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.

Response: 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.	Network in Palantir. Source: Palantir Technologies; diagram by David Hallangen.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.

Response: 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.