Pretty Heady Stuff

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.

Natasha Lennard is a Contributing Writer for the Intercept, and her work has appeared regularly in the New York Times, Esquire, Vice, Salon, and the New Inquiry, among others. She teaches in the Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism program at The New School for Social Research and is the author of two books: Violence: Humans in Dark Times, co-edited with Brad Evans, and Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life, from Verso Books. In this interview I ask Natasha about the recent murder, by police, of Tyre Nichols, Keenan Anderson, and the environmental activist known as Tortuguita. She talks about the fact that these are just three of the more prominent deaths this year alone at the hands of police, and explains the relationship of these losses to the inherent violence of policing. What she makes clear is that, despite the fact that cops don’t stop or prevent crime, and actually produce more violence than they stop, it is still the case that, for a number of reasons, the burden is never on those who align with carceral thinking to defend the police. And why is that the case? Because there is a deep ideological attachment to police and policing, to so-called “justice” in a carceral world. And that attachment is fed by a regime of representation that reinforces the heroism of cops in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. As a means of working through this problem, Natasha talks about Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “common sense” as a tool for understanding some of the baseline assumptions that exist to regulate action and reaction. These are some complicated issues. And she admits that it’s tricky. While we can fall into the trap of using what feel like exhausted ideas, the trap of political theatre, Lennard’s analysis has a way of cutting through the contradictions and centring the fact of ongoing oppression. If you do that, then you move out of the theoretical debates about strategy and into the streets. For this reason, she celebrates the small but nimble and durable protests against Cop City in Atlanta. She speaks ardently in support of the need for trans liberation, and articulates that imperative against the array of powerful revanchist far-right forces who stand against it.

Sarah King is the Head of Greenpeace Canada's Oceans & Plastics campaign. Pushing for a plastics-free future by holding corporations accountable for the growing plastics pollution crisis, Sarah has worked to protect our oceans and ocean-dependent communities for over a decade. She studied in the Environmental Applied Science and Management programme at Toronto Metropolitan University, and has worked at a consulting firm doing environmental impact assessments in order to help determine the scope of negative impacts associated with various development projects. I speak with her about the place of plastics in our everyday lives, the impact that plastics have on the environment, and the many ways that the Trudeau government’s plastics ban is woefully inadequate. I won’t summarize everything that Sarah explains here, but I will quote a particularly pithy summary of her position: she says that, in fact, “the entire category [of single use plastics] is a problem,” because of the overwhelming scale of production and our “lacking and disjointed infrastructure.” She stresses that the government is actually “very scared… to take strong action to hold industry… accountable. The result tends to be policies that benefit industry and do nothing to protect the environment. Loopholes can be found throughout Canada’s environmental regulations, and that means profit over survival. We have a new set of policies that the Liberal government is claiming will give us a “zero plastic waste” future by 2030, but King is very pointed in her assertion that, actually, the government has to know that this is a false promise: in her words, “they have to be looking at that [target] knowing that it’s impossible,” given the state of environmental protections in this country and the incredibly minor push to end plastics production and pollution. Confronting industry and closing loopholes is all about moving radically in a different direction. King says that embracing a “reuse and refill revolution” would legitimately “signal the end of the plastic era” and begin to seriously challenge “our fossil-fuel-dependent system” in which “the wrong things are valued.” Getting to that entirely reasonable, feasible alternative will take a project of accelerated solidarity-building, though, because the lobby for fossil fuels and petrochemicals is very strong. For this reason, King is really looking for more alignment between segments of the environmental movement. We’re starting to see this, and to see a shift both toward the centring of “the people that are most impacted” when it comes to “crafting solutions and a way forward” and toward, as Sarah puts it, “addressing not just our planetary crisis, but also our social justice crises around the world.”

Heather Davis and Mark Simpson discuss the urgent need for new communication strategies regarding plastic pollution. They explore the complexities of plastics, the limitations of recycling, and the emotional complexities of activism and scholarly work. The conversation also delves into the concept of 'low hanging data fruit' in activism and the importance of collaboration in addressing environmental challenges.

Kim Fry is a co-founder and board member for Music Declares Emergency Canada along with her daughter Brighid Fry from the indie rock band Housewife. Music Declares Emergency is a group of artists, music industry professionals and organisations that are looking to create solidarity in declaring a climate and ecological emergency and demanding an immediate governmental response to preserve life on Earth. Kim has worked on energy efficiency and climate but has also spent a lot of her career as an elementary school teacher, a union activist, a staunch climate justice activist and environmental campaigner. She’s worked for a number of environmental organizations, which is part of the reason she’s found herself devising strategies for Music Declares Emergency, which is moving to get a seat at the policy table by using the specific capacities of music to move people. Our conversation covers a number of different things that we’re both curious about in relation to these capacities. But we also dwell with the material problems associated with the music industry at a time of escalating climate emergencies. How does the music industry contribute to climate change and what should be done to correct some of its impacts? Thinking in these terms helps us move beyond the tempting, but also fairly limiting, logic of condemning particular artists for their hypocrisy, their ostentatious lifestyles, etc., and into a conversation about the kind of music scenes and spaces of meaningful local music participation we’d like to see. What kinds of structural and infrastructural changes might have to be put in place for that to be realized? We’re also concerned here with problems around genre, what kinds of music resonate, which tones seem out of touch with the complexity and urgency of the crisis created by an unaccountable fossil fuel industry and infrastructure… And we can’t help but land on the fact that it’s extremely complicated: there is undeniable power and influence in celebrity, and there is an inarguable concentration of power in a still quite monopolistic music industry. Transforming these things takes time that we do not have. The pace of change we need is more like a metal song, but what we’ve got is plaintive folk. It’s not an easy problem to solve, this stuckness, but Kim encourages us to remember the meaning of the word folk – it’s meant to be the music of the people. Just as pop is meant to be the music that is popular at a given time. This might give us an opening for thinking about the emergence of a new music nomenclature for conveying the climate breakdown that is coming if nothing stands in its way.

Tanner Mirrlees (https://twitter.com/tmirrlees_) is the Director of the Communication and Digital Media Studies program at Ontario Tech University. His current research focuses on topics in the political economy of communications such as war and media, work and labour in the creative and digital industries, and the links between far-right hate groups and social media platforms. He’s the author of Hearts and Mines: The US Empire's Cultural Industry, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization, co-author of EdTech Inc.: Selling, Automating and Globalizing Higher Education in the Digital Age, and the co-editor of Media Imperialism: Continuity and Change and The Television Reader. He’s also heavily involved in efforts to spread the knowledge practices of academia beyond the university. So, he has appeared in documentaries like Theatres of War (https://vimeo.com/ondemand/theatersofwar) and Myths on Screen, and contributed to putting together podcasts like Darts & Letters’ Dangers of Techno-utopianism series. Our conversation is an attempt to wrestle with American militarism, especially but not exclusively as it finds form through popular cultural representation. There is a very long history, Tanner points out, of the US Department of Defence investing in media products that project American military power in precisely the way the DoD wants. While this collusion is now loosely understood, Mirrlees’ insights point us to specific aspects of the ongoing partnership. We talk about the massive popularity of films like Captain Marvel and Top Gun: Maverick—spending a lot of time unpacking the dizzying spectacle of Maverick, one of 2022’s biggest movies: truly a dizzying spectacle, in terms of the gap between dramatized surreality and the actual logistics of military operations. Even though the DoD’s stated policy is that it will support films that give a “realistic” and “authentic” representation of the military, the reality of the representational choices in Maverick expose how tenuous that grip on reality needs to be, and in fact how films benefit financially and technology from the Pentagon when they fudge the facts firmly in their favour. There are long standing fears that drive this sort of forceful fabulation: one is the fear of a decline in the United States’ imperial power, relative to other influential states like China and Russia. Another is the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Pentagon’s particular investment in how Hollywood represents this threat has shifted over time, with Tom Cruise’s last two big action films, Mission Impossible: Fallout and Maverick, centring on this threat as a chief way to threaten the integrity and hegemony of American empire. Mirrlees offers some valuable commentary on how Maverick was written out of a time in the recent past where the threat of Iran enriching uranium was front of mind in US security planning. The United States has waged wars without end for a very long time. The country dominates in virtually every corporate sector. And yet the US empire functions in ways that are distinct from past modes of colonial imperial command. Multiple spheres interlock and interoperate in sometimes subtle ways, and while force is fundamental, cultural impact is also critical. As Tanner puts it, “no corporation sees itself as an emissary” of the US national security state, and yet they are incentivized or compelled to serve its ambitions. What are the foundations of that sort of power? How can we examine its constitutive elements?

El Jones is a poet, journalist, professor and activist living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She teaches in the department of Political and Canadian Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University. She’s the author of Live from the Afrikan Resistance!, a collection of poems about resisting white colonialism. Her work focuses on feminism, prison abolition, anti-racism and decolonization. In Rehearsals for Living, Robyn Maynard describes El as a “Black liberation visionary and long-time prison abolitionist [who] was nourishing abolitionist freedom dreams for years before the public would listen.” Since 2016, El has co-hosted a radio show called Black Power Hour on CKDU-FM. We talk about the important role that show played in producing the sorts of bonds that allowed for more substantial and sustained prison organizing. El explains how the show translated into building relationships, which translated into legal advocacy, a significant prison strike, and the creation of a manifesto demanding justice for those behind bars. The show led to the creation of a “kind of trust where” people like Abdoul Abdi could get to know El, feel connected, and from positions where they are made to feel utterly disconnected from the rest of the world. El’s been on the podcast before, but this is a special occasion, because she’s just put out a book that represents, as she’s put it elsewhere, her “life’s work.” The book, which you should order from Fernwood right now, is called Abolitionist Intimacies. It’s started to appear on a number of lists of the best nonfiction books of 2022, and it is a difficult-to-describe intervention. As El describes it, the different parts of the book, the different approaches to writing in it, are kind of “in conversation with each other;” she says that different images and events “preoccupy” her throughout and tend to show up again and again in this iterative, poetic, meditative way. But the main idea of the book, she states very simply, is “friendship,” it’s about love. What is by no means simple, though, is the book’s preoccupation with the barriers to that friendship and love. Those barriers are not housed in the hearts and minds of the incarcerated, she says, but in the phone system that makes it near impossible to maintain communication with the world, the guards who police contact in the prison, the administrators who ban people from coming in. El is asking: How can anything like intimacy be sustained under those conditions? One way that she has cultivated over time is by thinking a lot about the power and the intimacy of voice. So much of Abolitionist Intimacies is about voice, voices heard over the phone, over the radio. There is so much joy there. And pain, too. Someone’s voice, and the feeling of connection, can change your day. Take you away. There are some indelible moments in El’s book where she documents exactly this sort of witnessing: witnessing the strength of connections across borders and through walls. Against the tyranny of a carceral society. And she points out that changing the world we have is within our grasp, even if it’s difficult to imagine. Like, she admits that “it’s difficult to live a different kind of life.” Of course it is. But the point is that it can be done, just not through separated acts of individual behaviour change. It has to happen collectively. Sacrifices, in her words, are also blessings.

Baijayanta Mukhopadhyay is clinical faculty at the McGill Department of Family Medicine, focusing on supporting rural and low-resource practice. Mukhopadhyay organises around issues related to extractivism, migrant rights, policing, public services and decolonizing global health within local and international networks and collectives. Alexis Shotwell is a Professor in Carleton University’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her academic work addresses impurity, environmental justice, racial formation, disability, unspeakable and unspoken knowledge, sexuality, gender, and political transformation. She is the co-investigator for the AIDS Activist History Project (aidsactivisthistory.ca), and the author of Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding from 2011, and Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times from 2016. We discuss Baj’s new book from Fernwood Publishing, Country of Poxes: Three Germs and the Taking of Territory. In the book, we get an innovative technique for telling the history of colonialism and its effects on past and present capacities for collective survival, threatened as it has always been by microscopic entities that enter our bodies and undermine a misplaced and sinister pretence to mastery. In this conversation we talk about the question of culpability. Baj’s book prompts Alexis to think about agency and how illness is distributed. In her reading, its argument stresses how social actors have made consequential choices in the past, and how, as Baj writes in the book, “reflecting on these experiences in the past” can enable “those of us who believe in a more just, a more healed… future” to “contribute in some way to cobbling together a truer liberation.” You won’t just learn a lot by reading Country of Poxes—a text that focuses on the colonial continua of smallpox, tuberculosis, and syphilis—you’ll also learn, I think, to think differently about the tendency to accept suffering and death. The book historicizes contemporary diagnostic tools, dominant and subordinate ideologies of care in health, as well as the struggle for radical alternatives to the “fragile” health care systems we currently have. Mukhopadhyay’s articles from Briarpatch and Upping the Anti: https://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/the-labour-of-care https://uppingtheanti.org/journal/article/19-care-as-colonialism Country of Poxes: https://fernwoodpublishing.ca/book/country-of-poxes