Pretty Heady Stuff

Paris Marx is a technology writer. They’ve written for TIME magazine, WIRED, CBC News, Jacobin, and OneZero. They speak internationally on the future of transportation. They also host the award-winning podcast 'Tech Won't Save Us,' which offers a much-needed critical perspective on the history and future implications of Big Tech. Their book, Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong about the Future of Transportation, was published by Verso Books in 2022. Our conversation mainly focuses on Road to Nowhere, why they wrote it in such an accessible way, the politics of communication in the context of a climate emergency, and what it says that we’re largely programmed to assume that technology—even technology that is produced for a profit by private multinational corporations—will save us. Paris’ book has a lot of answers, but doesn’t answer all the questions. I kinda push them to speak to some of the most problematic issues around public engagement and political mobilization. One of the really useful things about their approach is that it’s rooted in a sense that history is helpful if we look critically at the things we’ve been told are true about our car-centric infrastructure, and compare it with what a rigorous look at that history reveals. The history they offer is startling, in the sense that it shows a number of branching paths where our infrastructure could have looked very different if it wasn’t for powerful sites of capitalist production impinging on policy making in profound ways. There have been moments where massive amounts of public money was spent making a world that doesn’t work. We need to move in a radically different direction. There are nearly 1.5 billion vehicles on the planet. According to Marx, replacing them with more vehicles, this time around powered by batteries, is not a viable strategy. I ask them if we need to leverage the desire for disruptive change. What Paris says is really appealing to me: that “people are much more open to change than we give them credit for;” we are “incentivized to want to keep things as they are,” despite the dire ecological consequences, because the economic consequences of change are made so punitive. For this reason, “in the face of the climate crisis,” Paris points out that we have to push ourselves to understand the intertwined nature of “many seemingly separate struggles, over mobility, housing, health, community, and many others.” So, while the rate of vehicle collisions or pedestrian deaths might feel ordinary now, that doesn’t mean it has to be met with passive acceptance. What if we let it radicalize us again? Here in Halifax, we saw that process happen. A local activist named Steve MacKay organized a protest against political inaction and it was successful in getting traffic calming put on Robie Street. The data shows that vehicular deaths disproportionately occur in poor neighborhoods, and not enough is being done. If part of the problem is just acceptance, the answer might be refusal. Refusing to accept this absurd reality where, as Marx says in their book, “an estimated 1.3 million people are killed [globally] every year in road traffic crashes… more than 3,500 people every single day.” What would it mean to refuse that reality?

Thomas Beller is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and the author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man, and Seduction Theory, among other books. He’s noted that his writing differs in form and genre but tends to share a lot of the same preoccupations: “the dynamics of relationships, a sense of place, and a preoccupation with the nature and effect of time.” We talk in this conversation about his book Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, which is definitely concerned with this question of time. I ask him about his sense that pickup basketball especially has “its own time… ruled by the sun, or by the night lights… or by the willingness of those with a ball to keep shooting in the dark.” We even circle around to this experience of shooting in the dark and try to see it as a metaphor for players that have a way of approaching the game with a second sight of sorts—players like Nikola Jokic or Kareem Abdul-Jabber: these all-time great titans of the game. But we also zoom in on the embodied experience of putting up shots and what it means for practice to feel like something that is both meditative and ritualistic, mindful and maniacal. Thomas was kind of astonished that I care as much as I do about basketball. And of course this is a podcast that is often very serious, where I am clearly really dedicated to working through some despairing and deeply scary issues with people. So, in a sense, this episode is almost like an interlude between these more serious concerns; but honestly I take basketball pretty seriously too. In the same way that Marcus Boon spoke to me about his personal relationship with music over the years—how music lets us think about the sort of war for our time that people are constantly engaged in—I wanted to talk to Beller because I think his ideas are also about that pursuit of a more engaging, autonomous relationship to time, beyond just being “productive” for the sake of it. As he puts it in the book: there is joy in “being lost in the game… a joy that doesn’t have to be relinquished.” So Thomas and I talk about what we love about basketball, the things about the sport that fill us with ambivalence, and why we keep coming back to it. We both admit that it’s kind of a mystery. In the end, we get to a point where we sort of say we appreciate both the “anarchic” and “analytic” aspects of the game. The dance and the discipline. Why do we care about a sport that still tends to be dominated by a discourse of intense and androcentric competition? Is that healthy? What kind of a use of public space is playground basketball? What effects has professionalization had on the sport?

Amy Cardinal Christianson is a Fire Research Scientist with the Canadian Forest Service. Her research on Indigenous fire stewardship, Indigenous wildland firefighters, and wildfire evacuations is important to any sort of comprehensive view of the shockingly intense wildfires that have burned 4 million hectares so far this year in Canada, and that produced almost 60 million tonnes of CO2 in May. She’s also the co-host of the invaluable Good Fire podcast, which I strongly recommend you listen to. She and Matthew Kristoff talk to luminaries on the contemporary reality of fire’s extreme intensity and destructiveness, and what can be done to restore a balanced relationship with fire. She’s the author of an abundance of work in this field, but I’ll just highlight two co-authored books: First Nations Wildfire Evacuations and Blazing the Trail: Celebrating Indigenous Fire Stewardship. Amy is drawing attention to realities and precarities that are too often ignored in the colonial state of Canada. She makes it clear that the impacts of today’s fire are “generational” where First Nations and Metis communities are “not [going to be] able to participate in their cultural activities on their land base for a long time.” While that is criminal—the uneven impacts of wildfires that have been supercharged by greenhouse gases and global heating—the irony is that future-oriented forms of Indigenous fire stewardship have historically been outlawed in Canada, the US and Australia, in particular. Amy helps us understand the history and motivations behind that policing of cultural fire. Her research is tough for a number of reasons, and not least because, she says, even though she is a Métis woman from Treaty 8 territory, it’s hard to earn the sort of trust necessary to learn fully how Indigenous peoples have preserved their cultural fire practices. In her words: “for Indigenous nations there’s a long history of distrust around fire with outside people” and “outside agencies.” It’s also becoming difficult to talk about the practice of prescribed burning because of the ways that climate change is altering the atmosphere and making conditions more volatile. Nonetheless, the things she has learned are eye-opening and progressive, reaching down to the roots of the problem of conflagration and problematizing things like land use planning and building design from a deeply decolonial perspective.

John Vaillant is the award-winning author of bestselling nonfiction books like The Golden Spruce and The Tiger. He’s written articles for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic and The Walrus. His latest book—Fire Weather: The Making of a Beast—is focused on how the conditions that human beings have created through the burning of fossil fuels and the acceleration of capitalist development are producing the sorts of enormous wildfires that we’re seeing right now. So far this year 2.7m hectares have burned across Canada, compared to the roughly 150 thousand that we typically expect. That’s an increase of 18 times over the norm. The fire season has never been this extensive or intense. There are wildfires from coast to coast; including in places that have never seen fires of this magnitude. This is a shocking trend, and it is not a trend that will reverse. Our forests sequester carbon, so when a wildfire occurs it leads to an increase in carbon emissions. It shouldn’t be lost in the fear that we’re feeling, as we view the images and videos of huge swaths of the country going up in flames, that wildfire was the biggest source of carbon emissions in Canada last year. Climate warming is driving an increase in the area burned and Vaillant’s book is absolutely clear about the role of global warming and unsustainable development in fueling these fires. Firefighters are acknowledging that modern fire, especially at the border between forests and urban areas, is unlike anything they’ve ever seen. Fires we can’t fight are emerging as normal under the conditions of a code red climate emergency. How can we respond to this reality without succumbing to panic? How can we let it radicalize and mobilize us? I appreciate the pointed ways that Fire Weather grasps the roots of why we are mired in an incendiary sense of what’s normal because of our attachment to fossil fuels. He says that, in the face of that attachment, we have the “incredible confronting inconvenience of climate change.” These shifts in the earth’s balance confront us, but this means we need to confront the drivers. And the drivers are, he says, “unregulated free market capitalism,” a “growth pattern” that mimics the destructive force of these megafires. In Canada, that means confronting a fossil fuel industry that remains mired in business as usual despite all of the signs that the industry must strand its assets, accept a relinquishing of control, and a transition off of oil and gas. In Alberta, the eye of the storm, there is—Vaillant says—a “provincial identity,” a “structure and infrastructure” and a “history” that is “built around petroleum.” What do we do about that province’s politics and its resistance to the necessary change? One thing Vaillant does in Fire Weather is talk about a trauma which people in Alberta, he says, do not want to talk about: the striking and scarring 2016 wildfires that consumed and destroyed Fort McMurray. Almost 100,000 people, he writes, “were forced to flee in what remains the largest, most rapid single-day evacuation in the history of modern fire.” And yet it is not engaged with. If there is a lack of a connection, a causal connection, between the aftermath of megafires like this and appropriate climate action, it is because of that unwillingness to engage and the related desire to just resume normal life under fossil capitalism. We are headed, especially after this fire season, for a “moment of collision,” though. We are colliding with climate impacts and we are seeing a collision politically between the obvious need for radical, disruptive changes and an attachment to business as usual. We are facing fires that are differently powerful. So what we confront now is what John calls “a process of integrating this new information.” Figuring out a way forward that doesn’t see this become commonplace, that doesn’t allow complacency to condemn us to combustion.

Dru Oja Jay is an author and web developer, currently the Executive Director of CUTV. James Steinhoff, an Assistant Professor at University College Dublin, studies the political economy of AI. Together, they dissect the AI hype cycle, exploring exaggerated narratives and the impact on creative jobs. They also tackle the ethical dilemmas of AI, advocating for community-driven approaches in data management. Finally, they delve into societal fears surrounding AI's apocalyptic themes, urging a balanced perspective on its implications for labor and capitalism.

Evan Newman is the Managing Director of Outside Music. Outside Music is an independent record label roster that includes a number of award-winning artists. It's one of the leading independent distributers in Canada. Some of the artists Outside Music has worked with include Jill Barber, The Weather Station, Rose Cousins, Aidan Knight, and Justin Rutledge. In 2019, Outside Music launched Next Door Records, a new label designed to provide equitable support and creative freedom to their songwriting community. I spoke with Evan about Next Door's mandate, and what it means for fostering work that engages with the politics of our climate emergency. In a condition of crisis, what can musicians do, beyond what they're doing: writing songs? Can they use what Evan describes as their "stature" to not only move audiences, but also encourage movement at the policy level to respond to carbon-intensive human activities, like how folks get to shows, how they get their music, and whether they're producing all kinds of plastic waste at those shows? Evan runs Outside Music with the passion of a fan. In this conversation he talks about how the rationale for who they work with does come down to who they're inspired by, the music they feel really needs to be heard. Part of this is also built on the faith that, as he says here, "music can enact change." If it's true that--and I agree with him on this point--the overwhelming deluge of information from news and other sources isn't necessarily communicating the urgency of eco-catastrophe, then music might need to not only move people, but move into a place of mobilizing people. The way it does that it through communicating a language of feeling: speaking to peoples' anger, anxiety, their stress and even their solipsism; letting them into the conversation about what climate politics should look like. As an educator in the music business program at the Nova Scotia Community College, he says he's working with young people who are attuned to the reality of the climate crisis, and curious about how to craft a way of working with artists that is environmentally ethical. He clearly derives some hope from knowing that these folks are working to figure out ways of changing an industry that, in his words, is still necessarily "tethered to capitalism." The mere fact that a new generation is entering the conversation about how music and climate change, arts and commerce, the environment and consumerism, means that transformation could become easier to imagine. I'll be discussing these issues with Evan, along with Shannon Miedema, Kim Fry, Joanna Bull, Waye Mason and Braden Lam this Wednesday, April 26th at Halifax's Central Library. The free event is titled "Changing the Tune on Climate," and will feature a number of performances by artists like Akuakultre, T. Thomason, The Gilberts, and Kristen Martell. We hope you'll attend... it will be a celebration of music, and an interesting discussion of environmental justice. Changing the Tune event info: https://halifax.bibliocommons.com/events/6418a052b4a2bc5b7ac1bbb9

Dr. Angele Alook is an Assistant Professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at York University. As a member of Bigstone Cree Nation in Treaty 8 territory, her research has mainly focused on the political economy of oil and gas in Alberta. She specializes in Indigenous feminisms, life course approaches, Indigenous research methodologies, cultural identity, and the sociology of family and work. David Gray-Donald is a settler media worker in tkaronto (Toronto). He worked as a climate campaigner at Environmental Defence from 2022 to March 2023. He’s also worked as the publisher of Briarpatch, a news and analysis magazine with strong anti-poverty, feminist and decolonial politics, and the publicity and promotions Manager at Between the Lines. He’s the current publisher of The Grind magazine in Toronto, and is the co-author of the new book The End of This World: Climate Justice in So-called Canada (https://btlbooks.com/book/the-end-of-this-world). The other authors of the book are Emily Eaton, Joël Laforest, Crystal Lameman and Bronwen Tucker. We focus primarily on The End of This World, an absolutely indispensable text for understanding and acting on our climate crisis paradox. There is far too much in that book for me to even attempt to summarize it, but what I’d like to emphasize is that it is proactive, decolonial, and radical, in the sense of identifying the fundamental roots of our climate emergency in a relationship to land that they and others describe as “extractivist.” That term can be tricky; as Imre Szeman and Jennifer Wenzel have explained, it is a term that designates not just the practice of extraction, but the ideological project of making extraction from the earth for private gain and consumer use seem completely natural, normal, and inevitable. Against that, and in response to the threats inherent to global warming, Angele and David, along with their co-authors, look to imagine alternative futures, futures that aren’t even just limited to decarbonization, but that respond in rigorous ways to the question of what it will mean to decolonize and decarbonize as two aspects of the same mission to save our planet. For Angele, the point is to emphasize the possibility and urgency of imagining ways of “building an economy based on systems of care” to replace what she calls our “death economy.” She and David make it crystal clear that the goal has to be not only respecting Indigenous sovereignty and inherent rights, but supporting everyone. This is a struggle for the future of a habitable planet, after all. And the push for a just transition has to confront that challenge with a sober sense of how to lift up not just workers in the oil and gas industry, but also people in the service industry who work to facilitate that industry, the people who take care of all the care labour, the domestic forms of caring that are usually performed by women and that are always left not only unattended to, but unrewarded. I’m releasing this interview around Earth Day for these reasons, but listening again to their insights, it struck me that Earth Day or Earth Month, or even making the claim that Earth Day is every day, is insufficient. These are good reminders, sure. But they’re incomplete. Their book isn’t just a reminder, it’s a roadmap. And even though a roadmap is a metaphor rooted, to an extent, in our current regime of fossil fueled freedom, it’s the right metaphor for thinking about how to get on and stay on a pathway that takes us out of the accelerationist race toward blowing our carbon budget, blowing our chance to stop the measurable, material, and tangible effects of runaway global heating. As they say in the book, “new political possibilities can be opened up quickly and change often happens in a non-linear way,” and that means that there isn’t a “strict deadline after which hope is lost.”

Moira Weigel is a scholar and founding editor of Logic magazine. Originally trained in modern languages, including German and Mandarin Chinese, she now studies digital media in a global context. You might have heard of her first book, Labor of Love: the Invention of Dating, from 2016, which is about how modern dating co-evolved with consumer capitalism and other forms of gendered work. Her second book, co-edited with Ben Tarnoff, is Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do and How They Do It. It is based in interviews that Weigel and Tarnoff conducted with workers at every level of the Bay Area tech industry, from startup founders to cafeteria workers. Her current research focuses on transnational e-commerce entrepreneurs, and that’s really our main focus here, since Moira recently published an incredible overview of Amazon’s reach and global strength: a lengthy report that she titled “Amazon’s Trickle-Down Monopoly.” (https://datasociety.net/library/amazons-trickle-down-monopoly/) What’s interesting is that she acknowledges the fact that we might not be particularly keen to sit and theorize the impact of the restructuring of the retail business in the 21st century, but it’s actually really important. What, we might ask, does “Amazon’s lack of accountability to the sellers that use it” indicate, in terms of the nature of platform capitalism? Weigel points out that “businesses [like Amazon] are really governed algorithmically in a way that undermines their [sellers’] entrepreneurial autonomy.” And yet, the way that Amazon often justifies its existence is by saying that it is a staunch “ally of small business.” Weigel unpacks this paradox by looking at what her interviewees said about negotiating the Amazon marketplace. The lack of accountability that Amazon enjoys, despite employing hundreds of thousands of people, expresses itself through, in part, these seemingly arbitrary decisions that the company makes—so, things like banning accounts, restricting certain sellers or constraining the flow of certain products. Those decisions are often experienced by sellers as “mistakes,” according to Weigel’s research. But in her analysis they could be part of what she describes as a sort of “regulatory risk shift,” a means of both policing an increasingly complicated marketplace and navigating a complex regulatory environment. Making things circuitous benefits Amazon by keeping things opaque. And understanding the make-up of the company’s power is similarly muddy. It was difficult for Moira to even do this research because of how hard it was to actually locate people to interview. That difficulty itself, she says, revealed something about the way that Amazon’s monopoly is maintained. As she puts it, “recruiting failures [were] an important finding.” Nonetheless, the report she’s put together came about as the result of building trust with sellers and realizing that people, if given the chance, wanted to talk about their experiences in the world of Amazon. And they had specific words for describing that world: they talked about the “old times,” the “wild west,” and “the jungle.” These terms were ways for people working within the system to understand that system.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun holds the Research Chair in New Media in the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University. She’s also the Director of the Digital Democracies Institute there. The Digital Democracies Institute is a group of scholars and stakeholders from around the world who collaborate across disciplines to generate more democratic technologies and cultures. Wendy herself has studied both Systems Design Engineering and English Literature, which she uses to understand contemporary trends and threats within digital media and emerging technologies. She is the author of books like Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media, and Discriminating Data: Correlation, Neighborhoods, and the New Politics of Recognition. In this episode, Wendy and I talk about how existing network structures reinforce discrimination. She’s one of a string of theorists who have been critical of what she calls the “segregationist defaults” that exist within these networks that we’re supposed to assume are mechanical, other-than-human, and thus somehow devoid of prejudice. Instead, she says ‘no’: in fact, “Twentieth-century eugenics and twenty-first-century data analytics… both promote or presume segregation.” This gives us a new way to approach the problem of political polarization. Chun argues that the assumption that people typically seek to associate with those that are like them—that look and think and act like alike—this assumption about a seemingly intuitive human tendency to group together in homogeneous ways is an assumption that historically produces itself as a fact. So it is not that homogeneous groups will somehow just naturally clash with other homogeneous groups, it is that an “unsustainable” assumption about homogeneity and homophily as baseline realities has obscured the inherent democratic virtue of difference and a diversity of worldviews. This “erases conflict,” but not in the sense of finding a way to cope with it or resolve it. And so, especially in an algorithm-driven era, polarization proliferates with overwhelming force. We talk about these ideas that challenge the common sense assumptions that folks often have about the nature of contemporary technology, and also tackle things like facial recognition technology, the fact of artificial intelligence being an increasingly normal part of our lives. Wendy’s point is that facial recognition and machine learning are used in insidious, often exploitative, and almost always in discriminatory ways, but that they don’t need to be. AI, she says, doesn’t need to be a “nightmare” that undermines and displaces “human decision-making.” What if these technologies were democratized? What if—and it may seem implausible, given the tech monopolies that silently govern many of our interactions through the diffusion of different technologies—what if there was broader public power and greater participation in deciding what AI should and shouldn’t do? The point here is to, as she says, “point to realities and futures [that need] to be rejected.” Prediction does us no good without power.

Alexander Etkind joined the Department of International Relations at Central European University in 2022. He previously taught at the European University Institute in Florence, and at several other institutions. His research looks at the extreme challenges of global decarbonization and security in Eastern Europe. Much of his past writing is concerned with the question of memory, of European intellectual history, and of empires and decolonization. He’s the author of many books, including Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience, Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the Unburied, Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources, and a really interesting new book called Russia Against Modernity which comes out in April. Here we talk about the war in Ukraine, but in the longue durée of various societies’ relationship to the natural resources they use and abuse for the purpose of development. Etkind says that the patterns that we see play out in terms of what is sometimes called the “oil curse” are not totally new. This is a big part of the argument of Nature’s Evil: he sees the “resource curse” unfold at a number of points in human history with other sources of energy, like wood and peat. There are ways that oil is unique, though. The “paradigmatic relationship,” for Etkind is between resource-rich and resource-dependent states, when it comes to oil. And he sees that division in terms of degrees of democracy. In the resource-rich state of Russia, the current regime sees the need to maintain a monopoly on information in order to perpetuate its unequal command of the revenue from the carbon-intensive resources it is founded on. Etkind writes about the dilemma of confronting autocratic petrostates on the problem of climate change, and confronts the seemingly unsolvable problem of how the state—which, he states, is actually the only entity that “stands between the energy barons and the tragedy of drowned cities”—can be made to radically disentangle itself from fossil fuels. He senses that, in Russia, the monopoly on information is weakening. That within the country there is an intergenerational war taking place over the future of the federation, given that a mass exodus of young people fled to what he says are “not very hospitable environments” rather than accept the propaganda and suppression that staying in the country would have meant. While, for him, this is admittedly a “modest grounds for hope,” it is still a source. The persistent problem, though, is that reducing emissions and saving the atmosphere from the death-dealing effects of CO2 will require a sustained period of peace. Once war breaks out, energy transition becomes inconceivable. Forms of feminist organizing and protest, the environmental movement, organized groups who refuse the trauma of war and the tragedy of drowned cities, these are sites of hope for Etkind, but the ongoing “asymmetrical sacrifice” is still, at the moment, stunning us into a kind of clarity.