Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - Wrong Way with Joanne McNeil

Episode Date: December 13, 2023

One of my favorite technology critics has just published a novel about Self Driving Cars (or fake Self Driving Cars). We talk about her new book, and the hidden human worker nestled in our technological revolution. I can’t recommend Wrong Way enough! 

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. Technology criticism and fiction have a lot in common. Think about the early days of the TV show Black Mirror. Some of the dystopian visions were technology criticism, but there were also a lot of startup bros who saw those episodes too and thought it would be cool to invent everything they saw. And now our world has become a series of technological dystopias. Making fiction is a lot harder to pull off. So I was very curious when I saw that one of my favorite technology critics, Joanne

McNeil, had a new novel. It's called Wrong Way and it's about self-driving cars or fake self-driving cars. In Wrong Way, the cars have hidden sears or drivers tucked inside the vehicles. Joanne and I recently got together to talk about her novel and technology and labor. I want to start with this idea, this comedic bit, which is the core of this novel. The idea that at the heart of all this world-changing autonomous technology is a human, a human worker secretly nestled inside. And I'm wondering if you could talk about this idea. Did you start with this on a comedy level, or is it the distillation of a philosophical

inquiry that I think is central to a lot of great technology criticism of our time, including yours? criticism of our time, including yours. Yeah, I mean, this is inspired by the mechanical Turk history, which keeps coming up again and again, that with automation, automation is often designed to mimic humans. But in fact, in practice, very often that automation is humans mimicking technology, mimicking humans. So this feedback loop of humans hiding themselves for the customers or the users of a product, being unaware that they are in a way interacting with other humans through this like very alienated process of automation. And I was thinking about how there are numerous examples of mechanical Turk-like technologies, things like the content moderators on Facebook for a number of people,

they might think their posts are flagged and removed because some word triggered AI in a very abstract way. When in reality, it probably was somebody who was in this process removing a post that was seen as objectionable and an actual human doing this surveillance style of labor and i mean in in the world of ai there are numerous examples right now with the self-driving cars there are remote operators who uh get involved in the driving process quite heavily from my understanding. So they might look on the road like this marvel of technology that is going through the streets of San Francisco entirely on its own, entirely programmed. But in fact, there is someone very not well-paid who is in a call center style setup, who if there is a problem with the cars, and there aren't that many self-driving cars on the road, by the way, if there is a problem with one of them,

this worker will get involved, will help with the troubleshooting, not necessarily with a steering wheel in their hands, like one would think of as like remote piloting, but still a part of the process of a self-driving car. And, you know, with all sorts of labor, workers have this perspective on the customers and the users that is quite unusual. I mean, I think about someone like a housekeeper who knows the people in that house possibly better than they know themselves, because she sees their mess. She sees what they leave behind and what they don't care about. And this view you have in these often menial jobs, and I'm speaking as someone who has worked a lot of these menial jobs, I've cleaned a dentist office, I've up in the work environment, who I could also see for who they were,

but the customers and the users, these people that I would have this view on just by nature of my position as low as it was. I've had a pretty spotty work history. I've been lucky to have some really great jobs. I've been lucky to have a few nice things happen work-wise. But I've also had some really terrible jobs. And some of those terrible jobs really shaped me who I am as a person. And I'm also someone who writes commentary about technology. So I follow the industry very closely. And at the point when I started the book, I was seeing in that summer of 2018, a lot of reporting on the potential of self-driving vehicles. And it just struck me as incredibly absurd. And somewhere in that nighttime brain, those two aspects came together and I got this novel going.

It's fascinating that you bring up house cleaners, because that seems like the most anti-tech story of all. But there is something about the hidden labor that, you know, that is almost the technology. The companies pride themselves on making the labor hidden. And there's something about the novel that I feel like how you deal with this secrecy I find really interesting because, you know, you could say on the one hand, the secret drivers are one TikTok video of being, you know, exposed. But, you know, it's only one of the open secrets. You have all these hyper-progressive mission statements of the Google-like AI car company that you tell us about. We have the tech CEO manifestos that are cringey because we recognize their real-life counterparts.

It almost seems like your plot device works because there's so many lies that we're already accepting about labor already. Oh, yeah. That's what I was going for with this book is like the illusions we can, we are willing to live with, because it's too hard to, to live outside them. So, for example, if Elon Musk were exactly the way he was, but he showed up on his platform X and started saying, well, I've been reading this great book called The Communist Manifesto. I've learned all these great things from it. I mean, what difference would it make if he was saying things like that and still

being the same person he is today? And it's just, it's the frustrating moment that we're in right now, this like divorce of what people say and what they do in positions of power, how free people are to act, to continue to gather power and gather to, you know, their quest is money and power, but they can say anything on the way up. Yeah. But I like your idea that people wouldn't care even if they knew the secrecy. And that seems to be with the company itself. Like they're not even really trying that hard. You know, you could imagine that, you know, keeping a secret like this would at least require you to pay the people responsible

for keeping the secrets really well. But that's not even on the table for the drivers or seers as they're called in wrong way. Yeah, this book is labeled science fiction I know as someone who reads a lot of science fiction this is barely science fiction it's pretty close to the technologies that are already available to us in fact that was something I was thinking about when I was writing it I I wanted a job. I was looking for labor, some kind of like gig labor that wouldn't be any more exploitative than what these startups are demanding of their least respected,

least well-paid workers. And this is what I came up with. Yeah. So let's talk about the woman nestled into the car, the worker, the laborer, Teresa. She is a working class character. She's not an Ivy League educated, well-dressed, ramen-eating striver. She's not an Ivy League educated, well-dressed, ramen eating striver.

We don't really see a lot of in this world because she's someone who seems to actually need a job. Oh, yeah. And this is another thing that you can see in the research that Uber drivers tend to be a lot older than Uber passengers. And it just kind of, if we're going to talk about generations, that to me feels like very relevant here. Why are people who perhaps didn't have retirement saved driving Ubers? That's something I wanted to show in this book like what happens um when you don't have a safety net and in this case that that this is a woman who's a working class woman I don't see a lot of working class women in fiction and I I wanted to show someone who is not this grizzled kind of character that you'd see in really like pandering sort of fiction about the working class you know this like hairdresser with a heart of gold kind of you know those characters

that you see in Ben Affleck movies they're the waitress they've got like a heavy she would have a heavy Boston accent I wanted someone who who is more like the working class that I know which is that she reads a lot she goes to see French films cinema like she has passions and interests but she doesn't have that ambition necessarily to go further than that it's and this was something that I I found like first of all I have to say like it's clear that this isn't a stand-in for me because anyone who's met me knows I am very ambitious and I couldn't have written this book if I wasn't ambitious like that's something that I I grapple with all the time I grapple with how much ambition is okay. Sure.

But even Teresa, you know, you say she doesn't have ambition, but she was also like, you know, had opportunities taken away from her. Yeah. Yeah. That was important for me to depict is that, you know, if you express that ambition, if you throw your hat in the ring, there is no guarantee. There is no meritocracy. So at this stage in her life, she's kind of given up on the big, big dreams. There have been times in her life that she has had those dreams. But even still, I would say her goals have always been quite modest. And it was important to me to show someone who, even with the modest goals she sets for herself, they're incredibly difficult for her to access.

It's interesting because all this great technology that we've witnessed and lived through these last two decades, in theory, is supposed to make the American dream easier to attain. But it almost seems in the world of your novel, especially for Teresa, it's more, you know, to quote your title the wrong way. Well, in this book, it was very important for me to show kind of a divide between the working classes and the middle class and the upper middle class in particular. So these cars, these fake self-driving cars, they're not for the ultra wealthy. They're not for the billionaires.

But someone who is maybe the tech worker class of middle class to upper middle class who can see perhaps they have family members who are who are working class perhaps they have family members who are poor perhaps they you know perhaps they got a scholarship to university and they know how how fragile social mobility actually is they're the ones who are going to appreciate self-driving cars because then they don't have to interact with the working classes, the gig workers. Yeah, yeah. And you also set this up as a Boston versus New York thing. What is that about? I get

the feeling you really must roll your eyes every time you see a New York versus LA piece. Oh, wow. I guess it's Boston versus the world. First of all, it's Boston versus the world first Boston versus Silicon Valley and Boston versus New York. Definitely. I mean, the thing about growing up in Boston is I you've lived there. I mean, you know, it's it's a Yeah, so for me, this, you know, this hits personal to like, I don't, you know, I felt trapped like i don't you know i i felt trapped there and you know so you know being pulled back you know especially for someone in the character you know your character and your story leaves new york to go back to boston so i feel like you know

i see where you're going for here but what what is this about well it's what the tech sector in Silicon Valley has in common with Boston is distorted history. I mean, the Silicon Valley is forever lying about its origins. Every technology has to be new, even if it's something very old, like Substack did not invent the newsletter. It just created new fancy branding. And just like, it's something that you notice when you follow these companies, how various co-founders are raised or how various stories about their own history, what they do to kind of like weave their own narratives, their own histories. I thought it was really interesting to put that in conversation with like the lies about history that Boston tells this kind of like storybook, John Quincy Adams slept here,

Paul Revere's house. Here's where the pilgrims and the Native Americans were friends on Thanksgiving. It's this cover-up of stolen lands that's immediately fake and ridiculous. I want to come back to one last question about Teresa. I feel like, again, thinking of this through line of the exploitation of labor that certainly exists before the iPhone and AI car revolution to the present. I wouldn't call your book of how to give someone a life who is fairly acknowledged not just by the company but most of the world and just to kind of like show how an ordinary life if you see it closely it can be quite quite fascinating full of drama full of

poignancy and this is what what the best of fiction offers us is that window into someone's world that you'll inordinarily see and I in writing this character I was thinking a lot about the women that I grew up knowing in the city that I grew up in, Br opposed to the women I would see in, in spaces that I'm literary spaces or art world spaces. And I, that I hadn't seen lives like hers in fiction. That's, that's what, what ultimately drove me to,

to write this book. Yeah. So we should say that this is your first novel, and I have such a personal question. You know, I really, really have been moved and learned a lot from your writing on technology, your nonfiction technology. I'm curious for you, having done this piece of fiction,

which I also feel serves as technology criticism, what are your thoughts on which one might work better or which one you want to spend more time doing in the future? I am always wary of novels that have an agenda because that sometimes feels like, well, why aren't I just reading an op-ed but at the same time we everything has politics and myself as a technology commentator critic uh my politics are are pretty inseparable to anything that i do so if this if this book is politically useful i I'm not going to distance myself from that and just say, I'm a serious novelist. How dare you say that I wrote an op-ed about Uber that could have been 800 words. I wrote a novel.

I mean, a book is what readers interpret it. And I hope people enjoy the journey. I hope people read it generously as this what I hope is an experimental and unusual and strange journey through a character that also is a commentary on this tech landscape of horrors we're in the middle of right now. Well, let's leave it at that, Joanne. Thank you so much for taking some time out to talk about Wrong Way. Oh, thank you so much, Benjamin.

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