Prompt: And I thought that deserved a respectful sort of attention. We don’t typically think of women, especially women of color, as having that kind of agency. We don’t talk about women of color creating their own online spaces, and hacking technology to make it work for us—even though we do it all the time.

Response: Before, you were talking about how certain subjects of conversation might make your students a target of online trolls. Are there ways that your students have hacked platforms like Twitter or Tumblr to create a safe space for their conversations? Yeah, it’s tough and an ongoing issue. I’m currently building a master’s program in digital sociology, and one of the first things I did was put the curriculum online. And immediately I was like, “Oh, no, that’s not gonna work.” In my class I say words like “racism” eighty times a day, and in grad school you forget that this does not typically happen in polite conversation. In my world, it’s nothing for me to say something is sexist and racist. But in the regular world, these are hot-button issues. I can’t have my students grappling directly with these topics in public, because they are attached to the institution, which makes them much easier to doxx. We’re a public institution, so all you need is a username and you can reverse engineer who they are.


Prompt: We’ve thought a lot about what to do about this. Some of the ideas have come from the students themselves. We previously had a “real name” policy, and we changed it to let students use aliases. That provided a bit of a buffer. We also shifted to no longer conducting the tougher discussions in public. Now the public space is more about the students interacting with a lecture or talking with an expert. We hope that gives them more of a buffer, because any attack will generally be directed at the professor as opposed to the student. It’s my job to be there to take the heat for them.

Response: Do the students use these strategies in other parts of their online lives? These are kids who grew up with nanny cams, GPS on their phones—they are so intimately aware, and sometimes scarily comfortable with, how much they’re being surveilled. They are deeply aware of the fact that they are always being watched—which is so interesting to me. And they’ve developed all kinds of hacks to protect certain parts of their privacy.


Prompt: They have the social media profiles that their parents know about, and then they have what they call their real or “backstage” accounts. Once you get to know them, they’ll say things like, “Oh, the first time I gave you my professional Twitter account. Do you want my real Twitter account now?” “Oh, you want me to use my real Instagram, or my ‘Gram-gram’?” They do all of that without thinking. For the class, our challenge was being really deliberate about saying, “No, we want you to keep your personal social media space. But let’s create this professional avatar for you to use on social media when you’re in class”—and we know those are different things.

Response: It has caused us to rethink everything. I’m older than they are, and for me, my professional account is my account. I don’t have split accounts, and I find that most people in my age group are the same way. So I’m learning from them as much as vice versa. The younger students know this stuff naturally and intuitively.


Prompt: Have you seen doxxing and trolling increase over time, or become more frequent as certain changes in the platforms happen? Or has it been pretty constant? There are peaks and valleys. In 2010, when you said something stupid or somebody was shaming you online, there would be a huge storm, with a pretty obvious tail. The first hour was the worst, you would peak at hour four, and then it would start to trail off. By the third or fourth day, you knew could come back to your account.

Response: What has changed is not only the architecture and design of the platform, but the impact of highly financed outrage machinery. That’s the thing we didn’t have ten years ago—we didn’t have right-wing sites like Infowars. That’s changed the scale and the life course of the attacks. Now something can happen to you on Tuesday, and it looks like it dies out by Thursday, so you think you can get back to your regular social media use. Then one of these outrage machines—either algorithmically driven, or a network of people who trawl for this kind of stuff—revisits your content two weeks later, and you’re right back in the cycle again. It starts to feel never-ending, because there’s no natural conclusion to a conflict. I think that’s why so many people are retreating from these platforms.


Prompt: The Rise of the Code School In Lower Ed, you discuss the current landscape of technology education. In my experience, people typically don’t think of coding bootcamps as for-profit colleges, even if they recognize them as for-profit institutions. How do these camps fit into the world of for-profit education, and into the economy more broadly? In my book, I talk about the “Wall Street era” of for-profit college expansion that began in the mid-1990s. Well, that’s also when the current coding bootcamp moment began, because of Y2K.

Response: The Y2K crisis started heating up around 1997. There was this widespread coding error related to calendar data that people feared would break computer systems in 2000—so you needed a mass army of workers to go out and fix it. The question was: who was going to reprogram all of these systems? So you saw an explosion of short-term training schools for A+ certificates, an entry-level IT certification, or the C++ programming language. In fact, many of those schools were the precursors for the growth of for-profit colleges.


Prompt: Today’s coding bootcamps are effectively the exact same thing: they are the short-term training solution that gets created when a quick, unpredictable demand for workers arises in this one sector of the economy. Colleges aren’t set up to do on-demand short-term training. Community colleges are, theoretically, but they need more lead time to develop a curriculum.

Response: So it’s come full circle twenty years later. Bootcamps and for-profit colleges come from the same era, and serve the same purpose. And the challenge for them is the same challenge they faced in the 1990s. There’s a very small pool of academically well-prepared, financially well to-do students who can afford to pay for this training and who can benefit from it. If you want to expand beyond that very small pool of people, you only have a couple of directions you can go in. You can raise the price to offer better instruction—which is what students will need if they’re not entering the school already academically well-prepared. But if you do that, you gotta figure out a way for them to get a student loan to pay for it.


Prompt: If bootcamps don’t solve those problems, they can’t survive. We’ve seen that with the recent closure of a major bootcamp company, Dev Bootcamp. They said, “We never figured out our business model.” Well, yeah: your business model is broken because people don’t have money. You can’t solve that problem unless you get into the federal student aid system—and if you do that, you’re just a hop, skip, and a jump away from being the University of Phoenix.

Response: What about technical colleges that offer technology degrees? What sorts of things to they teach?  What do they purport to prepare you for?  What do those careers look like? There’s a lot of variation depending on where you are. What you’ll mostly find is that those programs are extremely well-tailored for entry-level jobs in the tech sector—although not the tech sector of the popular imagination. They’re not thinking Google—they’re thinking the Department of Defense, or the local healthcare system.


Prompt: But when you go to places where there’s not a tech labor market in the area, which is probably true for the majority of for-profit colleges—based in mid-size and small cities without close proximity to federal or state government—they’re offering technology degrees to prepare people for jobs in the local mid-tier service sector. The curriculum is usually basic applied troubleshooting—first-line customer service, the people who provide routine technical support for a website or something.

Response: That we are calling both of those a “technology degree” is actually part of the problem. Because if I am in the small-to-mid-size town, I have little reason to know that the degree is vastly different from what other people think of as “technology.” That’s why technology degrees do not translate very well across the labor market. Employers can’t tell what it does, because there is so much variation.


Prompt: In my personal experience working in a technical college, what we were calling a “technical degree” was really more about fixing technology—applied, small-scale electrical engineering.  And that fell under the umbrella of “technology.” So a technology degree can mean anything from fixing radios to using programming languages. The word “technology” has lost its meaning.

Response: What is the relationship between coding bootcamps and these technical degrees? And what’s the difference in audience between these two types of programs? The difference is about status. If you’ve got a little bit more status—not necessarily money, but you were better prepared in K-12, or you have better family resources, or you live in a larger urban area—you are probably more attracted to a bootcamp than you are to the University of Phoenix. Whether you end up going to a bootcamp or the University of Phoenix is probably about who you are and where you come from.


Prompt: In many places, a bootcamp is still seen as having a bit more prestige. But if people don’t know anybody in the tech sector, then they go to what’s available. And nobody can beat the advertising and name recognition of the for-profit colleges. So the differences are mostly about how much status people are bringing to the problem—and that affects how are they going to get trained for the tech labor market.

Response: The tech industry has problems recruiting and retaining women and people of color. One of the things that bootcamps have done is brought a more diverse set of people through the door. Do you feel that these for-profit coding bootcamps could actually help alleviate inequality—or are they deepening it? What I suspect is happening is the same thing that we see happen in traditional higher education at elite universities. Schools like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have historically had diversity problems. To get better, they cherry-pick the best students from minority groups, because they have the prestige to do so.


Prompt: To diversify, a bootcamp like General Assembly probably does something similar. Because bootcamps have a bit more prestige than some other on-demand training program, they can skim off the top and take the best students from underrepresented groups. Some people can look at that as an achievement. But as a sociologist, my question is not about what’s going to happen to the top 2 percent of people. I tend to worry about the bulk of the people in the middle: the 80 percent. And so if bootcamps are able to skim the cream of the crop off of the top to try and solve the diversity problem, that’s only really solving the diversity problem for those individuals. It’s not solving it for groups of people who are still trapped in this unequal system.

Response: It’s not that I think these programs are bad. It’s great for the individual—just like I think it’s great for the black kids every year who get into Harvard. But usually if one kid makes it, a hundred didn’t. Learning to Code Tell us a bit about your background, and how you became a developer. Three months ago I was released from prison. I served seventeen years for murder. A lot of it had to do with drugs and alcohol for me—drug addiction, drug dealing, and just a messed-up mindset, really. When I got convicted, I made a decision to get clean and sober, and try to do everything in my power to turn my life around.


Prompt: I went back to school, and was able to earn my associate degree in prison. Then, two and a half years ago, they started a coding program inside San Quentin. I started learning front-end web development: HTML, CSS, JavaScript. The first track led into another one, where we started learning Node.js, WordPress, React, and some more advanced stuff.

Response: I fell in love with it. I felt like it really fit me, and that it was something I could see myself doing after prison. I felt really lucky to get that opportunity while I was inside. Were you sent to San Quentin originally, or did you move there? I spent the last ten years of my incarceration there. When you first get incarcerated and you’re young and you have a lot of time left in your sentence, you usually go to higher-security institutions. A lot more violence, a lot more lockdowns. There’s less programs, and more time in the cell. If you stay out of trouble, then you can go to lower-security institutions that have more educational opportunities, more self-help classes, things like that.


Prompt: San Quentin was a real blessing, because out of the thirty-four state prisons in California, it’s the one with the most programs and the most outside volunteers that come in. So it was a good place to keep learning and grow as a person. What were some of the other activities you were involved in at San Quentin, besides The Last Mile? There’s a tennis team at San Quentin, believe it or not. That was the first prison I was at that had a tennis court, and I quickly became addicted to that.

Response: Did you play doubles or singles? It was mainly doubles, but singles depending on how many people showed up. There was only one court, so you had to win to stay on the court. The winners stay on the court, and the losers go to the end of the line, so it really paid to win. A big part of my sobriety has been health and fitness.


Prompt: What was your experience with technology like before you got into prison? Before prison, I think the biggest thing going was Motorola flip phones and America Online. That was where it cut off for me in 2000. Computers inside prison are almost taboo. They don’t let guys on computers. You don’t have access to them. So, until The Last Mile brought the coding program inside, I wasn’t on computers. And as long as I was in prison, I never had access to mobile phones or Facebook. You know, I saw that stuff on TV or read about it on magazines, but I didn’t get my first interaction until I got out just a few months ago.

Response: I’m assuming that The Last Mile gave you guys access to computers, but not internet. Could you describe the setup? No internet at all. They had a computer lab that we went into, four days a week, Monday through Thursday, from 6:30 in the morning until 2:30 in the afternoon. It was work, but it was also learning. If most of the guys had a choice between hanging out in the yard and the computer lab, they would much rather be in the lab.


Prompt: Without internet, all we had were textbooks, but we could bring them back to the cell. If you were thinking about how to solve a computer problem, you had to write it all out by hand—which I think was a great exercise, figuring stuff out without the computer. I usually had a computer book with me everywhere I went.

Response: In prison, it seems like everywhere you go, there’s a line where you’re waiting for something. If you go to medical, for example, you’re waiting. So it was a great chance to read and study, and use that time wisely. When you were in the computer lab four days a week, would the instructor be teaching for most of that time? What was the structure? I was in the first class. They partnered with Hack Reactor, so we had a lot of their curriculum, although I think they chopped it up a bit. We would plan two to three-day sprints and then try to complete them.


Prompt: But our instructor, he wasn’t a coder either. So he was learning as we were learning. We learned from books, or from each other. There was no internet, so there was no asking Google or Stack Overflow, or anything like that. Did you guys do any pair programming? We did. Which is interesting, because prison, especially in California, is mostly segregated. You only cell with guys of your own race. And if you go in the chow hall, there’s different sections by race.

Response: Is that self-selecting? Or is it encouraged by the prison? It’s pretty much self-imposed. I think as far as who you cell with, the prison knows it’s going to be safer if you just cell by race. But in the yard, you get to choose where you want to go, and everyone groups up by race—especially in the higher-security institutions.


Prompt: When I got to San Quentin, I found those in-house politics weren’t as strict. I could play on the same tennis team with people of other races. That was a lot better for me, because that wasn’t the way I was raised. But when you come into an environment and everything is segregated, you’re kind of like, “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.” When pair programming, we paired with people from other races. There was no racial division, and I thought that was good, because we could figure stuff out better together than we could if we were segregated.

Response: But the pair programming was very difficult for guys in prison. I don’t know how difficult it is for someone on the outside. It’s still hard. I do it every day. You always want to be the one to take over. Like, who’s going to be the driver? Who’s going to be the navigator? I always wanted to drive. How many other guys were in your class? We started with eighteen, and I think twelve graduated. When it first started, it was only going to be one six-month program. Now they have a six-month track one, a six-month track two, and something called a joint venture, where guys are getting paid to work on projects for outside companies.


Prompt: Did you participate in that? I did. I was hired by them for my last six months in prison. And we did a project—not a paid project—for Airbnb. It was a social media dashboard that went to Facebook and Twitter, and pulled back their follower counts, page likes, and things like that. They said they used to have an intern that would log in to all the different sites and then write down the numbers. So we automated the process.

Response: What was that product development cycle like? It sounds like you had some contact with Airbnb, figuring out what their needs were. How did you figure out what you were going to build? We had a teacher named Hans, who started out as a volunteer with The Last Mile. But he took such an interest in the project that he agreed to get hired on. I don’t think we ever talked to Airbnb directly about what we were going to build. Hans just came in with an idea—and we didn’t even know if we could do it. I mean, we had to learn the OAuth flow. Doing that through offline tutorials, and not being able to test it online, was super tough.


Prompt: What did you do if you were stuck on something outside of class? No one was there to help. Could you all work through it together? What was that problem-solving like? We would just have to theorize about things and maybe write them down. Some of the guys actually had their own study sessions in the gym. They would meet, draw stuff out on paper, and figure it out that way. And then hope there wasn’t a lockdown, so they could get back to the computer and test it to see if it worked.

Response: Did lockdowns happen frequently? There’s a lockdown right now. I would say it happens two or three times a year. You just never know when—or for what. This time they said one of the officers lost a bullet. I call it the magic bullet because it seems to happen about once a year. All of a sudden a bullet is missing, and everybody needs to be locked down.


Prompt: Did you do any paid work on the inside? It sounds like you were doing work for clients like Airbnb. Did you ever get paid? Not by Airbnb. But I was paid to work for other clients, sixteen dollars an hour. How does that compare to pay for other jobs inside prison? Oh my God, it was probably sixteen times the next highest paid job.

Response: What is the next highest paying job? Probably working for the furniture factory. They have a prison industry furniture factory that makes furniture for institutions throughout the state. And I think that the lead man position there is ninety-five cents an hour. Was it competitive to get into those coding slots as a result? It was really difficult.  A lot of guys wanted to get in there.


Prompt: Did you have to take a test to get into The Last Mile program? Yeah. There was an application and an interview process. I feel really lucky to have gotten that job on the inside. I was able to save a little bit of money. The money you make in there, they split it into five categories. One fifth goes to a victims restitution fund, one fifth goes to room and board, one fifth goes into a bank account, one fifth you can send to your family, and one fifth you can have on your prison account, to use in the store when you’re on the inside.

Response: Is that split consistent for everyone, or just for you? No, just for the guys who are a part of the joint venture program. Had I not been in that program, I wouldn’t have been able to save money for when I got out. The state gives you $200 when you get paroled. And that’s what you have to survive on. It’s not much.


Prompt: Especially in the Bay Area. Right? They’re making a lot of these guys come to San Francisco to these transitional houses, and they stay there for six months. But then where are they supposed to go? How are they supposed to afford to live? Life on the Outside Are you living in the city now? I’m living in a transitional house in Concord. It’s a four-bedroom house. There’s currently six guys living there. There’s one more guy moving in tonight. He actually had to go through immigration when he got out of San Quentin. And they just released him from ICE. He’s coming tonight—I can’t wait to see him.

Response: What has your reentry been like? Coding in San Francisco is one of the most in-demand skills. What has that been like for you? That’s part of the reason why I paroled in the Bay Area rather than going back to LA, where I used to live. I figured I could use my skills here in the Bay Area. My reception back into the world has been amazing so far, in terms of family support, job support, and housing support. I know that’s not the case for everybody. But I feel like a lot of the work that I did on the inside set me up for what’s happening now. It’s way beyond my own expectations. I’ve been really humbled and grateful. I mean, it was a long journey inside. There was a lot of growing up going on.


Prompt: So for me, personally, the transition has been good. I’m super excited about everything that’s going on with the internet, technology, and mobile apps. I’m addicted to Spotify. I can’t believe they give you all this music. I feel like I’ve been really busy, just in general. After being down for so long, when I come out I want to say yes to everything. I’ve got a friend, she goes, “You want to go do SoulCycle?” I’m like, “What is that?” So we’re doing SoulCycle tomorrow.

Response: What’s the technology you’ve been most excited about? I think technology is a double-edged sword. I mean, just the way everybody is so connected and how everything is integrated with each other. I just learned about Google Calendar last week. The way that connects you—it gives me a notification that says, “Check out Xiaowei’s LinkedIn page.” It’s helping me at every step.


Prompt: Do you have a Facebook account? I do. Do you have any other social media accounts? LinkedIn. Instagram, but I haven’t figured it out yet. I guess you just take pictures, but I’m not sure. Yeah. That’s it. And I did a lot of writing on Quora. While we were on the inside, The Last Mile had us write responses. We’d actually write them out and then somebody on the outside uploaded all the content. We’d hear about our posts getting up-voted or down-voted. But when I got out and saw my own account—and how many people were following me on there and asking me questions—it was kind of cool. I’ve been able to do it in real time now.

Response: Do you know anyone else who is now outside of prison who went through the program? Yeah. The Last Mile has been kind of like a family. We all keep track of each other and try to support each other. Often software companies will run background checks for potential employment even if it’s not clear why they need them. I’m curious if that’s a problem that you’ve seen, and if there any particular barriers to employment that folks who have graduated from the program are experiencing? I’ve heard about it. One friend from The Last Mile went through the Hack Reactor program on the outside and graduated just recently, about a month or two ago. Now they have him filling out the applications and going through the tech interviews and things like that. He told me that with some of the applications, once they find out about his criminal history, his application gets automatically kicked to the side. He’s saying he’s getting excluded from some opportunities because of his record.


Prompt: That sucks. We were told that if you know how to code, your record isn’t going to be that much of an issue just because the job demand is so high here. I haven’t started applying yet. Did you start The Last Mile knowing when your release date was? I was sentenced to sixteen years to life. What that means is that you do sixteen years and then you start going in front of a parole board. The parole board wants to see you take responsibility for your crime. They want to see how you’ve used your time in prison. They want to know what kind of support network you’re going to have in place to keep you from re-offending when you do get out.

Response: It’s really hard for lifers to get found suitable for release. And it should be, I think. Maybe not as strict as it has been in the past—and the door is opening up a little more every day, especially with Jerry Brown in office. But I understand the parole board commissioners have a tough job to do. I went to my first parole board hearing in 2015 and I felt like I had done everything right—I’ve gone through The Last Mile, I was in the coding program, and they still said no. They said we want some more, to make sure that you have a deeper insight into why you committed your crime.


Prompt: When I went back, I was able to talk about it a little bit more in depth. I think I knew all the answers the first time, but going into that setting there’s a lot of pressure, so maybe everything doesn’t come out right—you know, these people really have your life in their hands. I was found suitable. But even then when you get found suitable, it’s not like you get released. You have to go through a five-month review process where they check over the record of your hearing and then the governor actually gets the last say-so—yes or no. I didn’t know until the end of April when I was going to be released.

Response: And how long ago were you released? May the 4th, 2017. That was Star Wars Day. “May the fourth be with you.” I’ll never forget it, for a lot of reasons. The Last Mile says they help prevent people from going back to prison because their graduates find jobs after they’re released. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that.


Prompt: Yeah, so far The Last Mile has a perfect record in terms of recidivism. Nobody that’s gone through the program has gone back to prison. I think the support network and going to work and having marketable skills makes a huge difference to a guy getting out of prison. They need a safe place to live. They need a job. They need to be able to support themselves. They need resources because limited resources lead to crime, in my opinion.

Response: If we want to address recidivism, we need to give people a chance. I think so too. They spend so much on keeping people in prison, it just seems like some of that money could be diverted into helping guys stay out of prison. You know, guys inside prison aren’t how they’re portrayed on TV and in movies. You should see what’s going on in San Quentin in terms of education and rehabilitation. It’s not being offered by the state—it’s being done by outside volunteers. People from the community are coming into San Quentin and sharing knowledge and the guys in there are soaking it up like sponges.


Prompt: There’s a Shakespeare program on the inside. There’s a radio show. There’s a newspaper. There’s a lot of men really working on themselves and preparing to go back out to the community and become productive citizens. If people understood that, they might be willing to give these men a second chance. A lazy sprawl of brick and mortar straddling the Tennessee River in orange and beige: at first glance one could be forgiven for mistaking Chattanooga for any number of landlocked manufacturing towns. Like many of its postindustrial relatives, this city of 174,000 is in the midst of a protracted and irreversible economic transition. In the past two years alone, Dupont, Alstom, and MetalTek all shut down manufacturing plants that once employed thousands of people across the surrounding Hamilton County, where economic anxiety runs high and Trump won by sixteen points.

Response: But Chattanooga doesn’t quite fit the tired narrative evoked in the president’s grim portrait of “rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation.” This is a city with a plan. Situated in the heart of the Great Appalachian Valley, Chattanooga is widely known by a silicon-tinged moniker that sounds a bit more Santa Clara: “Gig City,” a reference to “the Gig,” the city’s municipally owned fiber-optic network. Funded in part by a $111 million federal stimulus grant and maintained by the Electric Power Board (EPB), Chattanooga’s public electric utility, the Gig’s ambitions feel more collectivist—and more fundamental—than the superficial “disruption” on offer from private-sector techno-utopians.


Prompt: In 2010, the Gig became the first network in the country to offer one gigabit-per-second (Gbps) data speeds across its entire service area, which now top out at a mind-bending ten Gbps. (At ten Gbps, you can download a two-hour movie in about three seconds.) These speeds are even more impressive because they are symmetrical, which means downloading is as fast as uploading. Since it was laid across Chattanooga’s power grid, fiber-to-home internet service has been available at every home and business in the municipality for the past seven years.

Response: This is an astounding result in the United States, where service is spotty and the average connection speed was just below nineteen megabits-per-second (Mbps) at the start of 2017—lower than the federal definition of broadband.” And Chattanooga has certainly reaped the rewards, nurturing its newfound status as a regional tech hub with numerous conventions and noteworthy startups like Skuid, a cloud-based UX platform, and Bellhops, an on-demand moving company. One economist estimated that the fiber infrastructure had generated as many as 5,200 jobs and as much as $1.3 billion in net economic and social benefits in its first five years of operation.


Prompt: Another way the city has benefitted is through something called the “smart grid.” Since the EPB doubles as Chattanooga’s electric utility, and because their fiber-optic network was built on top of a pre-existing power grid, the company has been able to monitor their electrical system in real time, greatly reducing the impact of outages by rerouting power almost instantaneously. The EPB estimates that the “smart grid” has decreased the duration of outage minutes by half, resulting in a citywide economic benefit of about $50 million per year. This capability will become increasingly important as climate change accelerates the frequency of outages caused by severe weather events.

Response: Also, while other utilities need to deploy technicians in order to inspect site-specific meters, Chattanooga’s “smart grid” reads all meters every fifteen minutes, saving money for the EPB and greatly improving the reliability of their service. As a result, J.Ed. Marston, the vice president of marketing at the EPB, notes that the fiber network benefits everyone who uses electricity in Chattanooga—not just those who buy internet.


Prompt: Closing the Digital Divide The success of Chattanooga’s municipal network is often measured in economic terms. But it has also brought substantial benefits in people’s quality of life. From helping us file taxes and sign up for healthcare benefits, to enabling us to communicate and engage with mass media, the internet is an increasingly central force in our social, economic, and civic life.

Response: It is hardly necessary to state the value of a stable internet connection in 2017. Differing levels of access do not merely reflect pre-existing inequalities in material wealth—they reinforce them. If you can’t use the internet to access a government service, fill out a job application, or email your grandkids—or if you need to take hours out of your day to go to a library to perform these tasks on a public computer—it’s going to set you even further behind people with easy access. Marston tells me that, as a publicly owned company, the EPB has an imperative to address economic inequality as it manifests through this divide. “As a municipal utility,” he says, “our mission is to enhance the quality of life and local economy for our entire community.” To this end, the EPB offers a subsidized unlimited data plan called Netbridge to families on the National School Lunch Program. Since the “smart grid” connects to every home in Chattanooga, the plan is available throughout the utility’s entire service area, which Marston says has “dramatically raised the bar on people’s expectations of what the internet should be.” This point is significant. In other parts of the country, the “digital divide”—a structural gap between those who have ready access to the internet and those who do not—is fueled in part by a practice known as “digital redlining,” where internet service providers (ISPs) refuse to invest in low-income areas because of their poor capital returns.


Prompt: In many of Cleveland’s poorest census blocks, for example, one survey recently found that AT&T only offered downstream speeds of three Mbps or less. (The lowest rates on offer from the EPB are more than thirty times faster.) Rather than a simple binary division between those who can get online and those who can’t, the digital divide operates as a tiered gradient, where quality and ease of access are unevenly distributed.

Response: In practical terms, this means that low-income residents are often required to pay full price for an internet connection that can barely load a modern web page. For this reason, Angela Siefer of the National Digital Inclusion Alliance (NDIA) tells me, “access to affordable broadband is not just a rural issue, but an urban issue as well.” As demonstrated by Chattanooga’s Gig, one way to address that issue is by handing internet service off to public utilities, which are bound to serve the public good rather than profit-hungry shareholders. But accessible infrastructure alone isn’t enough. For people to take advantage of affordable broadband, they also need a base level of technical literacy, as well as an understanding of what they can do with the internet. Together, these are the building blocks of “digital equity,” a condition that the NDIA defines as one in which “all individuals and communities have the information technology capacity needed for full participation in our society, democracy and economy.” The digital divide persists in Chattanooga thanks to a structural gap in technical literacy, which is made even more apparent by the city’s booming tech industry. But the presence of a public broadband utility—which treats internet service the way other municipalities treat gas, water, and electricity—has radically altered the way local politicians and many ordinary Chattanoogans conceive of the internet. They have come to think of it as a right rather than a luxury.


Prompt: Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke has fully embraced the Gig since taking office in 2013, and he clearly sees deeper potential beyond the realm of techie startups. Offering a soft echo of Michael Harrington, he tells me that “the fiber network gave us a platform to talk about whether digital technology is going to exacerbate or curb inequality,” adding that, although the network leaves no house untouched, “that doesn’t mean that everything is equitable.” Arguing that “even $5 is too much [for an internet connection] if you have no idea what you’re doing with your computer,” Berke has used the Gig as a starting point to push a comprehensive digital equity agenda. This includes initiatives like Tech Goes Home Chattanooga, a publicly funded nonprofit that provides free tech literacy training, heavily subsidized Chromebooks, and education about how to sign up for reduced-cost internet plans—important considerations in a city with a poverty rate of 22.6 percent.

Response: Internet Access as a Human Right Chattanooga isn’t the only city to push for universal access to affordable high-speed broadband, but such schemes more often take the form of public-private partnerships—and are usually met with mixed results. For example, in 2008, Verizon signed a deal with New York City that gave the telecom giant a citywide cable franchise on the condition that they “pass all households” with their fiber-to-premise FiOS network by 2014.


Prompt: The city wanted FiOS to be available in every home. But Verizon quickly fell back on old redlining habits, arguing that they had only agreed to run their network by every household, not to physically connect them. New York is currently suing the company, claiming a breach of contract for Verizon’s failure to offer fiber-optic service to nearly a third of the city’s 3.1 million households, the majority of them in working-class neighborhoods.

Response: Google Fiber is another popular option for cities seeking a high-speed fiber-to-premise network. Its pilot even launched the same year as Chattanooga’s municipal network, and in a similar town: Kansas City. But while Gig City is running strong after seven years, Google Fiber continues to send out unexplained cancellation emails in Kansas City, and has failed to offer fiber connections throughout its entire service area.


Prompt: One significant advantage that the EPB had over these public-private partnerships was a pre-existing electrical grid. In addition to creating compounded benefits through the efficiency of the “smart grid,” this infrastructure gave the utility a reason, and a roadmap, to connect an entire service area.

Response: But even more importantly, the EPB is a democratically regulated public provider that treats internet service as a basic right. As a municipally owned utility, it can act in the interests of its community and not simply to enrich its investors. This approach is far more in line with the FCC’s own (under-enforced) classification of broadband as a public utility, as well as the UN’s declaration that internet access constitutes a human right.


Prompt: Frankly, it’s difficult to see how a serious effort at digital equity can align with a deployment strategy driven by profit. In public-private partnerships, the public sector is inevitably the junior partner, and social needs take a back seat to the corporate drive to extract as much wealth as possible. If internet access is to be treated as a basic right and regulated as a public utility, the public sector will need to build and manage the infrastructure.

Response: The Empire Strikes Back Chattanooga’s municipal network has attracted lots of well-funded resistance. When the FCC gave the city the green light to expand their network beyond their municipality—a popular move in the surrounding area, especially given that broadband access was not available to one in eight Tennessee residents in late 2016—AT&T lawyers hit back, eventually winning a federal court ruling that restricts the EPB to its current service area.


Prompt: “I find that infuriating,” Christopher Mitchell, director of the Community Broadband Networks Initiative at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance told the magazine Next City. “Chattanooga has not only one of the best networks in the nation, but arguably one of the best on Earth and the state legislature is prohibiting them from serving people just outside of their city border.” Even more recently, the Tennessee state legislature passed the Broadband Accessibility Act, effectively a $45 million tax break for private telecoms like Comcast.

Response: Arguments against Chattanooga’s municipal network and others like it usually take up a familiar anti-government line of attack. Critics often point to the high cost of building new broadband infrastructure, which Chattanooga partly covered with a hefty federal stimulus grant. They further argue that this level of state intervention hurts competition in the internet market, and could eventually result in poorly run public monopolies.


Prompt: But there’s reason to believe that this pushback has more to do with the interests of the telecom lobby than with good-faith concerns about the efficiency of Chattanooga’s experiment. With a $330 million price tag, the Gig was certainly expensive to build—but it has yielded significant returns on that investment. According to one study, the “smart grid” generates up to $67 million per year in combined revenues and savings. And its maintenance and operation are entirely funded by subscription fees, requiring no tax funding. The utility is solidly in the black, with a 57 percent market penetration that far surpasses initial targets and continues to grow.

Response: Rather than focus on the instructive lessons from success stories like Chattanooga, free-market critics prefer to frighten city governments with tales of municipal broadband gone awry, like the $39 million flop in Provo, Utah, which was bought by Google Fiber after years of mismanagement. But it’s hard to take this concern seriously when failed municipal projects are exactly what the private sector wants. The death of Provo’s municipal project simply became another investment opportunity for Google, while a success could have locked predatory telecoms out of the local market.


Prompt: Crushing the Competition The irony of the corporate argument against municipal broadband is that private providers hate competition. Throughout the United States, privatized internet markets have led to the exact monopolistic conditions that free-market hawks rail against: a 2016 FCC report found that only one or zero providers offered services qualifying for the federal definition of broadband in over half of the developed census blocks in the United States. Less than half of the country’s developed census blocks have access to 100 Mbps service, and less than a quarter of those have more than one provider offering service at those speeds.

Response: The resulting lack of competition leads to inflated prices, little incentive to modernize infrastructure, and shoddy service for poorer areas. Stagnation, inefficiency, and unfair consolidation are produced by private telecoms like Comcast, not public utilities like the EPB. Confronted with the oft-repeated argument that a publicly owned fiber network smothers competition and hurts consumers, Mayor Berke is uncharacteristically blunt: “I’ve seen no evidence of that.” Indeed, Chattanooga’s internet market is one of the most competitive in the country. The EPB isn’t the city’s only internet provider—the utility competes against four private ISPs, two of which also offer broadband-speed internet at a fraction of the national average. But in head-to-head competition, the EPB dominates. Its market share is larger than its four private counterparts combined.


Prompt: Pressure from the EPB has even pushed competitors to offer fairer prices to defend their dwindling market shares. In the past two years, Comcast, AT&T, and Mobile Beacon have all targeted low-income Chattanoogans with data plans that cost around $10 per month for people living on certain forms of government assistance. These are even cheaper than the EPB’s subsidized Netbridge plan, which costs $26.99—the lowest price allowed under a Tennessee law that establishes price floors for municipal cable systems.

Response: This kind of competitive outcome—exactly the result that critics warned the EPB would undermine—is enabled by public intervention in broadband infrastructure. In fact, the only force preventing Chattanooga’s internet costs from dropping even further is regressive, pro-corporate legislation. Far from killing competition, the EPB competes with great success against private ISPs—and that’s exactly what scares them. If the utility were too overburdened by bureaucracy to operate successfully, there would be no need for corporate lobbyists to push for state laws that hamstring the company’s growth.


Prompt: Demand for EPB service exists outside the utility’s municipal area precisely because it would provide a superior product to what is currently on offer. Absent the public pressure provided by the utility, Chattanooga’s internet market would likely tend towards monopoly, as it has in similar regions throughout the country.

Response: Municipal Momentum Southeastern Tennessee is hardly a bastion of big government, making Chattanooga a curious leader in the world of municipal broadband. But the Gig remains deeply popular in the city and its surrounding area, where digital equity has become a remarkably bipartisan issue thanks to support from local Republicans like Hamilton County Mayor Jim Coppinger. Given the chance to experience municipal broadband firsthand, people see it as less of a partisan issue and more one of common sense. It simply works.


Prompt: The Gig also offers a proof-of-concept for communities contemplating publicly operated broadband outside of Chattanooga, where attitudes towards municipal fiber are evolving quickly. Just two years ago, Seattle City Council member Kshama Sawant was ridiculed for proposing a $5 million pilot program in her city. But today, municipal projects are being proposed in major urban centers like San Francisco and Minneapolis.

Response: The Institute for Local Self-Reliance counts more than 500 public networks of some kind, including communities in twenty-four states that offer public connections of at least 1 Gbps. And public broadband is widely popular: a recent Pew Research survey found that 70 percent of the public believes that local governments should be able to build their own broadband networks, including 67 percent of Republicans. This all but proves that state legislators are serving the telecom lobby rather than their actual constituents.


Prompt: It is tempting to envision a national scheme to lay fiber-optic cable across the country’s electrical grids, akin to FDR’s ambitious Rural Electrification Act. At a time when the Republicans enjoy unified control of the federal government, however, such an effort is unlikely to succeed: Trump’s FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, is a close ally of the telecom industry who has used his office to pursue a decidedly pro-corporate agenda. In addition to going after net neutrality rules, he has led a push to significantly reduce the federal definition of broadband, signaling complacency with an uneven distribution of internet access that disproportionately impacts working-class communities and people of color. Meanwhile, telecom lobbyists have successfully passed laws that limit the expansion of public broadband in more than twenty states, including Tennessee.

Response: With the political climate so hostile to public broadband at the national and state level, focusing on local utilities seems like a promising path forward. An increasing number of cities are calling for resistance to Trump’s agenda. Municipal broadband offers one way for smaller governments to reclaim their autonomy.


Prompt: Reclaiming the Digital Commons The quality, reliability, and affordability of someone’s connection are all essential to determining how they can engage with the internet—and what kind of stake they will have in the world it helps create. As long as the digital divide is bound to inequalities in material wealth, the internet will remain subservient to capital and continue to reproduce old hierarchies of power.

Response: That’s why achieving digital equity is a political project, rather than a purely technological one. And, as with all political projects, there are a range of possible outcomes. Mayor Berke understands this as well as anyone. Conceding that Chattanooga’s exact model might not be a perfect fit everywhere, he nonetheless insists that local governments can’t afford to wait. “There has to be a strategy that actually gets you there,” he says.


Prompt: Kelly McCarthy, program director of Tech Goes Home Chattanooga, cautions that tackling the digital divide is “not just a problem where we can suddenly give everybody internet access and it will be solved.” Indeed, a robust digital justice agenda would also need to include tech literacy education, subsidized hardware, and offline services to ensure that people can get connected in a way that is truly equitable.

Response: But municipal broadband is a strong start: by handing the keys to public bodies, we empower them to distribute access in a more democratic manner. Bringing the infrastructure of the internet under public control lays the groundwork for pursuing a broader vision of digital justice. And at a time when corporations increasingly dominate fundamental resources like water, reclaiming common goods sends a powerful message to the private sector.


Prompt: Until digital equity becomes an urgent matter of public policy, the digital divide isn’t going anywhere. On May 2, 2013, in a dusty outdoor firing range somewhere in Texas, a lanky young man with grand ambitions fired what he hoped would be a shot heard round the world—or at least around YouTube. With a tug of a cord from a prudent distance away, twenty-five-year old law student Cody Wilson pulled the trigger on a crude gun made of 3D-printed Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene (ABS) plastic, successfully discharging a single .380 caliber bullet. The fact that the gun, which Wilson dubbed the “Liberator” (after a much-mythified World War II guerrilla pistol), misfired on a subsequent shot, and promptly exploded when loaded with a more powerful cartridge, seemed unimportant: proof of concept had been achieved.

Response: A savvy entrepreneur and self-promoter, Wilson leveraged his test run of the Liberator to the fullest. Posting CAD files for the gun online via his nonprofit, Defense Distributed, Wilson hyped the epochal, disruptive character of his invention in the breathless profiles of him that appeared in Wired, Forbes, and The New Yorker.


Prompt: Never shy about his self-styled “techno-anarchist” politics—his other ventures have included forays into crypto-currency and “Hatreon,” a Patreon alternative “absent speech policing”—Wilson articulated his vision of the future, sounding both like a Silicon Valley libertarian and a vintage American reactionary: “I think the future is openness to the point of the eradication of government. The state shouldn’t have a monopoly on violence; governments should live in fear of their citizenry.” The Liberator might not be much as a weapon on it own terms, Wilson conceded, but it embodied something much bigger: an inexorable future wherein the “myth” of gun control would be “exploded.” Lawmakers and media were quick to respond to Wilson’s prophecies with drama of their own. Senator Chuck Schumer from New York proclaimed that the advent of 3D-printed firearms meant that, “A terrorist, someone who’s mentally ill, a spousal abuser, a felon can essentially open a gun factory in their garage.” His colleague, Congressman Steve Israel, proposed legislation to ban them. “Security checkpoints will do little good if criminals can produce plastic firearms and bring those firearms through metal detectors into secure areas like airports or courthouses,” Israel told Wired. “When I started talking about the issue of completely plastic firearms, I was told the idea of a plastic gun is science fiction. That science fiction is now a dangerous reality.” False Prophets Behind all the tumultuous political rhetoric, and behind Wilson’s showmanship, there was just one problem: the “3D-printed gun” wasn’t technically all 3D-printed. It was hardly “completely plastic” either. The Liberator’s crude firing pin—a generic hardware store nail—would absolutely set off metal detectors. And even if it didn’t, the metal in the bullets certainly would.

Response: Subsequent, more sophisticated iterations of 3D-printed firearms have yet to overcome this hurdle, and there is no compelling reason to think they will. As far as the specific threat of undetectability is concerned, the hysteria over 3D-printed weapons resembles another panic in the summer of 1990, when a Bruce Willis line in Die Hard 2 about a (nonexistent) “Glock 7,” a “porcelain gun made in Germany … [that] doesn’t show up on your airport X-ray machines” led to terrified public demands for a ban—and, not coincidentally, sold a lot of Glocks.


Prompt: But panics over new firearms technologies are older than plastic guns or action movies. So are grandiose techno-futurist claims. The American-born Hiram Maxim, inventor of the first real machine gun, confidently predicted that his creation would actually “make war impossible,” rather than producing more lethal conflicts. Never mind that, in more unguarded moments, Maxim would admit that his inspiration to enter the arms industry had come from a businessman friend who had told him, “’Hang your chemistry and electricity! If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility.” In full philosopher-salesman-prophet mode, Maxim insisted that his fearsome weapon would, through a kind of logic of mutually assured destruction avant la lettre, leave nations too terrified of mass casualties to ever actually go to war. Needless to say, a brutal century-and-a-half later, Maxim’s sales pitch seems either laughably naive or contemptibly cynical.

Response: Evaluating the prophecies of gun futurists, then, the novelty (or lack thereof) of their inventions seems less important than the question of what problems, exactly, they claim to solve. And, by the same token, our collective fascination with gun futurism—our reactions, variously hopeful or hysterical, utopian or bleak—are more interesting when seen in light of what we don’t find interesting.


Prompt: It’s possible that 3D-printed guns may grow more common, but such fixation on a DIY firearm that requires an $8,000 Stratasys Dimension SST 3D printer to produce seems, at the very least, peculiar in a nation where reliable, durable pocket pistols can be bought for under $100. And our hysteria over the prospect that criminals might order guns via dark-web arms markets, or build assault rifles using homebrew CNC mills in black-market makerspaces, seems likewise misguided given how easily guns can be bought and sold without any paperwork or background checks at gun shows or through private sales in the vast majority of US states.

Response: In other words: the real issue isn’t our fantasies about the future, but how focusing on them helps us ignore the legacy of our past and the realities of our present. Guns Mean Too Much Firearms occupy a singular place in our national mythology, our legislative landscape, and our political debates. No other object functions as such a ubiquitous icon for key moments in America’s past, its different incarnations tied evocatively to various eras—the muskets of Continental soldiers and frontiersmen, the six-shooters of cowboys and desperadoes, the Tommy guns of Chicago gangsters and D-Day paratroopers, the M16s of GIs in Vietnamese jungles, and the AR-15s of open-carry protesters in state capitol buildings.


Prompt: No other object is addressed so explicitly or at such length in our Constitution, no matter what you might think of either the Second Amendment itself or the convoluted history of its competing interpretations. And no other object is quite comparable as an icon of contested cultural identities and as a flashpoint for vicious partisan disputes.

Response: Cognitive psychologists have documented how guns appear to activate our “affect heuristics”: when a senator holds a rifle up for a photo-op on the floor of Congress, or a researcher displays a picture of a gun to a subject in a lab, most people will have some kind of immediate and intense reaction, whether positive or negative—a knee-jerk response that belies our ability to dispassionately assess arguments or statistics. Meanwhile, when it comes to the ballot box, attitudes towards gun ownership have arguably become the single biggest predictor for party affiliation and voting preference.


Prompt: This surplus of meaning—what a psychoanalyst would rightly call an overdetermination—can make debates over guns and gun control both endlessly fascinating and terminally intractable. But it is precisely this overdetermination that occludes the basic realities of political economy that have produced our contemporary situation. These realities have dictated both why and how guns are present in America, and the purposes to which they are put. Partisan polemics and techno-futurist pipe dreams aside, they also represent a hard constraint on the range of possible gun futures.

Response: Strange Bedfellows It is often observed that Americans own more guns than any other nation. This is true, both per capita and in total numbers. Pinpointing precise figures can get contentious, but well-grounded assessments put the overall number of civilian-owned guns in the United States at well over 310 million, which means there are more guns than there are Americans to own them (112.6 guns for every 100 Americans).


Prompt: This puts America firmly ahead of its nearest competitors, Serbia (75.6 guns for every 100 Serbians) and Yemen (54.8 guns for every 100 Yemenis). After those top three, the countries with the next highest per-capita civilian gun ownership rates are Switzerland (45.7), Finland (45.3), Cyprus (36.4), Saudi Arabia (35), Iraq (34.2), Uruguay (31.8), and Sweden (31.6). Clustered closely near Sweden, but outside of the global top ten, lie Norway, France, Germany, Canada, Austria, and Germany.

Response: Many commentators will move immediately from these figures to discussions of crime rates and homicide data, or to heavy-handed pontifications, frequently dripping with barely disguised racist exceptionalism, about what (or rather, whom) Americans “should” be like. Bigotry aside, what this move ignores—artfully or naively—is a comparison of civilian rates of gun ownership with those of non-civilian gun ownership.


Prompt: These are striking, since, once again, they reveal that America remains a leader of sorts. When compared to those of the other top fifteen highest civilian-gun-owning nations, the American military arsenal includes over twice as many firearms as its second closest competitor (France), three times as many as its third (Sweden), four times as many as the fourth (Serbia again), and seven times as many as the fifth (Iraq). When it comes to police stockpiles, America once again leads the pack: American police have 1.15 million guns, a number followed only by Iraq (690,000), France (218,000), Yemen (210,000), and Saudi Arabia (90,000).

Response: How to make sense of this—what commonalities shape this distribution? One thing that leaps out, causing considerable offense to chauvinistic American sensibilities, is how, when it comes to being saturated with both civilian guns as well as guns in the hands of its military and police, America far exceeds variously repressive or chaotic Middle Eastern states (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq) and nations which in recent memory have seen brutal civil wars or other violence (Serbia, Cyprus).


Prompt: If one expands the set of comparisons on police and military stockpiles to other OECD states, America also starts to resemble our unfortunate next-door neighbor Mexico. There, civilian rates of legal gun ownership are quite low—but Mexico is also where ongoing violence between drug cartels and security forces generates a yearly body count on par with what one would expect from an outright civil war.

Response: But then there are our other peers, in Canada, Western Europe, and the Scandinavian countries. Much beloved as go-to benchmarks of stability and low gun crime for liberal American pundits, these states also have surprisingly large quantities of guns, civilian and otherwise. What deeper structure produces this strange set of statistical bedfellows? The answer, simply put, is capitalism in general, and the arms trade in particular.


Prompt: Capitalism Kills Global military expenditure is estimated to be around $1.6 trillion in any given year. The global trade in weapons clocks in at about $60 billion annually. The United States has dominated this landscape since the 1960s, and in the past two decades has only further cemented its position as far and away the world’s largest exporter of arms, with the world’s most profitable arms firms.

Response: The global trade in small arms (guns) is, in dollar terms, relatively small: only around $4 billion a year. But its outsize impact is belied by the low cost of individual units—entire army divisions can be equipped with assault rifles for the equivalent cost of a single helicopter or jet—and the fact that, when it comes to casualties, small arms are the leading global killer, far more than missiles, bombs, or tanks.


Prompt: The list of countries with high gun saturation reflects the dynamics of the global distribution of guns more broadly. Guns from more stable, developed, manufacturing states go to less stable, developing, consumer nations—from West to East, from Global North to Global South. The more contingent cultural features of gun ownership (for example, robust hunting traditions) are merely epiphenomenal to these broader dictates of supply and demand, flows of capital and materiel.

Response: There are the places where guns come from, and where they are plentiful as a matter of course; and then there are the places where guns go, and where they are used to full, lethal effect. These are the two categories of countries with large gun stockpiles: producers and consumers. Supply and demand—it’s as simple as that.


Prompt: Of course, America is, as so often, unique. While other countries like Germany or France manufacture weapons primarily for export, America builds them for both internal and external battlefields—and imports a great many besides. Indeed, the American model of policing unsubtly resembles American practices of foreign military intervention and occupation, and the policies and rhetoric of our security forces reflect this.

Response: Abroad, young brown men killed by US drones are de facto labeled “enemy combatants” by virtue of their age, gender, and location; at home, young black men shot by police are almost invariably said to have a “gang affiliation” based upon similarly gross logics of geographic proximity and networks of family and friends. And there is a sense, too, in which the Bush Doctrine of “anticipatory self-defense” more than passingly resembles the shoot-first attitude of many police departments, where the recourse of “fear for one’s life” implicitly structures any encounter between police and civilians.


Prompt: Homologies aside, the weapons that American troops use in the Global War on Terror have a way of winding up in the hands of domestic police, thanks to initiatives like the 1033 Program, which literally recirculates hardware from US military abroad to security forces back home. And then there is the unique role and cultural status of the American military proper. As a way of doing business, America’s privatized, volunteer military infrastructure contrasts starkly with that of states with mandatory service models like Sweden. As a matter of ethos, the paramilitary overtones of American gun ownership are also unique. In the US, guns are often possessed by individuals as putative tools to be used against the state. In countries like Switzerland, private citizens possess guns on behalf of the state, and activities like target shooting and institutions like gun clubs receive government subsidies as part of a broader military readiness program.

Response: Indeed, unlike other nations, which could be said to have gun cultures, the United States could more accurately be said to be a gun culture. Likewise, unlike any other country on the planet, American politics are shaped by a veritable gun culture industry. As a nation with a heavily privatized military, and where the consumer’s ability to buy practically anything is seen as a basic human right, the singular saturation of guns in the American context should actually be fairly unsurprising. And so, too, should the clear disparities in how the toll of gun violence is distributed along uniquely American fractures of race, gender, and class.


Prompt: Dubious Futures These are the forces that have helped write the recent American history of guns. Add to this picture the fact that, like few other mass-produced consumer goods, guns are durable, easily concealed, fairly simple to operate, and retain considerable resale value, and we can see how the ubiquity of firearms has vexed pro-gun-control lawmakers from the start.

Response: This obdurate reality goes a long way towards explaining our fascination with “new” guns and gun-related technologies. Faced with a landscape of byzantine regulations, fierce cultural debates, and legislative deadlock, both gun rights advocates and gun control supporters place their hopes in new technology, gambling that some breakthrough might produce a categorical, once-and-for-all break from our murky and ugly present, whether in the direction of absolute gun liberalization or total control.


Prompt: For gun rights advocates like Cody Wilson, the future is DIY. While major firms focus on other developments—exploring new frontiers in modularity, concealability, subsonic ammunition, suppressor technology, and the legal gray area between rifles and pistols—pro-gun techno-futurists dream of reinventing the supply chain from the ground up. If consumers can make their own firearms, they argue, any gun control laws can be decisively circumvented. Never mind that America’s gun control landscape is already a loophole-ridden, contradictory mess, and that cheap, reliable guns are already abundantly available to consumers, legally or otherwise.

Response: On the other side, gun control advocates are also regularly seduced by techno-futurist fantasy. Some hail the advent of “smart guns”—weapons that only fire when wielded by their “proper” owner. At least one such gun—the Armatix iP1, which requires the user to wear an RFID-chip bracelet when shooting—has been available for some time. But canny hackers have already circumvented its mechanism using $15 worth of magnets. And there are other, more fundamental concerns too.


Prompt: Although there is indeed a market for this kind of weapon (particularly among gun-owning parents), most people who buy guns for self-defense place a premium on reliability and ease of use. A gun that requires the user to first strap on a wristwatch, or that could be susceptible to battery failure or wireless jamming, does not recommend itself as a self-defense weapon. Other putative smart-gun technologies, like fingerprint-enabled triggers and handguards, are also dubious on this front. Reaching for a gun, only to have it not fire because of sweat, rain, or blood, means the weapon is reduced to an expensive club.

Response: More broadly, fantasies about replacing America’s massive civilian stockpiles of “dumb” guns with smart alternatives run up against the realities of politics. The political climate remains hostile: a New Jersey law from 2016 mandating that gun dealers eventually transition to smart-gun-only inventories was promptly vetoed by Governor Chris Christie, and several gun dealers who have carried the Armatix alongside their other offerings have been targeted with boycotts and threats by hard-right gun activists.


Prompt: The existence of smart gun technology in and of itself means nothing absent a significant investment of political capital to change producer, consumer, and regulatory practices. Ditto for other vaunted gun innovations. Mandating that guns include laser “microstamping” technology, for instance, could allow law enforcement to link any bullet casing found at a crime scene back to that weapon’s owner—but only if civilian ownership were tracked and a database of gun IDs maintained. Meanwhile, in the real world, talk of gun owner registries is a political nonstarter, and the ATF’s National Tracing Center, which would presumably maintain such a database, is so woefully underfunded that it still operates on microfilm and index cards.

Response: Technology is no substitute for policy. And innovation is no substitute for a cultural sea change. Behind all the political theater, money continues to flow. Politicians who condemn weapons manufacturers out of one side of their mouths lobby to fund firearms manufacturers in their districts out of the other. Even Chuck Schumer, who has loudly called for an assault weapons ban and vigorously condemned their manufacturers, has also pushed hard to award military contracts to domestic gun makers—and has even gone so far as to celebrate the job-creating “economic powerhouse” of assault rifle manufacturers in New York.


Prompt: That these manufacturers have since followed tax incentives to more gun-friendly states is beside the point, as is the likelihood that Schumer supports arms manufacturers only insofar as their products wind up in the “right” hands of respectable civilians and police at home and American troops abroad. The bottom line is that beneath the rhetoric, high moral dudgeon, and misplaced hopes for utopian breakthroughs, the realities of political economy are what matter most.

Response: Unfortunate pun aside, there is no magic bullet to “fix” this situation, one way or another. No brilliant inventor or charismatic entrepreneur can help us disrupt our way out of American capitalist militarism, legislative and regulatory capture, or interpersonal violence. The answers lie in the least flashy interventions: in old-fashioned harm reduction, in triage, in diminishing the inequalities that accelerate violence and precipitate lethal outcomes. Chasing dubious futures, we simply mortgage the present, and, in the most unthinking way, perpetuate it.


Prompt: First there are the text messages. Impersonal, incessant, and devoid of context, they reveal few hints of their purpose. The language is so vague you’d be forgiven for thinking it was spam. “Message from the Probe Group regarding an urgent matter. Please call us.” Then, a deluge of phone calls—up to ten times a day, often after-hours—from an unknown mobile number. Chances are you’re still ignoring them.

Response: Should you choose to return the missed calls, you’ll be greeted by an automated voice and placed in a queue. The identity of your caller remains a mystery. When a human operator at an overseas call center at last assumes the reins—whose identity and place of employment, by the way, remains unknown—you’re asked to disclose your date of birth and home address.


Prompt: Up until this point it sounds like an elaborate phishing scam, but the stakes seem graver. The voice on the other end grows hostile and threatening. The accusations fly thick and fast: You’ve been lying about your income. You’ve been cheating the system. You owe thousands of dollars to Centrelink, the Australian government’s agency for administering social services benefits.

Response: Welcome To Hell Countless stories like these have lobbed into my social media feeds over the past year. They belong to what is commonly known as the “robo-debt” scandal, which has stirred outrage in Australia in recent months. Diligent reporting from independent journalists like Asher Wolf, New Matilda’s Ben Eltham, and Paul Farrell from The Guardian have unearthed one horror story after another, driving a rising tide of public anger at the government.


Prompt: Understanding the scandal first requires understanding how welfare works in Australia. Australia is somewhat unique in that the vast majority of its benefits are means-tested. The consequences of this are complex. On the one hand, Australia’s welfare system is narrowly targeted toward low-income earners, giving the government more bang for its buck—welfare provisions make up a much lower proportion of its GDP than other OECD countries. The rationale behind means testing is to encourage fairness in the welfare system, ensuring that people receive what they are entitled to. Anyone who falls afoul of the system’s stringent requirements must pay back their “debt” to the government.

Response: This “debt”—the difference between what you receive and what you are supposed to receive—is the root of the robo-debt scandal. The scandal’s origins date back to 2011, when the Australian Labor Party introduced a data-matching algorithm officially known as Online Compliance Intervention. Its purpose was to compare the earnings reported by welfare recipients to the social services agency Centrelink with the earnings reported to the Tax Office by their employers. Discrepancies would be investigated by Centrelink staff members, who would then decide whether to follow up with the recipient by letter or phone.


Prompt: Things changed in December 2016, when the government announced that the system had undergone full automation. Humans would no longer investigate anomalies in earnings. Instead, debt notices would be automatically generated when inconsistencies were detected. The government’s rationale for automating the process was telling. “Our aim is to ensure that people get what they are entitled to—no more and no less,” read the press release. “And to crack down hard when people deliberately defraud the system.” The result was a disaster. I’ve had friends who’ve received an innocuous email urging them to check their MyGov account—an online portal available to Australian citizens with an internet connection to access a variety of government services—only to log in and find they’re hundreds or thousands of dollars in arrears, supposedly because they didn’t accurately report their income. Some received threats from private debt collectors, who told them their wages would be seized if they didn’t submit to a payment plan.

Response: Those who wanted to contest their debts had to lodge a formal complaint, and were subjected to hours of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major before they could talk to a case worker. Others tried taking their concerns directly to the Centrelink agency on Twitter, where they were directed to calling Lifeline, a 24-hour hotline for crisis support and suicide prevention.


Prompt: At the end of 2015, my friend Chloe received a notice claiming she owed $20,000 to the government. She was told that she had reported her income incorrectly while on Youth Allowance, which provides financial assistance to certain categories of young people. The figure was shocking and, like others in her position, she grew suspicious. She decided to contest the debt: she contacted all of her previous employers so she could gather pay slips, and scanned them into the MyGov app. “I gave them all of my information to prove that there was no way I owed them $20,000,” she says.

Response: The bean counters were unmoved. They maintained that Chloe had reported her after-tax income instead of her before-tax income. As a result, they increased the amount she owed to $30,000. She agreed to a payment plan, which will see her pay off the debt in fortnightly installments of $50 over the course of two decades. “I even looked into bankruptcy because I was so stressed by it,” she says. “All I could think about was the Centrelink debt, and once they upped it to 30k, I was so ashamed and sad and miserable,” she says.


Prompt: As coverage of the robo-debt scandal spread, calls for the government to suspend the scheme mounted. Yet it refused to halt the program until an inquiry by the Australian Senate finally ordered it to do so in May 2017. Dehumanized Debt Automation is dehumanizing in a literal sense: it removes human experience from the equation. In the case of the robo-debt scandal, automation also stripped humans of their narrative power. The algorithm that generated these debt notices presented welfare recipients with contrasting stories: the recipients claimed they’d followed the rules, but the computer said otherwise.

Response: There were few official ways to explain one’s circumstances: twenty-nine million calls to Centrelink went unanswered in 2016, and Centrelink’s Twitter account seems explicitly designed to discourage conversational exchange. One source of narrative resistance is notmydebt.com.au, a website run entirely by volunteers that gathers false debt stories from ordinary Australians so that the “scandal can’t be plausibly minimised or denied.” Over time it was revealed that many of these debts were miscalculated or, in some cases, non-existent. One man I’d read about was on a government pension and saddled with a $4,500 bill, which was revised down months later to $65. Another recipient, who was on disability as a result of mental illness, had a debt notice of $80,000 that was later recalled. A small proportion of recipients were exclusively in contact with private debt collectors and received no official notice from Centrelink at all.


Prompt: Soon it emerged that social services were a lucrative avenue for corporate interests: this year’s Senate inquiry revealed that some private agencies tasked with recouping debts were working on a commission basis, pocketing a percentage of the debts they had recovered for the government regardless of their validity. (All debt notices issued by private agencies were eventually rescinded after government review in February 2017.) The methodology of the algorithm itself was riddled with flaws. It calculates the average of an individual’s annual income reported to the Australian Tax Office by their employer over twenty-six fortnightly periods and compares it with the fortnightly earnings reported to Centrelink by the welfare recipient. All welfare recipients are required to declare their gross earnings (income accrued before tax and other deductions) within this fourteen-day period. Any discrepancy between the two figures is interpreted by the algorithm as proof of undeclared or underreported income, from which a notice of debt is automatically generated.

Response: Previously, these inconsistencies would be handled by Centrelink staff, who would call up your employer, confirm the amount you received in fortnightly payments, and cross-index that figure with the one calculated in the system. But the automation of the debt recovery process has outsourced authority from humans to the algorithm itself.


Prompt: It’s certainly efficient: it takes the algorithm one week to generate 20,000 debt notices, a process that would take up to a year if done manually. But it’s not a reliable method of fraud detection. It’s blunt, unwieldy, and error-prone. It assumes that variations in the data sets are deliberate, and that recipients have received more than what they are entitled to. What’s more, the onus is on the welfare recipient to prove their income has been reported correctly and that the entitlements they have received are commensurate within twenty-one days.

Response: Yet, as many critics have noted, this income-averaging method is porous. It fails to accurately account for the fluctuating fortunes of casual or contract workers, which often results in variations between the two figures. There’s also no way for the algorithm to correct for basic errors in the system’s database. It cannot yet discern whether an employer’s legal name has been used instead of its various business names—it treats them as separate entities, and therefore separate sources of income—or whether conflicting reports are caused by basic mistakes, such as spelling errors or typos. These seemingly small distinctions are ones that only a human could make. It’s no wonder, then, that conservative estimates of its error rate hover at 20 percent.


Prompt: Fully Automated Debt Slavery Centrelink’s automated debt recovery program is part of an ongoing initiative to expand the range of essential government services provided to citizens online. In an interview last year with ABC Radio National, the Australian national public broadcaster, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull referred to this digital shift as an “important part of the government’s productivity agenda,” and promised it would ensure that “citizens can engage with government on digital platforms as easily and conveniently as they do with their banks or e-commerce vendors.” It’s the kind of market logic that treats citizens as little more than consumers.

Response: Automated debt recovery isn’t confined to Australia. In December 2016, The Guardian reported that the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency’s automated compliance system wrongly issued debt notices to over 20,000 welfare recipients—93 percent of recipients in total—from October 2013 to August 2015. Those who were accused of insurance fraud lost access to their unemployment benefits, and even had their taxes garnished to pay substantial fines. At the same time, the state’s governor had earmarked the funds raised by the compliance system to balance the state’s budget. It’s fitting, if a little uncanny, that the Michigan Integrated Data Automated System is also known as MiDAS.


Prompt: These kinds of algorithms are badly designed, but their underlying ideology is more sinister still. Leaks from Centrelink staff members to the press revealed an underfunded government department struggling with depleted morale. Reports revealed that employees were sent memos outlining performance targets within the organization, which pitted employees against each other in a battle to process the most debt notices.

Response: In retrospect, the previous year’s Australian federal budget contained a telling omen: it forecast that $4.5 billion in overpaid entitlements could be reclaimed. It makes sense, then, that the dragnet was deliberately sweeping—its purpose was to balance the books. By the same token, the glitches in the system—from the difficulty of contacting Centrelink, the outsourcing of 43 percent of its debt recovery to corporate interests, and the kinks in the algorithm itself—are by design. They’re features, not bugs, aimed at discouraging formal complaints, raising money, and making the system as punitive as possible.


Prompt: We shouldn’t be surprised. There are plenty of conservatives for whom welfare is a societal wound that demands excision. No wonder their prescriptions seem so cruel. How else to describe actions that coerce the poor into the labor market at any cost? The infliction of force is inscribed in policy. Alan Tudge, the embattled Human Services Minister who implemented the aggressive recovery strategy, defended the program by suggesting that Australia’s social spending had been too lavish: “We must face the reality that in our desire to be a generous and caring society we may have reached a point where we have taken our good intentions too far.” The Patron Saints of Dole Bludgers It’s 1996. A Current Affair, a tabloid news show, is pondering the plight of Australia’s unemployed. Cameras skim the snaking queues and drab surrounds of a suburban Centrelink office. The narration is at once incredulous and contemptuous. Why don’t these people have jobs? Aren’t they trying hard enough? The specimens in the show’s lurid anthropological study are the Paxton family, who turn out to be luckless in more ways than one. They live in St Albans, a working-class neighborhood on the outer edges of Melbourne’s sprawling suburbs. It’s afternoon and sixteen-year-old Mark is in bed. The cameras linger on Mark, slumped in repose, while his older brother Shane tries in vain to coax him out of bed. Mark’s nonplussed, and not having a bar of it. “I’ll look at the clock at 9, 10 o’clock, and think, why do I have to get out of bed?” For another journalist, Mark’s helplessness might have been a hook for an exploration of the psychological and social ramifications of long-term unemployment. But this wasn’t going to be that story. Instead, the program set about cultivating the myth of the indolent poor, a mythical underclass that lounges around, mooches off the system, and has the temerity to spend society’s hard-earned money on booze.

Response: From the get-go, the dog-whistling is slimy and conspicuous, demanding resentment and scapegoating at every turn. There’s a barely contained glee in its whipping up of thinly veiled animosity and malice against the unemployed. From a ratings standpoint, it was a humiliating but high-rating spectacle: millions tuned in to watch the demonization of the Paxton family—specifically its teenage children—as they refused to succumb to the platitudes touting the dignity and virtues of low-paid labor.


Prompt: Over a period of two weeks, A Current Affair’s camera crew harassed the Paxtons at their home, airing their misfortunes on national television for six consecutive nights, stoking the embers of middle-class rage. Before long, the Paxton teenagers were anointed the “Patron Saints of Dole Bludgers”—people who are on benefits but are believed to be uninterested in seeking work—by a tabloid newspaper columnist, referred to as “putrid” by another, and ordered in a hectoring editorial to take jobs “for the sake of all our children.” Some politicians even called for an inquiry into the legitimacy of the family’s welfare benefits.

Response: The Deserving Poor For all of Australia’s egalitarian chatter, the issue of welfare and who deserves it has long stuck in the nation’s craw. It prompts moral righteousness among the Right, which has couched cuts in social services as fiscal reform, while progressive technocrats tittered about the best methods to refine means testing. There’s even a tendency by some commentators, perhaps intoxicated by the inoffensiveness of liberalism, to critique these cuts without any reference to ideology at all. They’re presented as a symptom of poll-driven politics, rather than something more pernicious.


Prompt: Much discussion of social inequality and class divisions in Australia treats these issues as phenomena that occur elsewhere. Home ownership is seen, somewhat uncritically, as an inviolable fixture of the Australian dream rather than a tax racket for the rentier class. Pouring scorn on “dole bludgers” and shaming welfare cheats has long endured as a national sport. Anxiety about welfare dependency persists, even though it is at historically low levels.

Response: In June 2017, the government released a report of the nation’s top ten suburbs for welfare non-compliance—or “bludger hotspots,” to use the parlance of a News Corp tabloid. These are places where recipients failed to meet the conditions for receiving welfare, which include attending interviews and appointments. It’s difficult to see such a move as anything other than a way to shame and stigmatize these communities.


Prompt: The political language used to talk about welfare reveals the nature of a shifting relationship between citizens and the state. Before World War II, unemployment was seen as an affliction of the “undeserving poor.” It was a social and collective responsibility, but it didn’t require government intervention. In postwar welfare societies, unemployment assumed an explicitly political dimension through the creation of social safety nets for the disadvantaged and economically vulnerable.

Response: As Australian media theorist and academic Alex Griffin writes, this “conception of citizenship entailed the state protecting citizens from unemployment, with social citizenship defined as the ‘right’ to assistance.” But the ascendance of supply-side economics in the 1970s recalibrated the discourse. By framing unemployment as a problem of supply rather than demand, joblessness was presented by conservatives as a moral choice rather than a symptom of market failure. Instead of receiving welfare assistance, the argument went, the poor should bootstrap themselves out of their poverty.


Prompt: This rhetoric of self-reliance prevailed through the mid-1990s and beyond, in which policies of “mutual obligation” were introduced by the conservative government led by John Howard. As Griffin observes, these policies ensured “eligibility for income support was reconfigured, newly coupled with requirements.” These included “obligatory participation in prescribed employment assistance activities, lower benefit payments and shorter benefit periods, means testing, and punishments for failures to attend job interviews.” And the slightest failure to follow these mandates led to a loss of income.

Response: The bureaucratic language surrounding these benefits—“Work for the Dole”—marked welfare for the economically marginalized as a provisional rather than enshrined right for citizens. It’s support with strings attached. Yet the irony of stigmatizing welfare recipients is that better-off Australians are major beneficiaries of social spending. The Australian writer Tim Winton notes that the country’s middle class has “an increasing sense of entitlement to welfare,” which is “duly disbursed largely at the expense of the poor, the sick, and the unemployed.” These include tax concessions on contributions to “superannuation,” which are funds designed to help Australians save for their retirement. Such concessions are distortionary: they’re levied at a flat rate of 15 percent, rather than at a progressive rate according to one’s income, which means their benefits are reaped overwhelmingly by the rich.


Prompt: The Australian Bureau of Statistics calculates that nearly one third of these concessions are claimed by the top 10 percent of income earners in Australia. Then there are policies like negative gearing, a tax concession that allows you to claim a deduction against your wage income for losses generated by any rental properties you own. (Australia and New Zealand are the only countries in the world to hold such a policy.) In addition, Australian homeowners are entitled to a capital gains tax discount of 50 percent once the property is sold.

Response: Critics have argued that the combination of these two policies only serves to fuel investor speculation, entrench housing unaffordability, and lock first-time home buyers out of the market. But it’s easier to attack the poor than to tax the rich. Shredding the Social Contract Unfortunately, the fallout from the robo-debt scandal has not deterred the Australian federal government from continuing to use technology to impose “personal responsibility” upon its citizens.


Prompt: In May 2017, Centrelink announced that it would expand its cashless debit card scheme for welfare recipients living in areas with high levels of drug and alcohol abuse. The scheme quarantines 80 percent of welfare payments to the debit card, which contains software that blocks purchases of restricted products such as alcohol, drugs, or gambling-related goods at the point of sale. It’s already been deployed in two towns (Ceduna in South Australia and East Kimberley in Western Australia), both of which have a sizable indigenous population. It’s a dystopian vision of welfare—one that is discriminating, inhumane, and corrosive.

Response: The creation of robo-debt is a logical, if painful evolution of the neoliberal unraveling of the Australian welfare state, in which social services were subject to savage cuts over the past few decades. Means testing is part of the problem, as was the decision made in the mid-1990s by the Australian Labor Party government—and continued by successive conservative and progressive governments—to bring in private employment agencies to help job seekers gain employment. What was once the responsibility of the state gradually became a lucrative opportunity for private firms to capitalize on a market that previously didn’t exist.


Prompt: These outcomes weren’t inevitable. The bipartisan embrace of means testing has meant that a truly progressive policy for welfare—that is to say, universal, unconditional, and rooted in a model of social citizenship safeguarded by the state—has not been articulated by policymakers on the left. What exists is a perversion of the social contract in which government shirks its responsibilities for the social well-being of its citizens in favor of serving the interests of capital.

Response: Means testing creates a political climate in which it is increasingly palatable for cuts to be made to the most vulnerable. By contrast, universal benefits are much harder to cut. The few benefits that are universal in Australia—such as Medicare, the government-funded health insurance scheme—are vigorously supported by Australians across the political spectrum. (An attempt by the federal government to introduce a copayment for doctor visits was rescinded after public outcry.) There’s an opportunity, surely, to make the welfare state more humane, more dignified, and more equipped to address the needs of all Australians. It’s tempting to think of what could have been—how technology could have been used to make social services more transparent and fair, not to mention more accessible to those who depend on them.


Prompt: What the scandal shows is that the neutrality of technology is a fallacy. A tool is only as good as the politics that underpin it. It’s not an accident that the Australian government’s attempt at algorithmic governance was inhumane. It was a defining feature of its design. In her brick house on top of a hill outside Green Bank, West Virginia, Diane Schou’s phone is ringing. My head is killing me, comes a voice on the other end of the line. My toes are burning. I’m having a heart attack, a stroke, Alzheimer’s, dementia. I’m living in my car, my home is a death trap. Help me or soon I will die.

Response: They call from Michigan, Minnesota, California, France, Turkey, Tokyo. Sometimes they use Google Translate. Sometimes they cry and Diane just listens. “I should have a degree in counseling by now,” Diane says. Diane is a celebrity in the electrosensitive community, a growing group of people who say they suffer from electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS), or harmful health effects when exposed to electromagnetic radiation (EMR). All modern electronics that run on alternating current (AC) power emit this radiation to one degree or another; it’s also present in any device that uses wireless communication—not just our computers and cell phones but also our cell phone towers, Fitbits, and baby monitors.


Prompt: Green Bank, a hamlet of 157 close to the Mountain State’s eastern border with Virginia, is one of the only places left in the world where humans can live in air that is devoid of Wi-Fi signals and emissions from other connected technology. To Diane and her fellow electrosensitives, it’s a “safe zone.” Splashy headlines have proliferated about Green Bank, portraying it as the town that “banned cellphones” because it’s backward or has anti-technological views baked into its culture. But this isn’t so. Rather, the national government conferred this destiny upon it from the outside, in the form of a commitment, made in perpetuity, to a different kind of communication.

Response: Listening to the Sky Some people who call Diane are so desperate that they show up in her driveway the next day. But many come and do not stay, citing the “primitive” nature of Green Bank—it lacks a Starbucks, an organic food co-op, and a wide variety of psychological services, for instance. Some who come bring class privilege and urban values and presuppositions that can make them suspicious of, or demeaning towards, their new working-class rural neighbors—a complicated dynamic when electrosensitives often see themselves as health refugees to a place where the local community struggles to get access to fresh food or standard healthcare.


Prompt: Diane has been in Green Bank since 2007, but her own assimilation hasn’t been entirely smooth. Besides her personality, there are cultural differences and class differences. She’s a religious Christian who says grace before every meal, while many of her neighbors worship bluegrass music and hard work. She comes from a middle-class family and isn’t afraid to assert her needs, while this town’s longtime residents are predominantly working poor with patterns of grit and self-sufficiency.

Response: To try to bridge this gap, Diane has taken to recommending a trial visit accompanied by a three-pronged homework assignment while they’re here: Buy a copy of the local newspaper, The Pocahontas Times. Go to the local grocery/hardware/gas station and buy something, anything. Take a tour of the Green Bank Telescope.


Prompt: I’ve come to do the third item on the list, to learn more about this telescope that is the reason that all Green Bank is safe for electrosensitives. A man who calls himself Tour Guide Dave stands before me and the other fifteen people assembled in the small, shiny auditorium where PowerPoints and educational videos are shown. It’s the largest fully steerable radio telescope in the world, he tells us, whose job is to study tiny emissions from the farthest away planets for information. Many of the most important discoveries about space have been made using this huge dish-like instrument.

Response: He tells us that the telescope works by listening to radio waves, a kind of EMR. Any time a charged particle moves, it releases EMR. Faraway planets emit EMR too, in the form of light, heat, or infrared radiation. Weaker than infrared is microwave radiation—water in our food (and in our cells) can absorb this kind of energy, which is what causes our food to heat up and cook and our skin to burn. Weaker still is the energy that Wi-Fi networks produce. Finally, at the very bottom, are radio waves, signals so faint that even the slightest bit of interference will blot them out.