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There is these ways of engaging with these tech booms that doesn't mean you have to buy into the logic of, oh, I've got to make a million dollars and be a startup and cash out and all that stuff.
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I think there's a way of making choices in this world that people tend to forget that are available to us.
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Made in partnership with The Nation magazine.
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I'm your host, Paris Marks.
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I'd like to say thank you to the people who reached out to let me know I was mispronouncing Kamala Harris last week.
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I will make sure not to do that in the future, so thanks for that.
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This week's guest is Chris Carlson.
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Chris is the author of many books, including most recently When Shells Crumble.
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He's the director of Shaping SF and a co-founder of Critical Mass.
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And the main reason he's on the show today is that he was also one of the people behind Processed World.
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If you're not familiar with Processed World, it was a tech critical magazine looking at the computerization of society in the 1980s, the 1990s, and you know, had a few issues in the early 2000s.
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But as we talk about criticisms of the tech industry today and all of the things that these major corporations have done to our societies, it can often feel like this is something that just exists now, right?
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That we're just realizing over the past little while.
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But the truth is that people have been criticizing these technologies and how companies were using computers to increase their power for much longer than the past five or ten years.
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And I think that is what is so important about something like Process World, especially looking at it now, is that we can see the evidence that this has been around for a long time, but we can also see how so many of the critiques that were being made in the 1980s and 1990s are so similar to the types of things that we're criticizing major tech companies for today, right?
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It seems like these things are novel because they have all this power now and because, you know, the internet has allowed them to expand so much.
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But really, these were things that were around much earlier in the rollout of computers, as people were starting to see computers change the way that work was done and that other, you know, aspects of society were changing as well.
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And so naturally, I wanted to have Chris on the show to dig into all this with us to understand like how Process World came to be and the perspective behind it, right?
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Like what was driving it and what the similarities are between then and now, and also what the differences are, because I think that there are some there as well.
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It was a real thrill for me to have Chris on the show.
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I've had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times now, and he's such a great person to like hang out with and chat with.
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You know, even in this interview, you'll probably be able to hear that we could have gone on much longer than we did, just kind of digging into all these different stories that Chris has and you know the experiences that he has with this industry, with these technologies, and just pushing back against corporate power for so long.
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Before we get into the episode, I will say that if you've never heard of Process World before, I highly recommend that you go check out the archive of it.
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Every issue is available on the Internet archive, it has been backed up there so you can dig through the pages of this magazine that, you know, has these criticisms of technology, these fun like comics and illustrations that really take digs at major tech companies and what they're doing to the world.
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It's really worth your time just to like have a little browse through and take a look.
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And I'll also include a few articles in the show notes that people have written since then that, you know, talk a bit about what Prozest World was and what it meant in the time that it was around and what it can still mean for us today.
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So I hope you go take a look at that.
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And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Chris Carlson.
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If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice.
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You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.
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And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week so I can keep having these in-depth conversations that hold the tech industry to account, you can join supporters like Aaron in Los Angeles, Thomas in The Hague, and Jill from Edmonton by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well.
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Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
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Chris, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
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I'm so happy to be on your show.
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Thanks for inviting me.
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No, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show.
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You are someone who has just been working on these issues, if it's okay for me to say since long before I was even born.
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So since the dawn of time, I've been trying to say tech won't save us, god damn it.
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So it's a real thrill to have you on because you know, you are one of the people behind this magazine, Processed World, which was really doing like, you know, we talk about the tech criticism that's happening today and how it feels like more people are critical of technology in this moment, but like this is not a new or novel thing, right?
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People have been looking critically at technology for a long time in various periods, and it feels like it kind of ebbs and flows in particular moments.
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And in the 1980s, when you and some of your friends and stuff were working on Process World, this was another one of these key moments that I think a lot of people today who are interested in technology, who are critical of technology, don't often think about what happens back then.
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But I think knowing those sorts of things can inform us, can give us a better perspective about what's happening now.
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And so I wanted to start by asking how would you describe Process World to people who aren't familiar with it?
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Well, I've done that quite a few times, so I'll try to not make it sound like a canned slogan, but we used to always call it the magazine with a bad attitude.
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And it was essentially a publication that was started in the financial district of San Francisco when a number of us were temp workers down there, and several of us had recently learned this incredibly exciting new skill, word processing, which doubled our wages because we used to be typists.
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And then suddenly, you know, learning this new way to handle magnetic media and put it in and out of a box and so on and so forth, it just suddenly became a highly paid skill, went from six to twelve dollars an hour in 1980.
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It was quite significant at the time.
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The magazine was essentially about the experience of working in the modern office life as it started.
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It became a broader focus for the magazine over its over its life.
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We published 32 issues over 13 years, about three times a year.
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But we always characterize it as the underside of the information age, as told by the alienated wage slaves of the modern office and beyond.
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And we met a lot of the readers and writers by actually going out into the streets of the financial district on Friday afternoons and selling magazines directly.
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And that we did primarily by wearing strange costumes.
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We made these paper-mache video display terminal heads with mylar screens, this type material, and it, you know, the brightly painted, and it said IBM, intensely boring machines, or GM, general monotony, or and then other ones were like commodity boxes that you know look like common products on the shelf in a supermarket, like a tied detergent box.
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And it looked exactly like that, except it said bound, gagged, and tied to useless work day in, day out for the rest of your life.
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And then, of course, you turn around, there's all the ingredients of the modern world, the modern office life, of fluorescent lights and green screens and bad air, et cetera, et cetera, wage labor, things that we were very critical about.
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A lot of what we were doing, I think, in a way to really understand the magazine, which sets it apart from a great deal of what was going on then of the old and new left, and continues to be fairly unique even in this era, is that we took our own experience as our starting point.
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We we really wanted to look into what we were living through and what we were experiencing, and recognizing that the alienation and futility and anger that we'd had as a daily experience, you know, dealing with stupid bosses.
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I mean, everything's quite normal.
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Everybody has these experiences at their jobs.
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But why?
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You know, why should we put up with this?
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And the funny thing was that almost everybody in our world that we were of ourselves and people that we knew, you know, we'd look around at the job and it was like, well, we're all here, you know, wearing these ugly suits or stupid clothes and you know, pretending to be have a good attitude at your job, you know, make sure you keep your work.
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And all you had to do is scratch the surface for a minute, and you'd find the other person or multiple different people with bad attitudes like your own.
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Like, this is stupid.
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Why are we here?
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That bifurcation we experienced right from the beginning was that I'm not an office worker.
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I'm just here for a little while making some money because I got to pay my rent.
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But I'm not, this is not me, it's not what I do.
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I'm actually a dancer, I'm a photographer, I'm a historian, I'm a writer, I'm a this, I'm a that.
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And that bifurcation, I think, is really the source of the magazine's excitement and humor and brilliant insights at certain moments and completely dumb ones at others, and gave rise to a great deal of creativity because we recognized that we were not going to get any sense of creative fulfillment by the so-called job.
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That was laughably obvious.
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But we were stuck there, so we might as well make the best of it.
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And so we ended up purloining a great number of resources from those rather bulging cabinets in the modern office that were around in 1979, 1980, 1981.
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We stole all the paper for the first three issues, which we had a little spoken Arima Day keeps the paper bills away.
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And so you had half a dozen people stealing a remain of paper every day.
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Pretty soon your office is full of stacks of paper.
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And we had access to our own little multilith printing press, and we got a typesetting machine, which at that point was quite a big deal to have real typesetting.
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After 1991 and desktop publishing, it all seems kind of so what?
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Everybody's got that.
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But there was a long time there where it was.matrix printers and daisy wheel IBM Selectrics, and that was it.
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And if you had a typesetting machine with photo typeset galleys coming off of it, you actually look like a real magazine.
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So Process World had a kind of a professional appearance, even though it was very much of an underground zine.
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One of the things that I really love that you brought up there is that the magazine is not just like, you know, people from the outside looking in and kind of analyzing what is happening here, but a lot of or most of the contributors were people who were actually in these offices, who were doing these temp jobs, if not working these proper jobs in these big banks and big technology companies and all this sort of stuff, and then relaying back their frustrations at doing this sort of work and how they would be preferring to do something different, or how they were seeing their workplaces change, and also how they were trying to like throw some wrenches into the machine to try to, you know, slow things down, to try to stop things from working properly.
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And like going back to read it, it just feels so I don't know, it's fascinating, but it's also like to get these insights from the workers themselves who are doing this work feels particularly novel as well, maybe, or maybe something that we don't see enough of today in some of the criticism that happens.
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We had a format that we developed kind of not spontaneously and we didn't think it up ahead of time, it just evolved from our work, which was called Tales of Toil.
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And so people began writing these amazing stories of their work lives.
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And you know, if you stop and think about it for a minute, you realize even today the hardest thing to find out is what is it really like to be at work?
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It's our greatest public secret.
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We don't want to talk about it.
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Everybody acts like, oh, you have a problem at work?
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Well, just quit and get another job.
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Move on.
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Don't if you don't like it, leave.
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That's the answer.
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It's never like, oh, you should actually organize and transform your experience at work.
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Or even more profoundly, the work you're doing is a complete waste of time and nobody should do it.
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The whole place should be shut down immediately because it's destroying the planet.
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You know, whether it's banking, insurance, real estate, advertising, military production, the production of shoddy goods that lasts for six months instead of lasting for 75 years.
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I mean, we don't get to participate at any moment in our society in a discussion of the aggregate division of labor, of why we do what we do and how we do it.
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And that to me was always underlying the processed world experience, which was worth mentioning that when we started the magazine, Jimmy Carter was still the president when we were working on it.
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And we were quite sure he would win re-election, and that Reagan was a bumbling idiot, would never possibly get elected.
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It's just much how we feel about Trump today.
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And shockingly, he did get elected, and of course, the whole kind of militarization of society that accompanied his his uh election win was part of that new experience that we were living through.
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But what we really didn't understand at the time, and now we can see quite clearly in retrospect, 40 plus years later, 44 years later, that was the dawn of neoliberalism.
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I mean, really, Carter was the dawn.
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I mean, he was the first president that started privatizing things really drastically and deregulating them and bringing in the market and the idea that private business should take the initiative more and the state should step back and the state's more of a problem than a solution, which, you know, that may well be.
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I'm not a big statist either, but the idea that, you know, the market is somehow the happy answer for every problem is just laughably stupid, and yet we've had to suffer through this for decades now.
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But that's when it started, and we didn't fully grasp that that's what was going on, I have to admit.
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You can't see in the pages of the magazine, especially the first ten issues or so, you know, really no sign that we're understanding this deeper transformation that's underway, although we saw it in much the way that the left saw it at the time, you know, this attack on organized labor, and we were critical of organized labor, so that didn't necessarily become the defining feature of our interests of how we understood it, but we could certainly understand that the state had been turned against the people, as it were.
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And so it made more sense for us to spend time rather than, you know, there was plenty of things that we were connected to, you know, fighting against the wars in El Salvador, fighting against apartheid in South Africa, supporting various liberation struggles around the world.
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Everybody was sort of like, yeah, sure, the Iranian Revolution, great, hopefully, but then of course not, as it turns out.
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But that and the Nicaraguan Revolution, same story.
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You know, revolutions have a way of turning on sour rather quickly.
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But there was a lot of hope and enthusiasm for them when they first happened.
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And seeing the social movements that accompanied those revolutions in the United States, particularly here in San Francisco, we had a very strong movement amongst the Sandinistas, all lived here before they went back to Nicaragua and made the revolution.
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And ultimately we came to know some of those folks who moved back to San Francisco afterwards and resumed their lives here.
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So there's a way that we were connected to all that stuff.
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But what we really thought, no, we should be looking at our own experience.
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I mean, my life as a straight white guy in San Francisco is actually worsened by the sexism and the racism and the homophobia that I live in the middle of.
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That's making my life worse.
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Not to mention the fact that I'm expected to spend my life doing completely stupid things under ridiculous bosses who are dumber than me telling me what to do and following rules that make no sense to anybody.
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What kind of a life is this?
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My life is degraded by all these different conditions.
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And so let's talk about my life, and not to be just selfish about it, because my life is representative of a lot of other people's lives.
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Let's start the conversation where we are and recognize that a political movement that has any kind of attraction or ability to go anywhere, it better be enjoyable.
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It better be something you like doing.
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It better be something that gives you joy in the world and pleasure.
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Because if it's not oriented around that, it's just sacrifice and suffering, which of course is the story of the left.
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Oh, you must sacrifice, you must give everything up, you must work, work, work, work, work.
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You have to be active every day.
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Get out there and struggle and get out there and protest.
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Like, no way.
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Our attitude was that's the problem, not the solution.
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Activistism is as much of the problem as anything.
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And so we were always looking for ways of creating kind of like convivial and funny ways of intervening in life.
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So I described how we sold magazines on the street.
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That was a big part of that.
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It was just like walking around in a strange costume, bellowing at the top of my lungs.
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If you hate your job, you'll love this magazine, get one here.
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You know, and then most people walk by you and say, Oh my God, that curse is nuts.
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I'm not talking to them.
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But they'd read the box and they'd smile.
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And that's when you knew you got them.
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And then they might stop at our table where there's a calm, usually female standing at the table, willing to have a real conversation and make magazines available to them.
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It was kind of an interesting model that really worked.
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And then we had a gathering at a bar in North Beach every other week for several years, and we went on strange field trips.
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We did a bus ride to Silicon Valley at one point where we actually went to this very large statue made by a famous communist sculptor, actually, Benjamino Bufano, from lived in San Francisco for most of the 20th century.
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And he made these large Madonnas, and one of them is made out of old missile parts.
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So it's very large, and it's very close to the NSA's Blue Cube where they were doing global surveillance from.
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So we went out there with people dressed like having uh toilet scrubbing brushes and whatnot, and tried to scrub the fences of the blue cube.
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And we all jump out of a big blue school bus, you know, processed world in all of our weird props and costumes and laughing and caring on and just having a crazy time.
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And then we had a big moment in front of the Our Lady of the Missiles, as we called it, because it's supposedly a peace monument in the middle of the Silicon Valley's most intense military-industrial complex.
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So we were always laughing.
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We couldn't help it, but it's an awful lot to laugh at in this crazy world, and it was staring us in the face all the time.
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I mean, one of the other issues I think that's worth mentioning since we're on that, we spent a lot of time being ironic and satirical.
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And that kind of came out of other things in the larger culture, whether it's Mad Magazine or Saturday Night Live or all these other things that are going on around us all the time.
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You had to do that.
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You if you didn't have an ironic tone, you were a chump.
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If you were trying to be sincere, clearly you're going to get it.
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We bought into that kind of heavily at the early days, because partly we were young and radical and cool and all that sort of stuff.
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So in retrospect, we didn't help the world very much by embracing that so thoroughly, because invalidating sincerity is one of our problems.
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We haven't figured out how to take sincerity as sincerity.
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Like you can have a sincere opinions about things and w and you should care about that.
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And you should care about hearing other people's sincerity and honor it and respect it, and then build something from that, and not just degrade it and say, oh, you're an idiot.
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Oh, you're a chump.
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You don't get it if you're just if you're going to be sincere.
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You've got to be snide.
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If you're not snide, you're not on the team.
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So that's one of the little self-criticisms that emerged for me over the years, looking back on the work we did.
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But it's pretty funny.
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You know, we had this recurrent series of different cartoons and sometimes just strange collages.
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But we we created a fake company called Contech.
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And the slogan is people like you, helping people like us help ourselves, which is very much the world we still live in today.
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Yeah, no, it definitely is.
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And one of the things that really stands out about the magazine is just how funny it is and how it's filled with a lot of things to try to, you know, make you experience joy while you're reading these stories about what is happening in the world or in the office or whatnot.
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You were talking a bit about the political moment that the magazine emerged out of.
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And certainly sure you didn't understand everything that was going on at the moment.
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Some of that was just understood in retrospect.
00:19:08.640 --> 00:19:13.119
But can you also talk about what was happening in work at that moment?
00:19:13.279 --> 00:19:37.279
Because as I was reading the magazine, there was a lot of discussion about, you know, the shift away from manufacturing and toward office work and kind of the services that we talk about today, and also the transformation of work through the increased use of computers and word processing, as you were saying, and these other tools that were put into the workplace and obviously had these other motivations behind them as companies were rolling them out.
00:19:37.440 --> 00:19:45.599
So, what was happening in that moment that really helped to motivate this magazine and this perspective that a lot of these workers that you were associated with had about this?
00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:46.880
Yeah, good question.
00:19:46.960 --> 00:19:49.440
There were, you know, this was the dawn of the automated office.
00:19:49.599 --> 00:19:53.039
This is when when they really began rolling in the Wang computer.
00:19:53.279 --> 00:19:58.880
My first job was working on an IBM mini computer on a terminal that had a glowing green screen.
00:19:59.119 --> 00:20:04.240
Later, when we got amber screens, it felt like a big improvement because the green was so harsh.
00:20:04.480 --> 00:20:17.039
But basically, you're using uh you know lines of code to access uh various programs that are already preset, and you're uh learning to interact with those in a very limited fashion is generally what was involved.
00:20:17.119 --> 00:20:19.920
And then word processing in those uh environments.
00:20:20.160 --> 00:20:33.759
Originally, word processing for me was uh working on an IBM Selectric that had a memory attached to it, a big box next to it that you'd put a mag card into that looked a lot like a punch card, but it was the magnetic material that ended up in discettes later.
00:20:33.920 --> 00:20:38.319
And you had to know in your head where you were in the document and figure it out mentally.
00:20:38.480 --> 00:20:39.680
It didn't have a screen at all.
00:20:39.839 --> 00:20:45.680
So there's you know a series of steps that involved learning to be in the automated office from in the 1980 period.
00:20:45.839 --> 00:20:52.960
And then there was, I remember a big conference at our Moscone Convention Center here in San Francisco called the Office Automation Conference, 1982.
00:20:53.039 --> 00:20:59.839
And we all showed up there with picket signs and costumes and everything else, and we call it the Office Automaton Conference.
00:20:59.920 --> 00:21:10.160
And we that's where the you may have seen this logo that one of our artists drew, which is a pictograph, a little tiny square image of a white character smashing a computer on a black background.
00:21:10.240 --> 00:21:14.960
It's a really common image that started in the pages of Process World back then in 1982.
00:21:15.039 --> 00:21:16.880
It was actually done for that conference.
00:21:17.119 --> 00:21:31.200
And so the experience we had of that sort of shifting office life was, you know, things were moving into this digital realm, and we recognized that that was partly a way of getting more people to do more work in less time, and then eventually less people would be employed.
00:21:31.359 --> 00:21:35.039
In the early stages of that, there was a great number of us being brought in as temps.
00:21:35.920 --> 00:21:41.440
And we had friends in France because we were kind of connected to radical political milieus elsewhere.
00:21:41.599 --> 00:21:47.759
And friends of ours from France told us, you know, that's you're great that you're writing about this stuff, but it won't last.
00:21:47.920 --> 00:21:49.759
The temp thing will be over very soon.
00:21:49.920 --> 00:21:55.119
We had that here in France in the early 70s when we started doing more automated offices there.
00:21:55.279 --> 00:21:59.759
And sure enough, temp things did start to shrink, and of course, the permanent employment started to shrink.
00:22:01.519 --> 00:22:02.559
So there's all that going on.
00:22:02.640 --> 00:22:07.359
And then meanwhile, we're trying to sort of think about well, how could we actually mess with this?
00:22:07.519 --> 00:22:08.720
Like, where's our power?
00:22:08.880 --> 00:22:12.079
Because we had the thought, oh, we're organizing at this point of circulation.
00:22:12.160 --> 00:22:13.759
You know, we're kind of Marxists about it.
00:22:13.839 --> 00:22:23.680
And we want to be able to intervene and, you know, stop them from accumulating capital by stopping the realm of circulation, which is where you know money moves around in circles over there.
00:22:23.839 --> 00:22:36.319
We had a whole joking campaign for disinformation day, 1985, which was going to be May Day, of course, and you know, just try to really encourage a massive wave of noncompliance and bad behavior at the level of data entry.
00:22:36.559 --> 00:22:52.400
But there's also different discussions that erupted in our magazine and to some extent in various workplaces about being in a smaller group and somewhat isolated in any given workplace, you and the three other people with a bad attitude amongst 40 people who mostly are acting all cheerful and like, oh, the work is great.
00:22:52.480 --> 00:22:54.559
I love my job, and this is a wonderful place.
00:22:54.799 --> 00:23:06.240
But uh one of the most common things we got, which we didn't publish always because it became a little bit too much like just publishing your own fan mail, but people would write these heartfelt letters with even just only a pair of like, thank God you're here.
00:23:06.400 --> 00:23:08.079
Thank God I'm not alone.
00:23:08.319 --> 00:23:19.599
So that was the key experience I think that we tapped was people who really were very isolated and couldn't figure out how to start the conversation about their actual experience or their actual feelings.
00:23:19.680 --> 00:23:32.480
And then they would encounter a copy of our magazine which circulated, you know, we had over 3,000 copies of each issue going out into the world, and we sent them to Australia and England and all over the world and plus all over the United States.
00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:34.799
We had pretty good distribution for a number of years.
00:23:34.960 --> 00:23:42.960
And you know, 3,000 doesn't sound like much, and it's not, but you know, if they get handed on three or four or five or ten times each time, that can be quite dramatic.
00:23:43.200 --> 00:23:47.359
So those letters then were really a big part of what gave us juice, gave us life.
00:23:47.440 --> 00:23:58.559
And actually, curiously enough, as the internet email really kicked in around 1990, 91, and then the World Wide Web shortly after that, letters to the to processed world just dropped off and stopped happening.
00:23:58.799 --> 00:24:01.839
And uh pretty soon we started wondering like why are we publishing?
00:24:01.920 --> 00:24:03.200
Or I I certainly did.
00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:10.079
Some of our other collective members were kind of angry at me because I finally made an argument in '94 that we should stop publishing.
00:24:10.160 --> 00:24:11.359
We've sort of said everything.
00:24:11.440 --> 00:24:13.200
We've kind of taken on a lot of different issues.
00:24:13.279 --> 00:24:20.400
We had a special issue on food, a special issue on the good job, special issue on immigration and exile, issues on public education.
00:24:20.559 --> 00:24:27.279
I mean, we tried to cover a lot of things, health issue, et cetera, et cetera, plus continuing tales of toil and continuing things that we were doing.
00:24:27.359 --> 00:24:30.400
But, you know, at some point we kind of had said it all several times.
00:24:30.559 --> 00:24:33.359
And I thought, well, you know, we kind of had a good run here.
00:24:33.599 --> 00:24:36.960
32 issues, no never had anybody, nobody ever got paid.
00:24:37.039 --> 00:24:40.640
There was no no money, no advertising, no religion, no none of that stuff.
00:24:40.720 --> 00:24:54.160
Just, you know, hard work with with people putting out their heartfelt creative experiences into the pages of the magazine and then physically producing them and physically distributing them and getting them to the post office and paying all those bills to the printer in the post office.
00:24:54.240 --> 00:24:56.400
And after that, there's no money left.
00:24:56.559 --> 00:25:06.319
As the cycle of producing the magazine began to slow down, the revenues fell really radically because people weren't renewing as quickly because we weren't sending out renewals often enough.
00:25:06.480 --> 00:25:11.759
And to some extent we fell fell victim to the logic of the small magazine.
00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:23.680
It wasn't, even though our content was quite different than any other small magazine that ever existed, we nevertheless faced the economics of a small magazine in a world in which that was a a dying breed.
00:25:23.839 --> 00:25:29.440
And, you know, people have still continued to start small magazines even to this day, but they very rarely last very long.
00:25:29.599 --> 00:25:33.039
Uh you know, not more than 10 issues is a good run now.
00:25:33.440 --> 00:25:40.480
And we had 32 issues, and then we did another one in 2001 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first one from 1981.
00:25:40.799 --> 00:25:42.079
And that was really fun.
00:25:42.160 --> 00:25:43.200
And it was a great issue.
00:25:43.279 --> 00:25:44.720
It was the best one of the best ones we ever did.
00:25:44.880 --> 00:25:52.160
We called it the theme was the greatest speed up in human history that we were living through in for sure at the end of the dot-com boom in 2001.
00:25:52.480 --> 00:25:58.400
And that was so much fun that we thought, oh, well, let's do another one, because a bunch of us had come back together and we were having fun doing it again.
00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:00.160
And so we started working on a new one.
00:26:00.319 --> 00:26:09.039
And as we worked on the next one after that, everybody started getting pissed off at each other again and dropping out and having to, you know, other aspects of their lives kicking in.
00:26:09.119 --> 00:26:14.319
And so finally there's just two of us left standing who were quite committed to getting it done.
00:26:14.400 --> 00:26:20.640
So the issue that's called 2005, Processed World 2005, which exists, that was it.
00:26:20.880 --> 00:26:22.160
We'll never do another one.
00:26:22.319 --> 00:26:28.720
So but all the I should say that the entire run of Processed World is online at the Internet Archive.
00:26:28.880 --> 00:26:41.839
So you can go to archive.org and you can have if you just search for Processed World magazine or Processed World Collective, you will find every one of our issues, including the one that never existed anywhere except online, the issue 33 and a third, and have at it.
00:26:41.920 --> 00:26:48.000
It's all there and pretty high-resolution scans and easy to read and download and have fun checking them out.
00:26:48.240 --> 00:26:51.759
Yeah, and I'll include the link to that in the show notes as well so people can check it out.
00:26:51.839 --> 00:27:01.279
You know, because I think Process World is this really unique thing, and like I'm so happy it did exist, and I'm so happy that like I discovered it and got to meet you and you know learn more about it.
00:27:01.440 --> 00:27:15.519
I wonder, like, you know, obviously with Process World, you're looking at this particular moment in time, but as you're saying, as you know, you published additional issues when you get to 2001, you're looking at the internet boom and what was happening there.
00:27:15.759 --> 00:27:26.640
And I wonder, I feel like today, when we look at these issues, you know, we can be focused on newer development so we can see the issues with things like crypto or generative AI or even smartphones.
00:27:26.799 --> 00:27:38.799
But then when you start to look back and say, question the rollout of computers and what they did to offices or to life or whatnot, certain people will kind of take a step back and say, no, those things were okay.
00:27:38.880 --> 00:27:41.519
It's these things that are newer that are the real problem.
00:27:41.680 --> 00:27:48.799
And I wonder, you know, when you have this kind of longer perspective, you've lived through this, you've been criticizing these technologies for decades now.
00:27:49.039 --> 00:27:56.880
I wonder what you think about how the concerns we have today, you know, are much longer than just the past 10 years, but have existed for quite a long time.
00:27:57.039 --> 00:27:58.240
I wonder how you reflect on that.
00:27:58.559 --> 00:27:59.119
That's well said.
00:27:59.279 --> 00:28:10.319
You know, I mean that's exactly right, is that this stuff is so not new, the conversation and the and the kind of critical sensibility that some of us bring to bear on it, your program being a key contributor to that.
00:28:10.559 --> 00:28:15.200
I'll give you a little history, uh, two different episodes of history that I think will inform this conversation a little bit.
00:28:15.279 --> 00:28:31.759
Which of first of all, I had gotten a job before the very first issue of Process World was published, and before I even thought of it, I was hired as the male secretary for a project called Community Memory, which existed in Berkeley, California, and ultimately had an installation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, curiously enough.
00:28:31.920 --> 00:28:37.440
So for Canadians, you might want to go and look into that history of the Community Memory Project in Halifax.
00:28:37.680 --> 00:28:52.079
Community memory was an attempt to create a series of distributed public computer terminals where people could have access to online communication, when nobody thought at that point in the 1970s that the man was going to let people have access to computing.
00:28:52.319 --> 00:29:00.960
And so these guys, including folks around the home group computer club, famously giving rise to uh, you know, the Apple computers and Bill Gates and all those kind of people.
00:29:01.119 --> 00:29:12.400
But one of the people in that area in that group was Leif Elsenstein, who devised that was the designer of the Osborne, the very first computer in a briefcase, which we had a lot of jokes about in the processed world over the years.
00:29:12.640 --> 00:29:26.799
He funded the community memory project, and they created a couple of pieces of cutting-edge software at the time, a relational database system and also a X.25 packet switching software for behind the scenes in the internet to allow packets of information to go back and forth.
00:29:27.039 --> 00:29:31.119
And that became really desirable for big multinational defense contractors.
00:29:31.200 --> 00:29:44.559
And so my job as a secretary for their for-profit marketing arm was to print out on WordStar 1.0 non-disclosure agreements and have these defense people come through and sign these things and have discussions with our people about buying these$30,000 licenses.
00:29:44.640 --> 00:29:51.119
So I went through this whole experience of a dot-com version of a computer startup, which was called Pacific Software.
00:29:51.200 --> 00:29:53.119
That was their for-profit marketing arm.
00:29:53.200 --> 00:30:03.119
And we went from three employee third employee, and then we went up to 25 employees, and then a year and a half later we collapsed because of lack of revenue and Lee not wanting to put more money in.
00:30:03.359 --> 00:30:11.039
So I lived through that whole experience then in 1980-81 and got deliberately laid off so that I would be on unemployment.
00:30:11.119 --> 00:30:12.480
And I never had a job ever since.
00:30:20.079 --> 00:30:31.200
So that's a moment where we already understood the emptiness of the process of creating products for ostensibly a good goal, which was to create this dynamic way for human beings to communicate with each other.
00:30:31.279 --> 00:30:38.559
That was their vision that had given rise to this left-wing computer collective in which everybody made the same money working on state-of-the-art Unix computing.
00:30:38.799 --> 00:30:46.640
But to make money, they did this thing and they sold it to the worst people on the planet, you know, and then finally those people all absorbed it and took over.
00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:53.599
And, you know, Oracle actually has roots of the original relational database system that they made at community memory in their software today.
00:30:53.920 --> 00:31:01.440
You realize like, you know, this kind of drama of, you know, we're going to change the world through technology is simply false.
00:31:01.599 --> 00:31:02.720
And it was false then.
00:31:02.960 --> 00:31:11.279
So the second example is, you know, in the latter stages of processed world in 91-92, we were publishing stuff about bicycling because a bunch of us were bicyclists.
00:31:11.359 --> 00:31:16.960
So we would go come to work, you know, come to the office that I had in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco by bike.
00:31:17.119 --> 00:31:19.599
It was just our my way of getting around since the 70s.
00:31:19.680 --> 00:31:23.119
I didn't think much about it except that I was treated as a second-class citizen on the street.
00:31:23.200 --> 00:31:25.839
So we started agitating about that in various ways.
00:31:26.079 --> 00:31:35.279
And then that gave rise to critical mass, the big huge bike movement that swept the world, actually, although in Montreal they had a mass bike movement in this much earlier than most other cities.
00:31:35.359 --> 00:31:38.160
So we ended up connecting a little bit with those folks too later.
00:31:38.400 --> 00:31:53.920
But anyway, through that process, then we kept looking at different ways of engaging with the world, and we found people who who were part of the anti-war movement who come into the city by bicycle and thought maybe they started critical mass with because they showed up on bikes, and they wrote to me and said, Do you think you got your idea from us?
00:31:54.079 --> 00:31:55.759
And I was like, Well, no, not really.
00:31:56.240 --> 00:32:00.559
And then they came back later and the guy said, Are you the same Chris Carlson who's publishing Processed World?
00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:01.039
Yeah.
00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:03.599
He said, Well, that's where we got the idea for the bike ride in the first place.
00:32:03.759 --> 00:32:05.119
And I was like, Okay, fine.
00:32:05.279 --> 00:32:07.200
So there's a lot of these funny little loops like that.
00:32:07.279 --> 00:32:26.559
But then when the magazine ends, I'm riding my bike through the financial district, and I had this idea, like, oh, how cool would it be to be able to have to be in the room in 1905 when that guy, who is attorney general of California, handed an envelope stuffed with cash to the bagman for the mayor, bribing him for whatever they were trying to do for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
00:32:26.880 --> 00:32:27.920
I thought, that would be cool.
00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:29.759
Let's maybe we could do that as a computer game.
00:32:29.839 --> 00:32:32.799
So this was the era of mist and Sim City and all that stuff.
00:32:32.880 --> 00:32:34.799
And we're and so we started thinking about that.
00:32:34.880 --> 00:32:41.599
And then this is when San Francisco's multimedia gulch took off, and everything was about interactive multimedia.
00:32:41.759 --> 00:32:50.000
And it was going to change everything and eliminate TV and radio and all other forms of communication, magazines, newspapers, books, everything's going to disappear.
00:32:50.079 --> 00:32:53.839
And it's going to be delivered to you on CD-ROMs.
00:32:55.680 --> 00:33:03.200
So, you know, we knew that was a laughable joke, and we actually knew that the idea of interactive multimedia was a fraud, essentially, because it's not interactive.
00:33:03.359 --> 00:33:05.680
You in a box, somebody had to put it all in there.
00:33:05.839 --> 00:33:10.240
It's all pre-programmed, and then you get to choose amongst pre-programmed possibilities.
00:33:10.480 --> 00:33:13.519
I mean, obviously, it's a different experience than reading a magazine.
00:33:13.599 --> 00:33:16.799
So, yeah, there's some art form there that might be interesting to play with.
00:33:16.960 --> 00:33:36.960
So, anyway, the upshot of it is that we just started off for 18 months trying to make a game that turned out to be the game part of it was silly because the idea was quickly just that you were a bike messenger, you'd made a pickup, you go down the hall uh with the pickup and you get in the elevator, and as you're in the elevator, San Francisco's hit with a giant earthquake, which will happen at any minute.
00:33:37.039 --> 00:33:39.200
It could happen right now, but it didn't, but could have.
00:33:39.440 --> 00:33:42.960
And so then the doors open and you've been knocked into the past.
00:33:43.200 --> 00:33:44.720
Now, how do you make your way back to the present?
00:33:44.799 --> 00:33:46.720
You have to solve problems in San Francisco history.
00:33:46.880 --> 00:33:53.359
That was the premise of the game, which sounds kind of good at first glance, and then on second, third, fourth, and fifth glance, it's a terrible idea.
00:33:53.519 --> 00:33:55.359
And so we eventually threw the game away.
00:33:55.519 --> 00:34:11.760
And by then we'd accumulated quite a lot of history, and we were really grappling with the questions that everybody was grappling with then, which is the question of interface, the question of how do you deal with nonlinear media, nonlinear knowledge, and hyperlinks, and what does this even mean for cognition?
00:34:11.920 --> 00:34:14.000
Like, does this change the sense of narrative?
00:34:14.159 --> 00:34:19.280
Does this change are the is the reader the writer by following hyperlinks?
00:34:19.519 --> 00:34:19.920
Really?
00:34:20.159 --> 00:34:20.480
No.
00:34:20.719 --> 00:34:24.719
But that's what people were arguing at the time was that the reader was becoming the writer.
00:34:24.960 --> 00:34:27.840
And so we were trying to come to grips with that and figure it out.
00:34:27.920 --> 00:34:35.679
And we ended up rolling out our thing in 1998 as a CD-ROM on Windows computers, because we didn't want to, we didn't have the money to do Apple.
00:34:35.920 --> 00:34:38.960
We also ended up putting out a series of public kiosks.
00:34:39.039 --> 00:34:46.320
And the public kiosks were sitting around town, and that the idea of the public kiosks was that you know somebody might sit down and look at it for it was free.
00:34:46.400 --> 00:34:51.599
You didn't have to put any money in a box or anything, and that hopefully somebody else would come up behind them and go, what is this thing?
00:34:51.679 --> 00:34:55.519
And they'd say, well, I don't know, some crazy commie made this weird history project, and look at that.
00:34:55.599 --> 00:34:55.920
What is it?
00:34:56.000 --> 00:34:56.480
What do they think?
00:34:56.559 --> 00:34:59.039
And putting this stuff on the out here on a computer.
00:34:59.199 --> 00:35:01.840
And then the two people would start discussing and arguing.
00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:03.440
That was for us was the interactivity.
00:35:03.599 --> 00:35:09.119
Like we used thought the technology was a Trojan horse to really produce a conversation amongst human beings.
00:35:09.440 --> 00:35:11.519
And so to some extent that succeeded.
00:35:11.679 --> 00:35:14.880
I can't say exactly how much, it's not quantifiable or anything like that.
00:35:14.960 --> 00:35:22.559
But we do have vast logs if anybody ever wants to do some data diving into what people actually did on our kiosks, because we have it, whatever they did, we could see.
00:35:22.639 --> 00:35:29.760
We don't know who did it, but we have the every user session ever on about 25 kiosks that were around town for a bunch of years.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:43.119
So that again, that's another moment in the history of technology where there's this buzz promoting something that's a fraud, interactive multimedia, and yet there was ways to use it that kind of took it in, turned it inside out.
00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:44.079
That's what we did.
00:35:44.159 --> 00:35:50.159
And that was people from Process World and myself who came together as a different kind of a project group and tried to produce this thing.
00:35:50.239 --> 00:35:56.000
So we ended up producing a million-dollar piece of software for free and giving it away for free, except for the CD-ROMs.
00:35:56.079 --> 00:35:58.639
We asked 20 bucks, but I mean basically it was given away.
00:35:58.880 --> 00:36:08.159
And then we hit a typical cul-de-sac of, you know, the stuff stopped working because Windows changed the drivers, and Apple never worked.
00:36:08.320 --> 00:36:12.400
So we were suddenly stuck with a screen that went blank after we'd done all this work.
00:36:12.559 --> 00:36:16.320
And we had to decide do we want to chase Bill Gates around or Steve Jobs?
00:36:16.480 --> 00:36:18.880
No, no, not going to follow those guys anywhere.
00:36:19.119 --> 00:36:20.960
Let's see if we can get online somehow.
00:36:21.119 --> 00:36:32.559
And so we created a really crude version of uh HTML pages for a bunch of this stuff, and that looked horrible, and we just sort of sat on our hands, and then eventually we got it all out of this very kludgy homemade system that we created.
00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:37.519
And uh somebody by the about 2005 or six said, Well, why don't you get it, why don't you do a wiki?
00:36:37.679 --> 00:36:39.119
It's like, duh, of course.
00:36:39.280 --> 00:36:47.760
By then, Wikimedia and Wikipedia had started, and we hadn't really put it together in our minds, like, oh, we have a version of that of San Francisco history.
00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:49.440
Let's use that software.
00:36:49.519 --> 00:36:53.519
So we use Wikimedia software today for our website at foundsf.org.
00:36:53.599 --> 00:36:58.159
And it's more than tripled in size since we finally opened it in 2009.
00:36:58.480 --> 00:37:00.480
And uh, it's a living archive of the city.
00:37:00.559 --> 00:37:06.559
It's a way for people to actually see themselves as agents of history and actually contribute to the historical record.
00:37:06.719 --> 00:37:23.440
So not only do we present San Francisco's history and over 2,300 screens of material, many of them are excerpted from books, or in some cases we have entire books that have been integrated into the site, thousands and thousands of historical and contemporary photographs, dozens of videos, oral histories, all sorts of stuff.
00:37:23.519 --> 00:37:25.840
It's quite an unusual project.
00:37:25.920 --> 00:37:28.639
There's really nothing like it in any other city that I'm aware of.
00:37:28.880 --> 00:37:33.199
But it's kind of a good use of the technology, but it's also still problematic problematic.
00:37:33.360 --> 00:37:45.280
Like I look at it and I think, well, this is kind of static, and it's like a giant book that sprawls on and on and on, and it doesn't really give you a narrative flow unless you know what the narrative flow is you want to find.
00:37:45.599 --> 00:37:50.320
You can find it and wander through this site, but a lot of it's pretty darn random.
00:37:50.480 --> 00:37:54.159
And so how do you get back to sort of storytelling with that?
00:37:54.400 --> 00:37:55.760
That's what I end up doing in public.
00:37:55.920 --> 00:38:00.719
I do a lot of walking tours and bike tours and boat tours where I tell stories.
00:38:01.039 --> 00:38:02.800
And I've learned too much.
00:38:03.199 --> 00:38:05.840
I can talk about San Francisco history until I'm blue.
00:38:06.079 --> 00:38:11.199
And that's just part of the deal for me because history isn't contained in convenient little silos.
00:38:11.280 --> 00:38:13.599
It actually does sprawl in every direction at once.
00:38:13.679 --> 00:38:23.840
And there is this phenomenon now that we put it all online, or so much of it online, that it kind of necessarily escapes your logical thread at any given moment.
00:38:23.920 --> 00:38:27.360
You might hop sideways through a hyperlink and go, oh, now I forgot where I was.
00:38:27.519 --> 00:38:29.119
Let's what was the thing I was reading?
00:38:29.199 --> 00:38:30.559
And you lose your train of thought.
00:38:30.639 --> 00:38:35.679
Well, this is the everyday experience of the internet, uh, even when you're doing it in a dedicated site.
00:38:35.760 --> 00:38:41.119
So anyway, I guess my point was just that there is these ways of engaging with these tech booms.
00:38:41.280 --> 00:38:47.360
That doesn't mean you have to buy into the logic of, oh, I've got to make a million dollars and be a startup and cash out and all that stuff.
00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:54.159
It's like some of us have chosen to do the exact opposite of that, and of course remain poverty stricken to this day relatively to the rich people in this world.
00:38:54.320 --> 00:38:55.440
But I'm not poor.
00:38:55.519 --> 00:38:56.320
I live very well.
00:38:56.480 --> 00:38:59.199
I'm not complaining, I have a great life.
00:38:59.360 --> 00:39:06.800
And I've never had to work for anybody for all these years except for clients who come in and employ me to do various publications and whatnot for them.
00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:12.960
So I think there's a way of making choices in this world that people tend to forget that are available to us.
00:39:13.119 --> 00:39:15.360
And Processed World was really kind of rooted in that logic.
00:39:15.440 --> 00:39:25.760
And here's a funny story to loop it back to Processed World is that there's a lot of people that we met over the years and wrote for us and sent us letters and whatnot, and then occasionally we'd lose touch with them and not see them for a long time.
00:39:25.840 --> 00:39:31.119
And every once in a while I'd run into one of these former old friends that from five or seven years earlier.
00:39:31.280 --> 00:39:34.960
And one guy in particular really stayed stuck in my mind because he was really sheepish.
00:39:35.119 --> 00:39:39.840
He's like, Oh God, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, but I found a good job.
00:39:41.760 --> 00:39:43.599
And he was really embarrassed about it.
00:39:43.679 --> 00:39:44.960
And I was like, Well, that's great.
00:39:45.039 --> 00:39:45.920
I'm so glad for you.
00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:51.360
That's really everybody wants to find something they like to do and they don't feel bad going getting up in the morning and going to do it.
00:39:51.440 --> 00:39:52.400
That's good for you.
00:39:52.639 --> 00:39:56.480
But he was a little bit ashamed because he thought, you know, it's contrary to the spirit of the magazine.
00:39:56.559 --> 00:39:59.679
You should always be hating your job and finding a way to mess it up.
00:39:59.840 --> 00:40:03.119
And it's like, well, that was a coping mechanism to a great extent.
00:40:03.199 --> 00:40:15.360
And it was also, you know, a little bit of a tactical approach to the larger issue of how do we begin to throw a wrench into the kind of complacent acceptance of a world in which we have no control.
00:40:15.760 --> 00:40:18.719
We want to assert that we should have control over our lives.
00:40:18.800 --> 00:40:27.199
We should control how we decide what to do with what technologies and when, and and you know, what are the mechanisms which we might create to make those kind of decisions together.
00:40:27.360 --> 00:40:30.719
We don't even talk about it, let alone begin to actually engage in it.
00:40:30.880 --> 00:40:36.400
So we're many steps removed from the possibility of shaping our technosphere in a meaningful way.
00:40:36.480 --> 00:40:41.840
But I do think that's the task at hand, especially in light of uh the dire condition of the climate.
00:40:42.320 --> 00:40:49.840
And I think that that is, on the one hand, what a lot of the focus is today when people are skeptical of technology or critical of technology.
00:40:49.920 --> 00:40:59.360
It's that, you know, they really feel that they have lost control of something in their lives that they're just, you know, kind of being pushed along and you know, remain reliant on these various tech companies.
00:40:59.519 --> 00:41:09.519
Or, you know, they accept like the conveniences that come with it because they recognize that there's so little power that they have that at least this is something that they get from this kind of trade-off, right?
00:41:09.840 --> 00:41:21.119
But you know, I think I think when you go back and read process world, you see this issue of kind of control and agency is so central to a lot of the criticisms that are being made.
00:41:21.280 --> 00:41:25.679
And if I can draw a through line, I think that that remains today, right?
00:41:25.840 --> 00:41:33.679
Certainly we've had these narratives about how technology is going to empower us and you know be more democratic and all this kind of stuff for a long time.
00:41:33.920 --> 00:41:40.239
But I think that when you look at how people really feel about these things, a lot of people feel that it has reduced their power, right?
00:41:40.320 --> 00:41:48.079
That in kind of pushing all of this uh, you know, the speed up and trying to automate so much of what happens, that there has been a loss there.
00:41:48.159 --> 00:42:03.280
And that that is often, I think, what a lot of people are reacting to when they start to feel critical of these technologies or you know, start to find aspects of them that they don't like or you know, that are causing their lives to feel like there's something wrong.
00:42:03.519 --> 00:42:05.440
That I think that is like a really motivating factor.
00:42:05.760 --> 00:42:08.000
Yeah, I think you're that's that's exactly right.
00:42:08.159 --> 00:42:23.679
I I actually did write a book in 2008 called Nowtopia, and it was an attempt to draw this through line that you're talking about and try to understand the ways that people do take really interesting and creative sort of action, I guess is a word to use, in the face of this predicament.
00:42:23.840 --> 00:42:30.639
Like how do we reconnect with some sense of agency, ability to actually shape the world that we're in?
00:42:30.800 --> 00:42:43.599
Because for the most part, as you correctly pointed out, that agency has been taken away from us, and we just feel like we're being pushed along in a river that that you can't get out of, that we're stuck in this river, and maybe we can paddle sideways for a minute, but that's about it.
00:42:43.760 --> 00:42:45.119
And it's it's not entirely true.
00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:47.280
We actually do have possibilities.
00:42:47.360 --> 00:42:56.719
And in Naotopia, the subtitle was How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant Lot Gardeners are inventing the future today.
00:42:57.039 --> 00:43:10.960
And it has a long analysis about the sort of dire atomization and fragmentation of our lives that has been imposed by the market primarily, and certainly through neoliberal capitalism, making all that much more dire and more severe.
00:43:11.280 --> 00:43:23.920
And so, you know, as atomized sort of lonely individuals, most of us face the world from that stance in one form or another, either with with or without family, with or without close friends, where do people take action?
00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:27.039
And so I thought, well, I believe in the possibility of revolution.
00:43:27.119 --> 00:43:28.800
I believe in the possibility of changing our lives.
00:43:28.880 --> 00:43:31.679
And if I believe in that, then it must be actually already underway.
00:43:31.840 --> 00:43:36.239
It should be visible that people actually do things that matter that can change the world.
00:43:36.480 --> 00:43:41.280
And of course, there's plenty of examples of people in co-ops and doing all sorts of little projects like that.
00:43:41.360 --> 00:43:51.119
And I started noticing things, though, that in particular were defined by people taking their time and their technological skills out of the market.
00:43:51.280 --> 00:43:56.559
They would, when they're not at their stupid ass job trying to make some money, they were busy.
00:43:56.719 --> 00:43:58.320
They were working really hard.
00:43:58.480 --> 00:44:33.440
In fact, harder than when they're at their Jobs and doing things that really mattered, whether it was creating a DIY bike shop and sharing skills with kids who don't know the first thing about repairing bikes or learning how to take this the salvage of discarded bicycles from the waste stream of modern life and turning them into useful transportation for people, or the community gardening phenomenon in which people are out taking plots of land that are essentially wastelands in urban environments and turning them into these thriving gardens in which people grow food and begin to actually address this kind of predicament of the last mile of food and how far away it comes and all these kinds of things.
00:44:33.599 --> 00:44:35.679
And obviously, some climates are better than others.
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:37.199
San Francisco is very well suited to this.
00:44:37.360 --> 00:44:42.960
San Francisco is a city that once had 70,000 gardens at the end of World War II as part of the Victory Gardens project.
00:44:43.199 --> 00:44:54.320
And you know, what people have forgotten is that by the end of World War II, 45% of all the fresh produce in the United States, and I think in Canada too, was being grown in urban gardens.
00:44:54.480 --> 00:44:56.159
And now it's down to less than 3%.
00:44:56.559 --> 00:45:00.320
Because they said, oh no, don't worry, we'll take it back to agribusiness and we buy it at the supermarket.
00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:03.599
It's like, well, actually, that's the problem, not the solution.
00:45:03.679 --> 00:45:04.719
That's the problem.
00:45:05.039 --> 00:45:09.920
And so, you know, this idea of the other thing is about recomposing communities.
00:45:10.159 --> 00:45:19.519
So when you're in a community garden, you might find the person in the plot next to you here in San Francisco is from El Salvador, and on the other side's they're from Cambodia, and behind you is a guy from Alabama.
00:45:19.679 --> 00:45:39.599
And you in the conversation, you're having this multiracial moment, and you're learning about different foods, and you're learning about different life experiences, and there's a sense of coming together on a different basis than, oh, we have a job together, or oh, we live next door to each other by completely random chance, and besides which I'll be leaving in five years and moving on to another place.
00:45:39.840 --> 00:45:58.880
So there is a way in which real communities start to emerge from these projects, even programmers who meet each other through long distance connections, but are doing projects that aren't about making money, but are about something they care about, something they think is actually useful and important for facilitating communications, often amongst political movements.
00:45:59.760 --> 00:46:05.440
Then a ton of that kind of work done over the years, and most of it gets sort of flushed aside and forgotten about quite rapidly.
00:46:05.599 --> 00:46:35.039
But anyway, so my vi my vision or my argument at the time in Nowtopia, which again is 16 years ago when it was published, but I think, you know, it's wrong, but it also could still be right going forward, is that the working class, broadly understood, that's all of us, you know, pretty much everybody on the planet is part of the working class, whether you make$8,000 a year or$18,000 a year or$180,000 a year, you basically have to sell yourself to somebody else and do what they tell you, or you don't have a job.
00:46:35.199 --> 00:46:45.360
And you might get a union and you might protect yourself a little bit from the most onerous authoritarian moments in that work experience, but you finally still have to do what the owner tells you to do or you don't have a job.
00:46:45.599 --> 00:46:47.760
That's the problem at the point of sale.
00:46:47.920 --> 00:46:49.920
We lose control over the world we make.
00:46:50.079 --> 00:46:55.840
And so for me, the question of technology, it's part of this menu that faces us all the time.
00:46:56.000 --> 00:46:57.039
How do we want to live?
00:46:57.199 --> 00:46:58.480
What do we want to do?
00:46:58.719 --> 00:46:59.360
Why?
00:46:59.679 --> 00:47:01.039
What are we here for?
00:47:01.360 --> 00:47:06.400
And once we start looking at those deeper questions, then there's lots of different kinds of answers.
00:47:06.480 --> 00:47:17.920
And some of them involve, well, I think I'll use this hoe and this shovel or this vehicle that I can repair myself or this computer that allows me to communicate with people in this interesting way, or whatever, fill in the blank.
00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:27.920
I'm not an anti-technology person because everything is a technology, whether it's a paper clip or some kind of really weirdly high-tech communication or transportation device, I don't know.
00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:30.159
You know, I I already don't control most of that.
00:47:30.320 --> 00:47:34.159
Like I don't know how to make a paperclip any more than I know how to make a shovel.
00:47:34.400 --> 00:47:37.280
But I'm going to use these things because I live, I'm a human being.
00:47:37.440 --> 00:47:47.280
And so the question for me, then, and then one of the arguments I made just to get it finally to the sort of more abstract theoretical level, is that we all engage all day long with the general intellect.
00:47:47.360 --> 00:47:49.199
We are part of it and we reproduce it.
00:47:49.280 --> 00:48:09.039
That is to say, the technosphere, all the stuff that we understand about life, how to use a phone, a smartphone, how to, you know, make a plane reservation, how to take the bus with your smart card down the street, how to ride a bike and fix the brakes, whatever, all of that stuff is a physical embodiment of all the labor that's been done up to this moment in history.
00:48:09.119 --> 00:48:13.599
And most of it, the individual, me, you, anybody else, we don't know how the hell it works.
00:48:13.760 --> 00:48:15.519
We don't know how that got that way.
00:48:15.760 --> 00:48:18.719
But all of us together maintain it and keep reproducing it.
00:48:18.960 --> 00:48:23.280
And so the question is, can we get conscious control over the direction of the general intellect?
00:48:23.440 --> 00:48:24.400
And I think we can.
00:48:24.559 --> 00:48:26.159
Most people say, no, no, that's impossible.
00:48:26.239 --> 00:48:28.480
It just has to be run by the market or it has to be run by the state.
00:48:28.559 --> 00:48:30.320
And it's like, no, both of those things are problems.
00:48:30.400 --> 00:48:32.800
We see what it's producing, is it's destroying the planet.
00:48:32.960 --> 00:48:43.599
So we actually have to turn that general intellect in the direction we want it to go, which is to invent a world in which we have enough of everything for everybody, everybody lives quite well, and we have a lot of fun doing it.
00:48:43.760 --> 00:48:45.039
That seems like a pretty good goal.
00:48:45.199 --> 00:48:46.400
I sign up for that one.
00:48:46.559 --> 00:48:47.280
How do we do it?
00:48:47.440 --> 00:48:48.559
Well, that's the question.
00:48:48.800 --> 00:48:49.599
I don't know.
00:48:49.760 --> 00:48:50.639
Let's figure it out.
00:48:50.719 --> 00:48:52.320
That's what human beings are good at.
00:48:52.639 --> 00:48:53.840
Yeah, no, absolutely.
00:48:54.000 --> 00:49:02.960
And one of the things I love about Process World is it always takes the technology and puts it in the context of these broader, like capitalist social and economic relations, right?
00:49:03.039 --> 00:49:06.719
It's never just focusing on the technology itself or what it's doing.
00:49:06.880 --> 00:49:10.239
It's always understanding that it's part of this kind of broader process.
00:49:10.480 --> 00:49:13.679
I have a couple final questions for you before we kind of close off.
00:49:13.920 --> 00:49:23.920
Quickly, you know, when we think about the companies that are often in the crosshairs today, it's like, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, things like that, right?
00:49:24.239 --> 00:49:32.320
Back in the 1980s, what were kind of the companies that were really drawing people's ire at the time, or was it just focused on certain technologies rolling out generally?
00:49:32.719 --> 00:49:47.360
Well, IBM and Apple, I mean, famously the Apple ad in 1984 with the woman throwing the thing through the screen, which, you know, seemed to be some sort of a claim for the liberatory qualities of Apple computing, which we now can clearly say was a fraud.
00:49:48.079 --> 00:49:50.639
Not that it wasn't really obvious to us at the time.
00:49:50.719 --> 00:49:52.320
I mean, we didn't have any fantasy.
00:49:52.480 --> 00:49:58.559
We knew Apple was a fraud already, once once that long before the 1984 moment.
00:49:58.880 --> 00:50:01.119
And we didn't like IBM or Microsoft either.
00:50:01.280 --> 00:50:18.400
We thought all of them were, you know, the behemoths which we want to overthrow, along with Bank of America, PG ⁇ E, Wells Fargo, Chevron Oil, I mean, fill in the blank, those are the companies we were focused on in the 1980s, were the large multinationals that had their headquarters here in San Francisco, most of which are now gone.
00:50:18.559 --> 00:50:21.360
They almost all moved out of San Francisco since the 1980s.
00:50:21.440 --> 00:50:30.480
And that's a separate conversation which I won't digress into, but it's a very interesting one about why they left and what the different companies were that left and where they went.
00:50:30.639 --> 00:50:34.239
All those things are quite interesting in terms of the evolution of modern capitalism.
00:50:34.480 --> 00:50:37.280
So our focus wasn't really on tech companies back then so much.
00:50:37.440 --> 00:50:41.199
I mean, we we recognized that some of them were part of the problem, not part of the solution.
00:50:41.280 --> 00:50:46.880
But the big ones at the time were essentially IBM and Intel and Microsoft were the main companies.
00:50:46.960 --> 00:51:04.079
And we had a lot of writing in Processed World about the pollution of the groundwater in Silicon Valley that IBM was primarily responsible for, but so was Intel, and so were anybody else, advanced microdedevices and all the other chipmakers that were at that point spewing toxic waste into the groundwater down there.
00:51:04.320 --> 00:51:14.320
Many of them, again, have moved to other locales where they continue the same toxic production processes, but out of sight, out of mind for people in California, people in the United States.
00:51:14.559 --> 00:51:17.599
So focusing on companies was always kind of less of our issue.
00:51:17.679 --> 00:51:19.039
I mean, we had a lot of fun at their expense.
00:51:19.119 --> 00:51:20.480
We made a lot of jokes about all of them.
00:51:20.719 --> 00:51:27.920
Bank of America was often our target for us because it was the giant bank in the country and it was headquarters here in San Francisco at the time.
00:51:28.159 --> 00:51:32.239
Later got stolen by a bank in North Carolina and it's no longer here.
00:51:32.480 --> 00:51:32.719
Yeah.
00:51:33.039 --> 00:51:40.559
So I would say that we're even then understood that these companies were manifestations of a logic, and it was the logic that we objected to.
00:51:40.719 --> 00:51:47.440
And the logic that we had perceived was one of which we were part of the cogs in the machine at the point of circulation.
00:51:47.599 --> 00:51:54.239
And the circulation had to do with records of property, data about the flows of value and money and so on and so forth.
00:51:54.400 --> 00:52:02.480
But it was very hard to get your head wrapped around that stuff then as it is today, because all of it is designed to be too abstract to make any sense to you as an individual.
00:52:02.719 --> 00:52:04.639
And most of it, frankly, should be abolished.
00:52:04.719 --> 00:52:05.760
It just should disappear.
00:52:06.079 --> 00:52:08.559
We'd be better off as human beings if it were to disappear.
00:52:08.960 --> 00:52:10.239
I I think that makes a ton of sense.
00:52:10.880 --> 00:52:16.400
Especially when today these like, you know, what we call tech companies now are like some of the biggest companies in the world.
00:52:16.480 --> 00:52:23.119
And certainly IBM was a big company at the time, but you know, the Microsoft's and Apples were not on the same scale that we see today.
00:52:23.199 --> 00:52:28.239
So it probably wouldn't have made as much sense to really have those in the center of the crosshairs at the time.
00:52:28.480 --> 00:52:40.320
I'm wondering, you know, obviously you got started doing this in the 1980s with Process World, in looking at this world and then have kind of followed it up through now.
00:52:40.480 --> 00:53:01.840
As we were talking about earlier, a lot of the things that you identified while the technologies are different and things have changed in capitalism over those number of years, there are still a lot of similarities there between the types of problems you were identifying in modern capitalism, but also in the ways that technologies were being deployed by it that were happening then that are also happening today.
00:53:02.079 --> 00:53:22.960
I was wondering how you feel about how things are going today and this sense that there is a new wave of kind of tech criticism or Luddism that is emerging and whether you feel hope for what that represents or at the same time recognizing that these companies are massive and huge and taking them on is difficult.
00:53:23.119 --> 00:53:25.599
But you know, obviously that's a challenge that that is always there.
00:53:25.679 --> 00:53:30.559
I I wonder how you reflect on the current moment after having been watching this for as long as you have.
00:53:31.039 --> 00:53:32.880
Well, that's a lovely question.
00:53:32.960 --> 00:53:34.639
I I enjoy that one quite a bit.
00:53:34.719 --> 00:53:42.639
And partly it would be easy to take a rather dire and pessimistic view, but I actually tend to think that the status quo that we're in today is unbelievably fragile.
00:53:42.800 --> 00:53:46.400
It feels like it's just like the thing that's just about to crumble.
00:53:46.559 --> 00:53:48.079
That's really how I feel about it.
00:53:48.320 --> 00:53:59.039
And I've probably felt that way at other times in the last 40 years, so that that would be a reason to take it with a note of caution when I say that, because there's a lot of people on the left who have said, oh, it's all going to collapse any minute.
00:53:59.519 --> 00:54:02.719
Crisis of capitalism is finally here and it's all over.
00:54:03.119 --> 00:54:05.679
Well, capitalism is incredibly resilient.
00:54:06.000 --> 00:54:14.079
You know, it's a system in which people are their own time and labor is turned against them again and again and again, in spite of their best interests and their best intentions.
00:54:14.239 --> 00:54:21.519
People tried really hard to do good things in the world, and it's used against them over and over again, on a micro level and on a macro level.
00:54:21.679 --> 00:54:26.400
And some of these behemoths that you're referring to today, these giant tech companies, they are disgusting.
00:54:26.559 --> 00:54:28.559
The way they behave in the world is disgusting.
00:54:28.719 --> 00:54:39.119
The way they've taken sort of a behaviorist science and turned it into this vast apparatus of data gathering and surveillance and everything else that Zuboff and other people have written about.
00:54:39.199 --> 00:54:42.719
You know, I don't agree with all their analysis, but they're that part's right.
00:54:43.039 --> 00:54:45.119
But that that system doesn't really work.
00:54:45.199 --> 00:54:46.480
That's what cracks me up.
00:54:46.559 --> 00:54:50.559
It's like people get so freaked out by all this stuff and they act like, oh, it works.
00:54:50.800 --> 00:54:52.079
They can control everything.
00:54:52.239 --> 00:54:53.440
It's like, no, they can't.
00:54:53.679 --> 00:54:54.960
Can't hardly control anything.
00:54:55.039 --> 00:54:57.199
It's actually barely control anything, actually.
00:54:57.280 --> 00:55:01.119
It's just incredibly out-of-control logic that's underway.
00:55:01.679 --> 00:55:08.079
And so the odd thing that I'm interested in is how do we find a way for human beings to make intelligent decisions together?
00:55:08.239 --> 00:55:11.199
Well, there's very little that encourages us to think we can do things collectively.
00:55:11.360 --> 00:55:25.119
We don't get a lot of experience doing that, even though we do, in fact, produce the world together every day, all of us, without anybody thinking about it that way, because we're not encouraged to think that way, and we actually don't have any mechanisms to allow us to engage in it consciously.
00:55:25.280 --> 00:55:28.159
We're just only allowed to engage in it unconsciously.
00:55:28.559 --> 00:55:47.519
So I don't think this system can last for all kinds of obvious, measurable reasons, having to do with the rising temperature on the planet, the endless amount of pollution being dumped into the into the seas, and the heat dumped into the seas, and the degradation of human life, and the incredible biodiversity crisis.
00:55:47.679 --> 00:55:52.400
I mean, you know, the laundry list is long of what's going wrong in the world.
00:55:52.639 --> 00:56:03.440
And all of those things are are converging into a crisis that can only be answered by a radical change in how everything on earth reproduces itself.
00:56:03.679 --> 00:56:09.280
You can't keep reproducing life the way we do, or it will in fact come to an end, period.
00:56:09.519 --> 00:56:13.920
So that existential reality is facing us all the time.
00:56:14.079 --> 00:56:23.679
And none of these companies are the least bit interested in addressing that other than through advertising campaigns that wrap themselves in the mantle of being a solution, but none of that's real.
00:56:24.239 --> 00:56:36.960
So to take it seriously is really difficult because again, we don't have a mechanism as a human being, individual human being, to engage in these very large questions and taking action on them on a small level is the best we can do.
00:56:37.119 --> 00:56:56.719
So there are in every city dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of communities of people who are really trying hard to do the human and earthbound thing, to figure out how to live together as earthlings with not just humans, but all the other species that are here, that are still here, and hopefully make it possible for them to persist as well.
00:56:56.880 --> 00:57:02.719
And to figure out what to do about fresh water, what to do about, you know, arable land and food and these kinds of issues.
00:57:02.800 --> 00:57:08.079
And if you leave it to private capital, well, they will destroy it systematically, as they have been for a very long time.
00:57:08.320 --> 00:57:13.840
So we do need some version of a revolution, a revolution of social r values and social power.
00:57:14.079 --> 00:57:17.119
Much of that is already clearly visible at the base of society.
00:57:17.199 --> 00:57:21.920
It's just there, but it's invisible to anybody who gets all their information from mass media.
00:57:22.239 --> 00:57:29.599
The media, as we know it, will not report on the kinds of initiatives that people actually engage in that might meaningfully change the direction of the world.
00:57:29.760 --> 00:57:33.760
And so we're never going to see it until we're living it completely.
00:57:33.840 --> 00:57:37.039
And that's a reason for optimism, actually, not a reason for pessimism.
00:57:37.199 --> 00:57:38.400
It's like really keep going.
00:57:38.559 --> 00:57:40.880
Everybody out there, whatever you're doing, keep going.
00:57:41.119 --> 00:57:48.159
And know that there's a millions and millions of us who are doing the best we can under really dire circumstances, and we all know what's at stake.
00:57:48.320 --> 00:57:51.519
And sooner or later, either we win or we die.
00:57:53.039 --> 00:57:53.519
Yeah.
00:57:53.760 --> 00:57:56.719
Uh hopeful uh point to end it on, maybe.
00:57:57.119 --> 00:57:59.679
Yeah, that's well, I believe in human beings figuring it out.
00:57:59.760 --> 00:58:02.400
I actually think we can figure this out, but it's not going to be easy.
00:58:02.800 --> 00:58:03.519
I think so too.
00:58:03.599 --> 00:58:11.760
You know, even though there's there's a lot of things to be pessimistic about today, I remain really hopeful in seeing the ways that people are trying to push back against it.
00:58:11.920 --> 00:58:23.599
And, you know, even though you can recognize that these major companies and these governments have a lot of power and those are difficult things to challenge, I think we need to have that hope or else it starts to feel impossible and we just give up, right?
00:58:23.760 --> 00:58:28.480
Even if that hope can be, you know, a faint hope sometimes in seeing the dire things that we face.
00:58:28.559 --> 00:58:34.559
But I I think we always need to have it so that we have that kind of flame that pushes us forward to try to keep challenging these things.
00:58:34.639 --> 00:58:35.039
Aaron Powell Yeah.
00:58:35.119 --> 00:58:39.760
I mean, there's so much evidence that human beings have the capacity to radically alter things in a short time.
00:58:39.840 --> 00:58:46.239
And there's been many moments of eruptions throughout history, you know, revolutionary movements that came seemingly out of nowhere.
00:58:46.480 --> 00:58:54.079
But, you know, to go beyond those spasms, those moments of rebellion, you have to actually have a pretty good idea of where you're trying to get to.
00:58:54.159 --> 00:59:14.480
And I think that a lot of the uh grassroots initiatives that we can point to on the ground in various places, you know, whether they're peasant movements in in various parts of uh the global south or or you know, the indigenous movements in the global north, or the agricultural resistance around organic food and people who are taken seriously protecting the water.
00:59:14.639 --> 00:59:18.159
I mean, there's so many different interesting initiatives that really do address the predicament.
00:59:18.320 --> 00:59:20.239
People bicycling, just ride a bicycle every day.
00:59:20.320 --> 00:59:21.360
That actually does help.
00:59:21.440 --> 00:59:22.239
It's very tiny.
00:59:22.320 --> 00:59:29.519
It's and ultimately an industrial machine itself, but it's a far better choice than embracing the electric vehicle or the car.
00:59:29.920 --> 00:59:34.400
So, you know, there's many small steps you can make that at least you're in the game.
00:59:34.480 --> 00:59:39.280
And then someday we might all face a moment where we can make better choices about the larger direction of society.
00:59:39.440 --> 00:59:40.400
Let's keep pushing for that.
00:59:40.559 --> 00:59:40.880
Why not?
00:59:41.199 --> 00:59:49.039
Yeah, and I think that answer also does like what Process World did to show us that it's not just about the technology, it's about so much more than that.
00:59:49.199 --> 00:59:58.159
And certainly we can challenge these major companies because they are outgrowths of this capitalist system, but it's not just about them as well, and we needed to be thinking broader too.
00:59:58.320 --> 00:59:59.920
Chris, it's always fantastic to talk to you.
01:00:00.000 --> 01:00:01.199
I could talk to you forever.
01:00:01.360 --> 01:00:02.559
Thanks so much for taking the time.
01:00:02.880 --> 01:00:04.159
It's been a great pleasure, Paris.
01:00:04.239 --> 01:00:07.519
Thank you so much, and thanks for keeping your uh vital show on the air.
01:00:07.599 --> 01:00:10.400
We need to keep the conversation going in every direction.
01:00:10.559 --> 01:00:11.599
So good work.
01:00:12.079 --> 01:00:13.199
Thanks so much.
01:00:13.599 --> 01:00:18.639
Chris Carlson is an author, director of Shaping SF, and one of the people behind a process world.
01:00:18.800 --> 01:00:22.960
Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks.
01:00:23.039 --> 01:00:26.000
Production is by Eric Wickham, and transcripts are by Bridget Peloux Rye.
01:00:26.159 --> 01:00:30.719
Tech Won's Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry.
01:00:30.880 --> 01:00:35.599
You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own.
01:00:35.760 --> 01:00:38.079
Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week.
00:00:00.080 --> 00:00:09.759
There is these ways of engaging with these tech booms that doesn't mean you have to buy into the logic of, oh, I've got to make a million dollars and be a startup and cash out and all that stuff.
00:00:09.919 --> 00:00:16.000
I think there's a way of making choices in this world that people tend to forget that are available to us.
00:00:34.240 --> 00:00:35.840
Made in partnership with The Nation magazine.
00:00:35.920 --> 00:00:37.200
I'm your host, Paris Marks.
00:00:37.280 --> 00:00:43.280
I'd like to say thank you to the people who reached out to let me know I was mispronouncing Kamala Harris last week.
00:00:43.600 --> 00:00:46.640
I will make sure not to do that in the future, so thanks for that.
00:00:46.799 --> 00:00:48.719
This week's guest is Chris Carlson.
00:00:48.880 --> 00:00:52.880
Chris is the author of many books, including most recently When Shells Crumble.
00:00:52.960 --> 00:00:56.640
He's the director of Shaping SF and a co-founder of Critical Mass.
00:00:56.719 --> 00:01:01.840
And the main reason he's on the show today is that he was also one of the people behind Processed World.
00:01:02.079 --> 00:01:13.840
If you're not familiar with Processed World, it was a tech critical magazine looking at the computerization of society in the 1980s, the 1990s, and you know, had a few issues in the early 2000s.
00:01:14.079 --> 00:01:24.879
But as we talk about criticisms of the tech industry today and all of the things that these major corporations have done to our societies, it can often feel like this is something that just exists now, right?
00:01:24.959 --> 00:01:27.280
That we're just realizing over the past little while.
00:01:27.439 --> 00:01:38.000
But the truth is that people have been criticizing these technologies and how companies were using computers to increase their power for much longer than the past five or ten years.
00:01:38.239 --> 00:01:59.200
And I think that is what is so important about something like Process World, especially looking at it now, is that we can see the evidence that this has been around for a long time, but we can also see how so many of the critiques that were being made in the 1980s and 1990s are so similar to the types of things that we're criticizing major tech companies for today, right?
00:01:59.280 --> 00:02:05.920
It seems like these things are novel because they have all this power now and because, you know, the internet has allowed them to expand so much.
00:02:06.079 --> 00:02:18.080
But really, these were things that were around much earlier in the rollout of computers, as people were starting to see computers change the way that work was done and that other, you know, aspects of society were changing as well.
00:02:18.240 --> 00:02:27.919
And so naturally, I wanted to have Chris on the show to dig into all this with us to understand like how Process World came to be and the perspective behind it, right?
00:02:28.000 --> 00:02:35.039
Like what was driving it and what the similarities are between then and now, and also what the differences are, because I think that there are some there as well.
00:02:35.280 --> 00:02:37.280
It was a real thrill for me to have Chris on the show.
00:02:37.360 --> 00:02:42.879
I've had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times now, and he's such a great person to like hang out with and chat with.
00:02:43.039 --> 00:03:00.319
You know, even in this interview, you'll probably be able to hear that we could have gone on much longer than we did, just kind of digging into all these different stories that Chris has and you know the experiences that he has with this industry, with these technologies, and just pushing back against corporate power for so long.
00:03:00.560 --> 00:03:08.479
Before we get into the episode, I will say that if you've never heard of Process World before, I highly recommend that you go check out the archive of it.
00:03:08.719 --> 00:03:24.479
Every issue is available on the Internet archive, it has been backed up there so you can dig through the pages of this magazine that, you know, has these criticisms of technology, these fun like comics and illustrations that really take digs at major tech companies and what they're doing to the world.
00:03:24.719 --> 00:03:28.639
It's really worth your time just to like have a little browse through and take a look.
00:03:28.719 --> 00:03:40.240
And I'll also include a few articles in the show notes that people have written since then that, you know, talk a bit about what Prozest World was and what it meant in the time that it was around and what it can still mean for us today.
00:03:40.400 --> 00:03:42.000
So I hope you go take a look at that.
00:03:42.080 --> 00:03:45.360
And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Chris Carlson.
00:03:45.439 --> 00:03:48.800
If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice.
00:03:48.960 --> 00:03:52.800
You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it.
00:03:52.879 --> 00:04:08.319
And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week so I can keep having these in-depth conversations that hold the tech industry to account, you can join supporters like Aaron in Los Angeles, Thomas in The Hague, and Jill from Edmonton by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us, where you can become a supporter as well.
00:04:08.479 --> 00:04:10.479
Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation.
00:04:10.719 --> 00:04:12.479
Chris, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.
00:04:12.639 --> 00:04:13.919
I'm so happy to be on your show.
00:04:14.000 --> 00:04:15.039
Thanks for inviting me.
00:04:15.280 --> 00:04:17.439
No, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show.
00:04:17.600 --> 00:04:23.759
You are someone who has just been working on these issues, if it's okay for me to say since long before I was even born.
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So since the dawn of time, I've been trying to say tech won't save us, god damn it.
00:04:31.600 --> 00:04:48.480
So it's a real thrill to have you on because you know, you are one of the people behind this magazine, Processed World, which was really doing like, you know, we talk about the tech criticism that's happening today and how it feels like more people are critical of technology in this moment, but like this is not a new or novel thing, right?
00:04:48.560 --> 00:04:56.399
People have been looking critically at technology for a long time in various periods, and it feels like it kind of ebbs and flows in particular moments.
00:04:56.560 --> 00:05:10.639
And in the 1980s, when you and some of your friends and stuff were working on Process World, this was another one of these key moments that I think a lot of people today who are interested in technology, who are critical of technology, don't often think about what happens back then.
00:05:10.720 --> 00:05:16.480
But I think knowing those sorts of things can inform us, can give us a better perspective about what's happening now.
00:05:16.639 --> 00:05:22.560
And so I wanted to start by asking how would you describe Process World to people who aren't familiar with it?
00:05:22.800 --> 00:05:31.279
Well, I've done that quite a few times, so I'll try to not make it sound like a canned slogan, but we used to always call it the magazine with a bad attitude.
00:05:31.519 --> 00:05:50.079
And it was essentially a publication that was started in the financial district of San Francisco when a number of us were temp workers down there, and several of us had recently learned this incredibly exciting new skill, word processing, which doubled our wages because we used to be typists.
00:05:50.240 --> 00:06:01.519
And then suddenly, you know, learning this new way to handle magnetic media and put it in and out of a box and so on and so forth, it just suddenly became a highly paid skill, went from six to twelve dollars an hour in 1980.
00:06:01.600 --> 00:06:03.519
It was quite significant at the time.
00:06:03.839 --> 00:06:10.319
The magazine was essentially about the experience of working in the modern office life as it started.
00:06:10.480 --> 00:06:13.680
It became a broader focus for the magazine over its over its life.
00:06:13.759 --> 00:06:18.399
We published 32 issues over 13 years, about three times a year.
00:06:18.560 --> 00:06:25.600
But we always characterize it as the underside of the information age, as told by the alienated wage slaves of the modern office and beyond.
00:06:25.680 --> 00:06:33.360
And we met a lot of the readers and writers by actually going out into the streets of the financial district on Friday afternoons and selling magazines directly.
00:06:33.600 --> 00:06:36.639
And that we did primarily by wearing strange costumes.
00:06:36.800 --> 00:06:58.160
We made these paper-mache video display terminal heads with mylar screens, this type material, and it, you know, the brightly painted, and it said IBM, intensely boring machines, or GM, general monotony, or and then other ones were like commodity boxes that you know look like common products on the shelf in a supermarket, like a tied detergent box.
00:06:58.319 --> 00:07:05.920
And it looked exactly like that, except it said bound, gagged, and tied to useless work day in, day out for the rest of your life.
00:07:06.079 --> 00:07:19.199
And then, of course, you turn around, there's all the ingredients of the modern world, the modern office life, of fluorescent lights and green screens and bad air, et cetera, et cetera, wage labor, things that we were very critical about.
00:07:19.600 --> 00:07:33.680
A lot of what we were doing, I think, in a way to really understand the magazine, which sets it apart from a great deal of what was going on then of the old and new left, and continues to be fairly unique even in this era, is that we took our own experience as our starting point.
00:07:33.759 --> 00:07:45.680
We we really wanted to look into what we were living through and what we were experiencing, and recognizing that the alienation and futility and anger that we'd had as a daily experience, you know, dealing with stupid bosses.
00:07:45.839 --> 00:07:47.199
I mean, everything's quite normal.
00:07:47.279 --> 00:07:49.600
Everybody has these experiences at their jobs.
00:07:49.920 --> 00:07:50.879
But why?
00:07:51.120 --> 00:07:53.120
You know, why should we put up with this?
00:07:53.360 --> 00:08:12.079
And the funny thing was that almost everybody in our world that we were of ourselves and people that we knew, you know, we'd look around at the job and it was like, well, we're all here, you know, wearing these ugly suits or stupid clothes and you know, pretending to be have a good attitude at your job, you know, make sure you keep your work.
00:08:12.319 --> 00:08:19.920
And all you had to do is scratch the surface for a minute, and you'd find the other person or multiple different people with bad attitudes like your own.
00:08:20.000 --> 00:08:20.800
Like, this is stupid.
00:08:20.879 --> 00:08:21.759
Why are we here?
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That bifurcation we experienced right from the beginning was that I'm not an office worker.
00:08:27.199 --> 00:08:30.079
I'm just here for a little while making some money because I got to pay my rent.
00:08:30.160 --> 00:08:32.399
But I'm not, this is not me, it's not what I do.
00:08:32.480 --> 00:08:37.120
I'm actually a dancer, I'm a photographer, I'm a historian, I'm a writer, I'm a this, I'm a that.
00:08:37.360 --> 00:08:56.000
And that bifurcation, I think, is really the source of the magazine's excitement and humor and brilliant insights at certain moments and completely dumb ones at others, and gave rise to a great deal of creativity because we recognized that we were not going to get any sense of creative fulfillment by the so-called job.
00:08:56.080 --> 00:08:58.000
That was laughably obvious.
00:08:58.399 --> 00:09:01.039
But we were stuck there, so we might as well make the best of it.
00:09:01.200 --> 00:09:11.360
And so we ended up purloining a great number of resources from those rather bulging cabinets in the modern office that were around in 1979, 1980, 1981.
00:09:11.600 --> 00:09:18.080
We stole all the paper for the first three issues, which we had a little spoken Arima Day keeps the paper bills away.
00:09:18.159 --> 00:09:21.120
And so you had half a dozen people stealing a remain of paper every day.
00:09:21.200 --> 00:09:23.600
Pretty soon your office is full of stacks of paper.
00:09:23.840 --> 00:09:32.240
And we had access to our own little multilith printing press, and we got a typesetting machine, which at that point was quite a big deal to have real typesetting.
00:09:32.480 --> 00:09:36.320
After 1991 and desktop publishing, it all seems kind of so what?
00:09:36.480 --> 00:09:37.679
Everybody's got that.
00:09:37.840 --> 00:09:43.919
But there was a long time there where it was.matrix printers and daisy wheel IBM Selectrics, and that was it.
00:09:44.000 --> 00:09:49.360
And if you had a typesetting machine with photo typeset galleys coming off of it, you actually look like a real magazine.
00:09:49.519 --> 00:09:54.799
So Process World had a kind of a professional appearance, even though it was very much of an underground zine.
00:09:55.200 --> 00:10:35.600
One of the things that I really love that you brought up there is that the magazine is not just like, you know, people from the outside looking in and kind of analyzing what is happening here, but a lot of or most of the contributors were people who were actually in these offices, who were doing these temp jobs, if not working these proper jobs in these big banks and big technology companies and all this sort of stuff, and then relaying back their frustrations at doing this sort of work and how they would be preferring to do something different, or how they were seeing their workplaces change, and also how they were trying to like throw some wrenches into the machine to try to, you know, slow things down, to try to stop things from working properly.
00:10:35.759 --> 00:10:51.200
And like going back to read it, it just feels so I don't know, it's fascinating, but it's also like to get these insights from the workers themselves who are doing this work feels particularly novel as well, maybe, or maybe something that we don't see enough of today in some of the criticism that happens.
00:10:51.440 --> 00:11:00.399
We had a format that we developed kind of not spontaneously and we didn't think it up ahead of time, it just evolved from our work, which was called Tales of Toil.
00:11:01.360 --> 00:11:05.039
And so people began writing these amazing stories of their work lives.
00:11:05.200 --> 00:11:11.440
And you know, if you stop and think about it for a minute, you realize even today the hardest thing to find out is what is it really like to be at work?
00:11:11.679 --> 00:11:13.200
It's our greatest public secret.
00:11:13.279 --> 00:11:14.639
We don't want to talk about it.
00:11:14.799 --> 00:11:16.960
Everybody acts like, oh, you have a problem at work?
00:11:17.120 --> 00:11:18.799
Well, just quit and get another job.
00:11:18.960 --> 00:11:19.360
Move on.
00:11:19.440 --> 00:11:20.879
Don't if you don't like it, leave.
00:11:21.039 --> 00:11:21.679
That's the answer.
00:11:21.840 --> 00:11:26.879
It's never like, oh, you should actually organize and transform your experience at work.
00:11:27.039 --> 00:11:32.080
Or even more profoundly, the work you're doing is a complete waste of time and nobody should do it.
00:11:32.240 --> 00:11:35.840
The whole place should be shut down immediately because it's destroying the planet.
00:11:35.919 --> 00:11:46.080
You know, whether it's banking, insurance, real estate, advertising, military production, the production of shoddy goods that lasts for six months instead of lasting for 75 years.
00:11:46.320 --> 00:11:56.159
I mean, we don't get to participate at any moment in our society in a discussion of the aggregate division of labor, of why we do what we do and how we do it.
00:11:56.320 --> 00:12:06.240
And that to me was always underlying the processed world experience, which was worth mentioning that when we started the magazine, Jimmy Carter was still the president when we were working on it.
00:12:06.399 --> 00:12:12.799
And we were quite sure he would win re-election, and that Reagan was a bumbling idiot, would never possibly get elected.
00:12:12.960 --> 00:12:15.519
It's just much how we feel about Trump today.
00:12:15.759 --> 00:12:26.159
And shockingly, he did get elected, and of course, the whole kind of militarization of society that accompanied his his uh election win was part of that new experience that we were living through.
00:12:26.240 --> 00:12:34.879
But what we really didn't understand at the time, and now we can see quite clearly in retrospect, 40 plus years later, 44 years later, that was the dawn of neoliberalism.
00:12:35.039 --> 00:12:36.480
I mean, really, Carter was the dawn.
00:12:36.720 --> 00:12:51.600
I mean, he was the first president that started privatizing things really drastically and deregulating them and bringing in the market and the idea that private business should take the initiative more and the state should step back and the state's more of a problem than a solution, which, you know, that may well be.
00:12:51.679 --> 00:13:02.000
I'm not a big statist either, but the idea that, you know, the market is somehow the happy answer for every problem is just laughably stupid, and yet we've had to suffer through this for decades now.
00:13:02.240 --> 00:13:06.240
But that's when it started, and we didn't fully grasp that that's what was going on, I have to admit.
00:13:06.320 --> 00:13:32.399
You can't see in the pages of the magazine, especially the first ten issues or so, you know, really no sign that we're understanding this deeper transformation that's underway, although we saw it in much the way that the left saw it at the time, you know, this attack on organized labor, and we were critical of organized labor, so that didn't necessarily become the defining feature of our interests of how we understood it, but we could certainly understand that the state had been turned against the people, as it were.
00:13:32.639 --> 00:13:46.240
And so it made more sense for us to spend time rather than, you know, there was plenty of things that we were connected to, you know, fighting against the wars in El Salvador, fighting against apartheid in South Africa, supporting various liberation struggles around the world.
00:13:46.399 --> 00:13:52.240
Everybody was sort of like, yeah, sure, the Iranian Revolution, great, hopefully, but then of course not, as it turns out.
00:13:52.399 --> 00:13:54.799
But that and the Nicaraguan Revolution, same story.
00:13:54.879 --> 00:13:57.919
You know, revolutions have a way of turning on sour rather quickly.
00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:01.519
But there was a lot of hope and enthusiasm for them when they first happened.
00:14:01.600 --> 00:14:12.960
And seeing the social movements that accompanied those revolutions in the United States, particularly here in San Francisco, we had a very strong movement amongst the Sandinistas, all lived here before they went back to Nicaragua and made the revolution.
00:14:13.120 --> 00:14:18.399
And ultimately we came to know some of those folks who moved back to San Francisco afterwards and resumed their lives here.
00:14:18.559 --> 00:14:20.720
So there's a way that we were connected to all that stuff.
00:14:20.799 --> 00:14:23.360
But what we really thought, no, we should be looking at our own experience.
00:14:23.440 --> 00:14:34.080
I mean, my life as a straight white guy in San Francisco is actually worsened by the sexism and the racism and the homophobia that I live in the middle of.
00:14:34.320 --> 00:14:35.919
That's making my life worse.
00:14:36.159 --> 00:14:49.759
Not to mention the fact that I'm expected to spend my life doing completely stupid things under ridiculous bosses who are dumber than me telling me what to do and following rules that make no sense to anybody.
00:14:50.000 --> 00:14:51.279
What kind of a life is this?
00:14:51.440 --> 00:14:53.840
My life is degraded by all these different conditions.
00:14:53.919 --> 00:14:59.279
And so let's talk about my life, and not to be just selfish about it, because my life is representative of a lot of other people's lives.
00:14:59.440 --> 00:15:10.240
Let's start the conversation where we are and recognize that a political movement that has any kind of attraction or ability to go anywhere, it better be enjoyable.
00:15:10.399 --> 00:15:12.159
It better be something you like doing.
00:15:12.320 --> 00:15:16.240
It better be something that gives you joy in the world and pleasure.
00:15:16.399 --> 00:15:22.080
Because if it's not oriented around that, it's just sacrifice and suffering, which of course is the story of the left.
00:15:22.320 --> 00:15:26.399
Oh, you must sacrifice, you must give everything up, you must work, work, work, work, work.
00:15:26.480 --> 00:15:27.600
You have to be active every day.
00:15:27.759 --> 00:15:30.000
Get out there and struggle and get out there and protest.
00:15:30.080 --> 00:15:30.960
Like, no way.
00:15:31.200 --> 00:15:33.919
Our attitude was that's the problem, not the solution.
00:15:34.159 --> 00:15:36.960
Activistism is as much of the problem as anything.
00:15:37.200 --> 00:15:42.960
And so we were always looking for ways of creating kind of like convivial and funny ways of intervening in life.
00:15:43.039 --> 00:15:45.279
So I described how we sold magazines on the street.
00:15:45.360 --> 00:15:46.159
That was a big part of that.
00:15:46.240 --> 00:15:50.799
It was just like walking around in a strange costume, bellowing at the top of my lungs.
00:15:50.960 --> 00:15:53.519
If you hate your job, you'll love this magazine, get one here.
00:15:53.679 --> 00:15:56.960
You know, and then most people walk by you and say, Oh my God, that curse is nuts.
00:15:57.120 --> 00:15:58.080
I'm not talking to them.
00:15:58.240 --> 00:16:01.039
But they'd read the box and they'd smile.
00:16:01.200 --> 00:16:02.879
And that's when you knew you got them.
00:16:03.120 --> 00:16:11.200
And then they might stop at our table where there's a calm, usually female standing at the table, willing to have a real conversation and make magazines available to them.
00:16:11.440 --> 00:16:13.759
It was kind of an interesting model that really worked.
00:16:13.840 --> 00:16:20.240
And then we had a gathering at a bar in North Beach every other week for several years, and we went on strange field trips.
00:16:20.320 --> 00:16:33.919
We did a bus ride to Silicon Valley at one point where we actually went to this very large statue made by a famous communist sculptor, actually, Benjamino Bufano, from lived in San Francisco for most of the 20th century.
00:16:34.080 --> 00:16:38.960
And he made these large Madonnas, and one of them is made out of old missile parts.
00:16:39.279 --> 00:16:45.200
So it's very large, and it's very close to the NSA's Blue Cube where they were doing global surveillance from.
00:16:45.279 --> 00:16:52.399
So we went out there with people dressed like having uh toilet scrubbing brushes and whatnot, and tried to scrub the fences of the blue cube.
00:16:52.480 --> 00:16:59.840
And we all jump out of a big blue school bus, you know, processed world in all of our weird props and costumes and laughing and caring on and just having a crazy time.
00:16:59.919 --> 00:17:09.359
And then we had a big moment in front of the Our Lady of the Missiles, as we called it, because it's supposedly a peace monument in the middle of the Silicon Valley's most intense military-industrial complex.
00:17:09.519 --> 00:17:11.359
So we were always laughing.
00:17:11.519 --> 00:17:16.799
We couldn't help it, but it's an awful lot to laugh at in this crazy world, and it was staring us in the face all the time.
00:17:17.039 --> 00:17:22.960
I mean, one of the other issues I think that's worth mentioning since we're on that, we spent a lot of time being ironic and satirical.
00:17:23.200 --> 00:17:31.279
And that kind of came out of other things in the larger culture, whether it's Mad Magazine or Saturday Night Live or all these other things that are going on around us all the time.
00:17:31.519 --> 00:17:32.400
You had to do that.
00:17:32.480 --> 00:17:35.279
You if you didn't have an ironic tone, you were a chump.
00:17:35.359 --> 00:17:38.640
If you were trying to be sincere, clearly you're going to get it.
00:17:38.960 --> 00:17:45.759
We bought into that kind of heavily at the early days, because partly we were young and radical and cool and all that sort of stuff.
00:17:46.000 --> 00:17:57.039
So in retrospect, we didn't help the world very much by embracing that so thoroughly, because invalidating sincerity is one of our problems.
00:17:57.200 --> 00:18:00.559
We haven't figured out how to take sincerity as sincerity.
00:18:00.720 --> 00:18:04.480
Like you can have a sincere opinions about things and w and you should care about that.
00:18:04.640 --> 00:18:13.519
And you should care about hearing other people's sincerity and honor it and respect it, and then build something from that, and not just degrade it and say, oh, you're an idiot.
00:18:13.680 --> 00:18:14.559
Oh, you're a chump.
00:18:14.640 --> 00:18:16.960
You don't get it if you're just if you're going to be sincere.
00:18:17.039 --> 00:18:18.240
You've got to be snide.
00:18:18.319 --> 00:18:20.319
If you're not snide, you're not on the team.
00:18:20.559 --> 00:18:25.759
So that's one of the little self-criticisms that emerged for me over the years, looking back on the work we did.
00:18:25.839 --> 00:18:26.640
But it's pretty funny.
00:18:26.720 --> 00:18:32.400
You know, we had this recurrent series of different cartoons and sometimes just strange collages.
00:18:32.480 --> 00:18:35.119
But we we created a fake company called Contech.
00:18:35.279 --> 00:18:41.920
And the slogan is people like you, helping people like us help ourselves, which is very much the world we still live in today.
00:18:42.319 --> 00:18:43.839
Yeah, no, it definitely is.
00:18:43.920 --> 00:18:58.000
And one of the things that really stands out about the magazine is just how funny it is and how it's filled with a lot of things to try to, you know, make you experience joy while you're reading these stories about what is happening in the world or in the office or whatnot.
00:18:58.240 --> 00:19:02.880
You were talking a bit about the political moment that the magazine emerged out of.
00:19:03.039 --> 00:19:06.400
And certainly sure you didn't understand everything that was going on at the moment.
00:19:06.480 --> 00:19:08.480
Some of that was just understood in retrospect.
00:19:08.640 --> 00:19:13.119
But can you also talk about what was happening in work at that moment?
00:19:13.279 --> 00:19:37.279
Because as I was reading the magazine, there was a lot of discussion about, you know, the shift away from manufacturing and toward office work and kind of the services that we talk about today, and also the transformation of work through the increased use of computers and word processing, as you were saying, and these other tools that were put into the workplace and obviously had these other motivations behind them as companies were rolling them out.
00:19:37.440 --> 00:19:45.599
So, what was happening in that moment that really helped to motivate this magazine and this perspective that a lot of these workers that you were associated with had about this?
00:19:46.000 --> 00:19:46.880
Yeah, good question.
00:19:46.960 --> 00:19:49.440
There were, you know, this was the dawn of the automated office.
00:19:49.599 --> 00:19:53.039
This is when when they really began rolling in the Wang computer.
00:19:53.279 --> 00:19:58.880
My first job was working on an IBM mini computer on a terminal that had a glowing green screen.
00:19:59.119 --> 00:20:04.240
Later, when we got amber screens, it felt like a big improvement because the green was so harsh.
00:20:04.480 --> 00:20:17.039
But basically, you're using uh you know lines of code to access uh various programs that are already preset, and you're uh learning to interact with those in a very limited fashion is generally what was involved.
00:20:17.119 --> 00:20:19.920
And then word processing in those uh environments.
00:20:20.160 --> 00:20:33.759
Originally, word processing for me was uh working on an IBM Selectric that had a memory attached to it, a big box next to it that you'd put a mag card into that looked a lot like a punch card, but it was the magnetic material that ended up in discettes later.
00:20:33.920 --> 00:20:38.319
And you had to know in your head where you were in the document and figure it out mentally.
00:20:38.480 --> 00:20:39.680
It didn't have a screen at all.
00:20:39.839 --> 00:20:45.680
So there's you know a series of steps that involved learning to be in the automated office from in the 1980 period.
00:20:45.839 --> 00:20:52.960
And then there was, I remember a big conference at our Moscone Convention Center here in San Francisco called the Office Automation Conference, 1982.
00:20:53.039 --> 00:20:59.839
And we all showed up there with picket signs and costumes and everything else, and we call it the Office Automaton Conference.
00:20:59.920 --> 00:21:10.160
And we that's where the you may have seen this logo that one of our artists drew, which is a pictograph, a little tiny square image of a white character smashing a computer on a black background.
00:21:10.240 --> 00:21:14.960
It's a really common image that started in the pages of Process World back then in 1982.
00:21:15.039 --> 00:21:16.880
It was actually done for that conference.
00:21:17.119 --> 00:21:31.200
And so the experience we had of that sort of shifting office life was, you know, things were moving into this digital realm, and we recognized that that was partly a way of getting more people to do more work in less time, and then eventually less people would be employed.
00:21:31.359 --> 00:21:35.039
In the early stages of that, there was a great number of us being brought in as temps.
00:21:35.920 --> 00:21:41.440
And we had friends in France because we were kind of connected to radical political milieus elsewhere.
00:21:41.599 --> 00:21:47.759
And friends of ours from France told us, you know, that's you're great that you're writing about this stuff, but it won't last.
00:21:47.920 --> 00:21:49.759
The temp thing will be over very soon.
00:21:49.920 --> 00:21:55.119
We had that here in France in the early 70s when we started doing more automated offices there.
00:21:55.279 --> 00:21:59.759
And sure enough, temp things did start to shrink, and of course, the permanent employment started to shrink.
00:22:01.519 --> 00:22:02.559
So there's all that going on.
00:22:02.640 --> 00:22:07.359
And then meanwhile, we're trying to sort of think about well, how could we actually mess with this?
00:22:07.519 --> 00:22:08.720
Like, where's our power?
00:22:08.880 --> 00:22:12.079
Because we had the thought, oh, we're organizing at this point of circulation.
00:22:12.160 --> 00:22:13.759
You know, we're kind of Marxists about it.
00:22:13.839 --> 00:22:23.680
And we want to be able to intervene and, you know, stop them from accumulating capital by stopping the realm of circulation, which is where you know money moves around in circles over there.
00:22:23.839 --> 00:22:36.319
We had a whole joking campaign for disinformation day, 1985, which was going to be May Day, of course, and you know, just try to really encourage a massive wave of noncompliance and bad behavior at the level of data entry.
00:22:36.559 --> 00:22:52.400
But there's also different discussions that erupted in our magazine and to some extent in various workplaces about being in a smaller group and somewhat isolated in any given workplace, you and the three other people with a bad attitude amongst 40 people who mostly are acting all cheerful and like, oh, the work is great.
00:22:52.480 --> 00:22:54.559
I love my job, and this is a wonderful place.
00:22:54.799 --> 00:23:06.240
But uh one of the most common things we got, which we didn't publish always because it became a little bit too much like just publishing your own fan mail, but people would write these heartfelt letters with even just only a pair of like, thank God you're here.
00:23:06.400 --> 00:23:08.079
Thank God I'm not alone.
00:23:08.319 --> 00:23:19.599
So that was the key experience I think that we tapped was people who really were very isolated and couldn't figure out how to start the conversation about their actual experience or their actual feelings.
00:23:19.680 --> 00:23:32.480
And then they would encounter a copy of our magazine which circulated, you know, we had over 3,000 copies of each issue going out into the world, and we sent them to Australia and England and all over the world and plus all over the United States.
00:23:32.720 --> 00:23:34.799
We had pretty good distribution for a number of years.
00:23:34.960 --> 00:23:42.960
And you know, 3,000 doesn't sound like much, and it's not, but you know, if they get handed on three or four or five or ten times each time, that can be quite dramatic.
00:23:43.200 --> 00:23:47.359
So those letters then were really a big part of what gave us juice, gave us life.
00:23:47.440 --> 00:23:58.559
And actually, curiously enough, as the internet email really kicked in around 1990, 91, and then the World Wide Web shortly after that, letters to the to processed world just dropped off and stopped happening.
00:23:58.799 --> 00:24:01.839
And uh pretty soon we started wondering like why are we publishing?
00:24:01.920 --> 00:24:03.200
Or I I certainly did.
00:24:03.440 --> 00:24:10.079
Some of our other collective members were kind of angry at me because I finally made an argument in '94 that we should stop publishing.
00:24:10.160 --> 00:24:11.359
We've sort of said everything.
00:24:11.440 --> 00:24:13.200
We've kind of taken on a lot of different issues.
00:24:13.279 --> 00:24:20.400
We had a special issue on food, a special issue on the good job, special issue on immigration and exile, issues on public education.
00:24:20.559 --> 00:24:27.279
I mean, we tried to cover a lot of things, health issue, et cetera, et cetera, plus continuing tales of toil and continuing things that we were doing.
00:24:27.359 --> 00:24:30.400
But, you know, at some point we kind of had said it all several times.
00:24:30.559 --> 00:24:33.359
And I thought, well, you know, we kind of had a good run here.
00:24:33.599 --> 00:24:36.960
32 issues, no never had anybody, nobody ever got paid.
00:24:37.039 --> 00:24:40.640
There was no no money, no advertising, no religion, no none of that stuff.
00:24:40.720 --> 00:24:54.160
Just, you know, hard work with with people putting out their heartfelt creative experiences into the pages of the magazine and then physically producing them and physically distributing them and getting them to the post office and paying all those bills to the printer in the post office.
00:24:54.240 --> 00:24:56.400
And after that, there's no money left.
00:24:56.559 --> 00:25:06.319
As the cycle of producing the magazine began to slow down, the revenues fell really radically because people weren't renewing as quickly because we weren't sending out renewals often enough.
00:25:06.480 --> 00:25:11.759
And to some extent we fell fell victim to the logic of the small magazine.
00:25:12.000 --> 00:25:23.680
It wasn't, even though our content was quite different than any other small magazine that ever existed, we nevertheless faced the economics of a small magazine in a world in which that was a a dying breed.
00:25:23.839 --> 00:25:29.440
And, you know, people have still continued to start small magazines even to this day, but they very rarely last very long.
00:25:29.599 --> 00:25:33.039
Uh you know, not more than 10 issues is a good run now.
00:25:33.440 --> 00:25:40.480
And we had 32 issues, and then we did another one in 2001 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first one from 1981.
00:25:40.799 --> 00:25:42.079
And that was really fun.
00:25:42.160 --> 00:25:43.200
And it was a great issue.
00:25:43.279 --> 00:25:44.720
It was the best one of the best ones we ever did.
00:25:44.880 --> 00:25:52.160
We called it the theme was the greatest speed up in human history that we were living through in for sure at the end of the dot-com boom in 2001.
00:25:52.480 --> 00:25:58.400
And that was so much fun that we thought, oh, well, let's do another one, because a bunch of us had come back together and we were having fun doing it again.
00:25:58.480 --> 00:26:00.160
And so we started working on a new one.
00:26:00.319 --> 00:26:09.039
And as we worked on the next one after that, everybody started getting pissed off at each other again and dropping out and having to, you know, other aspects of their lives kicking in.
00:26:09.119 --> 00:26:14.319
And so finally there's just two of us left standing who were quite committed to getting it done.
00:26:14.400 --> 00:26:20.640
So the issue that's called 2005, Processed World 2005, which exists, that was it.
00:26:20.880 --> 00:26:22.160
We'll never do another one.
00:26:22.319 --> 00:26:28.720
So but all the I should say that the entire run of Processed World is online at the Internet Archive.
00:26:28.880 --> 00:26:41.839
So you can go to archive.org and you can have if you just search for Processed World magazine or Processed World Collective, you will find every one of our issues, including the one that never existed anywhere except online, the issue 33 and a third, and have at it.
00:26:41.920 --> 00:26:48.000
It's all there and pretty high-resolution scans and easy to read and download and have fun checking them out.
00:26:48.240 --> 00:26:51.759
Yeah, and I'll include the link to that in the show notes as well so people can check it out.
00:26:51.839 --> 00:27:01.279
You know, because I think Process World is this really unique thing, and like I'm so happy it did exist, and I'm so happy that like I discovered it and got to meet you and you know learn more about it.
00:27:01.440 --> 00:27:15.519
I wonder, like, you know, obviously with Process World, you're looking at this particular moment in time, but as you're saying, as you know, you published additional issues when you get to 2001, you're looking at the internet boom and what was happening there.
00:27:15.759 --> 00:27:26.640
And I wonder, I feel like today, when we look at these issues, you know, we can be focused on newer development so we can see the issues with things like crypto or generative AI or even smartphones.
00:27:26.799 --> 00:27:38.799
But then when you start to look back and say, question the rollout of computers and what they did to offices or to life or whatnot, certain people will kind of take a step back and say, no, those things were okay.
00:27:38.880 --> 00:27:41.519
It's these things that are newer that are the real problem.
00:27:41.680 --> 00:27:48.799
And I wonder, you know, when you have this kind of longer perspective, you've lived through this, you've been criticizing these technologies for decades now.
00:27:49.039 --> 00:27:56.880
I wonder what you think about how the concerns we have today, you know, are much longer than just the past 10 years, but have existed for quite a long time.
00:27:57.039 --> 00:27:58.240
I wonder how you reflect on that.
00:27:58.559 --> 00:27:59.119
That's well said.
00:27:59.279 --> 00:28:10.319
You know, I mean that's exactly right, is that this stuff is so not new, the conversation and the and the kind of critical sensibility that some of us bring to bear on it, your program being a key contributor to that.
00:28:10.559 --> 00:28:15.200
I'll give you a little history, uh, two different episodes of history that I think will inform this conversation a little bit.
00:28:15.279 --> 00:28:31.759
Which of first of all, I had gotten a job before the very first issue of Process World was published, and before I even thought of it, I was hired as the male secretary for a project called Community Memory, which existed in Berkeley, California, and ultimately had an installation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, curiously enough.
00:28:31.920 --> 00:28:37.440
So for Canadians, you might want to go and look into that history of the Community Memory Project in Halifax.
00:28:37.680 --> 00:28:52.079
Community memory was an attempt to create a series of distributed public computer terminals where people could have access to online communication, when nobody thought at that point in the 1970s that the man was going to let people have access to computing.
00:28:52.319 --> 00:29:00.960
And so these guys, including folks around the home group computer club, famously giving rise to uh, you know, the Apple computers and Bill Gates and all those kind of people.
00:29:01.119 --> 00:29:12.400
But one of the people in that area in that group was Leif Elsenstein, who devised that was the designer of the Osborne, the very first computer in a briefcase, which we had a lot of jokes about in the processed world over the years.
00:29:12.640 --> 00:29:26.799
He funded the community memory project, and they created a couple of pieces of cutting-edge software at the time, a relational database system and also a X.25 packet switching software for behind the scenes in the internet to allow packets of information to go back and forth.
00:29:27.039 --> 00:29:31.119
And that became really desirable for big multinational defense contractors.
00:29:31.200 --> 00:29:44.559
And so my job as a secretary for their for-profit marketing arm was to print out on WordStar 1.0 non-disclosure agreements and have these defense people come through and sign these things and have discussions with our people about buying these$30,000 licenses.
00:29:44.640 --> 00:29:51.119
So I went through this whole experience of a dot-com version of a computer startup, which was called Pacific Software.
00:29:51.200 --> 00:29:53.119
That was their for-profit marketing arm.
00:29:53.200 --> 00:30:03.119
And we went from three employee third employee, and then we went up to 25 employees, and then a year and a half later we collapsed because of lack of revenue and Lee not wanting to put more money in.
00:30:03.359 --> 00:30:11.039
So I lived through that whole experience then in 1980-81 and got deliberately laid off so that I would be on unemployment.
00:30:11.119 --> 00:30:12.480
And I never had a job ever since.
00:30:20.079 --> 00:30:31.200
So that's a moment where we already understood the emptiness of the process of creating products for ostensibly a good goal, which was to create this dynamic way for human beings to communicate with each other.
00:30:31.279 --> 00:30:38.559
That was their vision that had given rise to this left-wing computer collective in which everybody made the same money working on state-of-the-art Unix computing.
00:30:38.799 --> 00:30:46.640
But to make money, they did this thing and they sold it to the worst people on the planet, you know, and then finally those people all absorbed it and took over.
00:30:46.720 --> 00:30:53.599
And, you know, Oracle actually has roots of the original relational database system that they made at community memory in their software today.
00:30:53.920 --> 00:31:01.440
You realize like, you know, this kind of drama of, you know, we're going to change the world through technology is simply false.
00:31:01.599 --> 00:31:02.720
And it was false then.
00:31:02.960 --> 00:31:11.279
So the second example is, you know, in the latter stages of processed world in 91-92, we were publishing stuff about bicycling because a bunch of us were bicyclists.
00:31:11.359 --> 00:31:16.960
So we would go come to work, you know, come to the office that I had in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco by bike.
00:31:17.119 --> 00:31:19.599
It was just our my way of getting around since the 70s.
00:31:19.680 --> 00:31:23.119
I didn't think much about it except that I was treated as a second-class citizen on the street.
00:31:23.200 --> 00:31:25.839
So we started agitating about that in various ways.
00:31:26.079 --> 00:31:35.279
And then that gave rise to critical mass, the big huge bike movement that swept the world, actually, although in Montreal they had a mass bike movement in this much earlier than most other cities.
00:31:35.359 --> 00:31:38.160
So we ended up connecting a little bit with those folks too later.
00:31:38.400 --> 00:31:53.920
But anyway, through that process, then we kept looking at different ways of engaging with the world, and we found people who who were part of the anti-war movement who come into the city by bicycle and thought maybe they started critical mass with because they showed up on bikes, and they wrote to me and said, Do you think you got your idea from us?
00:31:54.079 --> 00:31:55.759
And I was like, Well, no, not really.
00:31:56.240 --> 00:32:00.559
And then they came back later and the guy said, Are you the same Chris Carlson who's publishing Processed World?
00:32:00.960 --> 00:32:01.039
Yeah.
00:32:01.200 --> 00:32:03.599
He said, Well, that's where we got the idea for the bike ride in the first place.
00:32:03.759 --> 00:32:05.119
And I was like, Okay, fine.
00:32:05.279 --> 00:32:07.200
So there's a lot of these funny little loops like that.
00:32:07.279 --> 00:32:26.559
But then when the magazine ends, I'm riding my bike through the financial district, and I had this idea, like, oh, how cool would it be to be able to have to be in the room in 1905 when that guy, who is attorney general of California, handed an envelope stuffed with cash to the bagman for the mayor, bribing him for whatever they were trying to do for the Southern Pacific Railroad.
00:32:26.880 --> 00:32:27.920
I thought, that would be cool.
00:32:28.000 --> 00:32:29.759
Let's maybe we could do that as a computer game.
00:32:29.839 --> 00:32:32.799
So this was the era of mist and Sim City and all that stuff.
00:32:32.880 --> 00:32:34.799
And we're and so we started thinking about that.
00:32:34.880 --> 00:32:41.599
And then this is when San Francisco's multimedia gulch took off, and everything was about interactive multimedia.
00:32:41.759 --> 00:32:50.000
And it was going to change everything and eliminate TV and radio and all other forms of communication, magazines, newspapers, books, everything's going to disappear.
00:32:50.079 --> 00:32:53.839
And it's going to be delivered to you on CD-ROMs.
00:32:55.680 --> 00:33:03.200
So, you know, we knew that was a laughable joke, and we actually knew that the idea of interactive multimedia was a fraud, essentially, because it's not interactive.
00:33:03.359 --> 00:33:05.680
You in a box, somebody had to put it all in there.
00:33:05.839 --> 00:33:10.240
It's all pre-programmed, and then you get to choose amongst pre-programmed possibilities.
00:33:10.480 --> 00:33:13.519
I mean, obviously, it's a different experience than reading a magazine.
00:33:13.599 --> 00:33:16.799
So, yeah, there's some art form there that might be interesting to play with.
00:33:16.960 --> 00:33:36.960
So, anyway, the upshot of it is that we just started off for 18 months trying to make a game that turned out to be the game part of it was silly because the idea was quickly just that you were a bike messenger, you'd made a pickup, you go down the hall uh with the pickup and you get in the elevator, and as you're in the elevator, San Francisco's hit with a giant earthquake, which will happen at any minute.
00:33:37.039 --> 00:33:39.200
It could happen right now, but it didn't, but could have.
00:33:39.440 --> 00:33:42.960
And so then the doors open and you've been knocked into the past.
00:33:43.200 --> 00:33:44.720
Now, how do you make your way back to the present?
00:33:44.799 --> 00:33:46.720
You have to solve problems in San Francisco history.
00:33:46.880 --> 00:33:53.359
That was the premise of the game, which sounds kind of good at first glance, and then on second, third, fourth, and fifth glance, it's a terrible idea.
00:33:53.519 --> 00:33:55.359
And so we eventually threw the game away.
00:33:55.519 --> 00:34:11.760
And by then we'd accumulated quite a lot of history, and we were really grappling with the questions that everybody was grappling with then, which is the question of interface, the question of how do you deal with nonlinear media, nonlinear knowledge, and hyperlinks, and what does this even mean for cognition?
00:34:11.920 --> 00:34:14.000
Like, does this change the sense of narrative?
00:34:14.159 --> 00:34:19.280
Does this change are the is the reader the writer by following hyperlinks?
00:34:19.519 --> 00:34:19.920
Really?
00:34:20.159 --> 00:34:20.480
No.
00:34:20.719 --> 00:34:24.719
But that's what people were arguing at the time was that the reader was becoming the writer.
00:34:24.960 --> 00:34:27.840
And so we were trying to come to grips with that and figure it out.
00:34:27.920 --> 00:34:35.679
And we ended up rolling out our thing in 1998 as a CD-ROM on Windows computers, because we didn't want to, we didn't have the money to do Apple.
00:34:35.920 --> 00:34:38.960
We also ended up putting out a series of public kiosks.
00:34:39.039 --> 00:34:46.320
And the public kiosks were sitting around town, and that the idea of the public kiosks was that you know somebody might sit down and look at it for it was free.
00:34:46.400 --> 00:34:51.599
You didn't have to put any money in a box or anything, and that hopefully somebody else would come up behind them and go, what is this thing?
00:34:51.679 --> 00:34:55.519
And they'd say, well, I don't know, some crazy commie made this weird history project, and look at that.
00:34:55.599 --> 00:34:55.920
What is it?
00:34:56.000 --> 00:34:56.480
What do they think?
00:34:56.559 --> 00:34:59.039
And putting this stuff on the out here on a computer.
00:34:59.199 --> 00:35:01.840
And then the two people would start discussing and arguing.
00:35:02.000 --> 00:35:03.440
That was for us was the interactivity.
00:35:03.599 --> 00:35:09.119
Like we used thought the technology was a Trojan horse to really produce a conversation amongst human beings.
00:35:09.440 --> 00:35:11.519
And so to some extent that succeeded.
00:35:11.679 --> 00:35:14.880
I can't say exactly how much, it's not quantifiable or anything like that.
00:35:14.960 --> 00:35:22.559
But we do have vast logs if anybody ever wants to do some data diving into what people actually did on our kiosks, because we have it, whatever they did, we could see.
00:35:22.639 --> 00:35:29.760
We don't know who did it, but we have the every user session ever on about 25 kiosks that were around town for a bunch of years.
00:35:30.000 --> 00:35:43.119
So that again, that's another moment in the history of technology where there's this buzz promoting something that's a fraud, interactive multimedia, and yet there was ways to use it that kind of took it in, turned it inside out.
00:35:43.360 --> 00:35:44.079
That's what we did.
00:35:44.159 --> 00:35:50.159
And that was people from Process World and myself who came together as a different kind of a project group and tried to produce this thing.
00:35:50.239 --> 00:35:56.000
So we ended up producing a million-dollar piece of software for free and giving it away for free, except for the CD-ROMs.
00:35:56.079 --> 00:35:58.639
We asked 20 bucks, but I mean basically it was given away.
00:35:58.880 --> 00:36:08.159
And then we hit a typical cul-de-sac of, you know, the stuff stopped working because Windows changed the drivers, and Apple never worked.
00:36:08.320 --> 00:36:12.400
So we were suddenly stuck with a screen that went blank after we'd done all this work.
00:36:12.559 --> 00:36:16.320
And we had to decide do we want to chase Bill Gates around or Steve Jobs?
00:36:16.480 --> 00:36:18.880
No, no, not going to follow those guys anywhere.
00:36:19.119 --> 00:36:20.960
Let's see if we can get online somehow.
00:36:21.119 --> 00:36:32.559
And so we created a really crude version of uh HTML pages for a bunch of this stuff, and that looked horrible, and we just sort of sat on our hands, and then eventually we got it all out of this very kludgy homemade system that we created.
00:36:32.800 --> 00:36:37.519
And uh somebody by the about 2005 or six said, Well, why don't you get it, why don't you do a wiki?
00:36:37.679 --> 00:36:39.119
It's like, duh, of course.
00:36:39.280 --> 00:36:47.760
By then, Wikimedia and Wikipedia had started, and we hadn't really put it together in our minds, like, oh, we have a version of that of San Francisco history.
00:36:48.000 --> 00:36:49.440
Let's use that software.
00:36:49.519 --> 00:36:53.519
So we use Wikimedia software today for our website at foundsf.org.
00:36:53.599 --> 00:36:58.159
And it's more than tripled in size since we finally opened it in 2009.
00:36:58.480 --> 00:37:00.480
And uh, it's a living archive of the city.
00:37:00.559 --> 00:37:06.559
It's a way for people to actually see themselves as agents of history and actually contribute to the historical record.
00:37:06.719 --> 00:37:23.440
So not only do we present San Francisco's history and over 2,300 screens of material, many of them are excerpted from books, or in some cases we have entire books that have been integrated into the site, thousands and thousands of historical and contemporary photographs, dozens of videos, oral histories, all sorts of stuff.
00:37:23.519 --> 00:37:25.840
It's quite an unusual project.
00:37:25.920 --> 00:37:28.639
There's really nothing like it in any other city that I'm aware of.
00:37:28.880 --> 00:37:33.199
But it's kind of a good use of the technology, but it's also still problematic problematic.
00:37:33.360 --> 00:37:45.280
Like I look at it and I think, well, this is kind of static, and it's like a giant book that sprawls on and on and on, and it doesn't really give you a narrative flow unless you know what the narrative flow is you want to find.
00:37:45.599 --> 00:37:50.320
You can find it and wander through this site, but a lot of it's pretty darn random.
00:37:50.480 --> 00:37:54.159
And so how do you get back to sort of storytelling with that?
00:37:54.400 --> 00:37:55.760
That's what I end up doing in public.
00:37:55.920 --> 00:38:00.719
I do a lot of walking tours and bike tours and boat tours where I tell stories.
00:38:01.039 --> 00:38:02.800
And I've learned too much.
00:38:03.199 --> 00:38:05.840
I can talk about San Francisco history until I'm blue.
00:38:06.079 --> 00:38:11.199
And that's just part of the deal for me because history isn't contained in convenient little silos.
00:38:11.280 --> 00:38:13.599
It actually does sprawl in every direction at once.
00:38:13.679 --> 00:38:23.840
And there is this phenomenon now that we put it all online, or so much of it online, that it kind of necessarily escapes your logical thread at any given moment.
00:38:23.920 --> 00:38:27.360
You might hop sideways through a hyperlink and go, oh, now I forgot where I was.
00:38:27.519 --> 00:38:29.119
Let's what was the thing I was reading?
00:38:29.199 --> 00:38:30.559
And you lose your train of thought.
00:38:30.639 --> 00:38:35.679
Well, this is the everyday experience of the internet, uh, even when you're doing it in a dedicated site.
00:38:35.760 --> 00:38:41.119
So anyway, I guess my point was just that there is these ways of engaging with these tech booms.
00:38:41.280 --> 00:38:47.360
That doesn't mean you have to buy into the logic of, oh, I've got to make a million dollars and be a startup and cash out and all that stuff.
00:38:47.440 --> 00:38:54.159
It's like some of us have chosen to do the exact opposite of that, and of course remain poverty stricken to this day relatively to the rich people in this world.
00:38:54.320 --> 00:38:55.440
But I'm not poor.
00:38:55.519 --> 00:38:56.320
I live very well.
00:38:56.480 --> 00:38:59.199
I'm not complaining, I have a great life.
00:38:59.360 --> 00:39:06.800
And I've never had to work for anybody for all these years except for clients who come in and employ me to do various publications and whatnot for them.
00:39:06.960 --> 00:39:12.960
So I think there's a way of making choices in this world that people tend to forget that are available to us.
00:39:13.119 --> 00:39:15.360
And Processed World was really kind of rooted in that logic.
00:39:15.440 --> 00:39:25.760
And here's a funny story to loop it back to Processed World is that there's a lot of people that we met over the years and wrote for us and sent us letters and whatnot, and then occasionally we'd lose touch with them and not see them for a long time.
00:39:25.840 --> 00:39:31.119
And every once in a while I'd run into one of these former old friends that from five or seven years earlier.
00:39:31.280 --> 00:39:34.960
And one guy in particular really stayed stuck in my mind because he was really sheepish.
00:39:35.119 --> 00:39:39.840
He's like, Oh God, I'm sorry I didn't get back to you, but I found a good job.
00:39:41.760 --> 00:39:43.599
And he was really embarrassed about it.
00:39:43.679 --> 00:39:44.960
And I was like, Well, that's great.
00:39:45.039 --> 00:39:45.920
I'm so glad for you.
00:39:46.000 --> 00:39:51.360
That's really everybody wants to find something they like to do and they don't feel bad going getting up in the morning and going to do it.
00:39:51.440 --> 00:39:52.400
That's good for you.
00:39:52.639 --> 00:39:56.480
But he was a little bit ashamed because he thought, you know, it's contrary to the spirit of the magazine.
00:39:56.559 --> 00:39:59.679
You should always be hating your job and finding a way to mess it up.
00:39:59.840 --> 00:40:03.119
And it's like, well, that was a coping mechanism to a great extent.
00:40:03.199 --> 00:40:15.360
And it was also, you know, a little bit of a tactical approach to the larger issue of how do we begin to throw a wrench into the kind of complacent acceptance of a world in which we have no control.
00:40:15.760 --> 00:40:18.719
We want to assert that we should have control over our lives.
00:40:18.800 --> 00:40:27.199
We should control how we decide what to do with what technologies and when, and and you know, what are the mechanisms which we might create to make those kind of decisions together.
00:40:27.360 --> 00:40:30.719
We don't even talk about it, let alone begin to actually engage in it.
00:40:30.880 --> 00:40:36.400
So we're many steps removed from the possibility of shaping our technosphere in a meaningful way.
00:40:36.480 --> 00:40:41.840
But I do think that's the task at hand, especially in light of uh the dire condition of the climate.
00:40:42.320 --> 00:40:49.840
And I think that that is, on the one hand, what a lot of the focus is today when people are skeptical of technology or critical of technology.
00:40:49.920 --> 00:40:59.360
It's that, you know, they really feel that they have lost control of something in their lives that they're just, you know, kind of being pushed along and you know, remain reliant on these various tech companies.
00:40:59.519 --> 00:41:09.519
Or, you know, they accept like the conveniences that come with it because they recognize that there's so little power that they have that at least this is something that they get from this kind of trade-off, right?
00:41:09.840 --> 00:41:21.119
But you know, I think I think when you go back and read process world, you see this issue of kind of control and agency is so central to a lot of the criticisms that are being made.
00:41:21.280 --> 00:41:25.679
And if I can draw a through line, I think that that remains today, right?
00:41:25.840 --> 00:41:33.679
Certainly we've had these narratives about how technology is going to empower us and you know be more democratic and all this kind of stuff for a long time.
00:41:33.920 --> 00:41:40.239
But I think that when you look at how people really feel about these things, a lot of people feel that it has reduced their power, right?
00:41:40.320 --> 00:41:48.079
That in kind of pushing all of this uh, you know, the speed up and trying to automate so much of what happens, that there has been a loss there.
00:41:48.159 --> 00:42:03.280
And that that is often, I think, what a lot of people are reacting to when they start to feel critical of these technologies or you know, start to find aspects of them that they don't like or you know, that are causing their lives to feel like there's something wrong.
00:42:03.519 --> 00:42:05.440
That I think that is like a really motivating factor.
00:42:05.760 --> 00:42:08.000
Yeah, I think you're that's that's exactly right.
00:42:08.159 --> 00:42:23.679
I I actually did write a book in 2008 called Nowtopia, and it was an attempt to draw this through line that you're talking about and try to understand the ways that people do take really interesting and creative sort of action, I guess is a word to use, in the face of this predicament.
00:42:23.840 --> 00:42:30.639
Like how do we reconnect with some sense of agency, ability to actually shape the world that we're in?
00:42:30.800 --> 00:42:43.599
Because for the most part, as you correctly pointed out, that agency has been taken away from us, and we just feel like we're being pushed along in a river that that you can't get out of, that we're stuck in this river, and maybe we can paddle sideways for a minute, but that's about it.
00:42:43.760 --> 00:42:45.119
And it's it's not entirely true.
00:42:45.280 --> 00:42:47.280
We actually do have possibilities.
00:42:47.360 --> 00:42:56.719
And in Naotopia, the subtitle was How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant Lot Gardeners are inventing the future today.
00:42:57.039 --> 00:43:10.960
And it has a long analysis about the sort of dire atomization and fragmentation of our lives that has been imposed by the market primarily, and certainly through neoliberal capitalism, making all that much more dire and more severe.
00:43:11.280 --> 00:43:23.920
And so, you know, as atomized sort of lonely individuals, most of us face the world from that stance in one form or another, either with with or without family, with or without close friends, where do people take action?
00:43:24.000 --> 00:43:27.039
And so I thought, well, I believe in the possibility of revolution.
00:43:27.119 --> 00:43:28.800
I believe in the possibility of changing our lives.
00:43:28.880 --> 00:43:31.679
And if I believe in that, then it must be actually already underway.
00:43:31.840 --> 00:43:36.239
It should be visible that people actually do things that matter that can change the world.
00:43:36.480 --> 00:43:41.280
And of course, there's plenty of examples of people in co-ops and doing all sorts of little projects like that.
00:43:41.360 --> 00:43:51.119
And I started noticing things, though, that in particular were defined by people taking their time and their technological skills out of the market.
00:43:51.280 --> 00:43:56.559
They would, when they're not at their stupid ass job trying to make some money, they were busy.
00:43:56.719 --> 00:43:58.320
They were working really hard.
00:43:58.480 --> 00:44:33.440
In fact, harder than when they're at their Jobs and doing things that really mattered, whether it was creating a DIY bike shop and sharing skills with kids who don't know the first thing about repairing bikes or learning how to take this the salvage of discarded bicycles from the waste stream of modern life and turning them into useful transportation for people, or the community gardening phenomenon in which people are out taking plots of land that are essentially wastelands in urban environments and turning them into these thriving gardens in which people grow food and begin to actually address this kind of predicament of the last mile of food and how far away it comes and all these kinds of things.
00:44:33.599 --> 00:44:35.679
And obviously, some climates are better than others.
00:44:35.760 --> 00:44:37.199
San Francisco is very well suited to this.
00:44:37.360 --> 00:44:42.960
San Francisco is a city that once had 70,000 gardens at the end of World War II as part of the Victory Gardens project.
00:44:43.199 --> 00:44:54.320
And you know, what people have forgotten is that by the end of World War II, 45% of all the fresh produce in the United States, and I think in Canada too, was being grown in urban gardens.
00:44:54.480 --> 00:44:56.159
And now it's down to less than 3%.
00:44:56.559 --> 00:45:00.320
Because they said, oh no, don't worry, we'll take it back to agribusiness and we buy it at the supermarket.
00:45:00.480 --> 00:45:03.599
It's like, well, actually, that's the problem, not the solution.
00:45:03.679 --> 00:45:04.719
That's the problem.
00:45:05.039 --> 00:45:09.920
And so, you know, this idea of the other thing is about recomposing communities.
00:45:10.159 --> 00:45:19.519
So when you're in a community garden, you might find the person in the plot next to you here in San Francisco is from El Salvador, and on the other side's they're from Cambodia, and behind you is a guy from Alabama.
00:45:19.679 --> 00:45:39.599
And you in the conversation, you're having this multiracial moment, and you're learning about different foods, and you're learning about different life experiences, and there's a sense of coming together on a different basis than, oh, we have a job together, or oh, we live next door to each other by completely random chance, and besides which I'll be leaving in five years and moving on to another place.
00:45:39.840 --> 00:45:58.880
So there is a way in which real communities start to emerge from these projects, even programmers who meet each other through long distance connections, but are doing projects that aren't about making money, but are about something they care about, something they think is actually useful and important for facilitating communications, often amongst political movements.
00:45:59.760 --> 00:46:05.440
Then a ton of that kind of work done over the years, and most of it gets sort of flushed aside and forgotten about quite rapidly.
00:46:05.599 --> 00:46:35.039
But anyway, so my vi my vision or my argument at the time in Nowtopia, which again is 16 years ago when it was published, but I think, you know, it's wrong, but it also could still be right going forward, is that the working class, broadly understood, that's all of us, you know, pretty much everybody on the planet is part of the working class, whether you make$8,000 a year or$18,000 a year or$180,000 a year, you basically have to sell yourself to somebody else and do what they tell you, or you don't have a job.
00:46:35.199 --> 00:46:45.360
And you might get a union and you might protect yourself a little bit from the most onerous authoritarian moments in that work experience, but you finally still have to do what the owner tells you to do or you don't have a job.
00:46:45.599 --> 00:46:47.760
That's the problem at the point of sale.
00:46:47.920 --> 00:46:49.920
We lose control over the world we make.
00:46:50.079 --> 00:46:55.840
And so for me, the question of technology, it's part of this menu that faces us all the time.
00:46:56.000 --> 00:46:57.039
How do we want to live?
00:46:57.199 --> 00:46:58.480
What do we want to do?
00:46:58.719 --> 00:46:59.360
Why?
00:46:59.679 --> 00:47:01.039
What are we here for?
00:47:01.360 --> 00:47:06.400
And once we start looking at those deeper questions, then there's lots of different kinds of answers.
00:47:06.480 --> 00:47:17.920
And some of them involve, well, I think I'll use this hoe and this shovel or this vehicle that I can repair myself or this computer that allows me to communicate with people in this interesting way, or whatever, fill in the blank.
00:47:18.000 --> 00:47:27.920
I'm not an anti-technology person because everything is a technology, whether it's a paper clip or some kind of really weirdly high-tech communication or transportation device, I don't know.
00:47:28.000 --> 00:47:30.159
You know, I I already don't control most of that.
00:47:30.320 --> 00:47:34.159
Like I don't know how to make a paperclip any more than I know how to make a shovel.
00:47:34.400 --> 00:47:37.280
But I'm going to use these things because I live, I'm a human being.
00:47:37.440 --> 00:47:47.280
And so the question for me, then, and then one of the arguments I made just to get it finally to the sort of more abstract theoretical level, is that we all engage all day long with the general intellect.
00:47:47.360 --> 00:47:49.199
We are part of it and we reproduce it.
00:47:49.280 --> 00:48:09.039
That is to say, the technosphere, all the stuff that we understand about life, how to use a phone, a smartphone, how to, you know, make a plane reservation, how to take the bus with your smart card down the street, how to ride a bike and fix the brakes, whatever, all of that stuff is a physical embodiment of all the labor that's been done up to this moment in history.
00:48:09.119 --> 00:48:13.599
And most of it, the individual, me, you, anybody else, we don't know how the hell it works.
00:48:13.760 --> 00:48:15.519
We don't know how that got that way.
00:48:15.760 --> 00:48:18.719
But all of us together maintain it and keep reproducing it.
00:48:18.960 --> 00:48:23.280
And so the question is, can we get conscious control over the direction of the general intellect?
00:48:23.440 --> 00:48:24.400
And I think we can.
00:48:24.559 --> 00:48:26.159
Most people say, no, no, that's impossible.
00:48:26.239 --> 00:48:28.480
It just has to be run by the market or it has to be run by the state.
00:48:28.559 --> 00:48:30.320
And it's like, no, both of those things are problems.
00:48:30.400 --> 00:48:32.800
We see what it's producing, is it's destroying the planet.
00:48:32.960 --> 00:48:43.599
So we actually have to turn that general intellect in the direction we want it to go, which is to invent a world in which we have enough of everything for everybody, everybody lives quite well, and we have a lot of fun doing it.
00:48:43.760 --> 00:48:45.039
That seems like a pretty good goal.
00:48:45.199 --> 00:48:46.400
I sign up for that one.
00:48:46.559 --> 00:48:47.280
How do we do it?
00:48:47.440 --> 00:48:48.559
Well, that's the question.
00:48:48.800 --> 00:48:49.599
I don't know.
00:48:49.760 --> 00:48:50.639
Let's figure it out.
00:48:50.719 --> 00:48:52.320
That's what human beings are good at.
00:48:52.639 --> 00:48:53.840
Yeah, no, absolutely.
00:48:54.000 --> 00:49:02.960
And one of the things I love about Process World is it always takes the technology and puts it in the context of these broader, like capitalist social and economic relations, right?
00:49:03.039 --> 00:49:06.719
It's never just focusing on the technology itself or what it's doing.
00:49:06.880 --> 00:49:10.239
It's always understanding that it's part of this kind of broader process.
00:49:10.480 --> 00:49:13.679
I have a couple final questions for you before we kind of close off.
00:49:13.920 --> 00:49:23.920
Quickly, you know, when we think about the companies that are often in the crosshairs today, it's like, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, things like that, right?
00:49:24.239 --> 00:49:32.320
Back in the 1980s, what were kind of the companies that were really drawing people's ire at the time, or was it just focused on certain technologies rolling out generally?
00:49:32.719 --> 00:49:47.360
Well, IBM and Apple, I mean, famously the Apple ad in 1984 with the woman throwing the thing through the screen, which, you know, seemed to be some sort of a claim for the liberatory qualities of Apple computing, which we now can clearly say was a fraud.
00:49:48.079 --> 00:49:50.639
Not that it wasn't really obvious to us at the time.
00:49:50.719 --> 00:49:52.320
I mean, we didn't have any fantasy.
00:49:52.480 --> 00:49:58.559
We knew Apple was a fraud already, once once that long before the 1984 moment.
00:49:58.880 --> 00:50:01.119
And we didn't like IBM or Microsoft either.
00:50:01.280 --> 00:50:18.400
We thought all of them were, you know, the behemoths which we want to overthrow, along with Bank of America, PG ⁇ E, Wells Fargo, Chevron Oil, I mean, fill in the blank, those are the companies we were focused on in the 1980s, were the large multinationals that had their headquarters here in San Francisco, most of which are now gone.
00:50:18.559 --> 00:50:21.360
They almost all moved out of San Francisco since the 1980s.
00:50:21.440 --> 00:50:30.480
And that's a separate conversation which I won't digress into, but it's a very interesting one about why they left and what the different companies were that left and where they went.
00:50:30.639 --> 00:50:34.239
All those things are quite interesting in terms of the evolution of modern capitalism.
00:50:34.480 --> 00:50:37.280
So our focus wasn't really on tech companies back then so much.
00:50:37.440 --> 00:50:41.199
I mean, we we recognized that some of them were part of the problem, not part of the solution.
00:50:41.280 --> 00:50:46.880
But the big ones at the time were essentially IBM and Intel and Microsoft were the main companies.
00:50:46.960 --> 00:51:04.079
And we had a lot of writing in Processed World about the pollution of the groundwater in Silicon Valley that IBM was primarily responsible for, but so was Intel, and so were anybody else, advanced microdedevices and all the other chipmakers that were at that point spewing toxic waste into the groundwater down there.
00:51:04.320 --> 00:51:14.320
Many of them, again, have moved to other locales where they continue the same toxic production processes, but out of sight, out of mind for people in California, people in the United States.
00:51:14.559 --> 00:51:17.599
So focusing on companies was always kind of less of our issue.
00:51:17.679 --> 00:51:19.039
I mean, we had a lot of fun at their expense.
00:51:19.119 --> 00:51:20.480
We made a lot of jokes about all of them.
00:51:20.719 --> 00:51:27.920
Bank of America was often our target for us because it was the giant bank in the country and it was headquarters here in San Francisco at the time.
00:51:28.159 --> 00:51:32.239
Later got stolen by a bank in North Carolina and it's no longer here.
00:51:32.480 --> 00:51:32.719
Yeah.
00:51:33.039 --> 00:51:40.559
So I would say that we're even then understood that these companies were manifestations of a logic, and it was the logic that we objected to.
00:51:40.719 --> 00:51:47.440
And the logic that we had perceived was one of which we were part of the cogs in the machine at the point of circulation.
00:51:47.599 --> 00:51:54.239
And the circulation had to do with records of property, data about the flows of value and money and so on and so forth.
00:51:54.400 --> 00:52:02.480
But it was very hard to get your head wrapped around that stuff then as it is today, because all of it is designed to be too abstract to make any sense to you as an individual.
00:52:02.719 --> 00:52:04.639
And most of it, frankly, should be abolished.
00:52:04.719 --> 00:52:05.760
It just should disappear.
00:52:06.079 --> 00:52:08.559
We'd be better off as human beings if it were to disappear.
00:52:08.960 --> 00:52:10.239
I I think that makes a ton of sense.
00:52:10.880 --> 00:52:16.400
Especially when today these like, you know, what we call tech companies now are like some of the biggest companies in the world.
00:52:16.480 --> 00:52:23.119
And certainly IBM was a big company at the time, but you know, the Microsoft's and Apples were not on the same scale that we see today.
00:52:23.199 --> 00:52:28.239
So it probably wouldn't have made as much sense to really have those in the center of the crosshairs at the time.
00:52:28.480 --> 00:52:40.320
I'm wondering, you know, obviously you got started doing this in the 1980s with Process World, in looking at this world and then have kind of followed it up through now.
00:52:40.480 --> 00:53:01.840
As we were talking about earlier, a lot of the things that you identified while the technologies are different and things have changed in capitalism over those number of years, there are still a lot of similarities there between the types of problems you were identifying in modern capitalism, but also in the ways that technologies were being deployed by it that were happening then that are also happening today.
00:53:02.079 --> 00:53:22.960
I was wondering how you feel about how things are going today and this sense that there is a new wave of kind of tech criticism or Luddism that is emerging and whether you feel hope for what that represents or at the same time recognizing that these companies are massive and huge and taking them on is difficult.
00:53:23.119 --> 00:53:25.599
But you know, obviously that's a challenge that that is always there.
00:53:25.679 --> 00:53:30.559
I I wonder how you reflect on the current moment after having been watching this for as long as you have.
00:53:31.039 --> 00:53:32.880
Well, that's a lovely question.
00:53:32.960 --> 00:53:34.639
I I enjoy that one quite a bit.
00:53:34.719 --> 00:53:42.639
And partly it would be easy to take a rather dire and pessimistic view, but I actually tend to think that the status quo that we're in today is unbelievably fragile.
00:53:42.800 --> 00:53:46.400
It feels like it's just like the thing that's just about to crumble.
00:53:46.559 --> 00:53:48.079
That's really how I feel about it.
00:53:48.320 --> 00:53:59.039
And I've probably felt that way at other times in the last 40 years, so that that would be a reason to take it with a note of caution when I say that, because there's a lot of people on the left who have said, oh, it's all going to collapse any minute.
00:53:59.519 --> 00:54:02.719
Crisis of capitalism is finally here and it's all over.
00:54:03.119 --> 00:54:05.679
Well, capitalism is incredibly resilient.
00:54:06.000 --> 00:54:14.079
You know, it's a system in which people are their own time and labor is turned against them again and again and again, in spite of their best interests and their best intentions.
00:54:14.239 --> 00:54:21.519
People tried really hard to do good things in the world, and it's used against them over and over again, on a micro level and on a macro level.
00:54:21.679 --> 00:54:26.400
And some of these behemoths that you're referring to today, these giant tech companies, they are disgusting.
00:54:26.559 --> 00:54:28.559
The way they behave in the world is disgusting.
00:54:28.719 --> 00:54:39.119
The way they've taken sort of a behaviorist science and turned it into this vast apparatus of data gathering and surveillance and everything else that Zuboff and other people have written about.
00:54:39.199 --> 00:54:42.719
You know, I don't agree with all their analysis, but they're that part's right.
00:54:43.039 --> 00:54:45.119
But that that system doesn't really work.
00:54:45.199 --> 00:54:46.480
That's what cracks me up.
00:54:46.559 --> 00:54:50.559
It's like people get so freaked out by all this stuff and they act like, oh, it works.
00:54:50.800 --> 00:54:52.079
They can control everything.
00:54:52.239 --> 00:54:53.440
It's like, no, they can't.
00:54:53.679 --> 00:54:54.960
Can't hardly control anything.
00:54:55.039 --> 00:54:57.199
It's actually barely control anything, actually.
00:54:57.280 --> 00:55:01.119
It's just incredibly out-of-control logic that's underway.
00:55:01.679 --> 00:55:08.079
And so the odd thing that I'm interested in is how do we find a way for human beings to make intelligent decisions together?
00:55:08.239 --> 00:55:11.199
Well, there's very little that encourages us to think we can do things collectively.
00:55:11.360 --> 00:55:25.119
We don't get a lot of experience doing that, even though we do, in fact, produce the world together every day, all of us, without anybody thinking about it that way, because we're not encouraged to think that way, and we actually don't have any mechanisms to allow us to engage in it consciously.
00:55:25.280 --> 00:55:28.159
We're just only allowed to engage in it unconsciously.
00:55:28.559 --> 00:55:47.519
So I don't think this system can last for all kinds of obvious, measurable reasons, having to do with the rising temperature on the planet, the endless amount of pollution being dumped into the into the seas, and the heat dumped into the seas, and the degradation of human life, and the incredible biodiversity crisis.
00:55:47.679 --> 00:55:52.400
I mean, you know, the laundry list is long of what's going wrong in the world.
00:55:52.639 --> 00:56:03.440
And all of those things are are converging into a crisis that can only be answered by a radical change in how everything on earth reproduces itself.
00:56:03.679 --> 00:56:09.280
You can't keep reproducing life the way we do, or it will in fact come to an end, period.
00:56:09.519 --> 00:56:13.920
So that existential reality is facing us all the time.
00:56:14.079 --> 00:56:23.679
And none of these companies are the least bit interested in addressing that other than through advertising campaigns that wrap themselves in the mantle of being a solution, but none of that's real.
00:56:24.239 --> 00:56:36.960
So to take it seriously is really difficult because again, we don't have a mechanism as a human being, individual human being, to engage in these very large questions and taking action on them on a small level is the best we can do.
00:56:37.119 --> 00:56:56.719
So there are in every city dozens, if not hundreds, of examples of communities of people who are really trying hard to do the human and earthbound thing, to figure out how to live together as earthlings with not just humans, but all the other species that are here, that are still here, and hopefully make it possible for them to persist as well.
00:56:56.880 --> 00:57:02.719
And to figure out what to do about fresh water, what to do about, you know, arable land and food and these kinds of issues.
00:57:02.800 --> 00:57:08.079
And if you leave it to private capital, well, they will destroy it systematically, as they have been for a very long time.
00:57:08.320 --> 00:57:13.840
So we do need some version of a revolution, a revolution of social r values and social power.
00:57:14.079 --> 00:57:17.119
Much of that is already clearly visible at the base of society.
00:57:17.199 --> 00:57:21.920
It's just there, but it's invisible to anybody who gets all their information from mass media.
00:57:22.239 --> 00:57:29.599
The media, as we know it, will not report on the kinds of initiatives that people actually engage in that might meaningfully change the direction of the world.
00:57:29.760 --> 00:57:33.760
And so we're never going to see it until we're living it completely.
00:57:33.840 --> 00:57:37.039
And that's a reason for optimism, actually, not a reason for pessimism.
00:57:37.199 --> 00:57:38.400
It's like really keep going.
00:57:38.559 --> 00:57:40.880
Everybody out there, whatever you're doing, keep going.
00:57:41.119 --> 00:57:48.159
And know that there's a millions and millions of us who are doing the best we can under really dire circumstances, and we all know what's at stake.
00:57:48.320 --> 00:57:51.519
And sooner or later, either we win or we die.
00:57:53.039 --> 00:57:53.519
Yeah.
00:57:53.760 --> 00:57:56.719
Uh hopeful uh point to end it on, maybe.
00:57:57.119 --> 00:57:59.679
Yeah, that's well, I believe in human beings figuring it out.
00:57:59.760 --> 00:58:02.400
I actually think we can figure this out, but it's not going to be easy.
00:58:02.800 --> 00:58:03.519
I think so too.
00:58:03.599 --> 00:58:11.760
You know, even though there's there's a lot of things to be pessimistic about today, I remain really hopeful in seeing the ways that people are trying to push back against it.
00:58:11.920 --> 00:58:23.599
And, you know, even though you can recognize that these major companies and these governments have a lot of power and those are difficult things to challenge, I think we need to have that hope or else it starts to feel impossible and we just give up, right?
00:58:23.760 --> 00:58:28.480
Even if that hope can be, you know, a faint hope sometimes in seeing the dire things that we face.
00:58:28.559 --> 00:58:34.559
But I I think we always need to have it so that we have that kind of flame that pushes us forward to try to keep challenging these things.
00:58:34.639 --> 00:58:35.039
Aaron Powell Yeah.
00:58:35.119 --> 00:58:39.760
I mean, there's so much evidence that human beings have the capacity to radically alter things in a short time.
00:58:39.840 --> 00:58:46.239
And there's been many moments of eruptions throughout history, you know, revolutionary movements that came seemingly out of nowhere.
00:58:46.480 --> 00:58:54.079
But, you know, to go beyond those spasms, those moments of rebellion, you have to actually have a pretty good idea of where you're trying to get to.
00:58:54.159 --> 00:59:14.480
And I think that a lot of the uh grassroots initiatives that we can point to on the ground in various places, you know, whether they're peasant movements in in various parts of uh the global south or or you know, the indigenous movements in the global north, or the agricultural resistance around organic food and people who are taken seriously protecting the water.
00:59:14.639 --> 00:59:18.159
I mean, there's so many different interesting initiatives that really do address the predicament.
00:59:18.320 --> 00:59:20.239
People bicycling, just ride a bicycle every day.
00:59:20.320 --> 00:59:21.360
That actually does help.
00:59:21.440 --> 00:59:22.239
It's very tiny.
00:59:22.320 --> 00:59:29.519
It's and ultimately an industrial machine itself, but it's a far better choice than embracing the electric vehicle or the car.
00:59:29.920 --> 00:59:34.400
So, you know, there's many small steps you can make that at least you're in the game.
00:59:34.480 --> 00:59:39.280
And then someday we might all face a moment where we can make better choices about the larger direction of society.
00:59:39.440 --> 00:59:40.400
Let's keep pushing for that.
00:59:40.559 --> 00:59:40.880
Why not?
00:59:41.199 --> 00:59:49.039
Yeah, and I think that answer also does like what Process World did to show us that it's not just about the technology, it's about so much more than that.
00:59:49.199 --> 00:59:58.159
And certainly we can challenge these major companies because they are outgrowths of this capitalist system, but it's not just about them as well, and we needed to be thinking broader too.
00:59:58.320 --> 00:59:59.920
Chris, it's always fantastic to talk to you.
01:00:00.000 --> 01:00:01.199
I could talk to you forever.
01:00:01.360 --> 01:00:02.559
Thanks so much for taking the time.
01:00:02.880 --> 01:00:04.159
It's been a great pleasure, Paris.
01:00:04.239 --> 01:00:07.519
Thank you so much, and thanks for keeping your uh vital show on the air.
01:00:07.599 --> 01:00:10.400
We need to keep the conversation going in every direction.
01:00:10.559 --> 01:00:11.599
So good work.
01:00:12.079 --> 01:00:13.199
Thanks so much.
01:00:13.599 --> 01:00:18.639
Chris Carlson is an author, director of Shaping SF, and one of the people behind a process world.
01:00:18.800 --> 01:00:22.960
Tech Won't Save Us is made in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks.
01:00:23.039 --> 01:00:26.000
Production is by Eric Wickham, and transcripts are by Bridget Peloux Rye.
01:00:26.159 --> 01:00:30.719
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