be really illuminating in its analysis of a problem, before ending with a paragraph that basically concludes: “The solution is that we have to fundamentally overhaul everything about our society, economics, and culture.” It’s like: sure, maybe that is a solution, but it’s an unsatisfying way to end a piece.","completion":"MW: It’s true, as Ben says, that we don’t occupy a traditional literary scene. But we do have a certain literary streak to us, and that’s expressed in our shared desire to create a space for writing about technology that doesn’t demand simple solutions, whether it’s swapping algorithm A for algorithm B or, you know, full communism."}
{"prompt":"I’m thinking of Alyssa Battistoni’s piece for us on Biosphere 2, or Miriam Posner’s piece for us on supply chain software. Those pieces have a normative and critical dimension, but they’re mostly trying to describe how a system works.  AB: There’s always an argument you’re making implicitly along the way, just by virtue of the facts that you marshal and the way that you organize them. All of those choices are motivated. And you want to be in charge, as a writer and an editor, of the effects those choices have on the reader. Even a piece that, on the surface, may seem purely descriptive can make a very serious argument about the way the world is ordered. Every piece is an opinion piece to a certain extent.","completion":"JF: As editors, how do you motivate writers to make that journey? I sometimes feel like you have to play the role of coach, cheerleader, and psychiatrist all at the same time. I know that you spent a lot of time having conversations with people even before they had something to pitch—just to hear about what they were working on, and plant the seeds for future pieces."}
{"prompt":"MW: Especially at the beginning, you just have to get people excited about an idea. I often feel like a therapist. I’ll tell people, “Just talk to me.” And then after twenty or thirty minutes, I’ll reflect back to them the themes that I’ve heard. Then I might ask them to write a paragraph that captures the idea, and captures what excites them about the idea. That paragraph serves as a touchstone they can come back to later on, to help them understand why they wanted to write the piece.","completion":"Especially early on, when we were willing Logic into existence, we would have meetings as a team to figure out the topics we thought were interesting or important, and go through our mental databases of people who were working on those topics. Then we would reach out to them to see if they’d be interested in writing.  And that was a whole process. Because you’d go to Person X and say, “You wrote about this thing, we’re interested in that thing.” And they’d say, “Oh, I don’t want to write exactly about that. But there’s this other adjacent thing.” So you’d talk about that. And you’d get into a collaboration. For me, that was always the most exciting part of the magazine.  BT: The editorial relationship is a collaborative one in the sense that you are helping to guide someone’s writing process and engaging in varying degrees of co-writing with them. But it’s also a managerial relationship. You’re kind of like the person’s boss.  Now, that dynamic is somewhat diminished in our case because we frankly can’t pay people enough for it to be that important for their livelihood. Nevertheless, there is a power dynamic present: you’re giving them deadlines, you’re giving them direction. And you’re asking them to do a lot of work without much in the way of monetary reward. Which means you need to find a way to motivate them."}
{"prompt":"We’ve been talking about the importance of stakes. But you don’t just have to define the stakes of a piece for the reader. You also have to define the stakes for a writer. Why is the writer writing this piece? What is the source of their commitment? It’s our responsibility as editors to help them answer that question, and then to use that answer to propel them through what is often a fairly laborious writing and editing process.  AB: I don’t think I have the best bedside manner as an editor. And having three children has made it even worse. My ability to tolerate situations in which people don’t do what I ask them to do has really gone downhill.  Because of the dynamics that Ben is talking about, I try to be very upfront about how much work it’s going to be. I try to explain that writing is not just something the writer does, but an act of co-creation between the writer and the editor. We’re working together to make the piece as good as possible and together we own the finished product. The writer owns it. The editor owns it. The magazine owns it.","completion":"But, you know, neither the writer nor the editor knows in advance what the finished product will look like. It’s only through the difficult process of writing and editing that you figure out what the piece is supposed to be about. It might not be until the third or fourth draft that you’re like, “Oh, I see it.” Scar Tissue JF: What’s different about what we publish in Logic from other magazines? What makes a piece of writing feel like it’s Logic-y? AB: When deciding upon pieces we try to ask ourselves certain questions. Where’s our contribution as a magazine and what’s most interesting for our readers? Where is the new thinking? I think a good Logic piece also revels in the technical details. I loved pushing writers to really explain how the technologies that we’re surrounded by actually work to shape the world. Rodrigo Ochigame’s piece “The Informatics of the Oppressed,” which Ben edited, was a wonderful example of this."}
{"prompt":"MW: I think we wanted to see a certain commitment to precision and specificity, along with some ethical and political orientation, but not in a dogmatic or party-line sort of way. AB: I’d be interested to have a longer conversation sometime about the politics of the magazine. What were the politics of the magazine, and how were they expressed in the pieces? XW: Ben and I had a conversation with some folks from Reboot, and he summarized Logic’s politics as, “We’re creating a big tent, with generally leftist politics under the tent.” MW: We were trying to capture a piece of the world. I always think of our anonymous interview with an Amazon engineer. All these people on Twitter were like, “This guy’s a jerk. He’s just mouthing off.” And I was like, “Yeah, obviously he’s mouthing off! That’s the point.”  Our anonymous interviews exemplified a central goal of Logic, which was to capture very specific and textured voices from the world of technology, and not necessarily in the service of an argument.","completion":"AB: Of course, the best writing has always been the editorial notes in the front of the book.  MW: That’s not true.  AB: It always blows me away that you’re able to come up with these beautiful and moving introductions to the issue within the space of forty-eight hours. MW: I do think the editorial note that has to go down in history is the one I wrote on my phone with Ben’s help for Issue 9: “Nature” before getting my C-section with our first kid. I was lying there in the paper dress, and Ben and I were like, “Shit, we better finish this before this baby arrives.”  AB: Something else I want to touch on is the question of what made this whole endeavor worthwhile for me personally. I respect the magazine and love the work, but a big part of what made it enjoyable was discussing pieces with Ben. We had a lot of fun working together."}
{"prompt":"XW: Alex, how do you think your experience with Logic will stick with you? How will it shape your future editing? AB: Oh, to be honest, I’m never going to edit anyone ever again.  XW: Oh my God, did we scar you that badly? AB: No, it’s just—time now feels very short, for lots of reasons, mostly having to do with kids and being lazy. I just want to focus on my own writing, for what it’s worth.  As Ben pointed out in his postscript to the editorial note in Issue 15: “Beacons,” there wasn’t anything like Logic when you guys started it. And now there’s a lot more valuable tech critique out there. So I’m excited about handing over this project to you and Khadijah, so you can renew and reshape it. Not everyone gets to walk away from a magazine and have it take on a wonderful new life.","completion":"At a time when the default assumption was that a new publishing project would start out online, Logic chose a print-first mindset from the start. This wasn’t the easiest choice: a lot of labor goes into making a 8.5”x5.5” perfect-bound black and white book printed on 60 lb offset paper. And that labor is often purposefully invisible, in order to minimize distractions and maximize the pleasure of the reading experience.  Logic’s creative director Xiaowei Wang caught up with Jim Fingal and Christa Hartsock, two founding members of the magazine who have done the most to define the physical form of the magazine, and how it gets to our readers. They talked about how Logic as a print artifact materialized from an idea discussed over drinks and takeout dinners, why we chose to make a print artifact in the first place, and the surprises and learnings encountered along the way."}
{"prompt":"Starting out Xiaowei Wang (XW): Let’s talk about how Logic got started. How did we kick off the Agile Publishing Revolution? Jim Fingal (JF): [Laughs] The “Agile Publishing Revolution” was a joke early on, because a lot of us had worked in software before, and connected to the agile mindset of shipping the smallest thing that was functional, and iterating from there. That was very much the approach that we took–we figured out a lot as we went along.  Christa Hartsock (CH): When we were starting up the magazine, we talked a lot about the DIY ethos, zine culture, and the idea that anyone should be able to start a publication. There are similar ideas to agile in that, but also just the fundamental sense that you can have an idea, you can get together with your friends, and you can put something physical into the world, and then go from there.  XW: I think one of the first times I met Christa was at a zine skillshare at the Democracy Center in Cambridge.  CH: Because many of us were working on tech, there are pieces of agile that speak to the same idea, and it was funny for us to talk about “agile publishing”. But DIY was the underlying current that actually informed how we got together–Jim and I met doing college radio, and that’s how we know Ben too.  JF: Ben and I bonded over a mutual love for hardcore music in the early 2000s.  CH: That also related to our idea of Logic as a political project, of how we thought about money and how we structured paying people. We sort of said early on that we didn’t individually intend on making a profit from the project, and as a core team don’t intend to rely on it to make money.","completion":"JF: Not that that’s ultimately a recipe for a sustainable institution, but it reduced the barrier to starting out. Tech mag in meatspace XW: I guess that’s a good way of pivoting to the question of Logic as a physical object and the process of putting together that first issue. We were all working in tech, spending our time in the realm of the virtual, and then decided to make a physical magazine.  CH: One of the questions that we got a lot early on was–you’re starting a magazine in 2016 about technology, why is it a print publication, why not just have it online?  At the very beginning, I remember there was a brief moment where we considered not having a website at all–that it would just be a thing that would purely exist in physical form, and you’d have to come upon it in physical space to engage with it. We didn’t go that route, but we decided that the physicality of the book was really important.  What does it mean to have a physical magazine? It means you can give it to people. It has a weight to it, it lasts and we weren’t going to be worried about it falling off the front page of an algorithmic feed. You could steal it, you could reverse shoplift it into the lobbies of tech companies.  We admired other tech-focused print zines, like the earlier Processed World and more recent Recompiler."}
{"prompt":"But also, a physical object connects you to a physical place and a physical community. To me, that was something that was really compelling. We got started in San Francisco. If we had a physical book, it was a way to make friends with other people who were in the same physical space, and also be a part of the city’s literary history, whether that is having your book be in City Lights, or giving an excuse to talk shop with other small presses. Those are connections that I think wouldn’t have been made if we just produced digital work.","completion":"Also, we weren’t that interested in the pace that came along with online publishing.  JF: We all had day jobs and didn’t have unlimited hours to work on this project. When you are doing it in your spare time, putting together a print object three times a year can actually fit into your schedule. Depending on what you’re doing for it, there’s a lot of spiky work, but you also get lots of breaks in between it. The relentless pace of online publishing–the expectation of commissioning and editing and publishing new content every week–did not align with where we as individuals were at, in terms of the time that we had to commit to the project.  CH: From the beginning we always wanted to make sure we paid contributors. Whether or not we’ve been able to pay enough is another thing, but when we thought about online publishing, it was pretty clear that the internet had not figured out how to monetize content outside of selling ads, and we didn’t want to sell ads, or have a paywall. So creating this physical object was the way that we were able to at least sustain the finances that we had–people are willing to pay for physical texts much more readily than digital ones.  JF: Print is an enduring technology that has the wondrous property that you can turn ideas into a product that people are willing to pay money for. That is not necessarily the case with online formats.  XW: I think another thing we slowly found out is that there are some contexts in which print is actually more accessible than online. We often think of online as the ultimate accessibility–it’s the internet, everyone can go online! But that’s actually not true. By virtue of being a print book, we are accessible to people who don’t use the internet very much–we can be in places like prison libraries as well."}
{"prompt":"JF: I think the final thing I’ll say on the “why print” topic is–a number of us starting the magazine just had an affinity for the world of small magazines and literary publishing. Many of us had worked with and were attracted to the feel of something like the Paris Review, or Granta, or early McSweeneys–that kind of softcover, perfect bound, largely black and white book. We based a lot of the physical specs of Logic on Animal Shelter by Semiotex(t)e, which we really liked from a design perspective. It was intentionally a different approach from the big, bright, design-forward, in-your-face aesthetic of something like Wired.","completion":"Luckily for us, it was also massively less expensive to print a black and white book versus a full color glossy magazine format. Bootstrapping Everything XW: Can you talk a bit about our process of choosing a printer, and laying out the book?  JF: We use InDesign to lay out the magazine. I can’t remember where the original layouts and the template pages came from. I eventually got more involved in operationalizing things but wasn’t that involved with the original design."}
{"prompt":"CH: I think it was Xiaowei and I collaborating–I remember a lot of back and forth, one person making significant additions to the book, and then pulling those changes into templates and trying to make it more standardized going forward. We had a lot of learnings along the way. Tech Against Trump, which came out between our first and second issues, was incredibly painful because of the footnotes–our original footnote design was really beautiful, but it required manually moving text boxes around. After that, we decided we needed to change the designs so that they’re easier to lay out and figure out some efficiencies that would take out some of the manual labor.  XW: When I talk to folks who are doing print publications now they often use Figma or Canva. It’s wild that just in seven years it’s changed so much.","completion":"JF: Another thing you need to worry about when having a print object is making sure there’s a barcode for retailers to scan. The unique identifier for the barcode is called an ISBN, and is specific to the format—you’ll need one for print, one for digital. You can buy the ISBNs online, which we did at first one-by-one even though they’re cheaper in bulk because we had a very limited budget. Then, we just used a free online barcode generator to slap it on the cover."}
{"prompt":"CH: On top of laying things out, we had to decide how to actually print the books. There’s a cost continuum in printing from print on demand, to digital printing, to offset printing. Print on demand is much more expensive on a per unit basis, and there’s not much discount really as you print more copies.  Then there is digital printing, which costs less than print on demand, and doesn’t have a large setup cost, but there is a limit to how low the cost per unit gets when printing in bulk.  Offset printing has a larger up-front cost, but then after that your cost per unit is really low. There’s an inflection point in terms of cost, which I think for us was around 1,000 copies, where below that it makes sense to print digital due to the lower setup costs, and above it makes sense to do offset because of the lower price per unit.","completion":"JF: We decided early on to just not do print on demand. I got advice from our friend Gabe Durham who runs Boss Fight Books. He used a lot of print on demand services early on, then eventually moved on to do larger print runs, both because printing individual books is expensive and the quality of print on demand was pretty variable.  We decided to look for a printer that we could do small runs with. I ended up reaching out to folks at presses whose books I admired–Timeless Infinite Light, Song Cave, Justin Carder who ran Wolfman at the time. They were very super helpful and generous with their recommendations. A few of them recommended McNaughton and Gunn, which is a printer in Michigan, and ended up going with them, initially doing digital printing runs. We were pretty happy with the quality, especially the “luxury matte finish” covers–a lot of people commented on the silky hand-feel of the books."}
{"prompt":"For the first issue, we printed 500 copies. It was around $1,350 at the time for the print run, and then another almost $300 to freight to our house. So order of magnitude, it was a little more than $3 a book to print, in addition to the commissioning fees, packaging materials, and postage to mail it out. We ended up setting the cover price as $15. That decision was pretty unscientific, but was similar to how much other small magazines cost, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation told us it would allow us to cover our costs, pay writers, and at least not lose money.  CH: When we initially talked about starting Logic, we really weren’t sure how many issues to print in that first run? If you’re going from zero to nothing, it’s like: who knows, are five or a thousand people going to buy it? There was no real way of knowing. So early on we stood up a website with just our manifesto and a sign-up box for our mailing list. Sign ups for that mailing list gave us a sense of how many people were interested and we used that in part to figure out how many issues to print.","completion":"JF: We also then set up a BigCartel shop, which was a very 2000s emo move.  CH: Having a web store and directly selling issues to our readers early on was pretty important. When you sell stuff from your own web store, you keep all of the money from the sales minus your costs. Whereas if you go through distributors or to bookstores, you usually make at most half the cover price of each book that you sell. Other smaller publishers like Verso, Haymarket, and the like do really significant sales in their online stores, which I assume is partly how they can do such amazing seasonal discounts. The fact that we were selling directly online in the beginning allowed us to build a financial base that would have been hard if we’d started only in bookstores, because the profit margin is just so much lower even if you’re selling to them directly and not going through a distributor to place in their stores."}
{"prompt":"JF: Yeah, with physical magazine distribution there’s usually a 50-50 split with the distributor, and then it’s expected that they’ll sell about 50% of those, meaning you usually expect to make 25% of cover price at best as the producer. It’s standard for it to be a quasi-consignment set up with the distributor where they don’t pay for stock upfront. They are charged only for what is sold, then whatever is not sold is just destroyed, they’re not sent back to you. You’re paid only when the magazine comes off the shelf. So for us, publishing three times a year, it’s nearly a year after we finish an issue that we get paid.","completion":"CH: Things are even more complicated for magazines, since the previous issue basically deadstock once the next issue arrives. They don’t have the shelf life of books in the eyes of distributors. Anne Trubek who runs Belt Publishing writes a lot about the economics of small publishers, including working with distributors and the challenges of unknowable delayed income and remainder practices. It was totally eye opening for me.  JF: I think we always just assumed physical distribution would mostly be a way of advertising the magazine. We didn’t even really try it for our first issue–our initial distribution was just me carrying a box of books over to Peter Maravelis at City Lights.  CH: We love bookstores and we love the community and depth of expertise that they cultivate. City Lights has always been a huge supporter. We’ve done amazing events at Green Apple in the Park. But for us, it was clear selling in bookstores alone wasn’t a way to financially sustain the magazine."}
{"prompt":"Sending things out into the world XW: So what happened after someone placed an order on the web store? I remember when we started, we were fulfilling every order by hand.  JF: Yep–we had a system called Pulley for digital fulfillment, but shipping books involved a lot of manual exporting of data and spreadsheet wrangling, packing, shipping.  CH: Fulfilling things by hand is obviously a very manual process. You get the issues shipped by pallet to you, you have to unload them, you have to store them, you have to bring them up stairs, you have to pack them up, then you have to bring them back downstairs and take them to the Post Office.","completion":"Some of the stuff that was surprisingly annoying early on was things like formatting shipping labels. We went through different methods of formatting and printing the labels. I think Jim had a special Google sheet where he had a formula that would format all the addresses that then we could copy and paste into an InDesign document.  For some reason, I was like, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to write a Ruby app to generate printing labels. And so I wrote something that took a CSV, and because of the time I was doing a bunch of stuff with PDFs for work, I made a Ruby app that made a web server that used CSS to print a sheet of labels based on the CSV.  JF: I think we used that like once or twice.  CH: It was terrible to use it, so we never used it again.  As a rule, at Logic, we’ve avoided building technology, because as technologists, we know how much work it is to maintain it.  Initially whenever we would receive an issue, we had shipping parties with friends, which was partially out of necessity and partially just a fun activity. When we were in LA, we did a few Boss Fight shipping parties with Gabe. I remember sitting in his living room, just chatting while stuffing envelopes and putting labels on them. And we were like, wasn’t that fun? And so for us, we ended up inviting friends over, like you and Ian, I remember Adrian Daub, Wendy Liu, and Jim’s sister Jen coming over at some point and helping out with the assembly line."}
{"prompt":"JF: There’s a real pleasure in getting people together, feeding them pizza, and packing bubble envelopes. And always debating the most “efficient” way to do it. CH: Another thing that was surprisingly annoying for us was printing postage. At the very beginning we would take the packages to the post office at the old People’s Temple site in the Fillmore, which was terrible for our purposes. There was no parking outside. We had to temporarily park in a loading zone, and took incredibly heavy Ikea bags full of envelopes in, and then we printed the postage on site using the postage machine since we didn’t know how to do it at home.","completion":"JF: We could only print like ten stamps at a time. There was a limit of how many stamps you could print at once, and total dollar limit of per card swipe, and we had to keep retyping the postage amount for Media Mail every time. That was truly a huge pain in the ass. CH: At some point multiple of our cards got marked for fraud while we were using the terminal and we couldn’t use them anymore. At that point it was like, well, shit, this is terrible and needs to change. We figured out how to pre-print postage from home, which was glorious, and started dropping them off at the post office in the Haight, which was smaller but easier to get to.  As we started to scale–the people who worked at the post office were just so lovely, but also when they saw us coming in with boxes and boxes of envelopes, they were just like, please, no. They would open up the back and have us dump them directly into the mail carts. Then they were just like: please, arrange a pickup, don’t bring it here. We can’t fit it all on the truck.  JF: We did try many times to order a pickup, and it never worked out."}
{"prompt":"CH: Yeah, the truck just never showed up.  JF: We did a good job creating a veneer of a professionally run magazine when, in fact, for most of Logic’s history most of fulfillment has been me fielding messages in our gmail, and then hand-packing every order. To make sure people understand it’s basically one guy in charge of shipping their magazine, I’m typically extremely informal in email responses. I eventually wrote on the web store something to the effect of: we ship at an extremely casual rate, please allow three weeks for processing and then another couple of weeks for shipping.","completion":"CH: We always hoped that one of the things that people understood about Logic was that it was just a group of friends doing this, and we tried to make sure that was a part of the public face.  On social media and in our email newsletters we tried to give a human face to the operation, tweeting out pictures of the packing parties to remind people that we’re not Amazon. You’re not going to get this in a day or two because we have all of these stacks of envelopes in our apartment and there is a lot of human labor that goes into the production of something like this. I think that’s something that resonated with people, and wish that grace we received for all people trying to compete with the expectations of next-day delivery."}
{"prompt":"And now we party CH: After having our packing parties–then we had an actual party. I always loved our issue launch parties because Logic as a source of physical community is so important and special for me. Launch parties were a way for us to do that. When we knew that we had a print date, we would reach out to different bookstores, different community spaces, and just try to figure out what kind of launch event we could do. Sometimes it would be readings–authors who are in the area or who’d be visiting reading from their pieces at the event. Sometimes we would try to host panels.","completion":"Events were an opportunity for us to get books into the hands of people, but I think more importantly, it was an opportunity for people to hear directly from the folks creating the magazine, to have a connection with the contributors and with panelists and people doing work and organizing in the world. And also for them to feel as if they were a part of a community–I think so much of reading can be an isolating experience, but with events you could meet people who had similar interests to you.  Having events in a neutral space was really important. I remember we had folks offer to connect us to event spaces tech offices like GitHub–which are really nice spaces, but also they require you to sign an NDA and to register your name and all that. That wasn’t something we were interested in, the idea that people would have to do that and be surveilled just didn’t feel right, in addition to there being conflicts of interest with tech companies.  Events were a great opportunity for us to help build community and also join and bridge existing communities, whether that be City Lights or the Eric Quezada Center or B4BEL4B. I think about all the amazing organizations that invited us in, and it just makes me feel warm and fuzzy. I miss it. Online events are really great, especially for accessibility and access, but there is a special feeling of being in a sweaty room with a bunch of different people that’s hard to replicate."}
{"prompt":"JF: The first launch party was an extremely pre-pandemic packed sweaty room, in the poetry room at City Lights.  CH: It’s such a struggle, though–an anxiety and frustration I always had was how hard it always was to find accessible venues. I love City Lights and am so grateful for their support, but every time we ended up having an event in the Poetry room, all I thought about was that the only way you could get up there was through the stairs. There are very few venues in the city that are handicap-accessible, near transit, inexpensive or free for hosting, all ages, and don’t require signup to be in the space.","completion":"XW: It did feel really good that, for all that tech had been gobbling up the Bay Area, we could find spaces we wanted to support, and could play a part in bringing people in to buy books at City Lights. I feel like post-pandemic, spaces like B4BEL4B are winding down and many folks are getting squeezed out. To be part of all of those spaces for even a brief moment in time feels pretty nourishing.  CH: I feel that too. I hope it helped the people who attended to feel like they were a part of that community or legacy, to make a connection to these spaces that helped them feel responsible or accountable to them, if that makes sense."}
{"prompt":"We always had really great conversations with people after events. I always remember talking to Ellen Ullman at Vesuvio after a City Lights event about the times when City Lights almost died and just barely pulled through. And about how there is this historical continuum of similar projects–meeting with Chris Carlson from Processed World and talking to him about the group of folks who started that magazine in the early eighties.  If we had just started Logic as a website, it would be really hard for me to feel connected to that history.  JF: I loved those late night Vesuvio conversations with the authors or whoever wanted to hang out and chat. Those were so affirming of the project. I remember Alexis Madrigal coming to an early event and being really excited about Logic, and then another time getting a beer with Fred Turner and how supportive he was of the project–which was fun because we saw his work as a precursor to ours. Those nights at Vesuvio or the Little Shamrock after Green Apple events really helped create a deeper connections with people.","completion":"XW: Don’t forget the time we went to the Ruby Room after our B4BEL4B event and had a very East Bay night. CH: That was great, I forgot about that. I don’t know, this is making me actually really sad, because I’ve missed that through the pandemic–that’s one of the things that’s been hardest about Logic for me over the last few years. Without the in-person events, I’ve struggled with it as a project because it’s so much effort for everyone, and there is something missing to not have that personal connection.  JF: Part of the story of this phase of the magazine winding down is that the core group spread out across the country, and we stopped having in-person events because of the pandemic. Early on we would have meetings over dinner at our apartment, three hour or more sessions where we would eat Mama Ji’s and have really expansive conversations and then get loopy by the end–but at some point we were no longer living in the same place and just had been doing it long enough that we got efficient enough to handle everything asynchronously, so more or less stopped meeting. Without the project providing a direct connection with readers, and then even with each other, it started to feel less like fun and more like work."}
{"prompt":"CH: I’m really happy about the work you’re doing with Logic School, Xiaowei, and how you’ve managed to create and foster a community remotely–I think that’s incredibly difficult and special. Community enables people to be like–you know what? I’m gonna make different life decisions, I’m going to go deeper on this thing I’ve been feeling for a long time.","completion":"For Logic as a magazine, I like to think the in-person events did that; Logic School has been like a really beautiful example of how it doesn’t require being in person to do it, but it’s only because you’ve been so intentional with that space. It’s hard to do.  Making stuff better XW: So the magazine launched, we had a party, we found readers. And then over time we evolved how we did things–starting out is always an exciting time, but I think there are interesting things to talk about for how the different facets of the operations got better over time. Where do you think we should start with that? JF: The initial way we designed the book was not the most efficient format for producing it going forward. One of the things that we did was to streamline the process by improving how we were using our existing tools, things like turning whatever we could into a paragraph style or a character style in InDesign, and relentlessly standardizing the way the pages were laid out.  CH: One other thing that happened is that Celine Nguyen joined our team and shaped up our layouts and typography, in addition to designing some of the covers and interstitials. Process-wise, when she started to contribute we really had to think more about how to have one or two people working on the same file. You treat it differently if you’re using it as a team, versus one person just sort of pushing around your footnotes forever.  JF: With a lot of producing a print object, there’s just so many tiny fiddly things that go into proofreading and layouts, and if you get any of them wrong, it looks egregiously silly or unprofessional. So over time I also made these fifty-item runbooks of things to do and check for every issue–you know, making sure the numbers align in the table of contents, making sure the issue number on the spine is right, that all of the ellipses in the book are the ellipses character and not three dots, things like that.  XW: Beyond laying out the magazine–could you talk about how our practices evolved with printing and getting the book out there into the world?"}
{"prompt":"JF: We kept working and scaling with McNaughton and Gunn for some time. As the subscribers went up we started printing more copies per issue and eventually switched over from digital to offset printing. We improved a lot of little things one at a time and they added up–we got a stamps.com account, we started shipping issues directly to our garage rather than my office.","completion":"But, we hit a point where we were dealing with too many books to do everything by hand, and felt it wasn’t going to work if we kept on that trajectory. Similar to when we were getting started, we ended up reaching out to other folks involved in magazines to get advice. I think Ben and Moira connected us to Mark Krotov from N+1, and we had a really helpful conversation with Flynn Murray who was at Dissent at the time. We described our setup and both of them had a very similar recommendation which was: you want the printer to directly mail things to people, instead of freighting it to your house and paying for shipping and then packing it back up and paying for postage to send it back in the mail. I didn’t know that was an option! They both recommended Sheridan Press for that."}
{"prompt":"It was super fun for the first few years having the pizza parties to pack up issues, but it got old after a while. It’s kind of like when you move a bunch in your 20s and you have a crew of friends who all help each other get their couches up and down stairs. But then like, the third or fourth time the same people are moving the same count, it’s time to start thinking about hiring movers.","completion":"CH: We also just ran into space constraints. I remember that last round of distribution we did, when we loaded up all the stuff in the car, we were 100% full. We have a station wagon with a lot of storage, and literally could not fit any more books in it. It was going to start being a two trip affair if we wanted to take things to the post office, and they were not thrilled about us in the first place. We also had a small garage that barely could fit the car in that old San Francisco apartment building way, and it was filling up with all of the back issues. All those were great ways to start out, that ended up being incredibly inefficient as we scaled."}
{"prompt":"Through talking with Flynn and Mark we learned that the printers get commercial bulk discounts on sending mail that were better than the media mail rates we could get on our own. Part of that discount was because it required an address validation offered by USPS that reduced the amount of returned mail, which was a recurring problem for us.  As an added bonus, Sheridan could handle international orders, which we had always found prohibitively expensive and time consuming to fulfill. So there were a lot of things in there that made it make sense to switch up how we did things.","completion":"JF: There was one particularly dark issue where you were traveling, and I had to send out the whole issue by myself, packing and addressing and stamping every book. It was like a three day affair. XW: Oh, man, I’m so glad that you guys don’t have to deal with that anymore.  JF: It was fun when people said that they were a Logic subscriber to be able to say: yeah, I recognize your name, I shipped you your issue from my dining room. But I’m glad that phase is over.  XW: You mentioned that we didn’t have a proper way to have subscriptions at the beginning. How did our handling of subscriptions change over time? JF: When we started out our subscriptions were just one-off items in our webstore that were tracked by one big google sheet that we managed ourselves. Not having a way to let people automatically resubscribe was a big challenge for us that first year, and we ended up moving to software called Chargebee. That ended up working well and handled a lot of the problems that I didn’t even know we’d encounter–notifying people multiple times that their subscriptions were renewing, sending out bulk emails, handling what happened if people’s cards expired, what happened if there were chargebacks or people wanted refunds."}
{"prompt":"CH: Once we were solid and in a good place with subscribers, we decided that we wanted to get into more bookstores besides just the one that we could drop off books to personally. We got advice on what our options were, and then got connected with Small Changes, a small distributor that operates primarily on the West Coast that works with many small magazines like ours. We started working with them to get into bookstores–they’re a small distributor and their reach is geographically limited so that’s also why we don’t have distribution yet across the US or globally.","completion":"JF: It’s still a special feeling to see our books pop up in places we didn’t directly coordinate with, like seeing it in Left Bank Books when visiting Seattle, or seeing it at Point Reyes Books or Dog Eared. CH: I do love having the distributor, but there is always something special about the personal touch where we’d hear about people seeing our book at places like Powerhouse Books in New York, and it was because someone associated with Logic took it there by hand."}
{"prompt":"JF: I think Xiaowei you dropped off some at Wolfman. I don’t know if we ever figured out invoicing them, but that was fine too.  XW: It’s true. I would just keep on giving them to Justin.  JF: Even with the unfavorable economics of distribution for a small magazine, it’s a good way to just raise awareness about the magazine. I still think there are many more people in the world who would be interested in subscribing to the magazine, but they have to know that we exist first.  CH: People buying things in newsstands are great, but also all of those things we mentioned make it very hard economically to run a business off of it. That’s why often you get things like ads; other small magazines we talked to have foundations and do fundraising as a way to stay afloat.","completion":"JF: We were too lazy to do either when we started out.  I think we started out with a 501c3 and then eventually became a full nonprofit, knowing that at some point we’d want to be able to get institutional backing. But like with many of these things, we had a limited budget of night and weekend hours to spend on it and decided we would rather spend the time working on the magazine than raising money to scale it."}
{"prompt":"But, as we are handing off Logic and making it more sustainable, that’s changing. We do want it to be able to meaningfully support the people working on it and related projects going forward, which is why we’re so excited about the work you have been doing connecting to funders and institutions bringing it to the next level.","completion":"In an industry that measures impact through KPIs (key performance indicators), it’s hard to quantify, or even start to explain, what the effects of creating a print magazine are. When we first launched Logic in early 2017, we weren’t sure who would read it. But over the years, we gradually found an audience, and managed to both irritate and inspire some number of readers."}
{"prompt":"We’ve always been particularly interested in how our work was being received by younger people. How do they engage with Logic? Do they find it useful? To help explore these questions, and to reflect on the story of Logic thus far, Ben Tarnoff and Xiaowei Wang from Logic sat down with Jasmine Sun, Jessica Dai, and Emily Liu from Reboot. Reboot is a community for young technologists that is active on many fronts, from hosting events to running an email newsletter to publishing a print magazine. Logic has tried to do its part to advance the ruthless criticism of all that exists; we turned to our friends at Reboot to help put ourselves under the microscope. If Logic did have to come up with KPIs, we could do worse than measuring our success by the amount of criticism we get from the next generation.","completion":"Ben Tarnoff (BT): As we transition to Logic’s next chapter, we wanted to create space in this issue to reflect on the project so far: what we’ve achieved, where we’ve failed, how and why we did what we did. And we thought of you all at Reboot as ideal conversation partners for that reflection, because our projects feel like such kindred spirits. We’ve tried to make similar interventions, I think. But with important differences. And one of those differences is generational: we’re a bit older, you’re a bit younger."}
{"prompt":"Xiaowei Wang (XW): We are middle-aged. BT: Yes. I have not fully accepted that. But Moira has been telling me that every day. So yeah, we’re middle-aged. We don’t know what’s going on. We’re cheugy. Jasmine Sun (JS): We’re very excited to be doing this. We have all been Logic fangirls from a while back. Logic was a substantial part of the inspiration for Reboot.","completion":"Jessica Dai (JD): I first found out about Logic in 2018. I was an undergrad at Brown and one of my professors, Wendy Chun, told me I might like Logic. So I got on the train and came up to Cambridge for the issue four launch party. That event was pivotal for Reboot existing in the way that it does now. I was in college spending my days on CS problem sets, but I felt like something was missing. And I realized that the type of work that Logic produced could fill that gap for me."}
{"prompt":"BT: I’m so glad to hear that. Events were a big part of the Logic project from the beginning. We wanted to bring people from different backgrounds together not only in the pages of the magazine but also in physical space. In particular, the constituencies we had in mind were tech workers, scholars and researchers, and organizers and others doing political work. Out of that mix, we wanted to cohere a new public. You don’t create a little magazine for an audience—you create your audience through the magazine. Events always felt like the most satisfying way to do that. For me, some of the life went out of the project when we slowed down our pace of events and then stopped altogether. Something was lost.","completion":"JS: I very distinctly remember Jessica’s messages from when she went to the Cambridge event. And when she told me about it, I was like, “This is so cool. How come no one told us about Logic? How come our friends at school don’t know about it? How come other CS students and young tech workers aren’t reading it?” Emily Liu (EL): At the time, I was in college in Durham, and I was feeling pretty frustrated about the state of “tech ethics” discourse on campus. So I went to Twitter to find people who shared my frustration, and that’s where I first met Jasmine."}
{"prompt":"XW: When I was in college, there was no “tech ethics” discourse at all. It was such a different landscape. So I’m curious if you could tell us more about how that discourse is developing in CS departments, and how Reboot relates to it. EL: My school had a CS ethics course that wasn’t mandatory for the major, but it did fulfill a writing requirement, so CS majors often took it for that reason. I remember sitting in the lecture hall and the professor was talking about the COMPAS recidivism algorithm—one of the most canonical “tech ethics” examples—and people had never heard of it before. It kind of shocked me. I was like, “You’re about to graduate and enter the workforce?” For me, Reboot felt like a way to fill the gaps that were left by my college education.","completion":"JD: I had the opposite problem. When I was a junior, Brown CS implemented an intensive ethics program (now called Socially Responsible Computing) where they embedded ethics content into almost every single course. So we talked about all of the canonical examples—predictive policing, dark patterns in UI, you name it."}
{"prompt":"I was one of the TAs who helped run the program in the first year, and I ended up writing a whole diatribe about its limitations. My problem was that the program structure meant that it was hard to think systematically—never thinking about the why. Why does DoorDash steal tips? That’s a question that can’t be answered within the boundaries of any CS department.","completion":"JS: When you take a class as part of your CS curriculum, you see it as giving you units of knowledge that you consume. It’s just another thing you learn—you get a grade and move on. With Reboot, we’re trying to do something different. We want to create an identity around being a technologist who is interested in political transformation, both within and beyond the tech industry. That’s what Reboot as a community is trying to do. So when people make friends with each other in our Discord or in person, that’s an important part of the project. It’s not just about consuming content. It’s about becoming a different kind of person by joining a community where we’re all figuring it out together."}
{"prompt":"Doing Hard Things Together XW: You mentioned that Reboot is above all a community, but it’s also a publishing project. You recently started a print magazine, Kernel. We know from experience how much blood, sweat, and tears it takes to run a magazine. And you have so many other initiatives going on. So why do a print publication? EL: I think there are a couple of reasons. First, we want writing that is timeless. We want writing that is not tied to a particular trend or something that fades in a week or two. We want to be able to open an issue of Kernel three years from now and have the ideas there still ring true. There’s also something to the weightiness of a physical artifact. This year’s annual issue of Kernel is 164 pages, and it feels, literally, like a hefty piece of intellectual work. I think the physical aspect also helps as a signal.","completion":"JS: A lot of Kernel’s writers are already members of the Reboot community. They’re people who have attended or hosted an event, or are active in our Discord. So the magazine is also a way of bringing people together by working on a big, ambitious project that creates an artifact that everyone can feel proud of."}
{"prompt":"One of the books that has been really influential for my thinking is Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci. She makes the point that, in the social media era, it becomes too easy to gather people together. You no longer have to hand out fliers, or hold all these meetings to work out the logistics. But those slower methods are valuable, because they help build trust. They make people feel personally invested in a project. And that’s ultimately what enables a group to stay together in the long term.","completion":"Running Kernel requires a deep collaboration over both the lofty intellectual ideas that we’re trying to put into the magazine and all the nitty-gritty that’s required to actually make the magazine. Which printer should we use? How do we get the right kind of paper? Doing all that, and doing it together, strengthens our sense of community and brings new people into the community. So, yes, Kernel is hard. But that’s kind of the point."}
{"prompt":"BT: I love the emphasis on community. We hoped to create some kind of community with Logic, especially through events, but we were always primarily a print magazine. At times, we wondered whether we could do more to actively convene people—we toyed with the idea of running reading groups, like Jacobin did some years ago. One of the reasons we didn’t was because it felt like those conversations were already happening without our help, particularly in the first years of the magazine.","completion":"In early 2017, when we published our first issue, we were all living in San Francisco, in the midst of a wave of politicization within the white-collar tech workforce in response to Trump’s victory. Our world was filled with organizing meetings, with people pouring themselves into different kinds of political work. So we could simply insert Logic into those spaces—we didn’t need to create those spaces from scratch."}
{"prompt":"Over time, the political momentum diminished. Moira and I moved away from San Francisco, had kids, Covid happened, and we stopped doing events. The project began to feel less rooted. I started to have less of a sense of where Logic fit in, what kind of conversations it was creating. And that bothered me. Because if Logic is just a bundle of paper out in the world, that’s not enough for me.","completion":"JS: Did that feeling contribute to the decision to pivot to new leadership? How did you all arrive at that decision? BT: I came up in the punk rock scene. And in that scene, sometimes you see a band that just shouldn’t be playing music anymore. You gotta know when to call it. Little magazines are similar. Little magazines are creatures of a particular moment in time. They draw their strength from that moment. And when that moment passes, they become zombies. If you try to cheat death, if you try to live past the context that gave you life, you become a zombie. I won’t name any names, but I can think of a few projects that fit that description."}
{"prompt":"Logic came together at a particular moment in time. And, over the years, the moment changed—the broader political context, the broader context of writing about technology. Eventually, I started to feel like we had outlived our usefulness. Earlier this year, I brought that feeling to the core Logic team, and everyone broadly agreed. Our initial thought was to shut down the magazine. Then Khadijah and Xiaowei came up with a proposal to continue the magazine by reinventing it. And we all loved the idea.","completion":"XW: Honestly, a big issue is just time. A lot of Logic pieces are edited by Ben while he’s not watching his children. Not that I want to say that Ben’s a negligent father. BT: But it’s true. And we should get that on record. XW: There’s a lot of free labor involved. And that leads to burnout. Finding writers, growing writers—that stuff takes an enormous amount of time. So does building and running all of the invisible infrastructure around maintaining editorial calendars, lining up copyeditors, and so on. And everyone’s doing it on top of the job that pays the bills. So, at a certain point, you either have to find a bunch of money or come to terms with the fact that it can’t last forever."}
{"prompt":"JS: That makes sense. But I’m also curious about the politics of the transition. It’s one thing to say the team is burned out, so we need to raise funding to pay people more fairly. But it also seems like, at least from my reading of “Logic(s): The Next Chapter,” that there is an ideological shift at work. Xiaowei, you and Khadijah write about wanting to focus on queer, black, and Asian identities, to bring in perspectives outside of the tech industry, and to engage with international issues. Is that in response to a new political moment? And how does that relate to the previous iteration of Logic? XW: We’re in a moment where there’s a lot of critical tech discourse that talks about the poor impacted people in a super patronizing way. Then you have groups like Allied Media Conference and the Detroit Community Technology Project that have a very different perspective, which is that people outside of the tech industry, people from marginalized backgrounds, actually have a lot of insights to bring to the discourse and are building new technologies. So part of our hope with the next chapter of Logic is to build community with that in mind, and shine a light on those who are already doing that work. And that can take different forms: as long as I’ve been part of Logic, it’s always felt like a place where multiple political threads could coexist.","completion":"BT: Xiaowei touches on an important continuity between the two eras of Logic, which is the emphasis on the agency, and indeed the wisdom, of people who are affected by technology. That is, not seeing them as objects or victims, but rather as agents, as experts, as subjects of their own liberation and of everybody’s liberation."}
{"prompt":"Now, that emphasis can accommodate a variety of ideological strains. As Xiaowei said, Logic has always been somewhat polyvalent politically. I think my own political orientation is different from that of Xiaowei and Khadijah. And I know our publisher Jim has a perspective that’s different from mine. But, over the years, we’ve all managed to cohabitate and create something that feels not only complementary but more than the sum of its parts. We’ve also made space for contributors who come from a range of positions, from center-left reformist liberal types to anarchists. Broadly, I’d say our big tent is anti-capitalism, or at the very least anti-neoliberalism, but within that, there’s quite a lot of room for disagreement.","completion":"The Oedipal Stuff BT: If you don’t mind, I’d like to get to the meat. What did we do wrong? We’re looking for the Oedipal stuff. XW: I know. BT: Right? Just kill the father already. XW: Yeah, pretend that y’all are on TikTok and making a video about Logic. Go in. JD: For the record, I am not on TikTok."}
{"prompt":"JS: I’m not sure I’d frame it as a critique of Logic, but one difference between your project and ours is that Reboot’s tent is a bit bigger and a bit more industry-friendly. We want to be palatable to your median CS student or young software engineer who might, like, vote Democrat, but not really engage with critique or theory. A lot of our subscribers are tech workers who would not call themselves tech workers. The Reboot newsletter is the most political thing they read.","completion":"So what does it take to politicize, or even begin to engage, that kind of person? Many of our readers are starting from a few steps back. XW: Whenever I’ve seen Jasmine describe Reboot in person, she says, “It’s like Logic but, you know, less academic.” BT: Wow. XW: And I always wonder, what does “academic” mean? BT: I’m glad you smuggled in the spice at the end of the conversation. I was worried we wouldn’t get there."}
{"prompt":"Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into how Logic can remain approachable to a wide range of readers. We try to produce prose that is readable. But the reality is that not every piece is for every reader. Each issue should have at least some pieces that are accessible to the type of reader who is not conversant with the different intellectual traditions that inform the magazine—the median CS student, say. Those will be pieces that don’t assume any prior knowledge of a subject, and don’t use technical language.","completion":"We want to create those entry points. But not every piece can be like that, because it’s a quite constrained mode of writing: if you have to spell everything out, if you can’t, truly can’t, assume any prior knowledge, then you can’t go into very much depth. So we also want to create space for people who are doing more advanced work and writing for a more advanced reader. It’s a balance and, honestly, a struggle."}
{"prompt":"As for what it would mean to call Logic “academic”: as Xiaowei suggests, it’s a word that is used in so many different ways. One way is literal: “academic” as in academia. It’s true that many of our contributors have been academics. It’s sort of inevitable, given the fact that academics typically have more time to develop subject matter expertise, and more time to write, than anyone else. Still, it’s not a pattern that I feel particularly proud of. The lazy version of Logic is the para-academic journal—that’s what happens when we’re not working hard enough. We have published many wonderful pieces by academics. But when an issue is mostly composed of academic contributors, then it’s a sign that we’re not doing enough to discover and develop the kind of voices that ultimately differentiate our project.","completion":"People can also use the term “academic” to refer to technical language. Sometimes, as I said, such language is unavoidable. You wouldn’t expect a physicist or a car mechanic to describe the behavior of some complex system without using specialized terms; the same goes for those who write social commentary and critique. All you can do as an editor is to make sure it’s earned—that difficult language reflects a genuine conceptual difficulty—and that the prose is as legible as possible to nonspecialists."}
{"prompt":"JD: Something else I wonder about is, What happens when you publish social commentary and critique that is true but not necessarily actionable? What does the reader do out in the world after they’ve read the piece? That’s something we’ve thought about a lot while running the newsletter and Kernel. EL: When we were soliciting pitches for Kernel, we said, you don’t need to be techno-optimistic, it’s okay if you feel negatively about tech—but we do want your writing to leave readers with some sense of agency, so that they feel they can actually do something about whatever you’re writing about. We don’t want our readers to feel like, “The world is so fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it.” The theme for the first issue of Kernel was, “Where do we go from here?” And the theme for our upcoming issue is “How do we get there?” Those are the questions we’re trying to answer. What are the people, tools, and ideas that can lead us to a better future? BT: In organizing, it’s a great sin to agitate someone without providing a channel through which to convert their agitation into action. So you shouldn’t approach your coworker and get into a conversation about how much you both hate your terrible sexist boss if you’re just going to walk away afterward. You should be getting them to sign a union card, or join the organizing committee, or something. A good organizer never stimulates righteous anger without providing a direction for it to become politically constructive.","completion":"But I think the work we do is distinct, because neither Reboot nor Logic are organizing projects. They’re intellectual projects, cultural projects, community building projects. So our obligations are different. I should also say that my views on this have evolved over the years. When we started Logic in early 2017, I had more of a taste for polemical writing that pointed toward a particular solution. Over time, I’ve become less interested in reading, writing, and editing that sort of thing, and more interested in residing in the contradictions and the ambiguities and the uncertainties and the difficulties. My basic political commitments haven’t changed. But these days I’m more content to see where the lines of inquiry lead. I don’t want to know the destination in advance."}
{"prompt":"XW: I disagree—I think both Reboot and Logic are organizing projects. There’s many different types of organizing. And, at its heart, organizing is about community building. If you’re trying to organize your workplace, you’re trying to build trust with your coworkers—that’s building community, right? And that’s what you’re doing at Reboot. Also, different kinds of organizing inform each other. I know there are people who started organizing their workplace because they read an article in Logic.","completion":"BT: I think this was an excellent struggle session. Though there wasn’t as much struggle as I had hoped. XW: We want criticism. We’re lucky that you all have criticism, because that’s how projects and movements grow, through dialogue of this kind. So thank you."}