Prompt: I think our global fellows program really influenced thinking around decentralization—well, it did for me. The leaders in these communities are really challenging ownership of internet infrastructure. Zenzeleni Networks in South Africa, for example, is a nonprofit that helps create cooperative community networks in parts of South Africa that were deeply affected by apartheid. Janastu is an innovation lab based outside of Bangalore building technology for people who are nonliterate to share audiovisual information. For example, they install Raspberry Pis into old phone booths to allow people to record and listen to messages with each other, as a sort of community radio.  I think these types of self-determining technologies that are homegrown and locally-situated are central to the spirit of decentralization. Just showing that’s possible makes people imagine greater possibilities than the mainstream techno-solutionist approaches that just drop technology somewhere with the assumption that it will solve systemic problems.

Response: We interviewed Darius Kazemi about distributed social networks and his Hometown fork of Mastodon, and one of the big takeaways from that conversation was the idea that every system and protocol embeds a particular ideology and expectation about relationships in the world. Decentralization is a force that pulls you in one direction, but as you mentioned, if privacy or moderation is not embedded in the protocols, it may not have the outcomes you want.  Yes, and most of the well-known decentralized web projects have been started by European or North American cis men by themselves. And so obviously they have ideas about what is important to embed in these distributed protocols. For example, if a distributed protocol relies on associating messages and identity to a device, or stores IP addresses along with messages and none of this encrypted, that is totally not a safe or secure means of communication for people who are government targets. If they lose their device, or even worse, if it’s seized, all of their messages are compromised. If the decentralized tech also captures other people’s IP or device information, their device has effectively become an exploitable honeypot of private information.


Prompt: There’s a degree to which you have to make tradeoffs to create distributed protocols that work, but you need to prioritize certain things from the get-go to make sure that they work for the types of people that you’re building for. Again, a crucial part of decentralization is questioning the universality of technology and technological solutions. What works in Bangalore probably won’t work for a lot of other places. But if it’s free and open source, people can adapt it to their own communities. This assumption that technologies should be universal that everyone should be on one platform is dangerously naive. It flattens the nuances of language and culture and the ways different people engage with information and knowledge sharing.  It’s sad that there isn’t enough money to support all the experimentation we need. Obviously, some types of experimentation get injected with an insane amount of money—think Zoom or Facebook, or new platforms like Clubhouse. It’s like they’re injected with steroids.  But there are so many ways to communicate and share information. There’s not enough creativity around that. Due to the nature of capitalism and legacies of colonialism and white supremacy, only certain types of people have the capital and resources to support certain types of innovation. Investors and backers tend to support technologies that frame problems in ways that they can understand or relate to. Funding shapes priorities, and priorities shape technologies—this is one of the ways ideology gets embedded into the tools we use.  Engage Hypercore! It seems like with your work with Distributed Press, you’re starting with the core principles first, and then figuring out what is useful to build from there. Could you talk a bit about the formation of the project and its goals—what would success look like for Distributed Press? The idea originally came about from discussions between Benedict Lau and I, who both worked on DWeb Camp. He worked on Toronto Mesh, a community mesh network in Toronto, and I met him through my involvement with a community mesh network in Oakland. When we were publishing articles about decentralization ahead of the Camp, it felt wrong to have to publish media about the DWeb on the corporatized, centralized web. We wanted to be able to publish to the DWeb protocols we were talking about, and explore other ways of collective publishing in general.

Response: When we started to discuss what to build, we didn’t want to start from a place assuming we knew what we were talking about. So we did an ecosystem review, interviewing around a dozen people in the IndieWeb and DWeb movements, the journalist/crypto scene, and researchers in rightwing extremism in social media. We wanted to get a lay of the land and talk to people about what’s actually missing. What came out of this research phase was this idea to build a tool that allowed people to easily publish to different protocols, including the World Wide Web, and to have a way to sustainably monetize their work.


Prompt: As a way to figure out what writers and artists would actually want to use, we decided to create a magazine called COMPOST. It’s an initial use-case for the tool—the magazine is a lab for Distributed Press in a way. We decided to make the project even more meta, and make the magazine itself about the digital commons, while Distributed Press was about doing the organizing and technical work of building shared, free and open source digital tools.  We paid all the contributors for their creative pieces, and we also compensated them for contributing their feedback and ideas about how Distributed Press and COMPOST should work. We felt that building tools for artists and writers to use on the DWeb necessitated having their active input. Our goal is to continue giving artists agency over how this tool evolves.  Distributed Press is not yet a cooperative. Udit Vira, Benedict and I are the core contributors, and we were very explicit about the fact that to move this project forward we had to be able to make a bunch of the initial decisions. Having too many cooks in the kitchen can gum up the process of shipping something out. But we had a series of meetings with the contributors, took their input, and tried to implement their ideas as best we could. We’re hoping that with each issue we will have different cohorts of writers and creators that will shape not just the magazine issues, but also Distributed Press itself.

Response: There are different ways that we see Distributed Press as a budding digital commons project. It’s a free and open source tool, and we’re also contributing to these distributed protocols and projects upstream—as part of this work, Ben filed tickets with IPFS, Beaker Browser, and Hypercore. When he’d come across things that didn’t work, he’d do the work of flagging issues and suggesting ways to fix them.


Prompt: FOSS (free and open source) projects are typically mostly built on volunteer labor. Not just the technical development, but all the layers around the tech that allow others to use the tools—documentation, onboarding, communication, etc. We want to normalize practices where people are paid for all those types of labor. We think that paying people equitably for emotional and organizational labor is intrinsic to the sorts of projects we want to exist in the world. The three core contributors are paid some, though we’re definitely putting way more hours into this than we’re being compensated for. Unfortunately, that tends to be how it is when you’re getting a project off the ground.  Logic too relies on a lot of unpaid founder labor, but we’ve always paid writers, and our impulse to make the project more sustainable over time has been to find ways to bring in and pay more people for their labor. It’s bad institution-building to rely on an assumption that people will continue to work unpaid indefinitely, even passionate founders.

Response: Totally. If you want to create resilient systems, you need to prioritize emotional security, and making sure people are compensated is part of that. With Distributed Press and COMPOST we are trying to balance between, on the one hand, bringing in people who might just want to contribute some ideas and a piece to our first issue then have no other commitment, and on the other hand, encouraging people who want to stay involved as we eventually turn this into a cooperative. We want to allow different levels of contribution while always respecting people’s time and compensating them for their labor.  I think that’s really, really crucial. If for some reason we’re not able to pay people equitably or maintain a respectful and safe space for creative experimentation, I’d push for us to scrap the project. I strongly believe that if you can’t hold onto these basic values through the evolution of your project, then it’s not worth anyone’s time. We don’t need another institution that exploits people’s labor and creates toxic work environments.


Prompt: There’s a major problem of founder’s syndrome in many of these projects. I think that’s very tied to ego, when a person becomes too entwined with a project, or vice versa. Personally, I’d like to keep working on COMPOST and Distributed Press for a long time, but I would also love it if at some point I could take a break, and just trust someone else to run it for a while and experiment with it. There’s a balance, right? It feels good to pour your sweat and tears into a project, so it begins to become part of your identity. It’s your baby. But like babies, they grow up and you have to accept that they need to have a life of their own.

Response: Ultimately, what do you think is the potential of the decentralized web? When I was entering into this realm of decentralization, what appealed to me about it was the fact that different people with different ideologies were thinking about and were attracted to this word. Nathan Schneider said that it’s a “floating signifier”—the term means different things to different people, and they add their own meaning to it in the process.  But decentralization isn’t the ultimate goal. Our networks can’t just be this horizontal blob of people where no one is accountable for anything. I’ve worked in community projects where that was the case and, you know, shit just doesn’t get done. So I think of it more as a verb—by saying you’re decentralizing, you’re questioning the ways that things are centralized. I like to associate it with other words like interoperability, interconnectedness, and accountability.  I want more systems that are self-correcting—you don’t have one person or a clique of people in control that are not responsive to the needs of the system. I think government can be like that—a robust democracy is just one type of feedback loop that can allow policies to shift and adapt to the needs of the community.  Decentralization alone doesn’t really capture that idea. You need to think about the distribution of power within organizations, with different layers of accountability or maybe even some intentional centralization. You can’t just have decentralization across the board. Decentralization alone is not itself a vision of good governance, it’s not a vision of having accountable, safe, fun systems. It doesn’t encapsulate what it is about distributed systems that make them more resilient.  I often personally ask myself: am I working on the right problem? There’s horrific inequity everywhere. People are suffering from inhumane policies that make it impossible for them to live dignified lives. The Earth is becoming increasingly uninhabitable for billions of life forms. Is the work of building better networks important amidst all this?


Prompt: I actually do think that’s a worthwhile way to spend my time. If we’re to address any of these problems, we need to have strong, healthy networks of communication. We need to see each others’ humanity, have accurate and reliable information, and share stories, art, and memes to make sense of the chaos and make it all tolerable. The web has already proven that it can do all these things. The solidarity-based, interoperability-championing DWeb movement is about making sure we can continue to communicate and share knowledge, without fear or exploitation. The goal of this work isn’t just to have a robust web. The goal is to create knowledge systems that enable us to survive and thrive on this planet.

Response: 1/ We are, in many ways, badly made. A foal walks within hours. On YouTube, you can watch scores of baby turtles hatch and scrabble right down to the surf. It takes us a quarter century before our minds work properly. They say having kids is like letting your heart walk outside your body. The whole thing seems improbable, how much care a human being needs to survive, but cognitive psychologists say this is the secret of our species. The brain plasticity that makes us so needy also makes us creative, and capable of the kind of play that can make our worlds change.  Remind us of this the next time we are trying desperately to finish an editorial note before the kids wake up and start screaming.  Kids can be hard to see clearly. What are you having? Walking around pregnant is a great way to test the line between oppressiveness and good will, which is sometimes nonexistent—the stranger who immediately, excitedly asks about the gender of your fetus, as if you could know. Kids precipitate intense hope and fear and nostalgia, mix up the past and the future completely, which is why we project so much not only onto “our” kids (who are not our property; if anything, most days, the opposite seems true) but onto childhood as such.  Like everything, all this had to be invented. Medieval Christian theology regarded babies not as angels, but demons. In paintings, even the baby Jesus looks like an old man. The heroes of epics, up to at least Dante’s Commedia, were not young, but middle-aged. Scholars have shown that for childhood to become what it is now—among other things, a protected site and a source of sentiment—a lot of things had to happen, and of course they did not happen for everyone. Some people are never allowed childhoods: to the cops, a twelve-year-old playing with a toy looks like a killer. Other people never have to grow up: to venture capitalists and the business press, the forty-something CEO who messes up just needs more time to grow. There may be little that feels more obvious than the imperative to protect the innocence of children. Yet innocence as a category is anything but.


Prompt: 2/ This issue of the magazine tries to move beyond commonplaces, while also analyzing what those commonplaces are about, in the first place. Our authors examine the relationship between youth and technology. Relationships, plural, we should say. Because, as the cliché goes, it’s complicated. One of the first myths to dispel is that only one kind of connection is at stake. The singular reflects the idea that kids are a blank slate: naturals, “digital natives,” the ones whom large scale innovations should target, whether it’s the One Laptop Per Child initiative or Google Classroom.  Some pieces investigate the persistence of history that an emphasis on the youthfulness of technologies and technologists obscures. One writer points out that, although the money in Silicon Valley is often presented as new, much of it is in fact inherited. Indeed, tech’s dynasties raise the question of whether “new” money even exists, if wealth is ever created ex nihilo or only, like a face that travels through generations, changes shape, updates. Another writer looks at algorithms developed to manage the dispossession of Indigenous people in the nineteenth century, and how this same technocratic regime of laws and logics are now used to apportion shrinking water supplies in the climate-apocalyptic West. It can be unsettling to recognize the continuities of systems of oppression, how often our tools have simply been updated to remain the same.  But sometimes, more disruptive updates slip through, the kind that repurpose the system. The purpose of a system is what it does, cybernetic theorist Stafford Beer reminds us. When the state trains you in STEM for a communist utopia that never arrives, it turns out you can use those skills to hack the planet. It turns out, if you want to get a glimpse into the torture chambers of the War on Terror, you can set the geolocation on your Tinder app to 19.9031 N, 75.0967 W: Guantánamo, Cuba. Some of the young guards may turn out to be like you: bored, lonely, in love, ambitious, uncertain, hoping for a change. They won’t stay long. This does not make their role warehousing those whose own youth has disappeared into the blacksite less horrifying; it makes it more.

Response: Other contributions in this issue look at various attempts to protect young people from technology. These include parents and teachers, but sometimes also the kids themselves. Sometimes the kids long for less technical times, when the world felt more open for self-discovery, when you had to go cruising, instead of having the TikTok recommendation algorithm tell you you were gay. The tech industry tends to claim the mantle of youth in order to pretend it has no history and to bolster its ownership claims over the future. In this issue, we speak with recent college graduates who have gone into tech and have come to doubt these narratives, but who still want to use the power that the industry lets pass into young hands for good. Notwithstanding the lucrative business of defining and branding distinct generations, we find that one feature of youth today is that there are far too many kinds of kids to generalize about.


Prompt: 3/ As we close this issue, schools across the United States are starting back up in person. For many kids, the pandemic turned schooltime into screentime. Other kids stopped going to school at all. At night, after we finally get our own kids to sleep, we open our New York Times push notifications. They are frightening. In August, the American Academy of Pediatrics announced that nearly one in five new Covid-19 cases were children. A number of them have developed “long Covid.” Former star athletes are sleeping all day. Former star students cannot focus. It is hard to know how good the data is. It feels impossible to know what to do.  They say children are the revenge of grandparents: in them, we come back to haunt ourselves. If we didn’t sleep, they don’t. If we whined all the time, they do. Kids are where we see the past return. But they also carry our hopes for the future. They make us feel that certain things can change, that maybe we can do better next time. The pandemic has made abundantly clear that we are all interconnected spatially. Kids help us see how interconnected we are temporally. Now now now now is their favorite saying, second only to Again! They are reminders of our shared vulnerability, of how each generation makes the next. We promise we’ll do better next time. Next time, we’ll get it right.

Response: Coming of age is never easy, but coming of age in Silicon Valley is especially weird. Between applying for Thiel Fellowships, courting VCs, and getting recruited by Palantir at the career fair, today’s young tech workers are entering a world deeply marked by the previous generation’s mistakes. But they’re also joining the industry at a time of genuine disruption, with business as usual facing challenges from below. Unprecedented numbers of tech workers are organizing their workplaces and new algorithmic justice movements are achieving real victories. What does that mean for young people going into tech? Reboot is a publication and community for young technologists, primarily students and new graduates. Its aspiration is to reclaim techno-optimism from the techno-utopians—a counterpoint to the endless parade of “tech for good” initiatives, where solving systemic crises is only ever an app away. We sat down with some members of Reboot—Jasmine Sun, Jasmine Wang, and Alan Luo—to help understand how the next generation of tech workers sees their work and their future. We talked about lying to VCs, learning to “pass” in Silicon Valley, and how to find a sense of agency in a world of crisis.


Prompt: Let’s start by having each of you introduce yourself.  Jasmine Sun (JS): I’m currently a tech worker at a startup. I grew up around the tech industry on the Eastside of Seattle, but I was always more interested in the humanities and social sciences. Then I went to Stanford and got immersed in Silicon Valley. I was shocked by the amount of money and power and prestige flowing through the Valley and ending up in the hands of very young people—even some of my freshman-year classmates. Often, the young people didn’t know what to do with all that responsibility. But it also felt like an opportunity to me. I had an interest in social justice, and while I was initially interested in going into academia or law, I started to think it would be higher leverage to apply that interest in social justice to the tech world.

Response: Jasmine Wang (JW): I was born and raised in Alberta, Canada. The main industries there are oil and gas and agriculture—no tech. There were no computer science classes offered in my K-12, except for a typing class in elementary school, and a class in junior high where I learned how to use Google Drive, if those count. In university, I started out studying comparative literature and doing nonprofit work. I went to my first hackathon in my first semester and built a website for the nonprofit I had founded. I was really moved by the scale at which people were dreaming in technology, as well as seminal texts I was reading in the digital humanities class I was taking, and it was an easy decision to transfer into computer science the next semester. I had the sense that I needed to move to Silicon Valley to have a real pulse on things, and worked hard to get internships there, and ended up living in the area for about two years all together. It very much felt like I came of age in the Valley—a lot of my worldview and value systems were deeply formed by that experience.  Alan Luo (AL): I started programming at a young age. I was always interested in making video games because I played them growing up. My first exposure to the industry was when I published something that I made on Reddit, and it went a bit viral on Hacker News. It was this program that you could use to generate art. Then someone reached out to me to ask whether I wanted to freelance for them. So that was my first job in high school. What immediately struck me was how much money I was receiving for the work I was doing—there was nothing else like it. So then I went to Columbia, and did one year there before the pandemic hit.  Jasmine (Wang), you said you founded a company. What was that experience like for you? There’s a lot of cultural emphasis in Silicon Valley on the young founder. How did you navigate that? JW: Founding is an interesting thing. When you are a founder, the mission of the company has to be your personal mission. You are not able to recruit talented people or get venture investors on your side if you can’t convince them that you’re going to put the best ten years of your life into a company. You have to bleed, sweat, and die for this thing to exist. You need to persuade everyone that your startup is deeply aligned with your value system and worldview, or people won’t take a bet on you.


Prompt: I think it’s deeply unhealthy. I think it has caused a lot of mental health problems that founders are not able to talk about, because it would hurt their prospects at raising another round and hiring people, not to mention keeping bread on the table. That’s the thing: as an employee, you can just show up and do the job, to pay the bills. As a founder, you still have to pay the bills, but you can’t divorce yourself from your work on an ideological level. Even if you’re super burnt out, you can’t check out—you have to keep performing that founder role. This wasn’t the case for me, but I imagine that for younger founders labeled as some sort of wunderkind that this dynamic would be even more damaging—especially if the company fails, as most do.

Response: AL: The way people view you affects how you raise money. That is definitely true. JW: I remember a conversation I had with a mentor of mine where I told her, “I only want to say things that are true.” To me, words and language are almost the only things that we have; they’re so precious. They’re how we dream and make commitments to each other. And my mentor laughed at me, in all kindness. She said, “Never start a company. You will constantly have to say things that are not true to you, if that is what is required for the company to exist.” There’s also actual danger with saying things that are not true to you—the cognitive dissonance is so painful that you shift your self-concept for saying those words to make sense. It’s the same reason why manipulation tricks, like getting someone to do a favor for you to make them like you, work.


Prompt: JS: I am uncomfortable with lying in general, even when it isn’t harmful, or if it’s just an exaggeration. I had a couple of advisory conversations recently where I was asked whether I would ever do Reboot full-time as a nonprofit. I told them, “Oh, I feel like I couldn’t get the money to do it.” And they were like, “No, you can get the money, that’s easy. But in order to get the money, you have to say you’re gonna scale Reboot to 20,000 people and 200 schools.” On the subway home, I was just like, do I want those things? Would I enjoy the version of Reboot where I was trying to scale it 100 times?  JW: I want to make a distinction. When I use the word “lying,” I mean saying things that are not true to one’s self. And this doesn’t have to be an outright lie. It can be something that is factually true, but misaligned with who you are.  I remember calling some friends as I was getting ready to raise a round. Their advice was: “Act like Mark Zuckerberg.” Apparently Mark had a reputation of being disrespectful to VCs and telling them he didn’t need their money. That shocked me. And I think it’s because being disrespectful goes against my core values. I’ve never intentionally disrespected someone. And also, I couldn’t imagine telling VCs I didn’t need their money. What a concept. Of course I need their money! What sort of world are you coming from? Like, how can you not need money? And then I was looking at Zuckerberg and realized, oh yeah, his dad gave him a $100,000 loan to help start Facebook. He didn’t need other people’s money—at least not in a food-on-the-table type way.

Response: Second Languages You all had to learn to present yourself a certain way in order to be maximally appealing to the gatekeepers of the industry, whether it was VCs who might fund your startup or companies that might hire you. But how did you learn to perform these roles? Was it just a process of trial-and-error, or was there a more systematic way that you taught yourself the cultural protocols of the Valley?  JS: When I first got to college I had imposter syndrome, because I met so many people who were child prodigies. They were on magazine covers. I hadn’t done anything. I felt depressed. I also noticed that everyone in Silicon Valley was speaking a language that I didn’t understand. Like literally, I didn’t know what the words meant. So for a year I read a bunch of books that seemed to be the Silicon Valley canon: Zero to One by Peter Thiel, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy, Radical Candor by Kim Scott. I read whatever I thought other people were reading. Because I didn’t have a network yet—I didn’t have a way to learn directly from other people. But I wanted to know how the Valley thought.


Prompt: JW: I didn’t know anybody in the Bay Area when I came here. I didn’t even know what books I was supposed to read. So I joined as many different communities as I could. I thought they could give me what I was missing. It can be hard to find that information, because there are so many limits in terms of what is chronicled. Most of the stories about Silicon Valley are written by very particular people who live very particular sorts of lives. There are so many stories that are not chronicled, like those of women and people of color. So you have to go find those stories in different contexts—more high-trust contexts, not public forums but Signal and phone calls.

Response: Ultimately, I felt like I had to learn the right language to pass in the Valley. A lot of what you need to know is what you’re not supposed to talk about. In tech, you don’t really talk about money or power. Everyone’s default is, “I have no idea how much anyone earns.” Everyone dresses approximately the same and lives in approximately the same way. But some people wield much more power—orders of magnitude more.  AL: A lot of queer culture is oriented around being very “out.” But something’s at stake, so you might want to twist your words to get what’s best for the company. I don’t know if I care about participating in mainstream queer culture anymore, because it’s just not made for Asians. I want to be representing me, I don’t want to be queer for the sake of being queer. So if there is a version of like, Sino-queerness, which draws from traditions of Taoism and the existence of two spirits within the body or whatever, that’s the version I want to be creating.  The Bamboo Ceiling JW: Technologists are told that they only need technical competence, which is incidentally convenient for the bureaucratic governing class. This is perpetuated by the model minority myth, which says you only need to be good at STEM to have a good life, and that to be a good citizen you should keep your mouth closed. But the reality is that those skills only go so far. People talk more about the “bamboo ceiling,” but it’s always been there: Chinese-Americans might have technical competence, but they often don’t have the social capital needed to rise into C-level positions. Those are positions that require a lot of networking, a lot of buy-in, and often build off of generational privilege. Seeing which founders get funded and what they look like—that’s all about social capital, not engineering prowess. But then you look at those founders’ engineering teams and it’s a very different demographic makeup.


Prompt: JS: My mom told me many times, “If you’re good at math, you’ll be good at everything.” I’m not good at math. And I had a lot of issues around my failure to be good at math growing up. It made me feel like I was failing in general, because my parents, and all their friends, and all their friends’ kids, were good at math.  But yeah, the reason Asian kids get ushered into STEM careers, like being a doctor or being an engineer, is because you usually don’t need social or cultural capital to succeed in those roles. There’s a certain set of things you need to learn to join those professions, and they’re open knowledge. You go on LeetCode [an online programming education platform] or you study for the MCAT. There’s not too many hidden codes about how to get those sorts of jobs.

Response: Whereas being a VC is 100 percent hidden codes. There’s no playbook on how to get into VC. And if you don’t speak English well, or even if you just don’t know the social landscape, you can’t break in. I remember when I learned about cold emailing my freshman year of college. It blew my mind. I had no idea you could just email somebody and they would respond, because I couldn’t understand why they would talk to me. Now I love cold emailing—it’s the best thing invented. But you need that confidence.  The reason that I’m so interested in sociology is because I have been so baffled by the non-explicit networks and the other social components that go into creating technology products. Silicon Valley claims that it’s all about technology, that the product sells itself. But Silicon Valley is where I learned how much networking mattered, and how much it mattered to speak a language—which is very incongruent with what the Valley tells itself.  JW: My mother spent her entire life programming and she remained just an IC [individual contributor], and was never promoted. Once, she was fired out of the blue. It was simple to swap in another engineer for her. It seems much harder to swap out a general partner at a venture firm. That person’s power is rooted in relationships that are harder to build—less fungible. You can build technical skills by yourself, but social capital is predicated on so many other things. Who do you know? Where did you grow up? Do people like the sort of person that you are? Do you ‘pass’ to them as someone who’s in their social class? Are you able to afford the hobbies that give you access to the right people? In the Valley, people go to Equinox, Barry’s, and Burning Man—there’s all these stories about founders and VCs meeting at Burning Man. It costs thousands of dollars to sustain that lifestyle. So all these invisible things that accrue social capital take a lot of real capital and time to build. If you’re building technical skills, you can literally sit on your computer and do it alone in your room, and then go somewhere and get employed. But that also makes it less robust, in some sense.


Prompt: Coming of Age JW: Broadly, what we’re talking about here is coming of age. Some of the questions we’re struggling with are the same ones that young people have been struggling with forever. “What are my values?” “How do I prioritize between those values in order to ensure my personal stability and the stability of the work that I feel like I need to do?” “What conflicts do I attend to?” “How do I take care of and steward the lineages that are important to me?”  But we’re also asking those questions in a particular historical moment. So what’s changed for our generation? And how does technology fit in? What is unique about our time? AL: I’ve been talking to my parents a lot. And they said, “Yeah, we knew this was going to happen, because this is what happened to our generation, when we were growing up in the Cultural Revolution. Every single one of us went through the exact same thing that you’re going through now. We started off being idealistic, and eventually realized somebody somewhere else was profiting from us.”  Because I spent so much time on social media, I just didn’t talk to my parents when I was younger. I wish I had, because then I would’ve heard those stories earlier, and maybe could’ve avoided certain situations. Social media put my head elsewhere. It uprooted me from my family and my history and placed me into a strange soup of fellow Gen Z’ers. My values have been shaped by that soup, not my parents or my lineage.

Response: JS: I’ve been moving in the opposite direction when it comes to idealism. I was not idealistic for the vast majority of my life. I am a skeptic, and critic, by default. I think it has to do with coming of age while reading and being influenced by a left-wing academic world that has a lot of pessimism and negativity. In that world, the assumption is that anything you build is going to get co-opted. Everything fails, so there’s no future possible unless we burn it all down. And we probably can’t burn it all down.  I feel grateful to that world, because it gave me the capacity to understand power and systems. At the same time, it deprived me of a sense of personal agency because it doesn’t believe that things are worth trying. I see the same hopelessness in many of my friends and peers. They feel disillusioned by Big Tech—or really, by capitalism. They’re not very happy on a day-to-day basis. They’re depressed about climate change but feel they can’t do anything about it. Or they hate their job and think the company they work for is terrible for the world. But they also need to pay rent and have no idea what else to do. I also have friends who go into academia. And when I ask them why they’re doing it, they say, “Harm mitigation.” I’ve heard this from multiple friends. They’re like, “Every job is so flawed—it’s either the private sector or the nonprofit industrial complex. So I’m just going to go into academia, because I know that the university is not perfect, either. But it feels like it does the least harm.”  It’s a very pessimistic point of view. I want to reclaim a sense of agency. I think we need more idealism.


Prompt: What are kids doing on the internet, and what is the internet doing to them? These questions have preoccupied parents, teachers, and the media for decades. But all too often the conversation is clouded with condescension and panic. Obviously, there are issues here worth exploring, and we wanted to find a way to do so without indulging in the usual caricatures and fear mongering. So Logic editor Ben Tarnoff spoke with Ysabel Gerrard, a lecturer in Digital Media and Society at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom and an expert on young people’s mental health and social media. She explained what exactly the kids are up to, and how their elders get it wrong.

Response: There’s a lot of concern out there about the effect of social media on the mental health of young people. But this concern isn’t new. It belongs to a broader historical trend. When the internet was first becoming popularized in the 1990s, the media ran a number of stories fretting about kids going online: they could access pornography, be entrapped by predators, and so on. A prominent 1998 study from Carnegie Mellon University that got a lot of attention at the time claimed that spending time online made people lonely, depressed, and antisocial. Decades later, we’re seeing similar themes in the popular narratives around young people and the internet. How would you describe the current iteration of this discourse? What are the continuities and discontinuities with the 1990s? The major difference is the kind of media we’re dealing with—social media. Social media enables the sharing of a greater volume and range of content (e.g., live-streamed videos, high-quality images, and so on). That said, the discourse around “kids online” today is similar to what it was in the 1990s, because we see the same lack of dedication to understanding what young people are actually doing on the internet. I speak to teachers, parents, policymakers, and I name apps they’ve never heard of. I talk about things they’ve never heard of. And I think to myself, “How can you sit there and be afraid of what kids are doing online when you haven’t fully tried to understand it?” So the internet has changed, and the kinds of things that kids are doing on the internet has changed. But the reluctance to understand what kids are actually doing—and to take seriously their pleasures, as well as the harms that might arise—has not changed.  One continuity with the 1990s is the presence of a moral panic that prevents people from seeing clearly. If you’re in panic mode, you’re not capable of perceiving what kids are actually doing with the technology. But, as you point out, the technology itself has changed: social media has transformed the internet, as well as how kids interact with the internet.


Prompt: Exactly. I give lots of talks at schools and I’m usually invited to talk about the “dangers” of social media. But I always say, “No, that’s not my job. I can come, but I’m not going to do that.” And what I’ve found in every single school is a disconnect between how seriously the kids take the things they do online versus how seriously the adults take it.  For example, most schools in the UK have a “meme account”—a social media account that posts funny memes about the school, its kids, and its teachers. It’s anonymous: schools rarely find out who set it up. Teachers usually take it very seriously: they contact the parents; sometimes they contact the police. But when you speak to the kids, they say it’s just banter, it’s just humor, it’s just fun.

Response: The kind of concern from elders you’re describing is often expressed in a mental health idiom—that kids shouldn’t be engaging in certain online behaviors because it’s bad for their mental health. And clearly, there are certain online behaviors that are bad for one’s mental health. For example, you’ve written extensively about social media communities that promote anorexia and other eating disorders. But sometimes the mental health frame can be stretched too far, to the point that all sorts of online behaviors are unfairly pathologized. And this can lead to counterproductive interventions by parents and other authority figures, who discipline kids for doing things that might be harmless or even beneficial. I mean, there are lot of kids out there—particularly queer kids—whose life was quite literally saved by the internet. How do you strike the right balance? How do you find a way to identify genuinely destructive behaviors online without overpathologizing? This question reminds me of the favorite piece of research I’ve ever done. It was for an article I wrote with Dr. Anthony McCosker, where we analyzed all the Instagram posts that were tagged as “#depressed” within a certain timeframe. One of the most fascinating things we found was that when people were having discussions related to mental health, they were using pseudonyms 76 percent of the time.


Prompt: In recent decades, we’ve seen a greater destigmatization of mental health. People use terms like depression much more frequently than they used to. But I wonder how far destigmatization has really gone, if 76 percent of people don’t feel comfortable talking about the lived realities of depression while using their real name. As you said, the internet can clearly be a life-saving space. And much of its power comes from the ability for people to use a pseudonym on a major platform like Instagram to talk about depression. That’s why it can be counterproductive when platforms try to enforce enhanced identification measures like real name policies.

Response: Real name policies are motivated, at least in part, by the idea that the ability to be anonymous or pseudonymous on the internet is a major contributor to online toxicity. But what your research reveals is that the same anonymity or pseudonymity can be a life-saver, since it enables kids to discuss mental health issues they wouldn’t feel comfortable discussing otherwise. And there may not be an obvious real-world space where they could have those discussions.


Prompt: Precisely, it’s a double-edged sword. One of the things I’m talking to kids about in my current research is how they feel about “secret-telling” apps like Secret, which let users communicate anonymously. (I should note early on that, technically, they’re communicating pseudonymously, since anonymity is incredibly difficult to fully achieve in practice, but I’d like to use the word “anonymous” here—because they do.) These apps have been the subject of intense scrutiny by the press and some parents, particularly due to their connection to cyberbullying. What kids often say is, “I don’t really like secret-telling apps. I think they can be toxic. They scare me. I only use them because my friends do.” And then I say, “Imagine a world where there’s no such thing as a secret-telling app. Imagine a world where there’s no such thing as anonymity. Are you happier? Are you safer?” And they go, “No, you can’t get rid of it!”  What they’re telling me is, “How are my friends going to ask questions about their sexuality?” “How are my friends going to announce to the world that somebody is being racist to them and they don’t know what to do?” “How are my friends going to ask what to do when someone takes an inappropriate picture of them?” “Who else can I talk to about aspects of adolescence, like sex?” Kids need these spaces. They need to be anonymous. And that’s why—at least for the kids I spoke to in my research—they rarely use social media with their real name, instead relying on what they often call “nicknames.” So they’re simultaneously reliant on anonymity as a safety mechanism but, at the same time, they’re fearful of it. And I wonder whether they are fearful of it because they are told to be fearful of it.  It’s clearly a good thing that young people are able to find some solace in these online spaces. But I also wish we could be supporting them better. I mean, I want them to be able to go online and have these conversations. But I also really want them to have access to professional therapy and other mental healthcare. Talking to strangers through an Instagram hashtag is fine, but it shouldn’t be the main way for kids to get help.

Response: Absolutely. And this is the problem with the whole “social media is bad for kids” discourse. Is it social media or is it, perhaps, rising poverty levels, global warming, or increasing polarization? Is it maybe these things as well? I hear this sort of thing from kids all the time. “Why are you so worried that we created a meme account? Why aren’t you worried that I can barely get out of bed in the morning?” It’s a form of victim-blaming that feels very familiar. I’m reminded of the “avocado toast” discourse: the notion that many millennials can’t afford to buy homes because they spend too much money on expensive artisanal avocado toast. Similarly, it’s easier to blame teenagers’ anxiety and depression on their use of smartphones instead of looking at the deeper issues that are causing their anxiety and depression—as well as recognizing that, in some cases, a smartphone might be the best outlet they have for dealing with the problems. Not a great one, and not nearly as good as fully funded mental health services. But it’s what they have.


Prompt: You know, “Phone Saves Teen’s Life” doesn’t make for as good a headline as “Pro-anorexia Memes Drove Girl to Death.” What is The Daily Mail going to publish? It’s going to be the second one.  But it’s a difficult balance. People often think I’m too defensive of social media. And maybe I don’t say it enough, but yes, there are some awful things on social media. Content moderators have one of the worst jobs in the world because they have to look at diabolically bad stuff for hours and hours every day. And yes, kids have seen some of that stuff.  I recognize that. But the reality is that social media is highly contextual. You need to look at how social media is being experienced by a particular person in a particular moment. It seems to me that the press in particular prefers a solid, clean-cut answer: that social media is totally fine or completely evil. But it’s neither. We need to get better at thinking of social media as something that is deeply complex.  Balancing Acts You mentioned content moderators. Let’s talk a bit about how content moderation, as implemented by large tech firms, shapes the conversations that young people have about mental health in online spaces.  In your 2018 article, “Community Guidelines and the Language of Eating Disorders on Social Media,” you reproduce some images of women’s bodies from Instagram and explore whether the images promote eating disorders. “Yes, the people’s bones are outlined and emphasised in the framing of the images,” you write, “but when do they become too bony, to the point where these images are read as the promotion of anorexia or similar?” A human content moderator, or an automated content moderation system, might have trouble looking at these images and determining definitively whether they were “pro-anorexic.” How should we think about these challenges?  I’m on Facebook and Instagram’s Suicide and Self-Injury Advisory Board. It’s an unpaid role, and I really enjoy it. I contribute to meetings about once or twice a month, and what they generally do is give us example imagery—for example, an image of a person with a slender body and visible rib cage—and ask us how it should be moderated. But a talking point we reach in more or less every meeting is that we need far greater context: the caption, the comments, the other posts in a user’s feed, and so on.

Response: That’s something I struggle with. Nobody—no company, no moderator—should be looking at an image of a person and deciding if they are too thin or if their size promotes eating disorders. We’ve had decades and decades of feminist history, and this is the point we’ve reached! We shouldn’t be doing that to anyone of any gender. It shouldn’t be happening.  What you need is context. You need the caption. You need the comments underneath. You need the qualitative data. You need a deep understanding of the situation in which that image is being used, especially when it comes to posts about mental health. And that’s why we’re always going to need humans to do the work of content moderation. We have to find ways of making their work easier, but we need them.  To your point about context, those images of women’s bodies from Instagram might be circulating within a hashtag devoted to supporting people who are trying to overcome their eating disorders. In that context, the content might be playing a beneficial role.  Exactly.


Prompt: But how can big tech companies afford to do that sort of nuanced, context-specific moderation at scale? It’s obviously much more time- and labor-intensive. And if you’re Facebook, you can’t maintain the profit margins that your investors demand while paying for high-quality content moderation across a social network of more than two billion people.

Response: Something I’ve learned from Jillian C. York and Tarleton Gillespie’s work in particular is that it’s very hard, probably impossible, to moderate content at scale. To take the example of the Instagram images, let’s say the content moderator decides that a piece of content is in fact promoting eating disorders. Okay, it breaks the rules, so what do you do? If you remove that user’s account, you’re also cutting off their support system. People often call on social media companies to do more about X, Y, and Z. But what that means in practice, given the scale at which these companies operate, is account deletions, blanket bans on hashtags, that sort of thing.  So scale also incentivizes platforms to look for low-effort, cookie-cutter solutions when moderating content. If you’ve got lots of users and a relatively small number of overworked, underpaid content moderators, it’s easier to delete a bunch of posts or deactivate a bunch of accounts. But if someone’s having a mental health crisis online, that’s not going to do anything to address the crisis. In fact, it probably makes things worse.


Prompt: Right. Again, context matters.  Another good example is the online fallout after the European football championship. Here in the UK, our team played Italy in the final. It was pretty monumental, because we haven’t been in the final for fifty-five years. The game was close. It went to a penalty shootout at the end, and the three players who missed the penalty shots were Black. The UK lost. You can only imagine the extent of racism directed at these players afterward. It was horrific.  On social media, racist posts often used monkey emojis to refer to the Black players. So people began calling for social media companies to take action. Some folks asked, if you can slap a warning label on every post about Covid, why can’t you slap a warning label on every post that uses the monkey emoji to be racist? The problem is that context is everything. The same emoji or word can be racist in one context but then in another context might be a vernacular within a community. That’s why we’re always going to need humans to do content moderation.  There was an interesting post on Twitter recently from a former content moderator. They were talking about how there were so few pathways for promotion and progression. Moreover, moderators at large social media companies often get no say on policy, despite the fact that they’re the ones doing the work. So yes, we need to improve their working conditions, and we need to find automated ways of taking the most traumatic content away from them. But we should also be transforming their very job description. They should become specialists in particular subject areas, so that they can better recognize context and better interpret nuanced content.

Response: What else do you think should be done? We need transparency. But we also need to be specific about the kind of transparency we’re asking for, instead of just saying to these companies, “Be transparent.” This is something I’ve learned from Nic Suzor’s work, in particular. I’ve been wrong about this issue in the past. A few years ago, I said platforms needed to publish lists of banned hashtags, because there’s a lot of discrimination present in the hashtags they ban. But often when you ban a hashtag, people just move the conversation to a different hashtag. So publishing a list of banned hashtags can make it easier for people to come up with workarounds. That’s one of the many reasons why we need to be careful with what we’re asking for when it comes to transparency.  One form of transparency we really need is around content moderation guidebooks. In my view, we need to see most, if not all of the rules that content moderators are using to make decisions. It troubles me that these are hidden from the public, and therefore hidden from scrutiny. And maybe I’m being too idealistic here, but I believe it would make a big difference if researchers had access to those rules and could make evidence-based recommendations for their improvement.  You’ve written on how feminist thought can inform our approach to content moderation, and to young people’s mental health on the internet more broadly. What in particular do you draw from the feminist tradition, and how does it bear on the question of where we should go from here?  One of my biggest influences both in academia and in life is Dr. Carolina Are. She’s an academic, activist, and pole dance instructor, and often posts images and videos of her pole dance tutorials on social media. Carolina is constantly having her account suspended, then reinstated, then suspended, then reinstated. She gets told that she’s broken the guidelines and then, a day later, gets told it was a mistake.  The reality is that social media companies often don’t know where they stand on issues like female nudity. That’s why they’re so inconsistent. What they want to do is to come up with one global rule. They want to have a single guideline about female nudity that they can globalize across the entire platform. But female nudity is an issue that is viewed so differently according to the country that you’re in, the region of the country that you’re in, the religion that you belong to. Many different elements factor into it. So, to have one international rule on an issue like that is impossible. On certain things, generalizability isn’t possible.


Prompt: If there’s one thought on the subject of mental health and young people on the internet that you’d like our readers to carry out into the world, what would it be? Again, I would push back against the “real-name web.” Lots of people have made the argument before me but it still stands. The kids I’ve spoken to feel so much safer on social media if they use a pseudonym. Pseudonymity has so many benefits for them and, while it will always carry risks, there’s a wealth of evidence telling us that the benefits outweigh the harms. We need to listen to the kids. We need to believe what they’re saying, and create a digital world that doesn’t alienate their ideas.

Response: Ex nihilo is one of those concepts that makes you immediately suspicious. When someone claims to have made something out of nothing, there is almost always an inconvenient history that they intend to eclipse. The fantasy that before us there was nothing has a great deal of ideological power. The creator ex nihilo gets to claim some faint emanation of divine power—the wealth creator and the job creator are treated as distant cousins to the capital-C Creator.  The same is true for the idea of terra nullius. When tech came to a stretch of Northern California along the San Francisco Bay, it reframed the world it found as a bunch of apricot groves, a rail line, and not much else. This kind of pioneering story abounds in Silicon Valley. It’s not just the architecture, which seems to pretend that nothing was there before whatever spaceship of an office park landed in a given lot. Rather, it’s the environmentalist facade of an industry whose dirty beginnings—above all, in the known carcinogen, trichloroethylene, long used to clean semiconductors—have dotted Santa Clara County with a record number of Superfund sites. It’s the way, looking at the names of the wealthiest people in the Valley, you get the sense of wealth that’s been created by this generation rather than inherited from previous ones. Of course, the Zuckerberg-Chan dynasty may one day amuse the Bay Area’s society columnists with their coke-fueled antics at the annual Cotillion Debutante ball. Maybe X AE A-XII Musk will one day run for governor of California like so many scions before him who were born on third base and think they hit a triple.  But for now, this wealth feels new. And the newness is part of its allure, its legitimacy. Stories abound about how Silicon Valley’s newly rich don’t know how to spend their money, or how they spend it on absurd things. There is something reassuring about that framing, suggesting as it does that these protagonists are new to wealth and privilege, that wealth is foreign to them.


Prompt: Years ago, I became fascinated with the question of how “new” the money invested and made in Silicon Valley really is. It has fascinated me in part because it is on some level an unanswerable question: how do you decide whether money is really “new”? Even asking the question, asking where money came from, teases out some inconvenient continuities, and a different understanding of how this industry and the place it has made its home came to be.  Supertankers of privilege Silicon Valley is good at persuading people to accept its self-perception as fact—a useful tactic, since a lot rides on that perception. In 2014, Forbes ran an analysis showing that “the wealthiest people in the country are increasingly self-made, leaving behind an era when dynasties inherited and concentrated wealth.” The leading indicator, they pointed out, was tech, where “more than 94 percent of the tech billionaires created their fortunes themselves.” (The numbers were much lower for sectors such as manufacturing.) How did Forbes determine tech wasn’t dynastic? The authors ranked Silicon Valley’s super-rich on a 1-10 scale. A “1” on their scale denoted “inherited fortune but not working to increase it”; a “4” meant “inherited fortune and increased it in a meaningful way”; a “7,” “self-made who got a head start from wealthy parents and moneyed background”; and an “8” was self-made but “came from a middle- or upper-middle-class background.” To rank a “10,” you basically had to be left in a basket on a river.  The results of the analysis aren’t particularly surprising. It turns out tech is mostly, by these calculations, “8s.” After all, that’s what the methodology was basically created to deliver. Anyone involved in tech in the last forty years who wound up as a billionaire likely grew their fortune significantly. You’d have to be an idiot, or actively trying, not to. But even beyond that, the methodology is profoundly telling. There is the unspoken assumption that growing one’s wealth was somehow the opposite of being dynastic. There is also the idea that money only grows due to some immense effort—in fact, their one example of a “1,” Laurene Powell Jobs, is evidence of how hard it is to avoid growing your wealth once it’s reached a certain level of absurdity. And the suggestion that anyone “6” and above “truly made it on their own” is staggering. When a certain “billionaire” ex-president ranks in the middle of your scale, the off-ness of the scale seems to be the point.

Response: The most interesting questions about wealth transmission in America, however, happen within the “8s”—that is, among the twenty million millionaires as opposed to the 600 ro so billionaires in the US. Forbes set up their method around the idea that dynastic wealth and wealth multiplying from one generation to the next are mutually exclusive, as though taking an eighty million dollar fortune and turning it into a billion-dollar fortune is somehow the opposite of the dynastic transmission of capital. There’s one kind of story about capitalism being told when you highlight how Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard (and, um, Quibi), is a self-made billionaire who ran for governor of California as just “Meg.” And another when you think about the fact that she comes from two Boston Brahmin families, and one of her sons bears the almost comically dynastic name Griffith Rutherford Harsh V. (“Griff,” as he’s known, is the direct descendant of a revolutionary war general, so if anything the “V” is lowballing it.)  Rather than a story of disruption and discontinuity, the story of Silicon Valley can be told as one of family legacies. Rather than upjumped kids in hoodies upsetting the staid operations of capital, it’s wealth doing what it always does—attracting more wealth. Think of the way Aaron Sorkin chooses to frame Mark Zuckerberg’s rise in The Social Network: here Mark Zuckerberg in a sloppy hoodie, there the Winklevoss twins—“men of Harvard,” constantly in blazers, and, as portrayed by a duplicated Armie Hammer, radiating inherited privilege from every pore. That doesn’t seem exactly untrue to life. Born in the Hamptons and raised in Greenwich, Connecticut, the Winklevoss twins surely led a life of privilege before coming to Harvard. What’s perhaps more remarkable is Sorkin’s insistence that slovenly, mousy Mark Zuckerberg, who was raised in Westchester County, and attended Phillips Exeter Academy, is somehow not just less cool than them, but socioeconomically distinct. What Sorkin insists on framing as Old Money versus The New Economy, in actuality, was more like two supertankers of privilege colliding (or, as Forbes would call them, “8s”).


Prompt: The idea that industry creates wealth out of nothing is one that US capitalism compulsively projects onto whatever segment of the economy is particularly new and shiny. Part of this idea is the notion that new elites disrupt older systems of wealth and privilege. The deck gets reshuffled, old systems of privilege get upended. The promise contained in such an idea seems deeply connected to American notions of equality. If wealth, power, and legitimacy comes from upending the old order, if fortunes are remade with each generation in different fields, the thinking goes, then there is something deeply anti-dynastic and possibly even egalitarian about wealth generation in this country.  From The Summit to Sand Hill Road When you’re dealing with the San Francisco Bay Area, the question “where does the money come from?” is the obvious but perhaps less interesting one. San Francisco made its wealth in gold, San José in silver—or in supplying those trying to get rich off gold or silver. Generations of ranchers made vast fortunes on giant estancias carved from the land of the many peoples and nations now collectively known as the Muwekma Ohlone, and then from the territorial loot of the Mexican-American War. San Francisco was, and still is, a banking town—and with the advent of highways, the groves and fields up and down the Peninsula became subdivisions where home values skyrocketed. The Department of Defense invested in the region, funding whatever technology might help defeat the Soviets. When Silicon Valley started making unimaginable amounts of money, in other words, it did so in a place already awash in cash. The more interesting question is: where did that money go?  If you tell the story of Silicon Valley as the story of children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, it becomes a story of money changing shape: shipping wealth becoming real estate holdings, becoming office parks, becoming bitcoin. When you tell the story this way, it’s less about mansions overlooking the Mission or the Presidio, but rather of The Summit atop tony Russian Hill.

Response: There are open and literal connections between the old guard and the new. Dede Wilsey, for example, a fixture of the SF social scene, was old-money dynastic to the point that she frequently claimed that the 1980s soap opera Falcon Crest was modeled on her clan. Her son Trevor Traina is a serial founder, whose successes (do you remember CompareNet?) mostly occurred during the first boom. Walter Haas III, the latest scion of a billionaire dynasty that goes back to the founding of Levi Strauss, is himself a founder.  There are also emerging dynasties that bring together different corners of the Silicon Valley cosmos. Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen, for instance, is the daughter of John Arrillaga, Silicon Valley’s biggest commercial landlord and a Stanford mega-donor; she is married to Marc Andreessen, creator of Netscape and partner in the VC fund Andreessen Horowitz. Beyond such matches made on Sand Hill Road, there is the role family wealth has played in Silicon Valley’s preferred funding model, where family money is all over, and yet at the same time quite difficult to detect.


Prompt: From the outside, Silicon Valley can seem a rather mysterious engine for value generation. At the center of that mystery is so-called “venture capital.” Even within the venture capital pipeline there are more and less public segments, and wherever the mystery is most mysterious, the pipeline at its most opaque, there seems to be a pretty good chance, in the end, that the black box contains nothing but family money.  When the former US Ambassador to NATO, General William Henry Draper Jr., founded Draper, Gaither & Anderson in 1959, it was the first venture capital firm on the West Coast. Draper modeled the fund on the outfits that invested family money for the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, the Carnegies, and other industrialists out east. Draper, Gaither & Anderson’s initial investors included the Rockefeller family and the Hellmans, founders of San Francisco–headquartered Wells Fargo Bank. Stanford’s then-provost Frederick Terman convinced DG&A to set up shop at 851 Welch Road, immediately abutting the university’s campus. The historian Leslie Berlin has pointed to the clear marching orders DG&A was receiving from the Rockefellers: no real estate please; rather, the point was to connect Rockefeller cash with high tech.

Response: With time, the Drapers turned venture investing into a dynastic concern of their own. William Henry Draper Jr.’s son William Henry Draper III cofounded Sutter Hill Ventures, a legendary private equity firm based in Palo Alto. Draper’s grandson Tim Draper, before becoming famous for constantly proposing to split the Golden State into a number of smaller states that would allow Californians to shop around for their ideal California, founded Draper Fisher Jurvetson, which was an early investor in Baidu, Tesla, and, more controversially, Theranos. Tim’s daughter Jesse, who starred in several Nickelodeon shows, also runs her own venture fund, Halogen Ventures, which invests in companies founded by women.  The Friends and Family Round Dynasties like the Drapers may not be the norm in Silicon Valley, but they’re not uncommon either. Family money shapes Silicon Valley companies, even if it does so in ways that are less readily apparent than the big bets of famous investors. That’s partly because family money gets in before anyone gets famous. VCs advise aspiring startup founders to raise money with a “friends and family” round even before turning to angel investors. “Friends and family” is entirely private, it’s decidedly small-bore, and it leaves very few traces unless someone sues (and there’s an entire cottage industry in Silicon Valley making sure that no one does). Absent a Theranos-sized fuckup, there’s usually no way to know if a founder’s parents, who both happened to work for Goldman Sachs, invested a critical $200K to help Junior get his business off the ground.


Prompt: When it comes to angel investors and venture capital funds, while much of their money comes from endowments, pension funds, insurance companies, and the like, one major source is “family offices.” That is a euphemism for investment funds run for one or sometimes a handful of immensely wealthy families. As the historian Tom Nicholas points out in VC: An American History, the structure of modern venture capital investment grew out of the need to formalize family offices in the 1920s. According to an April 2021 Financial Times report, there are over 7,000 family offices worldwide (a 40 percent rise from 2017 to 2019), managing about six trillion dollars in assets. The trend line has been pointing up ever since the financial crisis of 2008. And, as Crunchbase reported in 2018, family offices seem to be increasingly keen on investing in startups directly: pivoting, as it were, from contributing to VC funds to behaving like VCs in their own right. A 2020 report by Silicon Valley Bank suggests that over 90 percent of family offices prefer to get involved in the early stages of venture investing (meaning Seed or Series A).  In Silicon Valley, many family offices were founded to manage the fabulous wealth of the tech billionaires themselves (for instance the Omidyar Network, which manages investments on behalf of the family of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar)—so relatively recent money. But some money is positively ancient. The Rockefellers’ family office, Venrock, was a crucial early investor in both Intel and Apple Computers. The Bechtel family, having made a fortune in construction going all the way back to the Western Pacific Railroad, incorporated as Bechtel in San Francisco in 1889. The family is as old money as they come in San Francisco—Bohemian Club, generations of Stanford alumni, the works. (I am—fun fact—writing this essay sitting across from a building on the Stanford campus that bears the Bechtel family name.) Their family office is called The Fremont Group, which was once run by former US Secretary of State and longtime SF high society fixture George P. Shultz. Through Trinity Ventures, founded in 1986, the Bechtels also invested directly in companies like Extreme Networks, Blue Nile, and mommy-supplier extraordinaire Zulily.

Response: One partner at a venture capital fund told me that, in his experience, VCs turn to family offices when first starting out. Big as family funds can be, the inflow of capital represented by, say, a pension fund or a university endowment is both much bigger and much more reliable. Family offices generally do not get access to what a big university endowment gets access to. The only way family offices get to play in a hot new fund is to have invested in the firm’s funds back when it was just starting out. That means that on the whole family money comes into play early in the process of fund formation.


Prompt: Between the “friends and family” round, the family office’s role in fund formation, and their preference for early-stage investment, the family is Silicon Valley’s ultimate incubator. Combine that with the fact that friends and family rounds tend to be extremely informal, and that family offices are barely regulated by the FDIC and SEC, and you notice that the system is perfectly set up to clothe family wealth in the trappings of an open market.  The only time you get even a slight glimpse is when things go seriously wrong: when companies collapse, when people go to jail, when very wealthy people sue each other. When Theranos collapsed, it became pretty clear that wealthy families—from the Waltons, to the DeVos family, to, yes, the Drapers—had been Theranos’s main backers. Other Theranos investors, like George Shultz, while not mega-rich themselves, were fixtures of the family office world. In general, it seems that very little of the billions in valuations that evaporated had come to the biotech-startup in the way most startups make their money—one reason why Elizabeth Holmes was able to get away with her deceptions for so long.  Disembodied and Reconstituted If family money is everywhere in Silicon Valley, albeit almost undetectably so, there’s one place where anyone making money in the Valley looks to pass it on to the next generation and to the generations after that: real estate. The federal estate tax exemption is $11.7 million as of 2021, and just owning two or three buildings in the right zip codes in the Bay Area means you leave just a trace in the federal ledgers when you die. IRS agents thus have a box seat for the way Silicon Valley moves its dynastic project forward.  The thing is, they’re not seeing tech wealth show up in estate tax filings quite yet. As one agent told me, in most of the cases the Bay Area offices handle, “wealth is made through buying real estate, or indeed by inheritance. Some may dabble in high tech investments, but only after making money another way.”

Response: Some of this has to do with the fact that most techies are still young. But some of it probably has to do with the fact that the wealth that migrates from one generation to the next isn’t usually in stocks anyway. Where the IRS is seeing tech show up is in gift tax enforcement, which is handled by the same office. Techies, the IRS agent says, “are young and wealthy and hearing from the lawyers in the area about how to start gifting” their money. That means the fabulously valued stocks likely change shape into something else—among other things, real estate.  If anything, real estate has probably outperformed tech since tech moved in. Silicon Valley as a collection of companies has experienced boom and bust, but as a physical location the stretch of the San Francisco Peninsula between Burlingame and San José seems to have known only one endless boom. That boom has been extremely narrowly distributed: buying some Tesla stock is not attainable for most, but still a hell of a lot more attainable than owning property in Mountain View. Real estate is still the greatest repository of dynastic wealth—and the greatest source of intergenerational immiseration.  Even before a single semiconductor company moved in, the Valley made some families very rich and ensured that others would be deprived of their spin of the wheel. As the historian Stephen Pitti has noted, as Santa Clara County developed, the powers that be were concerned to attract more residents to the area, where the mining economy had largely given way to an overwhelmingly agriculture-based economy. They were concerned that not enough white people would stay in the area, and that too many Asians and Latinos might. As a result, small farming tracts were readily made available to white Americans and immigrants from Europe (Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese), while Mexican Americans were kept “as a naturally mobile, low-wage labor force.”  With each subsequent generation, those small parcels had a way of generating ever more massive amounts of wealth. The well-documented explosion in home values in the area is almost entirely due to an explosion in the value of land. The inequality fostered by the nearly feudal land distribution promoted in the County has given rise to the escalating differences between the area’s rich and poor.


Prompt: Almost every campus up and down the Valley has a story like the new Apple spaceship: the Glendenning Farm, slowly sold off to developers in the middle of the last century, until Hewlett Packard plopped down its headquarters (long called the “apricot division”), eventually selling it to Apple. Some of the local landowners seem to have gotten stiffed by the bargain, but the rapid development also created massive wealth for some. Richard Peery and John Arrillaga bought up massive tracts of land and became two of the largest commercial landlords in the Valley. Justin Jacobs Jr. plopped down the cheap, interchangeable concrete tilt-up buildings, which still make up a majority of the low-flung Silicon Valley office parks.  Most centrally, the area once occupied by the large estate maintained by the railroad barons Leland and Jane Stanford transformed itself into Stanford University, an investment behemoth and still Silicon Valley’s largest landowner. On the surface, this transformation seems perhaps the most unusual in the Valley, but it might be the most representative. Stanford University represents a frustrated dynastic project: named after Leland and Jane’s son, Leland Jr., who died a year before the university was founded, it is home to his gravesite and is dedicated to his memory. Disembodied and reconstituted as a tax-exempt entity, indivisible by the vagaries of family squabbles and immune to the decadence that might have befallen actual generations of Stanfords, Leland Stanford Jr. has dominated the area more effectively than any dynasty made of flesh and blood could have.  And that seems to make unfortunate Leland Stanford Jr. something of a patron saint for the entire area, where wealth has enormous inertia and nevertheless constantly changes shape. There is an old comedy bit where Chris Rock distinguishes between being rich and being wealthy. “Rich is some shit you can lose with a crazy summer and a drug habit,” he jokes. “You can’t get rid of wealth.” Through all its transformations—from precious metals to land to superconductors to photo-sharing apps—Silicon Valley seems determined to prove that last part right.

Response: The Colorado River snakes southwest from fifteen thousand feet high in the Rocky Mountains, down through plains and desert to present-day Mexico and the Gulf of California, draining a vast watershed of 250,000 square miles. Indigenous peoples—the Navajo and the Hopi, the Zuni and the Ute, and dozens of other nations—have been living alongside the river and its tributaries for centuries. Beginning in the 1820s, Anglo settlers began seizing water and land in the Colorado River Basin, and by the 1870s, the Colorado River Basin region had become part of the expanding United States empire. The region was reimagined by the US state as what the American geologist John Wesley Powell called “arid earth”: “drought-stricken” lands that supposedly needed to be salvaged through settler control and technology.  In the decades that followed, the newly created US Geological Survey initiated a massive program of data collection to map, chart, graph, and apportion the basin’s water, land, and people. This stream of information—from acre-feet per year of river flow to racist atlases of Indigenous peoples—fed into decisions by US agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation about who should be allowed to live in the basin and use its land and water. This was, in effect, a data analytics program that entrenched white supremacist ideology into the legal and scientific functioning of the US state.


Prompt: Guiding decisions about how to distribute the region’s land and water was the belief that scarce resources should be optimized to foster development and maximize profits for white settlers. This regime of resource optimization persisted into the mid-twentieth century, when it was combined with a newly dominant mode of economic analysis called Input-Output (I/O) economics and programmed into computer algorithms known as linear programming algorithms, which guided the work of deciding how to allocate the basin’s water and land.

Response: Today, those optimization algorithms, and the settler-colonial logics they derive from, control the distribution of resources on which forty million people throughout the American southwest depend. According to officials in Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah, and other states, that water system is now collapsing in the face of what the media, in a contemporary echo of Powell’s drought-stricken arid lands thesis, has described as “megadrought” and “water starvation” exacerbated by the climate crisis. That has led to calls for further technological intervention of the same kind that has long enabled settler control. But it is clear the optimization framework—which over the past century has contributed to water shortages, toxic waste from profit-driven energy development, flooding of Native American agricultural land, and enduring campaigns of water appropriation—will not solve the water crisis.


Prompt: There is now an urgent need to abandon that framework and imagine better water futures. Luckily, the resources for this work already exist. In the period when settler-colonial water policy was being entrenched in digital algorithms, a group of young people from the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC) were developing critiques of the optimization regime, and articulating a different vision for the Colorado River Basin. That vision can help us support sustainability and justice-centered water policy for generations to come.  Computing Landscapes The story of how the optimization regime took over the Colorado River Basin is a complicated one. But at its core are innovations in policy, law, and technology that enthroned profit as the guiding principle of resource distribution in the region.

Response: In the nineteenth century, two doctrines guided the US empire’s allocation of Colorado River water. The first, known as the doctrine of prior appropriation, was basically a “first come, first served” rule that privileged the first interests to lay claim to the use of a given amount of water. The second, known as the doctrine of equitable apportionment, split water between US territories. In theory, these water doctrines might have favored Native American water rights, as they did after the 1908 Winters v. United States Supreme Court decision, which upheld the water rights of the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation over encroaching settlers. But since then, white settlers have managed to subordinate water rights under the principle of “beneficial use,” which holds that in the case of disputes, water should be allocated to the parties that intend to use it for vaguely defined beneficial purposes. In practice, this has usually meant profits for technological developers and extractive energy industries.


Prompt: That evolution in the principles of water distribution policies was later operationalized in new computing technologies. Beginning earlier but expanding significantly in the 1960s, analysts in laboratories at major land-grant universities like the University of Arizona took the data collected by the US Geological Survey and other agencies and encoded it onto punch cards. Mathematicians, economists, and other technologists then used those cards as the fodder for computer programs that would optimize water distribution for profit maximization.

Response: The design of these computer programs was derived from the economic technique known as Input-Output modeling. Created in the 1920s by the economist Wassily Leontief in order to optimize the transportation of grain in Soviet Russia, I/O modeling was later used to analyze entire national economies and even to guide US bombing campaigns in the Second World War, thereby advancing US imperialism and rationalizing mass destruction on the world stage.


Prompt: I/O models are based on a table that looks like an Excel spreadsheet, in which columns for materials (such as oil, steel, or coal) intersect with rows for industries (such as agriculture or manufacturing). The basic idea is that an economic system can be measured as the overall ratio of resources used (input) to goods produced (output). In the Cold War period, scientists at Harvard, the Pentagon, and elsewhere developed mathematical techniques known as linear programming algorithms to determine the optimal input and output numbers for a desired objective, such as optimizing resources for military development at the lowest possible cost.  After being successfully implemented in imperial bombing campaigns and New England manufacturing, I/O economics and linear programming algorithms began expanding westward in the 1950s into water management on the Colorado River, becoming the dominant mode of modeling water within a decade. Researchers and students at the land-grant universities were charged with optimizing water distribution across the region. As the basis of their analysis, they carved the diverse land into relatively homogenous virtual quadrants known as “problem settings.” For example, in proposals for the Central Utah Project, initially formalized in the 1960s, the state of Utah was represented as a square divided into a grid of eight to ten smaller squares that obliterated all distinctions about whose land, histories, and water rights the grid overlaid. Researchers then used computer programs to figure out how to distribute X acre-feet of water for Y farm plots across each problem setting, so as to maximize profits and minimize costs for the region’s large agribusinesses and other industries.

Response: Youth Against the Empire The optimization regime is so entrenched in water policy and technology that, even in the midst of catastrophic climate change, it is difficult to imagine other futures for the Colorado River Basin and proximate regions. But in the late 1970s, a group of Native American students did just that, fighting back against a water diversion program in New Mexico, and providing a model for activism and water management that could guide us today.


Prompt: The NIYC was founded in 1961 as a nationwide coalition focused on environmental justice work and an intergenerational fight against US colonialism and economic extraction. In the subsequent decades, the NIYC argued countless environmental court cases, wrote numerous policy reports, and utilized every political and scientific tool to fight against the settler policy and technologies of the US empire.  One of the tools they used was the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). These statements were created in 1969 by the National Environmental Protection Act to help guide government decisions on new development projects. In the Colorado River Basin region, developers manipulated the EIS format to justify the impacts of their projects in light of those projects’ beneficial use—in other words, to show that the profits outweighed the environmental costs.  In 1976, student youth members of the NIYC of Albuquerque, New Mexico, wrote their own anti-colonial EIS for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They recognized that the EIS was a powerful policy medium that could be repurposed for environmental justice work. They were attempting to intervene against a recent data-driven decision about the allocation of water from the San Juan River—a major tributary of the Colorado River—as part of the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project. The project was supposed to take water from the Navajo Dam and Reservoir, created in early ’60s, and use it to irrigate land in San Juan County in northwestern New Mexico.  The students supported the irrigation project in principle—as a founding member of the NIYC, John Redhouse, said in another context, “we’re not anti-development, we’re just anti-exploitation”—but they were concerned that Native oversight was lacking, and that the project would thereby undermine Navajo self-governance. They focused their EIS on the New Mexico state government’s opaque decision to divert 330,000 acre-feet of water from the Navajo Dam, which they pointed out was just one among countless decisions made without robust structures of Native oversight.

Response: In their statement, the students recounted how Native American water rights had been diminished since at least the early twentieth century by the doctrine of beneficial use. They pointed to the ways that dominant data-driven decision-making processes had been used to disavow Native American claims to water, and questioned the specific hydrological data employed to make the decision in this case. They decried the influence of corporate agriculture in the decision, as well as recent changes in the Navajo Council that weakened possibilities for total self-sufficiency from US resource governance. They also provided a clear vision for Navajo self-sufficiency, which included breaking away from the domination of US agribusiness to create a system of food production and distribution organized into small family farming and local Navajo food-producing cooperatives.  Perhaps most importantly, they demanded transparency and power in the decision-making process, so that they could assert their voice within the Native council, and break from US water management and the technological regime of optimization. This has become a central tenet of contemporary Indigenous Environmental Justice and Indigenous Data Sovereignty resistance movements: the right to collection, ownership, and application of all data about Indigenous peoples, their lifeways, and territories.  Crisis Epistemology Water justice requires acknowledging historical pasts as much as imagining new futures, but optimization frameworks flatten past, present, and future into calculations of profit-driven time.


Prompt: Optimization algorithms are misleading in stories about water in other ways, too. In upholding extractive economic systems, they formulate water crisis as a future problem and ignore the fact that this crisis has been caused by centuries of settler and capitalist control. Scholar Kyle Whyte has named this false description of climate change as new and urgent as “crisis epistemology.” This anxiety is evident in “megadrought” media descriptions of the Colorado River that warn of impending collapse. In response, technological developers and policy makers are granted unchecked decision-making power that reaffirms optimization-led economic systems.  Environmental Impact Statements continue to dominate in water development policies. Standard EIS reports utilize optimization algorithms, Monte Carlo methods, and other predictive statistical frameworks. This means that dominant water policy assessment tools are designed with the same optimization logics that they are supposed to check. Against this, the NIYC’s anti-colonial EIS is a model of environmental assessment that breaks optimization’s stranglehold on water policy, and privileges intergenerational sustainability and water rights. Their approach centers the needs of the people over the profit of technological developers.  The NIYC’s environmental justice work over the past seventy years—including their 1976 intervention into the Navajo irrigation project water diversion decision—and their unparalleled expertise in water policy, water-related technological development, and agriculture, underscore the critical importance of local organizing and wider coalition building, as well as centering youth perspectives, in formulating water futures written by the people. There is already enough information in these past interventions to write justice-centered policy and support livable water futures for the Colorado River.

Response: In October 2019, an op-ed in a student newspaper at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte made an allegation that rippled across campus: it claimed that the university’s administration had quietly appointed a war criminal as the new head of campus safety and security. The man, retired army colonel John Bogdan, had spent two years running the notorious detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay.


Prompt: The student who wrote the op-ed didn’t have to look far to find traces of Bogdan’s record. The colonel’s LinkedIn profile noted that, between 2012 and 2014, Bogdan had been “responsible for the safe and legal custody of 166 opposing force detainees.” Those detainees were young and middle-aged Muslim men who had been extrajudicially imprisoned during the so-called War on Terror. Further internet searches revealed that while Bogdan was warden of Guantánamo Bay, he had implemented a regime of intrusive genital searches, had detainees on hunger strike intravenously force fed, and had allowed guards to use rubber bullets on hunger-striking detainees. One lawyer for detainees has written that Bogdan’s Guantánamo was characterized by “displays of power for power’s sake.” Although Bogdan’s actions likely do not constitute war crimes under international law, the UNC Charlotte Chapter of the American Association of University Professors later argued that those actions “clearly violate human decency and the spirit of the Third Geneva Convention and other protocols for the treatment of prisoners.” Almost immediately, the op-ed set off a campaign to have Bogdan fired. A group of several dozen students, consisting primarily of campus Democrats and Young Democratic Socialists of America members, began searching for more evidence of what Bogdan had done at Guantánamo. They formed a group chat on GroupMe to strategize and share articles about Bogdan’s past, and a Twitter feed to publicize their discoveries and rally support. They called themselves the Coalition to Remove John Bogdan.  Members of the coalition soon found themselves clashing with the university’s administration over Bogdan’s role on campus, and struggling to convince their Zoomer-generation peers—most of whom were born after 9/11 and were children during the early years of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars—that the man who ran the Guantánamo detention center shouldn’t be the head of campus security. At the same time, the coalition members were trying to educate themselves about what had transpired in the detention facilities. In the decade after 9/11, Guantánamo was perhaps the most potent symbol of the abuses and excesses of the US national security state, but its place in the public imagination had been receding since Barack Obama’s second term in office. “I didn’t really know anything about it,” one coalition member recently told me over Zoom.

Response: The coalition members’ understanding of the base was almost entirely mediated by digital records, “Guantánamo” Google searches, Wikipedia skims, and tidbits teachers had told them along the way. But the version of Guantánamo that public schools teach and that tends to live online is very narrowly defined: a hundred-year-old naval base on forty-five square miles of US-controlled land and sea at the southeastern tip of Cuba. Though the identities and experiences of the people detained at Guantánamo have now been reported, catalogued, and even cinematized, a political and technological veil has been cast over the past and future of most former guards. The result is a Guantánamo that is always far away: the people there are never coming here, to America.  That myth has made formulating the right questions about truth, justice, and the US detention center at Guantánamo Bay incredibly hard to do. Bogdan’s presence at UNC Charlotte raised exactly those questions. He was the rare exception of someone who had emerged from behind the veil.


Prompt: A Pinpoint on Google Maps Although Bogdan had listed his Guantánamo experience on his LinkedIn profile, knowledge about most of the guards that return from Guantánamo is extraordinarily hard to come by. This is largely the result of decisions made by the Pentagon, which worked for years to ensure that most guards’ identities, decisions, and actions would not be documented in public archives.

Response: The Guantánamo that emerges online tends to be a pinpoint on Google Maps, a small strip of land through which all kinds of people—private contractors, intelligence agents, soldiers, sailors, policymakers, lawyers, journalists—pass through, disappearing in discourse once they leave the base. Google Images almost inevitably turns one’s attention to the physical detention camp, too. Searches produce a checkerboard of orange jumpsuits, snapshots of current detainees, splatters of camouflage. Over the past decade, the first page of results has evolved to include photographs of protesters in the mainland US, but even those images point back to the camp: many protesters have decided that the best way to remind civilians of Gitmo’s continued existence is to dress up like detainees. In the digital archives of major US newspaper outlets, there is a parallel pattern. Almost all the photographs accompanying stories about the detention facilities show a similar montage: hurricane fencing and barbed wire; American flags and the backs of military personnel; the small, beige-colored trailers containing men deemed too dangerous for US soil.  Political discourse about Guantánamo has also centered on the prison and its detainees. If the Zoomers at UNC Charlotte had looked for Guantánamo on C-SPAN.org, they would have scrolled through decades of videos of congressional representatives, national security lawyers, lieutenants, and journalists regurgitating the same five or six questions. When will Guantánamo close? Where will the detainees go? What might happen to the detention facilities if they are ever emptied of people? What is it like to see Guantánamo with your own eyes? What horrors might befall America if detainees were to be housed and tried in US federal criminal courts instead of military commissions? Wikipedia articles about Guantánamo echo these frames, and have become repositories of contested knowledge about the detained. Footnotes include Supreme Court cases about habeas corpus petitions, links to lengthy Pentagon reports on the detention facilities, memos written by ACLU lawyers arguing for the immediate closure of the prison, and a rich archive of investigative news articles that try to detail human rights abuses at the prison. In much of this writing, the passive voice lurks in the prose, quietly obfuscating precisely who is ordering that detainees be force-fed, who is implementing groin searches, who is doing the detaining.


Prompt: Archivists, activists, and journalists have pushed against this erasure, and initiatives such as the Guantánamo Public Memory Project have endeavored to trace the lineage of the place. Reporters from some countries whose citizens have been imprisoned at Guantánamo have tried to document who did what, when, and why, and individuals released from the detention facilities have written about their experiences. Some of the most rigorous coverage of the prison is unsurprisingly written in Arabic. But language barriers have made this knowledge relatively inaccessible to English-speaking monolinguals living in the United States.

Response: Some guards have chosen to identify themselves on Twitter and other social media platforms. One even started a gym in Philly. But most keep quiet. There is no public list, no Excel spreadsheet of former guards. Instead, there is a persistent informational void about who the individual guards were, who they harmed, what ideologies motivated them, and where they went when they left the camp. Contrary to what Google Maps might show you, Guantánamo runs on the dreams and sweat and blood and logics of people like John Bogdan—former guards and wardens who are now scattered across the United States.