Prompt: My sources are quite broad because the project is not a finite and finished one, but rather an open framework for addressing the multiple layers of the molecular colonization that currently traps us and the planet in a collective mutagenesis — mutation to our bodies, sex, gender, fellow non-humans, and environment.  How did you start to work on your open source estrogen project? What materials did you need? What kinds of collaborators, if any?  Initially I collaborated with a Canadian artist Byron Rich who introduced me to the possibility of an open source birth control pill that contains primarily estrogen or progesterone. Although we are far away from an open source platform for producing hormones, through this journey I was able to form collaborations with many others in the open source community, such as Paula Pin from Transhackfeminists and Gynepunk Lab; Ryan Hammond, who is working on Open Source Gendercodes; Spela Petric, who I collaborate with in a collective called Aliens in Green; and most recently with the Lifepatch citizen initiative based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where we investigate various strategies for addressing the most polluted river in the city. The materials of our bio hack sessions are usually low-cost and easy to find, and have ranged from transgenic yeast biosensors to silica gel, urine, cigarette filters, methanol, plastic, and of course, hormones.  Why estrogen, in particular? Are you working on other hormones, or would you consider doing so? Estrogen is interesting because not only does it code for our social and cultural ideas of “femininity” and regulate so much of our basic endocrine function in the body (for example, reproductive development, mood, and metabolism), but it can also be mimicked by hundreds of other toxic industrial molecules of our late capitalist efforts, molecules we call “xenoestrogens.”  Some popular examples of these molecules are plastics — BPA and phthalates — synthetic hormones, PCBs, dioxins, pesticides, and soaps. For decades since the 1930s, these molecules have caused much of what Rob Nixon called the “slow violence”: environmental degradation and the marginalization of bodies and communities. There have been severe population declines in certain marine vertebrates because they can no longer reproduce, and humans as well are directly affected. The question is how our cultural notions of sex, gender, and reproduction will shift if we are surrounded by molecules that mutate our bodies and physiology. Ultimately this is an issue of body sovereignty and agency. Toxicity is never consensual!

Response: What materials does a person need to make open source estrogen? How much knowledge of chemistry, and how much of code? It is currently out of reach for the average citizen to make estrogen in the kitchen. But even if it were possible, there are many risks involved with dosage and purity. Nonetheless I collaborated with two trans-femme artists, Jade Phoenix and Jade Renegade, and the production team Orgasmic Creative to make the short film Housewives Making Drugs, a speculative fiction piece that performs a urine-hormone extraction protocol as a way to make DIY hormones for you and your trans community.  Although based in both fiction and in reality — the protocol originates from some of my estrogen geeking sessions where we extract hormones from the urine by a column chromatography method using cigarette filters, silica gel, and methanol — I wanted to show the possibility that we can create alternative pathways to access our own health, especially as marginalized people who don’t usually have a voice in the scientific or medical community. At the same time, the film shouldn’t take away from the already long and enormous efforts by the LGTBQ community for gaining greater access to hormone therapies.


Prompt: What are the social or political obstacles to such a project? What are the social and political reasons to undertake it? How do you see your work on open source hormones in the current environment, in the US or elsewhere? The obstacles for open source hormones are plenty, the primary one being the science, since it’s currently not possible at the citizen level. I think the artist Ryan Hammond may be the closest example, since they are currently developing transgenic yeast or tobacco plants to be biofactories for hormones, which are organisms that are easy to cultivate and share once they can be properly engineered. But I hope Ryan doesn’t run into a patent or copyright infringement battle with larger pharmaceutical companies — it would be stupid of them to go after a sole independent artist.  As for my own work on open source hormones, my practice exists primarily as “workshopology” with the public. Now I’m on a ten-month Fulbright scholarship in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where I’m collaborating with the Lifepatch citizen initiative and Gadjah Mada University, focusing on environmental hormones (xenoestrogens) in the Code River, and how we can form strategies for manufacturing embodied affect in the local citizens who live intimately with the river.  I think working in open source doesn’t always have to produce a practical result. It can also be used as a discursive exercise for generating new subjectivities. I think it’s great that with hormone hacking protocols, we can open up the cultural discussion about sex and gender — what is female and male — and how has molecular colonization also extended to our social ideologies of (eco)heteronormativity, the idea that nature also follows rules of purity and male-female reproduction. We can hack the hormones themselves, but it’s equally interesting to hack our social ideologies that are related to hormones. These are all deeply entrenched and subconscious notions, when you look at something like the gender binary. Bringing them to surface, like the way we do with detecting hormones in the local river, is what I try to strive for.

Response: Could you describe at a high level what your role is and what you do? I have worked in security control centers at different companies for the better part of ten years. I’ve been a supervisor level since 2010 or 2011. In that time, I’ve mostly worked at the global control center level, which means: monitoring travelling employees and events around them, monitoring world events to make sure they don’t impact our sites worldwide, monitoring the sites themselves to make sure they’re secure, and monitoring any other incidents that might be going on around the sites that might put them in jeopardy. My role is to protect people, assets, and property — basically in that order.


Prompt: I’d always worked for security contractors up until recently when I was hired by a manufacturing company. My position is very rarely in-house; usually, it’s only more senior positions. My current company has much more in-house staff on the control center site. The rest, such as the guard staff, are for the most part contract.

Response: How did you originally get into this line of work?  I’d say part nepotism, part strength. I started in 2003, and I got the job because my mom worked in the legal department, and at the time security was under legal. They had a split swing/grave shift position open that I started in. In my first position, I was in the role of an “operator.” I was the one on the computer monitoring the alarms, answering the phones, doing the basic point-of-contact stuff, and doing the radios for the security officers.


Prompt: After a few years there, I saw the writing on the wall that they were closing that control center and moving it to Austin. I had a friend who was working at a tech company and reached out to him to get an introduction. That’s how I got into security operations work in the tech sector. Were you specifically interested in the security industry when you took the role? Not really. I did it because it seemed decent pay for not very stressful work. I mean, it’s a stressful job when shit’s going down, but 95 percent of the time it’s a whole lot of nothing. It was a relatively non-stressful job. I’d go in, I’d do my job, I’d come home, and I got a decent amount of money for it.

Response: When I got the job, I was just out of school and didn’t really have a degree. I had been working in retail, getting paid maybe nine bucks an hour. It was a 50 percent raise to go into security for a whole lot less work, so I was like, sure, why not?  Could you talk a little more about control centers? What is a control center?  Control centers are the central communications hubs in most companies. We’re the intake point of calls to “security” — someone in a regional or global control center will be the one answering the phone if anyone calls into security.


Prompt: We triage those calls depending on their content. We have people respond on the ground if it’s a security event, dispatch 911 if it’s a medical or police event, or, if it’s minor, just document what occurred. Say someone calls to say they lost their cell phone: we’ll document it so it’s in our records, so if it turns up we can give them a call.

Response: The job spans from pretty mundane customer service — hey, we found your phone! — to things like the building next door blowing up, disabling all power and causing damage to our building. That would trigger us reaching out to upper management to let them know something’s happened so they can start a crisis management process and connect to the site to make sure everyone’s okay, evacuated, and accounted for.


Prompt: What does your job look like at its most mundane? At its most boring, which is the vast majority of the time, there is nothing going on and we’re getting run-of-the-mill phone calls. When you’re on the operator level, you’re basically just staring off into space between calls. As a supervisor, I’m a little bit more flexible than some other people I’ve worked with — if nothing’s going on, as long as the work is getting done, I don’t care about anything else you’re doing. If you’re on the internet and watching YouTube, I don’t care. So long as everything else gets done, that’s fine. Just don’t fall asleep; give me plausible deniability if someone higher than me walks in the room. Everything else? I don’t care.  Some companies are more strict about that. Thankfully, the control room I work in now doesn’t have cameras in it, but that hasn’t always been the case — I’ve worked at places with cameras that look at people’s monitors. I’ve had someone at the management level call me and tell me they saw someone on their phone, and that I should discipline them. And I’m thinking, “Why are you watching the camera? Don’t you have something better to do?” It could be pretty dumb sometimes, but when you’re contract, you have to keep up the appearance of being 100 percent on your A-game at all times, or you might lose the contract. I understand it on a conceptual level, but that doesn’t mean I like it.  Since I’m in a supervisory role, I now get to spend downtime on things that are partially outside of the day-to-day scope. I use that time to get projects done that better both the SOC (security operations center) or myself or the security department as a whole.

Response: What about on the opposite end of the spectrum — what is an example of “shit going down”? The most intense is when national or international incidents happen, the sort of things that you see in the news. For example, I was on duty when the Boston Marathon bombing happened. We had a site in Boston, and when the bombing occurred, it was three blocks from our office, and we had people on the ground in the race. The whole city basically went on lockdown. People were stuck at the office and at home, and we had to make sure that everyone was okay, everyone was accounted for, and that our management was aware of the situation going on, how close it was the site, how many people were impacted.  Then a few days later, all hell broke loose and the whole city closed down trying to find the guys. That was one of my busiest days.  I was also on duty when the Mumbai attacks happened in 2008. That was when the terrorists came in on boats and started shooting up a hotel. Our office was a mile or two away from that. That was an almost two-day affair and we were updating the CEO every six hours.  Another example is that I was also on the job when the coup happened in Turkey in 2016. Thankfully, our office was on the Asia side and most everything happened on the Europe side, but half of our employees were on-site at the time. We gave them direct instructions to stay on-site until the coup was over. Don’t leave, stay accounted for. We accounted for everyone who worked at the office, down to the last person. The last person ended up being on vacation in an island just off the coast of Turkey, and we were able to get a hold of him too.


Prompt: So yeah, there’s been a few all-hands-on-deck, nothing-else-matters moments where it’s very intense until everyone is accounted for. Shoestring War Room Are there any generalizations you can make about the background of people who go into this area of work?  The easiest generalization I can make is ex-military and ex-police. A lot of companies will specifically try to hire people from those backgrounds. I know a few people who were actually pushed out of positions they were in because the company wanted someone with military or police experience.

Response: I also see a lot of students because the hours are pretty flexible. And then I see a lot of people who might not fit a mold specifically in a company, but still need to work — that was more or less where I fit in when I first started. I don’t really have a relevant degree to work with and was not getting considered by interviewers in other realms.


Prompt: Once you’re in, you also tend to stay in. Security has a stigma, so once you have security on your resume, it’s hard to change into other industries. Interviewers will look at your resume and say, “That’s interesting, buuuuut you were kind of a mall cop?” No, no I was not.  Unfortunately, pop culture has given security a very poor reputation. People either think of us in an ultra-high-tech Las Vegas casino war room, or they see us as Paul Blart: Mall Cop types. I’ve never seen it depicted the way it actually is, although I’ve seen it come close on occasion. Don’t get me wrong; some people who are hired on the rank-and-file frontline are not the sharpest tools, all things considered. But it’s unfortunate because it ends up being looked down upon as a career path.  It’s funny because I had a picture of that casino war room in my mind as well. I’m picturing something like a big room with thirty monitors on the wall with a map of the US and glowing lights on it. What is it actually like? It depends on how much budget the company has. At my current company, we have no budget since the nature of manufacturing is that it’s penny-pinching. Our control room fits four desks. Each desk has maybe two to three screens and we have eight big screens on the wall showing cameras or news or some combination thereof.  [E-commerce Company] was probably my fanciest, but I’ve seen fancier. [Social Media Company] has one of those ultra-high-tech war rooms. They have more money to burn than sense. [Big Company] has a fancy, twenty thousand dollar window where you press a button and the glass leading into the room fogs up. It’s all about budget.  That’s the other thing about security: security is always a cost center. It does not make revenue for the company, so you’re the last in line for budget — unless something happens, and that’s when the budget explodes.  So you tend to get more budget after an incident happens?  At one company, just before I got hired, they had a bomb go off at one of their buildings after hours one night. After that, they staffed every exterior door 24/7 with a guard, installed a ton of super high-def cameras at all the driveways, and built up their SOC significantly. It was basically like, “We never want that to happen again, here’s more money so hopefully it doesn’t.”

Response: Is there a general preference for how well you are funded or treated as a contract worker versus in-house employee? It pays significantly more to be in-house. Not only because you’re typically getting a higher base pay, but because the benefits are usually better. When you’re a contractor, benefits packages and everything are all dictated by the specific contract. So if a company you’re working for is the lowest bidder on the contract side of things, you’re probably getting crappy coverage unless the company is very nice.  This is also the first time I’ve received stock options, too. I got hired on with a pretty significant stock grant — or at least I think it’s significant. Obviously I know people who get that in base pay raises all the time. I’m not high on the scale, all things considered, but I’m up there.  Just Following Procedures I’m trying to imagine what your org chart looks like. Can you describe your reporting structure? The organization is typically broken down by region. It just makes life easier, especially when you have 150 sites worldwide. You divide everyone up — the three typical divisions are Americas, EMEA (Europe, Middle East, and Africa), and APAC (Asia Pacific). Then you just divide down from there.  Most control centers are in North America, so they will typically fall under the NorAm or Americas regional manager. Each center will have a manager who runs the SOC itself. Below the manager, there’s a supervisor. The manager will do more of the strategic side of things, where the supervisors are still doing the day-to-day stuff. I’m a shift supervisor, so I cover the day shift, there’s someone who does swing, there’s someone who does grave. I have a bevy of operators who work for me on my shift, and same with the other shifts. People in these roles report either up to the Americas region or up to a global security manager of some variety.  That’s from top to bottom. Starting from the bottom moving up, typically you start at operator, move into a lead operator, and then into management of the security team or a security niche within another team. When you’re an operator, your job is to follow the path through the procedure; when you’re in the lead, you have the option to bend the rules a little bit more, or to have a say in making decisions on things outside of the scope of the existing procedures.


Prompt: Developing the procedures is usually a collaboration between the control center’s management team and the physical security managers of the spaces they’re involved in. So if there’s a certain site that has certain requirements, like OSHA requirements, those have to be built into our procedures. For example, if there’s a medical event where someone lost a hand, has 911 been contacted, are we handling it, is the patrol team on-site handling it, is it some combination thereof? That all goes through a long committee process over time.

Response: When you mentioned strategic work that is done at higher levels, what is an example of what that means?  Sometimes, it involves networking into other teams. We communicate what our wheelhouse is at the moment, and we think about how we can make other teams function better or have other teams help us improve. Other times, it involves reaching out to stakeholders, outlining the communications we send when incidents occur, and understanding: do they want to be involved in those communications, is there any information they need that we may not be including now, that sort of thing.


Prompt: The long-term strategy is just to prove, and to increase, the value we provide to the company. Like every other department, if we’re not adapting and changing and building better, we’re just costing the company money.  What are the other sorts of niches or connections to other teams? Myself, I’m trying to go into the technical side of things — the side that involves the cameras, the card readers, the systems and the design thereof. I’m currently working on a project with a tech team collaborating to improve systems for both their team and my own. The company I’m at was previously run cowboy-style where everyone was doing their own thing, so there’s seven different systems for cameras, there’s five different systems for alarms, and there’s no unity to it. Decisions were made site by site, or regional manager by regional manager, or whatever the budget allowed.  As they get to higher levels, a lot of people will go into the analysis side of things. Most security departments will have people who investigate larger incidents using some form of intelligence analysis. So security will look into some of the smaller, nickel-and-dime stuff, but it’s the investigation team that comes in when it’s big money losses, sabotage, or IP theft on incremental levels, where it’s someone who’s been taking out a little at a time for a long time.  Travel security can sometimes be a separate team. They make sure everything goes well when people are abroad. That can be looped into a control center team, though it’s not always. They’re also the ones who will look into best practices for higher risk countries like China, for example. Don’t bring your work phone, bring a burner phone; don’t bring your laptop, or bring a laptop you don’t care about. You need to have a VPN that works in that country; you need to have an anti-USB keylogger adapter system; you need to have one of those special power cords that only passes power through, so you don’t get any viruses when you plug your cell phone into a wall charger that was provided to you by the hotel.

Response: Did the different companies you worked at have different levels of paranoia about that sort of thing? When I worked at a non-customer-facing hardware company, they weren’t too worried about it. Obviously, they had IP theft concerns, but they licensed their stuff out anyways. Manufacturing tends to be more super secret about it than the tech companies I was at. They are a lot more fearful of intellectual property disappearing and then being duplicated because it’s literally their livelihood.  When I worked at an e-commerce company, there wasn’t much IP to be stolen. The worry was more about user information getting out.


Prompt: You mentioned that you’re interested in getting more into the technical side of things. How do you currently use technology in your role, and what kind of tools are at your disposal?  A lot of companies use a program called Lenel, which is made by a company called OnGuard. I’m well versed in Lenel because it’s something I’ve been using for almost twelve years now. But it’s getting a little dated and other companies are starting to branch out into other things. There are also about a half dozen different camera systems.

Response: I’ve done surface-level programming in these sorts of systems: generating alarms, naming those alarms, timing them for certain things. Alarms can tell you many kinds of things; one door can generate a dozen different types of alarms. They’re usually either technical or security-related. If a wire is not connected properly, it’ll generate an incorrect voltage alarm or an intermittent disconnection alarm. Those are technical alarms, and only the technical side of the organization really needs to know about them.


Prompt: But you also have security-related alarms, like if a door is forced open, if it’s held open for more than thirty seconds, or if it’s an emergency exit that has a screamer on it. Or maybe it’s a glass break alarm, a duress alarm, or someone is pressing the button that says, “Oh my God, there’s a guy with a gun in here and I’m pressing this button, so hopefully someone looks at the camera and sees the incident going on without triggering the guy with the gun.” Obviously, my team needs to see those.  For the most part, no company uses any sort of in-house technology because they don’t want to spend the money on it — because it would have to be developed, it would have to be serviceable, it would have to have more than one person who knows how to fix it. So it’s always farmed out to other software systems or contract companies.

Response: At Your Service How does the work that you do relate to security guards? Is that in the same organization? Or do security guards work for different companies and you coordinate boots on the ground?  If the SOC is contract, security guards are typically part of the same contract company. It depends on the site and company. Some companies will cherry-pick contract companies based on their strengths — one company for on-campus security guards, one for travel security, etc. — and other companies will pick one contract company to cover everything. In general, if it’s a small enough company, the SOC will also control the biggest site, or direct the local site’s guard force.  The guard force is partially autonomous — unless otherwise given instructions, they do their own thing for the most part. Then when something happens, we act as an override on top of their typical procedures. That can be as small as needing them to go unlock the conference room for someone, to having this belligerent person in the lobby and making sure everyone responds to make sure he’s escorted off the property. If there is a medical incident, it’s making sure they respond to that — once they are there, they have their own process and procedure they follow. Or when it’s a security event, or heaven forbid an active shooter — which thank God I’ve never dealt with — we direct them and they take over.


Prompt: So your job is to deal with everything from active shooters to people locked out of conference rooms.  This job is in part an over-glorified add-on to an insurance policy. In essence, your being there makes their insurance cheaper. But it’s also in large part a concierge service. Security is customer service before it’s actually security. We’re there to say yes more often than we are to say no. With manufacturing it’s a bit of a different story, but with tech it’s 100 percent, we’re there to help people get what they need, more than tell them they can’t do things.

Response: Huh. When I think of infosec at least, that emphasis on customer service seems like it could be a vulnerability since social engineering is a big threat — so being overly-friendly to people could lead to malicious actors trying to take advantage of you. Have you ever had to be rude to people?  Not to sound terrible, but having worked at the control center — which is all just customer service over the phone — those times when I could say no was a glorious thing. It felt great for once to be able to tell someone, “No you can’t do that, fuck off.” But it was a very rare occasion, and it had to be like a pure breach of protocol. We could bend things every once in a while, but not break them.  We are customer service to a point where we’ll help someone get to the information they need, though we won’t necessarily give them that information. And obviously understanding social engineering from a basic level — to not just volunteer stuff — is important.  Tech is a lot more customer service because, even though it’s all on a server somewhere and it’s easier to sneak stuff out because it’s a lot smaller, there’s very little we could do to prevent things that aren’t already dealt with by infosec, or with all the stuff that’s built into your laptops. Manufacturing is a lot more keeping track of material stuff, because every ounce that goes out that isn’t in the product is basically money lost.  When I was working at an e-commerce company, whenever sellers called in because they were experiencing a technical problem with the site, it was typically their livelihood on the line. It was like, “Oh my God, my store isn’t working, and if it doesn’t work in the next forty-eight hours I’m going to go kill myself.” I had to call police departments in more countries than I care to count, since if someone says they are going to kill themselves, it’s a liability and we need to make sure they’re okay. Or at least do the due diligence of reporting it, so that it’s on the police if they don’t actually go and do anything about it.


Prompt: Beyond answering phones I assume you’re also monitoring security cameras. How much of the job is that? People always assume someone is watching a camera at all times. I can 100 percent say no one is watching a camera at any time. We might have some up for peripherally keeping an eye on trouble spots. For the most part, though, the cameras are recording at all times, but no one is ever watching them.  Once you get past a certain number of cameras, you are past the point where it makes any sense for someone to be watching all of them; it’s 100 percent looking back retroactively and seeing what exactly happened.  On average, at my current manufacturing company, I do maybe three to four of those investigations a day. And the previous tech companies I worked at, it was maybe three to four a week depending on the scenario. It was kind of feast or famine with tech. With manufacturing, they care a lot more, because they’re keeping an eye on when people screw up, when things break, or when damage is done — because every penny counts.

Response: So in manufacturing, beyond security and managing the infrastructure or assets of the tech company, it sounds like there is also a level of surveillance over the work that people are doing?  In a way. They have cameras on the production itself. It’s more a matter of making sure that if there is damage done, the person who does it is held accountable, and it’s dealt with in a timely fashion. Because they need to investigate — was it just an accident? Was it malicious? That sort of thing. If it is malicious, they deal with it rapidly; if it’s just an accident, the safety team is there to determine how it happened and how to prevent it in the future.


Prompt: The degree of surveillance differs a lot when you’re dealing with the US versus Europe. In the US, we have a lot more liberty in terms of what we can watch and how we can document things. In most of our US sites, we have high-def cameras at all corners of the building, at all entrances, and cameras that even look out into streets in the area.  For a lot of the European sites nowadays, with GDPR, those cameras are required to be blocked off or blacked out. They cannot have any visibility into public space or anyone’s workspace. We have limitations on how much can be recorded and how much an investigative body can share with us when they’re requesting access to our footage. We’ve had cases where the police will reach out to us and say, “We had an incident here, we want the video from X time to Y time, and we can’t tell you anything else.” And we say, “You realize three days’ worth of footage is like ten gigs of video file, you sure you want this? ‘Cause we could narrow it down really quickly if you told us…” And they’re like, “Nope, we can’t tell you.”  After applying all those rules, what can you record? Where are the cameras pointed in Europe?  The cameras are typically on entrance doors. If it’s an exterior camera, it’ll be looking at just the door; if it’s an interior camera, it’ll typically looking at just the door or the hallway leading up to the door. They’ll be looking at lobbies, elevators, stairwells, and that’s pretty much it. Maybe server rooms or networking closets on occasion.  So any places where people are entering and exiting, or enclosed spaces that are meant to be sensitive.  Yeah, high-risk zones basically. That’s actually one of the weird things having come to manufacturing from typical Silicon Valley companies. Most companies will put cameras in places where the highest volume of OSHA violations or OSHA-like issues could occur. As I said, stairwells, hallways, elevators, and entry doors are the big places accidents can occur. Manufacturing companies are looking at the process on the floor; they could care less about stairwells or elevators or anything else. Where there are machines, there are cameras.

Response: No Can Do What kind of interactions do you have with other people in the companies you work at, if any? You sometimes hear about the different badge colors at some organizations and there being a kind of caste system, I’m curious if you have experienced that.  There is some kind of caste system, obviously. Most companies see their own employees as the top line, and then everyone else is down the chain. Most of the service-level stuff gets contracted out — janitorial, cafeteria, security. Facilities is a big one that’s typically contracted out. We work directly with facilities fairly regularly. We’re the ones who will find all the issues with the building and let them know when glass gets broken, or ceiling tiles are falling out, or there’s a water leak somewhere, that sort of thing. We work pretty heavily with janitorial as well.


Prompt: But we treat everyone pretty equally, unless they have a C in their title or a V in their title. For the most part, everyone else is stuck following the same exact policy and procedure. There are no exceptions. There are some policies that are employee-specific versus contract-specific — who has physical access to what areas of the building, some contractors can only work eight to five Monday to Friday whereas employees have 24/7 access, that sort of thing. But for the most part, everyone else is treated relatively equally.  Do you see any difference in how you as someone on that team are treated? At best, security tends to get ignored, and, at worst, we get sneered at or yelled at. Because we’re the ones saying, “No, you can’t do that — it’s against the policies and procedures that you signed up for when you joined the company and you have to follow the rules.” I’ve had many occasions where someone’s like, “Well I’m important in this company and it shouldn’t apply to me.” And I tell them, “Sorry, you’re like everyone else.”  My running joke for engineers is that you could paint a door red and write “You will die if you walk through this door,” and certain engineers and still walk through the door. Many times, people will walk through doors that literally say in big giant letters “Do not walk through this door. Audible alarm will occur.” Then we get angry calls from people who sit at the desk near that door. That’s pretty common.  When those cases happen, is it that people are clueless, or they think rules don’t apply to them?  A little of column A, a little of column B.

Response: How these incidents get treated depends on the company. In manufacturing, when someone breaks a rule, our job is to reach out to the person and their manager and have the manager enforce that they never break the rule again. In tech when someone breaks a rule, our response is usually limited to reaching out to the person and saying, ”It would be nice if you did not do that again.” The previous two tech companies I worked at told us to be very, very nice when we told people these things, versus in manufacturing, where we are encouraged to lay down the hammer.  I would say 20 percent of the time, we can get people who are understanding of it and will acknowledge it. But the other 80 percent are like, “But I need that, I need to do this thing now, it needs to be done now, let’s do this now, why can’t we do this now.” And we’re like, “We can’t because it’s against policy, sorry.” Are there escalation paths for things like that?  We can bend rules on certain occasions, but it’s context-specific. Is this person an intern or are they a vice president? It literally is dependent on: are they in the upper echelon of the company, or do we not care about them at all? They can escalate it all they want, and if it escalates far enough we might make changes to the policy. But most of the time, even if it escalates up to our senior management, the senior management will go, “Well, they followed the procedures to the letter. Everything’s good.”  Caught on Tape What are some of the things about the job that you think would be most surprising to people outside the industry? The biggest thing I’ve come across over the years working security is how much people think they can get away with things, or operate under the assumption that there aren’t cameras in an area, or the cameras aren’t recording. Which, to be fair, that’s sometimes the case. But 99 percent of the time, if they’ve done something stupid, it’s probably on camera. A control center operator has probably seen it or has been asked to look into it and found it.


Prompt: To give another example of how much info we have: any time there’s a card reader and you tag on it, it generates a “granted access” or an “invalid access” code depending on if you have access or not. So if there is ever a time where we need to find out where someone is, we can trace their badge and see, oh, at 8 a.m., they badged here, at 8:20, they badged into this conference room. That’s the last badge-in they have and it’s 8:30 now, so they’re probably in that conference room.  This typically comes up during investigations, anytime we’re trying to track someone. For instance, if we have a high-risk termination, HR will reach out and let us know that someone is high-risk because he’s made threats to his manager or something. We’ll then be asked to track him and let them know when he comes on-site, so we can make contact immediately and have security on standby in case something goes wrong. In cases like that, we can trace his badge, set it up so we get a ping when he comes on-site, and bring up cameras to track his movements.

Response: But back on the topic of getting away with things: I’ve had times where we’ll see an incident occur in a parking lot. Someone will ding someone else’s car and then we’ll see them park, get out of their vehicle, and walk into a building. From our perspective, we know which building entrance they used and what time they walked in. We can run a trace on that door, look at that time, see the person, look at their badge picture, and call them up. This is a pretty common occurrence. We can also reach out to the victim because we can go back, watch them park, get out of their car and badge into the door, and see who they are too.  There are always occasions of petty theft, where people who make six figures will walk up to a desk, see a phone charger or a laptop on the desk, and just walk away with it. It’s just like: why? You have a perfectly good job, making really good money, and you’re going to steal someone’s phone charger or their laptop or their cell phone or their wallet? Why? And then on the flip side, one of the first things that happened at one job was someone tailgated into the parking lot — a non-employee who was wearing a lanyard with a convincing-enough badge. They went upstairs, walked up to someone’s purse, took the credit cards out of it, and within an hour had charged five or six thousand dollars on their cards. They did that two or three times, at multiple companies, until they finally got caught.


Prompt: I’m always surprised by the cleverness of the people outside the company who try to steal things, and the stupidity of the people inside the company who feel they can get away with things. In the first days after I found out I was pregnant, my number one pleasure was tracking my embryo’s growth on various apps. As nausea set in, my morning ritual consisted of crunching Cheerios in bed while clocking the latest developments: one week the apps told me my baby was the size of a poppy seed, the next week a pea. When only my inner circle knew that I was knocked up, these apps acted as chatty confidantes. Their girlfriendy tone assured me that everything was moving along fine.  If I scrolled far enough or swiped the wrong way, I would occasionally land on the “community” sections of these apps. A typical series of posts might look something like this:  Light spotting at 12 wks normal?Nub & Skull Theory BFP or BFN? Thoughts? Constipation! 12 Weeks and Couldn’t Hear the Heartbeat — But all is OK!**Update 7dpo test** Who else just started their TWW… 3 DPO hereVeiny boobs LOL Early miscarriage, cervix feels weird Lord help me  Most of the time, I would click away. I was mystified by the acronyms and uncomfortable gawking at their naked vulnerability. On the one hand, I felt for these women, who clearly had nowhere else to take their fears, frustrations, and disappointment. On the other hand, I was trying to enjoy my BFP (Big Fat Positive) in peace. I found that these conversations were more likely to inspire new anxieties than to assuage the ones I already had.

Response: I got my first exposure to such “communities” through pregnancy tracking apps like Glow. But when I did Google searches for things like “round ligament pain” or “morning sickness when will it end,” I discovered another place where people were discussing pregnancy online: website forums that look like relics of the AOL era. I couldn’t fathom why anyone would spend their time poring over the comments on these sites, let alone posting them. But millions of women do, posing (and answering) every conceivable question.  BabyCenter.com claims to be the world’s number one digital parenting resource, reaching 100 million people monthly and attracting eight out of every ten new and expectant moms each month in the US. Since its publication in 1984, the blockbuster pregnancy guide What to Expect When You’re Expecting has done brisk business enlightening and terrifying parents-to-be. Today, the online home of the pregnancy-guide-turned-empire, Whattoexpect.com, has a new community post every three seconds. These sites (and a handful of others) play host to groups as broad as “birth clubs” (comprised of women due the same month) and as narrow as “40+ Expecting 8th LO” (Little One).


Prompt: Despite the proliferation of slick apps dedicated to fertility and pregnancy, much of the conversation still happens on old-school, web 1.0 forums like BabyCenter and What to Expect. Hectic, disorganized, and largely anonymous, these message boards recall the chatrooms of the 1990s, where you could be anyone and say anything under the cover of a screen name. While plenty of the pregnancy action has made the move to social media — where both “mommy” groups and branded pages abound — the forums maintain the upper hand in one key way. Whereas on Facebook users have to join the group in order to see the conversations, traditional message boards are far more lurkable. “Many studies show that there are way more lurkers than posters,” says Anna Wexler, a bioethics fellow at the University of Pennsylvania studying the rise of do-it-yourself medicine. “If you look at the number of posts on these forums, the number is tremendous — on some of the What to Expect ‘birth clubs,’ it’s over 500,000 posts already.” I stopped finding the forums so pitiable as soon as I got my first bad test result. When I was around ten weeks pregnant, I went in for a routine test called a nuchal translucency. Analog and old-school, the ultrasound scan measured the fluid behind the fetus’s neck to look for Down syndrome, which previous tests had indicated the baby did not have. It didn’t even occur to me to be nervous about this test, so I didn’t pay attention to the Very Bad Sign of the ultrasound tech quietly turning the monitor away from me.  I waltzed into my midwife’s office, ready to learn about breathing techniques and placenta smoothies. Instead she gently explained that the baby seemed to have excess fluid behind her neck — we learned it was a her — and that it could mean a few different things, none of them good. I was so shocked and distraught that I lost the ability to hear and process information. As soon as I got home, I descended into a Google vortex, which led to countless conflicting perspectives across multiple message boards.

Response: Down the Rabbit Hole Once I was referred to a Maternal-Fetal Medicine practice to run more tests, I quickly understood the primary reason women take to the boards: getting a hold of a doctor is too annoying and takes too long. “If you have a question and you don’t want to wait until your doctor’s appointment and don’t want to make the call, the forums are just really immediate,” explains Wexler. Most ob-gyn offices also employ a firewall of nurses to answer more basic questions and refer the complicated ones to doctors. “I can’t directly contact my fertility doctor,” explains Aba Nduon, a psychiatrist who moderates a pregnancy subreddit. “She has a nursing team that I can email or call with questions and then wait until they’re able to get in touch with her, or you can post on a forum and get a much quicker answer.” Intended or not, the effect is to shame patients into being very selective about what issues they bring up to their medical team.  It turns out another very good reason to hit the forums is to decode the complicated answers (or opaque non-answers) that busy, impatient medical professionals actually do tell you. For every casual aside (“you’ll probably be fine”) or stern command (“stay on bedrest until the bleeding stops”), there’s an online army of amateur experts ready to explain, debunk, reassure, or raise the red flag. As Wexler points out, “Even if you have the most amazing OB in the world, just hearing from your OB that something is normal is not the same as hearing from twenty people who are going through the exact same thing as you that it’s normal and you’re okay and you’ll get through this.” While the forums may seem like a potential hotbed of misinformation, the volume of voices tends to serve as a check on bad advice. The more science-minded threads offer an unexpectedly effective form of crowdsourcing, providing both quantity — multiple users chiming in with their own experiences — and quality — laypeople who are so deeply immersed in the finer points of fertility treatments or fetal development that they can competently address even the most obscure questions. Nduon told me that she’s also part of a Facebook group for female physicians going through infertility. Compared to the laypeople equivalent, she said it’s “honestly not too dissimilar — we have a lot of the same questions because a lot of this stuff is very specialized information.”


Prompt: If you question the wisdom of trusting strangers on the internet over your clinical care team, you probably don’t know how perilous a condition pregnancy in America is. The United States is the most dangerous place in the developed world to deliver a baby, with 26.4 maternal deaths per 100,000 births as compared to fewer than ten in Germany, England, France, Japan, and Canada. The US is one of just thirteen countries globally where the rate of maternal mortality is worse than it was twenty-five years ago. The CDC reports 700 deaths and more than 50,000 near-deaths annually. If things have gotten worse for women, they’ve gotten disproportionately worse for black women, who face three to four times the risk of pregnancy-related death as compared to white women. Black infants are more than twice as likely to die as white infants — a disparity that’s wider than it was before the Civil War.  According to a USA Today investigation, half of those deaths could be prevented and half of the injuries reduced or eliminated with better care. The life-saving interventions aren’t dependent on cutting-edge technology, but on basic monitoring that’s standardized in the rest of the developed world. Since many US hospitals don’t require widely recommended measures like quantifying blood loss or quickly treating dangerously high blood pressure, doctors and nurses rely on their own intuition rather than best practices. And if you can’t trust your doctors to follow simple rules to keep you alive, why should you take all of their other directives at face value?  Sick of This Shit When I started bleeding at work a few weeks after the grim test results, I called my ob-gyn’s office in a panic. I got the automated answering system, and pressed 1 for “health care providers and true medical emergencies” with conviction. The man who answered acted as if I had casually mentioned that I was experiencing some cramping and wondered if I might swing by for a consultation. He begrudgingly penciled me in for a 12:30 appointment (it was noon). When I arrived, the receptionist told me to have a seat, like I was waiting for a dental cleaning.

Response: Before any examination, the doctor told me that I might just be passing a clot and be okay, or I might be starting to miscarry, in which case I would just have to let it happen. I was appalled that these radically different outcomes were being offered up as two equally valid prospects. An ultrasound showed the same scene I was used to: fetus squirming around like it was a regular day in the uterus; heartbeat whooshing away. I think the doctor might have actually shrugged when she turned to me and said, “Everything looks fine.”  Unfortunately, this didn’t change her previous statement, meaning that I could still be kicking off a miscarriage. Unbelievably, her prescription was to send me home and see whether it got better or worse. “So just wait and see if I stop bleeding or if I’m having a miscarriage?” I tried to clarify.  “If you’re soaking through more than two pads an hour, call us,” she told me.  In the days that followed, I waited, and watched. I couldn’t manage going to work physically (I was put on bed rest) or emotionally (I was constantly on the verge of tears). I was stuck at home with nothing to do but watch bad TV and occasionally sneak a glance at the various apps, peeking through my fingers like I was watching a horror movie. All of the breezy talk of fruit sizes and organ development quickly started to feel very dark. The apps’ daily tips about iron-rich foods and how to spot the first kicks were bleak reminders of milestones I might not reach. But a hop-skip over on the community section were thousands of women whose fertility experiences deviated significantly from the joyful journey of belly selfies and gender-reveal parties.  For me, dwelling on stories of fetal anomalies and miscarriages felt grim and panicky; reading about other women’s awful experiences made the prospect of an unhappy ending that much more real. I felt like I was jinxing myself — and my baby — by even remotely identifying with them. Still, it was weirdly reassuring knowing that other women were finding some solace while going through the same type of misery. Alongside those happy posters “staying positive” or “waiting for that BFP” was an equal and opposite chorus bemoaning their latest setback or saying they were sick of this shit. The latter group tended to rely less on hope and faith than data and odds, whether dealing with a complication or trying to get pregnant in the first place. While I couldn’t bring myself to join them, this was my tribe: science-minded cynics who still refused to give up.


Prompt: But I found it technically challenging to lurk effectively, because the communities are so steeped in their own impenetrable lingo. Nduon, the psychiatrist, tells me that the conversations in her pregnancy subreddit can be difficult for outsiders to parse. “It’s very hard to understand what on earth people are talking about if you’re not familiar with the medications or different procedures.” She contends that it’s not just a pregnancy thing, but a human thing: “You create a language whenever you join a new group. You fall into the language that the group uses; it makes you feel like a part of the community.” The lexicon not unites the in-members, but also effectively shields them from intruders.  The amateur scientists who can rattle off their hormone levels and treatment protocols are bound not just by their common language, but by the many ways in which modern medicine has failed them. These women have sought out the top doctors and the soundest science, scouring the research and polling fellow lay-reproductive endocrinologists to maximize their chances of conceiving or giving birth to a healthy baby. But for all the promises of cutting-edge technology, the common denominator for women heading down that road is past disappointment.  When faith in the latest innovation falters, a trustier form of tech is waiting in the wings. And an older form of tech: old-school message boards that promise anonymity rather than the interconnectedness of social media. The web 1.0 setup of these forums is a feature, not a bug: that wild and wooly quality of the early internet makes room for a rare kind of openness and honesty among intimate groups of strangers.  Keeping it Sticky in the Cyber Sweatshop Long before branded content was a twinkle in any media corporation’s eye, early internet companies recognized the value of building communities that produced the “‘stickiness’ that maintains users’ attention and increases the emotional cost of shifting sites,” in the words of feminist theorist Kyle Jarrett. According to a 1999 Wired article, AOL deployed (not employed) tens of thousands of “community leaders” to keep its chat rooms and message boards humming, compensating them in the form of free AOL memberships and select online perks — that is, until a group of them brought a class-action lawsuit against AOL’s “cyber sweatshop.”

Response: Two decades later, women are still providing the same free labor, keeping the leading pregnancy sites nice and sticky. If they feel like a vestige of the past, it’s likely because there’s not a lot of incentive for their owners to update them. “They’re still getting a ton of content, and that content is coming up in searches on Google, so as it is it’s probably drawing a lot of traffic without them having to invest anything,” Wexler, the bioethics fellow, explains.  When I reached out to one such site, The Bump, to find out more about its community, a representative was keen to steer me toward their social media content instead. She explained that while their forums “originally served our users by fostering a sense of community for new and expectant parents,” they have “taken note of the shift away from forums and towards social media” and shifted their own attention accordingly. I had a hard time squaring this supposed migration with the numbers: The Bump’s Facebook page has fewer than 300,000 followers, while over at the message boards, the “Trying To Get Pregnant” section alone has 223,500 discussions and nearly three million comments. A single thread titled “what does a positive pregnancy test really look like??” has over 500,000 views.  A quick scroll through The Bump’s Facebook feed may help explain why. It shows plenty of upbeat material and clickbait-y headlines, with the occasional frazzled mom or baby with spaghetti on his head as the only nod to the tougher side of pregnancy and motherhood. But if you’re panicking over bad test results or low hormone levels, the knowledge, support, and advice of like-minded women is a lot more useful — and comforting — than a funny #momfail. As I faced down the prospect of a terrifying diagnosis or miscarrying altogether, the sanctioned kinds of “problems” discussed in the official content on sites like The Bump — morning sickness, body image issues, and worst of all, “baby brain” — began to enrage me more and more. It was as if the worst thing that could happen to you was throwing up at your desk.


Prompt: The social channels of all the major pregnancy players are also peppered with paid partnerships — tie-ins with eczema creams and baby food and diapers. It’s no wonder that The Bump and its ilk would prefer we spend our time browsing monetized social content rather than reading the forums for free. It’s hard not to conclude that the more sanitized version of pregnancy has become more lucrative, while the messier version remains more popular. Despite companies’ best efforts to mold the communities they want, women continue to carve out the communities they need. As long as the pregnancy narratives in mainstream culture stay relentlessly positive, women will go underground to find (authentic) stories and experiences that actually reflect their own.  The fact that women have to go underground to find these narratives is partly a function of how much the experience of pregnancy has changed. In her book Ina May’s Guide to Childbirth, renowned midwife Ina May Gaskin describes the “techno-medical” model of maternity care as a “male-derived framework” built on the assumption that “the human body is a machine and that the female body in particular is a machine full of shortcomings and defects.” In this framework, which unsurprisingly arose alongside the Industrial Revolution, doctors are the ultimate authority, while the responsibility for any failure to progress in pregnancy or labor is placed squarely on women’s shoulders.

Response: Before the techno-medical model of maternity care took hold, these communities existed IRL: midwives, mothers, and sisters formed a core support group for pregnant women. As Richard W. Wertz and Dorothy C. Wertz point out in Lying In: A History of Childbirth in America, childbirth in the United States was seen as a social experience through the nineteenth century — an opportunity for women to express their love and care. While there are plenty of reasons not to glorify those days, this approach had its upsides.  According to Gaskin, before the new model of birth had fully taken hold, nineteenth-century (male) doctors recognized the importance of staying out of a laboring woman’s bedroom until “women helpers” determined it was time to assist. As long as labor stayed in the home — where doctors couldn’t shoo away persistent women helpers — labor stayed social. In the humanistic (read: woman-centered) model that once reigned supreme, monitoring the physical, psychological, and social well-being of the mother-to-be was considered as important as minimizing technological interventions. But once the business of birth transitioned to the hospital setting, men and machines took over. While midwifery continues to gain traction in the US, the masculinized/medicalized approach remains dominant. Absent women helpers to do battle for us in the delivery room, we turn to the internet for the social experience we still crave.  Unruly Forums for Unruly Bodies I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t. There was before, and there was after. After, I operated in a constant state of dread. I dreaded anyone asking me about it and I dreaded having to explain myself. Not because I was sad (I was) or ashamed (I wasn’t) but because I didn’t want to do the emotional work of managing their discomfort. Faced with unnerving news that they’re ill-equipped to respond to, most people will just say they’re sorry. But this puts the suffering person in the uncanny position of comforting the un-suffering person, reassuring him or her that everything is fine, which of course is a lie designed to end the conversation. Every interaction continues to remind you that it’s easier to keep your feelings to yourself than to apologize for other people’s unease.


Prompt: Supposedly we live in a society where we can talk about anything. Technology has ended privacy; everything (and everyone) is fair game. Tabloids scrutinize celebrities for the faintest hint of a “baby bump” and announce every confirmed pregnancy with great fanfare. But we’re not equipped to handle the cognitive dissonance of a pregnancy gone wrong, or a failure to conceive in the first place. As Jen Tye, COO of Glow, puts it, “Sometimes I think the uncertainties that come along with being pregnant — the questions, the worries — some of the concerns may be harder to share because there’s this idealized view of what pregnancy is. You’re just supposed to be glowing and happy and that’s it, but it’s not.” Even the most well-meaning, genuinely caring friends and family struggle to navigate tales of fertility woe.  In the US, most of the pregnancy literature says to wait until the second trimester to announce your pregnancy. Most of my friends who’ve been pregnant seemed to respect this rule of thumb, and it has the standardized feel of medical truth. Even those most notorious oversharers, the Kardashians, have gone to great lengths to keep their pregnancies under wraps for as long as they could. But when you read between the lines, there’s no concrete reason to wait that long other than that, if you’ve made it that far with a clean bill of health, the risk of birth defects and miscarriage drops to almost zero. Which sounds reasonable, until you realize that traditional wisdom dictates that you shouldn’t tell anyone about your pregnancy until you know a (healthy) baby is definitely coming out the other end of it. The unspoken part of the second trimester “rule” is: keep your miscarriage or abortion secret. This effectively enforces a code of silence about an already-isolating experience.  As anyone who’s experienced pregnancy loss quickly discovers, it’s an incredibly common phenomenon: 10-20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage, and at current rates almost a quarter of American women will have had an abortion by the age of forty-five. So, so many women told me about their own experiences when they found out what I was going through — women my age who worked in the next cubicle, or women my mother’s age who had raised my best friends. Some I had even known when they were going through it, and I never had an inkling. And in all cases, I wouldn’t have heard their stories if I hadn’t volunteered my own. These points of connection were some of the few shreds of solidarity I felt during the most alienating periods of my life.

Response: The problem is that since people rarely talk about pregnancy loss, the act of conveying a matter-of-fact life occurrence — I was pregnant, now I’m not — takes on the ick of an overshare, reinforcing the pressure to keep quiet. If you’re lucky, close friends and family will rally around you. But more likely than not, acquaintances and colleagues will be discomfited by a revelation about something that happened inside your body. Given the choice, they would probably prefer not to know, and be left to privately wonder why you never ended up giving birth.


Prompt: This extreme discomfort with any deviation from an idealized version of pregnancy — let alone any discussion of it — is what forces women underground, to unruly forums for unruly bodies. When the bodily machine malfunctions and all of the short circuits are exposed, the infrastructure of the internet forms a protective shield. On the forums, you’re only as visible as you want to be: they provide cover in the form of a username disconnected from the rest of your social media presence; a persona without a personal brand.  Suddenly, internet strangers start to look a lot more appealing. You don’t have to explain yourself, and no one says I’m sorry. And if anyone feels uncomfortable, they can show themselves the virtual door.

Response: Inside the Collins household fireplace, underneath nine Christmas stockings that hang year round, sit the cryptocurrency mining rigs. In the winter, these screenless computers are moved below the furnace, where the excess heat they produce helps warm the house. That way, Owen, Cassie, and their seven children can save some money on the energy bill for their rural Washington home. It also helps them avoid unwanted attention from the power company — which, if it found out about their power-hungry endeavor, might ask for bills to be paid up front.


Prompt: Owen maintains the mining rigs as they search for whatever cryptocurrency earns them the most per watt, but it is his wife Cassie’s trading that really keeps the family afloat. When not homeschooling the kids, she is glued to her computer, hoping to multiply their earnings by trading the cryptocurrencies that the mining rigs bring in for others she hopes will grow in value. Now that she has a few years of experience, she knows how to spot a “scam coin” and which forums to trust. Most days, she earns a profit.

Response: The children, who range from first grade to college, help with both sides of the business. The oldest daughter has been in charge of keeping the miners cool since she was fifteen. In exchange for fixing the fans, reapplying thermal paste, and maintaining airflow, she gets a cut of the profits. Other kids help with the trading. Those who aren’t legally old enough to have their own accounts use Cassie’s spreadsheets to simulate swapping crypto. Owen reads crypto articles aloud at the dinner table to stir up discussion, and even the seven-year old has an opinion on the family business. (She likes DigiByte, an obscure security-focused coin.) The Collins can keep everyone fed by mining and trading crypto, but only because everyone pitches in.


Prompt: True Believers The scholar Langdon Winner once observed that all technologies have their own politics. When it comes to cryptocurrency, the politics of its underlying technology, blockchain, are built around distrust — or, as crypto enthusiasts like to call it, “trustlessness.”  To understand how this works, imagine the following scenario. The White House announces that in order to increase voter turnout, the 2020 election will be held online at WhiteHouse.gov. Naturally, this upsets Americans who do not trust the White House to count and collect the votes fairly. One solution would be to let people run the vote-counting program on their own computers. If everyone’s voting program could be kept in sync without depending on the White House, people could trust this “distributed ledger” to keep a list of the votes. This is the blockchain: a technology that keeps data on many computers synchronized without having to trust a central authority, or even each other.

Response: In 2008, an author with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto published a paper that introduced both the blockchain and a decentralized digital currency built on top of it called Bitcoin. The problems that Bitcoin had to solve were: How do new coins get issued without a centralized mint? And how do you prevent people from spending those coins twice? Nakamoto solved both problems by having computers on the network compete an energy-intensive mathematical lottery to determine who gets to add the next “block” of transactions to the ledger. To compensate them for spending that energy, the winning computer is awarded some newly minted currency. This process is called “mining.” Bitcoin soon attracted a colorful cadre of early adopters, many of whom became fabulously wealthy as the price went from $22 in 2014, to $800 at the start of 2017, to a peak of $17,900 by the end of that same year. Some were asset managers who could afford to take the risk early, like the Winklevoss twins or Barry Silbert. Others sought to improve or specialize Bitcoin’s functionality and earned their fortunes by building their own blockchains or cryptocurrencies, like Vitalik Buterin with Ethereum or Chris Larsen with Ripple.


Prompt: A large contingent of these early acolytes were ardent libertarians who saw Bitcoin as a technology that encoded their beliefs. They came for the politics and stuck around for the profit. In “trustlessness” and “distributed ledgers,” they saw a way to build a monetary system free from the government control — a goal that gained greater urgency in the aftermath of the massive bank bailouts during the 2008 financial crisis. Perhaps no one exemplifies crypto-libertarianism better than Brock Pierce, who started mining Bitcoin in 2009 and went on to reach number nine on Forbes’ 2018 Richest People in Cryptocurrency, even as he faced a laundry list of financial and sexual abuse scandals. Today, Pierce is working on Puertopia, a crypto-libertarian society built from the rubble of Hurricane Maria that takes advantage of Puerto Rico’s sunny weather and unparalleled tax incentives.

Response: If these nouveau riche are crypto’s landed gentry, then the Collins family are its subsistence farmers. They put in long hours to keep the mining rigs running, the hackers at bay, and the stomachs of nine family members filled. Their yield is unpredictable at best and at worst, catastrophic. They may share the same principles as the crypto elite, but they aren’t making money hand over fist: in fact, they’re just barely getting by. They have made crypto their whole lives for ideological reasons, not financial ones. They are true believers in the principles around which crypto is organized, and their commitment to those principles is rooted in bitter experience. “I’m on this adventure because 2008 almost killed me financially. I’m not on dollars, I’m on Satoshi,” Owen says in his Texas Hill Country drawl. “When you come at me and ask what the value of something is and you say dollars, I’m gonna say fuck off.” Into the Ether After the housing bubble collapsed in 2008, the Collins were in dire straits. Owen found himself on Craigslist, responding to people offering freezer-burned meat or, once, an old goat he could butcher. Just as the Collins started to recover, they were dealt another blow — this time by the Fukushima nuclear disaster of 2011. Owen was working as a licensed electrical engineer, helping upgrade the facilities at a nuclear site. But within a month, Owen’s company lost over ten million dollars worth of projects as nuclear sites all over the country put upgrades on hold to reevaluate their systems. He was out of work.


Prompt: The only option to support his family and get them out of debt was for Owen to pick up government contract work, bouncing around federal nuclear sites. “From 2011 to 2017, I was gone. [I was] living in a hotel, going on an airplane, sleeping in a minivan,” Owen says. He would FaceTime in for the Advent calendar, to say grace at the dinner table, and even to catch the occasional dinner and a movie with Cassie, who was raising and homeschooling the children on her own. The kids called him “Daddy-in-a-box.” Working for the government, Owen was overwhelmed by the inefficiency. The bureaucracy was farcical, the technology was wildly out of date, and the cubicles made for an environment less “move fast and break things” and more Dilbert. Worse still, Owen, a privacy hound, had to give up a lot of personal information to receive a security clearance. Every place he ever lived, every relative he ever contacted, and every illicit substance he ever used were just some of the data captured in the 127 pages of his SF-86 clearance form. And when hackers breached the Office of Personnel Management in 2015, all of that information was stolen. “Damn feds lost my DNA sample… they got intel on my whole family,” Owen says.

Response: In 2014, during his ample free time at work, Owen came across a white paper about a new blockchain called Ethereum. While Bitcoin is a distributed list of financial transactions, Ethereum is that plus a distributed list of computer states. In other words, it stores programmable ones and zeros that act as a giant, decentralized computer running public, uncensorable code. It’s like Amazon Web Services (AWS) in that users can pay to run applications on it (using its native currency, Ether) but without a central Amazon-like authority. Today, even though it is thousands of times more expensive and millions of times slower than AWS, the Ethereum distributed computer runs code simultaneously on the computers of a few thousand strangers.


Prompt: Ethereum appealed to Owen right away, not only as an inveterate tinkerer but as a staunch libertarian. The government had failed Owen too many times — first as a facilitator of the 2008 financial crisis, then as a soul-crushing and privacy-annihilating employer. Owen finally had the chance be part of something built by engineers, for engineers. Most importantly, it was specifically designed to resist oversight from some CEO or government official. He had just received a $1,500 signing bonus for his latest gig, and over the phone, he walked Cassie through spending it on two hexadecimal numbers that together represented a couple thousand Ether. And as quickly as they decided to buy it, the Collins forgot about it.

Response: Buried Treasure To compare trading stocks to trading crypto is like comparing the Westminster Dog Show to a back-alley dog fight. Stocks are regulated by laws around market manipulation, hours of operation, and insider trading; cryptocurrency regulation is practically non-existent. That means the Collins are left to find their own way when it comes to taxes and record keeping. “I can’t call a lawyer or an accountant and say, ‘Help me!’” says Owen. “I have to call them and explain them everything, teach them. I’m tired of it.” Scant oversight also means the Collins have to be extra careful about security. When Cassie buys any cryptocurrency, she gets a “public key,” which lets her prove to others she owns it, and a “private key,” which lets her spend it. If a hacker steals Cassie’s private key, there is no bank or credit card company she can call up to get her money back. And since most cryptocurrencies are pseudonymous — she could only see a hacker’s public key — there isn’t anyone to take legal recourse against. Like early homesteaders burying their valuables, Owen and Cassie combat thieves by storing their private keys on hard drives and slips of paper hidden around their home: in the chicken coop, by the outhouse, under a flat rock. Cassie likes to joke that they even have one tattooed on Luke, a duck the family rescued from Tropical Storm Bill.  The Collins also tread carefully around the power companies. The family has moved around in search of cheap energy and landed in rural Washington, where electric rates are as low as one fifth the national average thanks to hydroelectric power from the Columbia and Snake Rivers. They weren’t the only itinerant crypto miners to move to the area, especially when the price of Bitcoin grew by over 1,700 percent in 2017. According to the Wall Street Journal, some small local utilities in Washington were receiving upward of twenty calls per week from miners looking to use more electricity. Without sufficient infrastructure to meet demand, power companies have recently clamped down on crypto miners by placing limits on energy usage, requiring hefty deposits, and turning off power to those who don’t comply.


Prompt: Still, the mining rigs in the Collins household run most hours of the day. And so does Cassie’s trading. “If something comes up, I’ll drop everything to look at the chart… I can think of times that I’ve been pulled out of bed at three in the morning when my husband has seen something on my phone,” Cassie says. Even though Owen and Cassie get up early, go to bed late, and don’t take weekends, they seem to thrive off the work. “We’re the kind of people that can’t take a vacation,” Cassie says. “We got married young, we didn’t have a honeymoon, we had kids, we’ve never taken a break.” A Fork in the Road There is one way to get a refund for stolen crypto: every miner can agree to undo the transaction. In other words, if a blockchain is just a list of transactions that a group agrees upon, then a coordinated effort can be made to get every individual in that group to remove the theft transaction from their list. This involves what is called a “hard fork,” and it is a massive undertaking, both technically and politically. It is also extremely rare.  Only an unmitigated catastrophe can prompt such a response. In the summer of 2016, this is exactly what Ethereum was headed for. The first major application for the Ethereum network was about to be released: the Decentralized Autonomous Organization, or DAO (pronounced “dow”). DAO was designed to be a democratic venture capital fund. Anyone could purchase shares using Ether, and then be able to vote on projects for the fund to invest in.  Buzz about the DAO reminded Cassie and Owen to check on the Ether they had bought a while back. When they did, they found it had grown close to seventy times in value. It was more money than they had ever had in their life together. Swept up in DAO euphoria, they were ready to make another big investment. Or, as Owen puts it, “Like some dumbass newbies, we took our Ethereum, one hundred percent, and put it in the DAO.” They were hardly alone: the DAO was the largest crowdsale ever up to that point, raising over 10 million Ether — worth $200 million at the time.

Response: Then disaster struck. Within a month of DAO’s launch, a hacker found a hole in the code and began to drain funds out at a rate of $4,000 worth of Ether every three or four minutes. The attack ran into its own bug six hours after it began, but the hole was still exposed. The Ethereum community was divided over how to respond. Some DAO victims begged the developers to get them their money back by doing a “hard fork” and reverting the attack. However, a group of ideological purists argued that a “hard fork” would erode Ethereum’s promise of running code that no authority could interfere with. The Ethereum developers were too chummy with the DAO developers, they insisted. And, by leading an effort to clean up the mess, they were undermining the decentralization that made Ethereum so appealing in the first place.


Prompt: Even though it would mean losing all their money, the Collins were hardline supporters of the anti-fork camp. “I thought there was no way we were going to roll back the blockchain,” Owen says. “I thought, they’re not gonna do it man… No one is going to do the bailout like they did in ’08.” In the end, though, the hard fork went through. But the fight was so vitriolic that the anti-fork group forged on. They released a “Crypto-Decentralist Manifesto” and continued to mine the old currency, now rebranded “Ethereum Classic.”  It was in this split that Cassie found her sea legs trading. Over the next few days, the prices of the sister Ethereum currencies oscillated violently as they fought for dominance. If she timed it right, Cassie could double her money every couple hours. “I think I was up for two days straight. Trading Ethereum Classic was the most fun I’ve ever had,” Cassie says. She was so glued to the charts on her phone that she couldn’t look away even while driving her daughter to violin practice.

Response: The Collins had learned the hard way not to put all their eggs in one basket, and they didn’t make the same mistake twice. Cassie was soon trading around thirty different cryptocurrencies, and Owen had bought mining hardware to get their hands on more. They picked up their investment tips from the “trollbox,” a freewheeling crypto chat room filled with pump-and-dumpers, flamewar sparkers, and a select few seasoned traders who would dispense occasional nuggets of wisdom. During Owen’s few Friday nights at home, he and Cassie would often crack a beer and watch the trollbox.


Prompt: Cassie’s homeschooling materials were on the same screen as her trading spreadsheets and eventually the two became mixed. The children already had a STEM-heavy curriculum, with a particular focus on hardware and software. (“They definitely know how to crimp a Cat6 cable, use the amp meter, the fluke meter, ping, configuration setup,” says Owen.) Once they started asking questions about her trading tables, Cassie had them learn all two-hundred-odd currencies on her exchange. “It’s like pulling teeth sometimes,” she says.

Response: An All-Liquid Diet While the Collins kids were learning their cryptocurrencies Aeternity through Zcash, my friend Dan and I were just catching wind of the cryptocurrency hype. Some time in the first half of 2017, we thought we might as well invest a couple hundred bucks into Ether on the offhand chance that it would make us wildly rich. More than that, though, it was something for us to talk about. Dan and I had been friends since kindergarten, but we were living on opposite sides of the country. The day-to-day price fluctuations gave us a reason to keep in touch, and made for pleasant conversation when the price was up, which it usually was.


Prompt: When the price of Ether hit a thousand dollars at the start of 2018, Dan and I were elated. Our investment had paid off and we were hailed as brilliant prognosticators. People came out of the woodwork to seek advice on whether or not they too should buy: a college classmate I hadn’t heard from in years, the owner of a diner in my hometown, my dad. Dan and I started fantasizing about blowing our profits on an opulent party, with free drinks and flights for our friends from around the country.

Response: This was also around the time I met Owen and Cassie while doing research for a piece I was writing about Ethereum Classic. We met on Discord, a chat application popular in crypto circles, and after a while, Owen and Cassie suggested I do some crypto day trading. They provided tips on how to avoid scams and what to buy — including Ethereum Classic of course. They also set me up on a more reputable exchange and gave suggestions about how to store my crypto more securely. Cassie even offered to share some of her spreadsheets.


Prompt: But I was barely able to handle the little bit of crypto I already had. I had gone from checking the price once a week to several times a day, sometimes in the middle of conversations. It was the first thing I did when I woke up and the last thing I did before I went to sleep. Should I sell before the bubble pops? Or was I on the brink of getting rich? As the price slipped, I picked up a new habit of grinding my teeth. Despite Owen and Cassie’s advice and assurances, I cracked under the pressure and sold most of what I had. The pain in my jaw from holding just one cryptocurrency had reduced me to an all-liquid diet. I was not cut out to be a trader.

Response: As for Dan, he has always been more relaxed than I am and wasn’t bothered by the daily ups and downs. While I was stuck drinking soup, he was living entirely off his crypto earnings for months after having been laid off his job. But one day, Dan went to the exchange website to chip a little off to refill his bank account and found his entire account emptied. All of it. His private key had been compromised, likely by malware. Our crypto adventure was over.


Prompt: Keeping Warm in the Crypto Winter Business has been rockier for the Collins since the value of cryptocurrency peaked in 2018, right around the time that Owen quit his job. The mining rigs are less profitable than ever. The threat of government regulation looms large as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network consider how to treat cryptocurrencies. The promised “killer app” that will do for crypto what email did for the Internet has yet to materialize. Crypto-enthusiasts call the downturn a “crypto winter,” a reference to the “AI winter” of the 1970s and 1980s when interest in AI declined. Still, Cassie has a knack for trading and can still consistently turn a profit. The family had a nice windfall when one of their holdings, a currency called Verge, was selected to be the coin of the realm for pornography conglomerate MindGeek.

Response: In his spare time, Owen is trying to get his own mining consulting business off the ground. Unfortunately, most of his inquiries come from shady clientele — perhaps because he is reticent to tell clients his real name or what state he lives in. After one man from Montana wanted to open a mining business suspiciously fast, Cassie did some snooping and found out he had defrauded senior citizens out of millions of dollars. Another potential client had an FBI rap sheet. Owen took on neither project.


Prompt: Meanwhile, the piece that I was writing about Ethereum Classic became a piece on the Collins family. Wired picked it up and wanted to fly me out to Washington to see the crypto homestead in person, but Owen and Cassie wouldn’t have it. The magazine insisted on using their real names and the Collins thought such prominence would make them a target. (I have changed their names for this piece.) I pleaded with Owen — this was his chance to help others escape what he called the “cube farm.” Maybe he could even stir up some legitimate consulting business! My pleas fell on deaf ears. He stopped responding to my messages and Wired dropped the story.

Response: I shouldn’t have been surprised. The Collins are true believers in anonymity and autonomy, values they believe the blockchain embodies. Their principles had already been tested in the DAO hack — there was no way they would compromise them for a little press coverage. The newly minted crypto millionaires may begin to divest as the crypto winter chills the industry, but the Collins, like true homesteaders, are battening down the hatches.  “I’m not a rich dude,” Owen says. “I’m still living the same lifestyle — broken down cars, broken down house. The reason that I do this is the freedom to make my own choice. I don’t want to be told it’s Hawaiian shirt Friday.” The costs of such freedom are considerable: the paranoia, the anxiety, the endless hours spent mining and trading. But for the Collins, it’s the only life they can imagine.


Prompt: In the winter of 2018, I started to hear rumors about miraculous clinical developments taking place in my hometown of Philadelphia involving growing sheep fetuses in plastic bags. “Bio-bags” was what they were called. Eager to learn more, I got in touch with the renowned pediatrician Dr. Thomas Shaffer. Shaffer wasn’t involved with the bio-bag experiments, but he knows a lot about fetuses. He is a pioneer of “liquid breathing” techniques designed to help prematurely born babies survive.  “As we’ve known for some time, fetuses are not little adults,” he told me over the phone, in early 2019. “Have you read Water Babies by Charles Kingsley? Have you watched James Cameron’s The Abyss? Fetuses’ survival comes down to what a deep diver needs to do: fill his lungs with water.” I nodded, hoping for Shaffer to say explicitly what I (a creature of the humanities) had not yet felt able to argue: that fetal humans are a distinct, aquatic species.  Intrauterine space is wet. The amniotic sac that holds the fetus contains up to about a quart of oxygen-rich fluid that is mostly composed of urine. Exposure to the air stops fetal lungs from completing their development. Before we turn into “land babies” (that is to say… babies), we breathe amniotic liquor. Though we have no gills, we move our tiny diaphragms and intercostal muscles in a dedicated rehearsal of future gaseous breathing, and we do not drown.

Response: Some escapologists and deep-water divers try to slow their heart rates by “remembering” this time before fear — this state of non-antagonism towards water — to calm themselves. These trance-like attempts at becoming-amphibian are not, I feel, what the conservative Christian organization Focus on the Family had in mind when it gazed, via ultrasound, into the abdomen of Abby Johnson — the Planned Parenthood volunteer turned abortion opponent whose memoir Unplanned made her into a heroine of the anti-choice movement, and is now the basis for a movie with the same title — and declared the contents “human.”  Dr. Thomas Shaffer did not explicitly say whether or not he agrees with the anti-abortion political thrust of this kind of humanization of the fetus. Yet, as he himself explained to me, breakthroughs in the field of neonatology have frequently been predicated precisely on the recognition that fetuses are simultaneously part of land-based humans, and nothing like land-based humans. They are another species. The wetness of the womb — or, rather, the wetness of the entity some academics call “the motherfetus” — is both moat and membrane, bath and barrier, bridge and buffer: it is both what makes gestator and gestatee dissoluble, and what makes them indissoluble. Wetness is, in this sense, intrinsically Janus-faced and inhuman: “we” cannot live there. Liquid is villainously difficult to control, contain, and put to work within “wet tech.” It is lethal to the gestator when it floods her from the inside in, for instance, a hemorrhage. Water is just as much a killer as a nourisher, just as much a threat to life as a source of life.  Born in a Ziploc I started contacting neonatal scientists in Philadelphia because I wanted to talk about what water does in the context of a pregnancy, and to what extent the process might be automated through something like a “bio-bag.” Eventually, I managed to find a researcher directly involved in the bio-bag experiments: a surgeon at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia named Dr. Emily Partridge. I also learned something extraordinary: while the bio-bags currently involve sheep fetuses, the researchers plan to begin trials with human fetuses next year.


Prompt: Partridge is an unlikely candidate for the role of Dr. Frankenstein, as I already knew from watching her kindly and unthreatening TV appearances on YouTube. When I first emailed her, I received an enthusiastic reply. She floated a future coffee date but, being a cursedly impatient person, I couldn’t wait. I started hanging out around the reception areas of the hospital that I imagined would be nearest the bio-bag unit. My hope was to glimpse the half-gestated lambs-in-the-making — breathing, growing wool, and kicking their little legs in outsized Ziploc sachets.  Alas, I didn’t. And soon there was a change of tone in my email inbox, after I unwisely mentioned my interest in the “history of ectogenesis” — artificial gestation — to the hospital’s public relations officer. She was polite but firm: “We are going to pass on this opportunity.” No more emails with Partridge.

Response: It could have been a coincidence that our communication chilled at a time of rapidly worsening abortion politics. This was just a few days after Trump tweeted, falsely, that “[Democrats] don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth.” It would sadly be astonishing if the hospital board didn’t want to keep its hands as free as possible from contamination by the struggle over abortion.  Dr. Thomas Shaffer, for his part, was explicitly worried about the Trumpian “news” that — as he put it — some doctors were now “killing viable babies.” He seemed to be trying to depoliticize his work by focusing as narrowly as possible on saving preemies. He recounted to me how “huge” it felt in the 1980s when it dawned on him that “preemies” (premature neonates) required a completely separate body of medical care. “The lungs were always the bottleneck, and we have broken that ceiling,” he explained, charmingly mixing his metaphors.  His team at Temple University is widely recognized as having revolutionized the standard approach to caring for fetuses’ still unformed pulmonary apparatuses: filling them with surfactant fluid rather than prolonging their premature exposure to gas. Preemie death-rates — and their age of viability, counted in weeks — plummeted as a result. “But that doesn’t mean we can go younger and younger,” said Shaffer, listing to me a number of other fetal organs it is as yet still impossible to envision not failing at fewer than twenty-two weeks’ gestation.  I noted carefully, here, that he said “can” rather than “will.” Indeed, I got the distinct sense that, whoever that “we” was, it would cater to “younger and younger” preemies. Could scientists keep going younger and younger, to the point where they are automating gestation entirely? Put another way: in the image of the bottleneck, what is the bottle? If we’ve broken the ceiling, where is the sky? Is the ultimate goal to remove the human gestator from gestation altogether — and if so, cui bono?  Building the Bag Type Emily Partridge’s name into a search engine, and you will find her on CBC, stressing the “awe-inspiring” character of the bio-bag she has co-designed: the gravid see-through amnion that exposes the process of pregnancy to the gaze for the first time in human history. The news anchor is determined to play and replay the few seconds of footage Partridge’s lab has seen fit to release, of a visibly alive lamb-to-be plastic-wrapped in brine. Partridge cheerily evokes the “dogged three years” she spent developing prototypes, “camping out” on a sleeping mat next to the waterborne lamb fetuses “for weeks and weeks at a time.” She helpfully explains that the sheep is the standard scientific surrogate for the human where fetuses are concerned, due to its similar size and pace of physiological progression in utero.


Prompt: While long-term data on Partridge’s fetal sheep does not yet exist, the cyborg brood are reported stable and “not distressed” after four weeks inside the bio-bag. For now, animal protocols dictate that specimens plucked from organic wombs and inserted into inorganic ones cannot be mechanically “gestated” for longer than that. In the last few years, the patent-holders — Partridge and her fellow researchers Alan Flake and Marcus Davey — have published a slew of reports and research papers with titles like “Development of the artificial womb” and “EXTENDING fetal physiology beyond the womb.” (The official name for their product is EXTEND™, for EXTrauterine Environment for Neonatal Development.)  The perfected bio-bag system is remarkably small and simple. It works like this: uncover your target fetus via caesarean-section (at a point equivalent to a human’s twenty-three-week gestation), then clamp and cannulate the umbilical cord so as to connect it, not to the mother anymore, but to the “artificial placenta — which is basically a lung.” Immediately submerge the cord and fetus in your artificial amniotic liquid, where twenty-eight days of simulated pregnancy will pass uneventfully (the maximum ethical guidelines for livestock allow) — an extraordinary improvement on the mere four hours (the previous record) that researchers, also in Philadelphia, were managing in 1998. Then remove the lamb, put it on a ventilator and (this is the bit that will not be replicated with humans next year) euthanize it for dissection.  As anyone who has recently wandered down South 33rd Street in Philadelphia will know, Partridge and her collaborators work in a newly renovated and dazzlingly glitzy hospital complex. Yet until now, they have operated without significant funding: relegated, with their plastic tubs and tubes and slimy livestock, to a space that resembles a fairly dingy school basement. This is where they brooded over their facsimile uteri; this is where they camped. Partridge clearly thinks it’s all about to pay off, big time. With an investigative device exemption in hand from the Food and Drug Administration, the bio-baggers are hoping to schedule trials with human preemies in 2020 or 2021.

Response: Back in 2018, Partridge’s collaborator Flake had predicted that “the next obstacles we’ll need to overcome will be regulatory.” But later that year, the Trump Administration’s Department of Health and Human Services declared that “life begins at conception.” For the bio-baggers, this new political mood means they have to be especially careful in how they present their work. In an era marked by “personhood bills” and “fetal rights,” it is plainly in the interests of those seeking bio-bag funding to focus on its potential for saving preemie lives, and to see those water babies swimming inside the twenty-two-week amnion as human. It’s undeniably compelling: you could reach your finger out and watch them react to your tickle through the polyethylene.  A History of Frankensteins Philly’s bio-bags are part of a long tradition of fantasizing about the artificial womb, the politics of which are complex. Most obviously, the tenacity of the dream of automating human gestation, across the centuries, seems attributable to “womb envy” on the part of those without viable wombs: an arrogant determination to annex, expropriate, and (crucially) even outperform the female-coded capacity to build human life. In an 1896 short story by Fred T. Jane, “The Incubated Girl,” for example, male scientists engineer an egg-shaped vessel and then break it open to reveal a fully formed person suspended inside who is more perfect than any human “of woman born” hitherto.  But there’s more to the trope, too, than male jealousy vis-à-vis the female. The mechanical uterus was imagined in the socialist debates and science-fiction bestsellers of the turn of the last century variously as: a feminist plot to overthrow men by escaping women’s domestic work burden; an anti-feminist plot to render women redundant and hence disposable; and, more diplomatically, a gender-neutral means of assistance to those unable (as opposed to merely unwilling, note) to gestate. Some saw in it the actualization of Dr. Frankenstein’s hubris, laid out in the much earlier science-fiction novel Frankenstein (1818).