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JD: For the record, I am not on TikTok.

JS: I’m not sure I’d frame it as a critique of Logic, but one difference between your project and ours is that Reboot’s tent is a bit bigger and a bit more industry-friendly. We want to be palatable to your median CS student or young software engineer who might, like, vote Democrat, but not really engage with critique or theory. A lot of our subscribers are tech workers who would not call themselves tech workers. The Reboot newsletter is the most political thing they read.

So what does it take to politicize, or even begin to engage, that kind of person? Many of our readers are starting from a few steps back.

XW: Whenever I’ve seen Jasmine describe Reboot in person, she says, “It’s like Logic but, you know, less academic.”

BT: Wow.

XW: And I always wonder, what does “academic” mean?

BT: I’m glad you smuggled in the spice at the end of the conversation. I was worried we wouldn’t get there.

Over the years, I’ve put a lot of thought into how Logic can remain approachable to a wide range of readers. We try to produce prose that is readable. But the reality is that not every piece is for every reader. Each issue should have at least some pieces that are accessible to the type of reader who is not conversant with the different intellectual traditions that inform the magazine—the median CS student, say. Those will be pieces that don’t assume any prior knowledge of a subject, and don’t use technical language.

We want to create those entry points. But not every piece can be like that, because it’s a quite constrained mode of writing: if you have to spell everything out, if you can’t, truly can’t, assume any prior knowledge, then you can’t go into very much depth. So we also want to create space for people who are doing more advanced work and writing for a more advanced reader. It’s a balance and, honestly, a struggle.

As for what it would mean to call Logic “academic”: as Xiaowei suggests, it’s a word that is used in so many different ways. One way is literal: “academic” as in academia. It’s true that many of our contributors have been academics. It’s sort of inevitable, given the fact that academics typically have more time to develop subject matter expertise, and more time to write, than anyone else. Still, it’s not a pattern that I feel particularly proud of. The lazy version of Logic is the para-academic journal—that’s what happens when we’re not working hard enough. We have published many wonderful pieces by academics. But when an issue is mostly composed of academic contributors, then it’s a sign that we’re not doing enough to discover and develop the kind of voices that ultimately differentiate our project.

People can also use the term “academic” to refer to technical language. Sometimes, as I said, such language is unavoidable. You wouldn’t expect a physicist or a car mechanic to describe the behavior of some complex system without using specialized terms; the same goes for those who write social commentary and critique. All you can do as an editor is to make sure it’s earned—that difficult language reflects a genuine conceptual difficulty—and that the prose is as legible as possible to nonspecialists.

JD: Something else I wonder about is, What happens when you publish social commentary and critique that is true but not necessarily actionable? What does the reader do out in the world after they’ve read the piece? That’s something we’ve thought about a lot while running the newsletter and Kernel.

EL: When we were soliciting pitches for Kernel, we said, you don’t need to be techno-optimistic, it’s okay if you feel negatively about tech—but we do want your writing to leave readers with some sense of agency, so that they feel they can actually do something about whatever you’re writing about. We don’t want our readers to feel like, “The world is so fucked and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

The theme for the first issue of Kernel was, “Where do we go from here?” And the theme for our upcoming issue is “How do we get there?” Those are the questions we’re trying to answer. What are the people, tools, and ideas that can lead us to a better future?

BT: In organizing, it’s a great sin to agitate someone without providing a channel through which to convert their agitation into action. So you shouldn’t approach your coworker and get into a conversation about how much you both hate your terrible sexist boss if you’re just going to walk away afterward. You should be getting them to sign a union card, or join the organizing committee, or something. A good organizer never stimulates righteous anger without providing a direction for it to become politically constructive.

But I think the work we do is distinct, because neither Reboot nor Logic are organizing projects. They’re intellectual projects, cultural projects, community building projects. So our obligations are different.

I should also say that my views on this have evolved over the years. When we started Logic in early 2017, I had more of a taste for polemical writing that pointed toward a particular solution. Over time, I’ve become less interested in reading, writing, and editing that sort of thing, and more interested in residing in the contradictions and the ambiguities and the uncertainties and the difficulties. My basic political commitments haven’t changed. But these days I’m more content to see where the lines of inquiry lead. I don’t want to know the destination in advance.

XW: I disagree—I think both Reboot and Logic are organizing projects. There’s many different types of organizing. And, at its heart, organizing is about community building. If you’re trying to organize your workplace, you’re trying to build trust with your coworkers—that’s building community, right? And that’s what you’re doing at Reboot. Also, different kinds of organizing inform each other. I know there are people who started organizing their workplace because they read an article in Logic.

BT: I think this was an excellent struggle session. Though there wasn’t as much struggle as I had hoped.

XW: We want criticism. We’re lucky that you all have criticism, because that’s how projects and movements grow, through dialogue of this kind. So thank you.