librarypunk - 096 - Digital Labor feat. Miriam Posner

Episode Date: July 10, 2023

Miriam is back to talk about her Digital Labor course and how it went teaching undergrad IT students to think critically about tech and logistics. We also cover student anxiety and why Justin could never get a BBL. https://twitter.com/miriamkp  https://bsky.app/profile/miriamkp.bsky.social Course syllabus. https://miriamposner.com/classes/dh150s23/  Media mentioned Zizi Li: influencer labor. https://www.zizili.net/ https://westernkabuki.podbean.com/e/vtube-nation-ft-j-aubrey/ Acid Horizon: Data is Dead Labor. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr3tE0D7UhI  https://baki.fandom.com/wiki/Jack_Hanma https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14549466/ https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520383876/resurrecting-the-black-body

I'm Justin. I'm a Scoutcom library. My pronouns are he and they. I'm Jay. I'm a music librarian and my pronouns are he and him. We have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes. My name is Miriam Posner. My pronouns are she and her. And I am an assistant professor at UCLA in information studies and digital humanities. And generally kind of a disorganized person, Kihei, but happy to be here, nevertheless. Happy to have you back. I appreciate it.

Welcome back. So you were teaching a course that I was really interested in, so we wanted to bring you on to talk about it, because I wish I could have taken a course like this. I think the title of the course was just digital labor, right? Digital Humanities 150 is digital labor. Yeah. Yeah, I had taught a class on digital labor,

but like a decade ago. So this is my first time teaching it again in a long time, and a lot has changed since the last time. So it was really interesting. Who was the last time? It must have been like 2012 or 2013. And it doesn't, I don't know, in my head it doesn't seem that long ago. But then when you think about, you know, the advent of like easy to access AI and, you know, the ubiquity of Uber and like all that stuff was kind of new, like, that wasn't really on our radar a decade ago.

So it definitely I don't think I used anything from the previous syllabus actually Oh sorry my toddler is here So we have to hide from him So I kind of had to rip it up and start again But you know it's something like I I think about all the time

And probably a lot of people right now And yeah I don't know that there is like a natural place right now at UCLA for a class like that to fit. We do we're we have an excellent labor studies major actually at UCLA but um right now there aren't faculty kind of teaching on digital topics in that program. So I was really interested in teaching a digital labor class and I'm you know I'm assuming it's on a lot of people's minds right now because we're hearing all of the time about like stuff happening in the tech industry or stuff the tech industry is doing to the working lives of other people. But it's kind of interesting that there wasn't

necessarily a natural place at UCLA for a class like that to fit in. So, yeah, like we have a really good labor studies program at UCLA. We're really fortunate. But just by happenstance, like there aren't faculty in that program right now teaching on like digital topics. And, uh, and so it just seems like, oh, here's an opportunity to teach something that I care about. And that's probably on the student's minds as well. And, you know, it fits in to digital humanities or information studies, because both of those are so kind of catch all that, you know, they can accommodate something kind of broad. Yeah. And it seems like from the readings, I got the idea that you wanted to focus on other types of workers that might be like service industry or pink collar or care work

that would be of a lot of interest to people in digital humanities and information studies because that's probably the fields they're going to go into as well. Yeah, it's so interesting. You know, in preparation for like putting the syllabus together, I looked at a lot of other syllabi from people who taught like similar courses. And there are some like incredible examples out there. I think of, like, I looked at Dan Green syllabus, at Maryland or Karen Gregory at the University of Edinburgh, along with a ton of other people whose names I can't remember. And there are so many different approaches to, like, teaching the topic. Like, I noticed Dan did his industry by industry, which was really interesting because, of course, like, every field has its own, like, issues and specificities. But I guess I was really thinking about undergrad. You know, like what is going to be on their minds right now?

And so rather than like be really doctrinaire about like trying to get them the canonical take on this topic or, you know, being really encyclopedic in coverage, just thinking about like what's going to grab them and keep them awake at night or like what are they going to be thinking about when they ride the bus? Yeah, I just really wanted it to stick with them. Yeah, it's probably roughly the way I would organize this course if I had to build it, think. Yeah. And I like that you end it with like, what do we do, action-oriented ending week, which is probably a lot of what we're going to talk about. Yeah.

There's part of me that's just like, I wish, you know, I would enjoy building a class like this. It was really fun. It was a good excuse to read a lot of stuff or listen to a lot of stuff that I hadn't, you know, I knew existed, but hadn't had time to sit down with. I really liked the podcast, as always. I was reading the one article I didn't get far in it, but it was about digital domestic labor. And it's about closet cleaning videos. And then you have another one about AI generated fashion models.

But what I would have done is I would have done like a week on V-tubers because I think they're fascinating as an industry. Because it's like sex work for teens. Yeah. And no one wants to like acknowledge it. It's so wild. Well, you know what? if I, I realize that, like, I've never felt, I don't know, I guess I've finally gotten to an age where, like, I don't totally understand what's happening on the internet anymore. I'm only 30 and I'm already there, so it's, yeah.

I have to say, yeah, I mean, the only reason we covered, like, the closet decluttering videos and the AI models is because, um, Vee Vee Lee, who's a grad student at UCLA who studies these and similar topics, influence or labor in particular, kindly agreed to be a guest speaker and offered two of her pieces. Like those topics hadn't even been on radar. Like, I didn't even know that there was a whole industry of AI models or that closet decluttering videos were like a huge thing. And then I learned from my students about, you know, AI generated.

bands that had tons of fans. Like, I don't know. Yeah, it was a little bit of a sobering moment where I was like, this is very alien to me, actually. I don't get this. But I was glad. I was very glad that Zizi was willing to come and like talk to them about it because she understood all the mechanics.

Yeah. We've got to do a, we've been talking about it for over a year trying to do, we've been threatening to do an episode on V-Tubers. So I might have to get your call. colleagues information and see what they know about V-Tubers, and if they want to talk about them. I know Western Kubuki did like a behind-the-paywall episode on V-Tubers a while back, I think. Because they go into it as like not just like people in America doing it, but like it as a little industry in Japan, similar to like the idol industry that was like fascinating.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of my students, some of them were international students and some of them just had like family connections overseas. So like one of them had spent her childhood in Taiwan and another one had in Hong Kong. And they were very conversant with like internet subcultures abroad. I mean, it was just like a very global discussion. It made me realize how like provincial my own understanding of the internet is compared with them. But Zizi understood that. Yeah, I think definitely there's like this hyperconsumption aspect to it where everyone needs

to understand everyone else's topics of conversation. So then you pick up like, oh, this is a, this is like a common meme in Japan. That's why we all know about it. Or like this was a common meme in China for like a week. We all need to know about it so we get each other's jokes. Yeah. So it's like with the binge watching culture,

it's like so that everyone has the monoculture to be able to talk about. But because there is so much more access and so much more, it's just like we're like glutton on it now. Yeah. so much more to have to keep up with. It's not like a monoculture. It's like just like a million things that we all have to pretend to know about instead of just being like, this is what happened on the Sopranos.

Yeah. Yeah, it really is overwhelming. I guess it was about also a decade ago that I taught a class called selfie, Snapchat, and cyber bullies about like cultures online, which was super fun. But again, it was like a decade ago. And I was looking at the syllabus and I was like, this is like I'd have to do the same thing, rip it up and start again.

Everything is different now. And when I taught that craft, you know, I felt like my students were millennials. And I was, you know, I was born in 1979, so I'm kind of on the cusp.

So I kind of, I really felt like there was nothing they were talking about that seemed that alien to me. But now I realize like, oh yeah, no, like it's not worth pretending that you're a youth anymore. I guess that day comes for all of us.

Yeah. There's a new Jim Gaffigan bit where he's like, aging isn't like a thing that just happens and you slowly realize you're old. You just once in a while get whacked in the face with the realization that you've aged a lot. Man, that's the truth. Yeah. I mean, like I said, I only just turned 30 and I work at a graduate conservatory. And even then, I'm like, what do you say?

What's going on? I mean, I'm not cool. But it's like that I felt, I feel like the range of like, what is like mutually understandable as culture TM between like you know I'm like on like the younger end of millennials where I was born in 93. I think the cutoff is like 95 or 97 I think to like you know these graduate students some of them are a very few of them are my age most of them are in their mid 20s you know even then it's like you know I'm not that much older than them and yet the gap and I I mean generational discourse is like weird, but there's something about how the internet and like our digital worlds are right now that has caused like such a gap that like it feels like it's accelerated within the past couple of years. But maybe that's just because I turned 30 and I'm like,

maybe we're just old. Maybe things are happening faster. I don't know. But it is like one pleasure of teaching classes like this is that like, you know, if you're lucky, the students get to a point where they share. what it's like, like, living from their perspective at their, like, moment in history. And it's always really eliminating. I really worry about, like, young adults their age, because, like, it just seems like we systematically eliminated any job with, like, latency of any kind, like, any freedom or creativity. Like, when I was in, when I was graduating from college, it was still possible to like aspire to be a writer or an artist, you know, to work in a magazine or in book publishing. And that's like absurd. That's an absurd aspiration for them now. So it's like what do they even, their options are so limited. I don't know if they experience it that way. But to me,

it just the pressure on them seems just like so immense. It's like either you, you work gig labor or, you know, if you're lucky, you can slot into the tech industry. Yeah, it's like, I feel like that has been one reason why, like, I've seen with, like, the writer's strike, why I've seen a lot of people being critical of the strike because they view that job as being so cushy. When, in reality, a lot of those people, like, I read somewhere that, like, some guy, he was, like, on stage winning an award and had a negative bank account balance. Exactly.

Right. Like, just because Adam Conover is like very well known and like Justin, if we could get Adam Conover on, that would be so cool. I think he's so cool. And he's great. And I want to be his. I love him. If you know him, like, please. He's great. But like just because he's very well known doesn't mean that every single person in the Writers Guild of America is sitting pretty and that writing isn't a lot of labor. But because like you said, that kind of job is like just for Nepo-based. now. Exactly. Exactly. Basically. It's like, why should Nepo babies get a union? You know, like, why should we care? And those, you know, those who don't have generational wealth are just living gig to gig, you know, as we discovered when the story started coming out about like mini rooms and Netflix and residuals, I think it was really eye-opening to see that like, yeah, people were just like scraping to get by like the rest of us. It's, uh, I don't know. You know, you read, stories about, like, writers of an earlier age and, like, how they, um, made a living and, like, found a job that maybe wasn't glamorous, but could support them. And it's just like, I don't know

anymore. Like, we talked about this on my other podcast. I do a podcast on Cannibalism, with, um, with, um, our friend who has been on the pod, uh, Kate, Terry. Um, and it's, like looking at it through, like, like, a cultural lens and, like, a media and cultural. and art and stuff. And we did an episode on art, on this really bad article called Art is Eating Itself that was like conservative fascist nonsense, but we had to, right? And we talk about how back in like the 70s and 60s and stuff, the reason why we had so much great culture and stuff is because of an apartment, like a shitty apartment in New York City was like $30. Right?

You know? There's no water. People could afford to, you know, write crap and be able to experiment. and to refine their craft and afford to live in the city where that happened. But that's not a thing anymore. So it's not just that like digital technologies have made it harder for that to be a kind of living because of how is it'll accelerated. But just that plus the material conditions of fucking rent, making any sort of creative pursuit impossible. Yeah, it's all of it working in concert, right?

So it's these like real estate investment trusts, which themselves, you know, have a, own algorithmic means of like squeezing the most possible capital out of the built environment. Those combined. Yeah, Zillow, Blackstone. I get them all confused. Blackstone. And I'll, you know, I mean, it's just, it's systematic. There's no corner of the economy where like an opportunity to exploit a person or to extract

rent has been overlooked. It's just, it's all been vacuumed up. Like now that literally we rent culture and we rent everything else, not just our house, but like everything's subscription model now, which for some things, I like a subscription model. Right. It's not an entirely bad model. It's just I don't want it for everything. It's so awful.

I hate it. I know. I don't want to buy something. Yeah. I'm going to pirate it the way that, you know, we've been doing for generations. It's so unfair that we're not allowed to do that. Yeah, it's a skill. People aren't learning anymore is how to pilot a different Photoshop.

It's a time old, like it's a tradition, tales old as time. How to click on the right link so you don't download a porn bot instead of the software. Or why not both, you know? Why not both, indeed? Yeah, Lincoln Park, numb.exe. So yeah, I do worry about them a lot. I listen in the background to a lot of these lectures by Rick Roder,

because he was a philosopher at Duke University back in 2000s. And so these lectures are from the 2000s. I think he died in 2005, so it must have been around then, maybe late 90s. And he was talking about sort of the impact of an encroaching post-modernity on students. So I think maybe our concerns are also just like we're empathetic people worried about what younger people are going to have to deal with because we've kind of landed on our feet more or less. Yeah.

I think it's natural to then be worried about everyone else. So maybe they don't see it as bleakly as we do. Totally. Because I was also like pretty cynical when I started my career. I was very much like I would make offhand comments. Like a faculty member would say like, oh, you know, students aren't learning anything. I'm like, cool, they can't take my job. Not my problem.

Like I'll be better. I'll be better at my job than them. Like, you know, I was saying that too annoy them, not to because I believe it. like reminds me of like how there was that fear mongering maybe god maybe decade half a decade ago it's weird that like i can talk in that time span now with this kind of stuff yeah you're 30 we heard shut up justin that's not what i was talking about for one 18 i've only got two hours of sleep okay i'm a little bitchy tonight you're 30 now i know you got to look i know i have to get more asleep

I'm a child. Yeah, you're 30. But no, I just got back from Philly. No, but like when there was that like article or whatever that came out that talked about how like most kids these days when they were asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, they said a YouTuber or an influencer or something. And like there was this like mass hysteria. Oh, the kids want to be YouTubers. And I'm like, how is that different than wanting to be rock stars or wanting to be astronauts? They don't get to be a writer.

They don't get to work in the culture industry. Where are they getting to exercise in creativity? Right. And there's like nothing inherently wrong or bad or weird about being a YouTuber. That's a job that people have. I, you know, I think people need to be more realistic about what it looks like. But like it was just like this like fear mongering. It's like, oh no, we forced the kids in the culture to want to be YouTubers. We've ruined everything.

It's like, you know, things are, they just change. the issue isn't that kids want to be YouTubers. No, that's not the cause of our... We have several friends who are YouTubers. Right. Yeah. We're podcasters. That's worse. Yeah, it is worse.

I'm not learning Adobe, whatever the one is for video. Oh, yeah. We learned that, actually. Premiere Pro, now that you mentioned it, we learned it for this very class. Because... Did you pirate it? No, no. Sir, I'm sure I don't know what you're talking about. We all get a free subscription at UCLA, which was amazing.

I didn't even realize that until pretty recently. So that's why I chose it because we all had access to it. And as a digital humanities class, like one of the components has to be like some substantial technical component. So I decided to make it a digital storytelling class where they like told the stories of a group of work. on video. I love that. Premier Pro and a little bit about audio editing. Very interesting.

It was a good opportunity for me. Love the J-cut. Yeah. I don't know how, I think they were a little bit like, we've got a lot going on already. And I'm not sure that they were quite a big. Learning Adobe is very much like. Its own class.

It's a thing. It's. Oh, yes. Did you talk about the movie Sleep dealer? Did that come up at all? I feel like a movie I think always comes up. I very much wanted to incorporate it, but as the quarter unfolded, I just didn't find a slot for it.

But I mean, I wish I had now because I think it might have, they might have found it eye opening. It's been on my watch list for like years now, and I've yet to get around to it. I know everything about the movie have not watched it. I've never heard of it. It's about basically people, it's easier to experience.

work to Mexico. So they have workers who pilot AIs from Mexico in the United States. And so that's how the labor is exported. Makes sense. So it's about, sort of about, it's a movie about NAFTA. Yeah. I also thought about showing, like, the same filmmaker has a short film about, I can't remember the title. It's called Why Cyber Serra about. Yeah, I saw that. That's what made me think about it. Yeah. I don't know that, like, I think that we ran out of time and didn't manage to watch that. But, like, part of the reason I stuck it on this syllabus was because one of my students, like me, had grown up in San Jose and had, like, me, listened to, like, elderly people tell her stories of how recently San Jose was made up of, like, cherry orchards and agricultural fields. And, and she, wrote in one of her responses about how that made her think about some of the ways in which the modes of agricultural labor have been kind of imported into other industries as well. And the film, Why Cicerceros is a kind of satire of a promotional video for the Braceros

program in which it's posited that laborers and I think Mexico specific, physically could like operate these automata to to pick fruits and vegetables. And it explains that like this is desirable because then we wouldn't actually have to deal with the people from Mexico. We'd just take advantage of their labor. Yeah. It lets you do ethno nationalism, but also neoliberalism. Exactly.

Living a dream. Yeah. I think it's missing a key component of agricultural labor, though, which is holding people hostage and taking away their visas. I think that's kind of like core to the whole grift. So you can't do that if you're still in Mexico. But yeah, we have tons of cross-border stuff. So I think about it a lot.

And I think about sleep dealer a lot. Yeah. Because it's, you know, I see Tamalipas plates all the time. Like people live across the border and they commute here for work. And then they got to wait, you know, two hours every morning to commute across the bridge or whatever. But, I mean, there's this combination that I like in some of the readings that I got to was it's not just the technological changes are pushing this. It's a mixture of technological and economic. And like you're saying, like the buying up of real estate, the automation has made the whole

industry really, really bad, but it's still sort of the same industry. It's, you know, commercial real estate's a big problem. Centralization is a big problem. So the destabilization of workers in retail and food service is like, yeah, you have self-checkout, but people are making hiring and firing decisions. Like, that's not obvious. automated yet. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what I kept trying to push them towards. Like, let's not reduce this to like a simple question about like, what does digital technology afford and not afford? Well, that is important. Like, we always have to zoom out and ask, like, who's making these changes? Like, who benefits from these changes? What are the like large-scale

years that are turning to make these changes happen. And I think in a way that's always like where you want to go with undergrads, because they feel so acutely like individual examples. But then the hope is that like you'll also get them to look a little bit at larger, you know, mechanisms of history that are driving these changes without being too obvious or doctrinaire. It's a fine line. I mean, because I certainly have my own pretty vehement convictions about, like, what's driving these changes. But I don't want them to, like, call home and be like, mom, my professor's a communist. You want them to get there, you know, on their own. You want them to be kind of communist on their own. Yeah. Or wherever, you know. But we did spend a lot of time talking about, like, organized labor and, like, the decline of organizing.

labor and I mean it just seemed like again it was another case where I didn't want to be like I didn't want to bash them over the head with a frying pan but like to a certain extent you just can't talk about the way that the quality of life has declined between like my parents generation and my students generation without talking about the decline of the proportion of the workforce that's unionized like it just have to. And so I was pleased with that, like, that by the end of the class, their kind of propositions for helping to fix some of the issues really did involve, like, unionization and organization of workers. Yeah, especially if you're looking for stability in your job, the ability to, to argue about how the work is organized through your union is important.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's, yeah, I, I, I, I, I don't know if you guys have experienced this. There's always an impulse to, with, with like sort of earlier stage scholars to look at different factors in isolation and to talk about, like, things they notice in isolation.

And then, but, but the, the harder challenge is to, to get them to think about things as an organized system. And that's, I mean, that's hard for all of us.

Yeah. I, yeah, let's go to the, to the, the conclusions they did, come to in your last week, I see that there's like a list of sort of like what conclusions do students come to? One of them was like reclaim our data. So what were they saying in the

class when they were talking about reclaiming their data? Well, I had, I should say, you know, that like I've been teaching for a long time. And this quarter was particularly difficult to get students to talk. I don't know if you all have encountered that or heard that. It was my first time teaching undergrads in quite a while because I've been mostly teaching in our MLAF program. And so I wasn't sure if I was out of practice with undergrads or what, but then colleagues told me that a lot of students, their age, that it's been similar kind of across the board. And I wonder how much of it has to do with Zoom classes or the pandemic interrupting their kind of growth as like participants in the classroom.

But they did grow a lot over the quarter, which was great. I mean, whenever I talk about pedagogy, I always talk about like anxiety. So I think it's always like the big thing is just getting people to trust you very quickly. I think that's important for library work when someone's got an issue is getting them to calm down. It's like the number one priority immediately. Because they're usually in a rush. They're usually have waited too long. Yep. That's so perfect.

Because that's the point where we need them. So it's always, yeah, I was a, I kept hopping on that point when I took a pedagogy class in library school. That is so true. Yeah, when you, like, like, every time I teach, like, at a certain point in the quarter, there's a moment where, like, it's like the ice breaks, you know, for the first couple course that your classes, you're sort of circling each other. And they're deciding whether to trust you and you're getting to know them and everything. thing is pretty stilted. And then at some point in the quarter, inevitably, the barriers drop, and they feel like they can trust you, and you know that they'll cut you some slack. Like, if you, you know, forget to post a reading, they're not going to, you know, bring it up

to the dean or whatever. And you can always, like, just feel that moment when it happens. And in this particular course, it took a long time. It took longer than I've ever, it's I think partly because a lot of them were CS majors and they weren't used to like this kind of class. So yeah, they were like, what does she want from us? Like what is her, she keeps looking at us expectantly and like what is she looking for? So it took us a while to just sort of figure out, you know, what the other person wanted. But anyway, to your question, so I decided like for the last class to kind of stage a little. little bit of a debate. I always hate like really artificial debates where like one side has to

argue something they don't believe or or whatever. But, but I did in this case, like divide them into groups and assign each group a different, an article representing a different approach to like addressing inequities in the labor market right now. And all of this like normally I wouldn't be quite so elaborate with like planned activities and group assignments, but you find that like when students are not naturally comfortable speaking, like you have to work so much harder and organize many, many, many different activities to keep the class like from being stultifying. But this actually looked pretty well. So the Reclaim Our Data group read an article by Ben Tarnoff, who until recently was the editor

of Logic Magazine and then it's a, you know, like a pretty well-known tech writer who wrote an article called Reclaimer Data about the fact that, like, tech companies have been making billions off of little bits and pieces of our own data. And yet, when are we going to get compensated for this information that we've shared? And so that group argued that, like, the first step needed to be demanding compensation from tech companies for the kind of property that they've confiscated from us. We had another group that looked at efforts among, like, community organizers to push back on, like, police surveillance and the use of technology to, like, surveil members of the community. And they talked about the way that, like, communities could organize around particular issues.

And they argued that, like, that was the way to move forward to, like, organize across local communities and local issues. Another group took, you know, a very tech center approach. And so they looked at that. at a piece that proposed a different way to build a machine learning algorithm such that like concepts of like justice and fairness and feminism and all that stuff is built into the algorithm itself. And so they argued like we should start there. Another group looked at a proposal for reforming labor law. In this case, the report was generated by a group at Harvard called the cleanest late agenda. And so they talked about some of the ways in which American labor law benefits corporations

to like a really outrageous degree in how we might reform law to make it easier for workers to unionize. And finally, the last group read an article. This one was also published in Logic. It was an interview with two organizers for the alphabet workers union. And so they argued that our first step should be organizing tech workers. So in reality, we could do all of these things at the same time. But, you know, in the context of the class, they had to take a position and argue for the efficacy of one or the other.

And then they did vote on it. So after everyone had presented their point of view, they took a vote. And interestingly, I think, let me just check. I think I put a little, I'll send you the link to the results. of the vote, they decided that we needed to enact better labor legislation. So there you go. The answers from my brilliant undergrad was to reform labor law, which I think is not a bad place at all to get started. Because once you look at the details of existing labor law, you're like, wow, this sucks. It's incredibly unfair. Especially how it, I was actually reading that clean slate

one out of Harvard, where it was talking about the way, like, labor law is designed to exclude large amounts of workers and can be easily used to exclude people. So, yeah, agricultural, domestic and undocumented workers, workers who are incarcerated, workers with disabilities, extend coverage to independent contractors. And it also sounds very much like it's like a major sort of like co-op kind of almost mainstream Democrat kind of position of like, yeah, yeah, we need more like democracy in the workplace. We need like 10% of the people of the board of directors should actually work there or something like that, you know. Not radical at all, but.

They're pretty mainstream positions, but you don't just hear him trumpeted that often until like, honestly, like Bernie Sanders gets up there and says it. Like, they just don't, they don't make annoying old men like him anymore. It's like, you know, they had one. We got one in the factory, but he's pretty old. Being a returning guy, but for annoying old men like Bernie Sanders. Yeah. Just a certain type of Democrat. politician they don't make anymore. Yeah.

Instead of make the kind of guy. I volunteer my dad. Yeah. Well, it was really interesting to hear them talking about it. The kids were all right. They're adults, but, you know. Even the kids like who you're not sure about, like, they're thinking. They really are.

They really are. They're good kids. Well, I'm glad they didn't pick build better ML systems because that was probably the worst option. Yeah. I mean, I have to say that that is not my favorite option. But given that many of them are CS, majors like yeah yeah that appeals to some of them for sure you know it's always like I don't know

yeah it's always like a little bit of a push and pull between like tell them exactly what to think and pretend there's no right answer at all so you know you want them to get get to where they should be but but gently well it's just you need a lot of background information then you need time to think about it and classes just like a really fast thing that kind of goes past. I feel like a lot of stuff didn't really sink into like my last couple semesters where we were just doing more symposium sort of or like a yeah, like more symposium style classes and our capstones and stuff. It was just all history majors.

We all had to like sit in a circle and like that was every class for a whole semester for history of ideas and or whatever our capstone was called. And we had to do that and we had to sit there and just like actually talk about things. Yeah. There was no getting away from it. You know, a lot, I don't even, I realize now that, like, I didn't understand half of what I learned in grad school until now. You know what I mean? Like, it takes years sometimes to put the pieces together.

Yeah. And the good thing is, like, they're always, they're always putting the pieces together. They're always comparing what they learn to what they see in the world and trying to make sense of it. I guess that's a human thing. But it's fun to notice it in your students. So I have confidence. They'll keep growing. Do you know if you're going to be teaching this class again soon?

I hope so. There was a lot of interest among my MLS students, actually. So this was, weirdly, I kind of teach in two programs, the DH program and the MLS program. And this was a DH class. And so I haven't had the opportunity to offer like an equivalent class for our MLS students, but they seemed quite interested in these issues. So I'll be on sabbatical next year.

But when I get back, I mean, I would love to teach a class that focuses on labor issues and digital labor specifically for information studies students. I know when I was at U of I, there was like a cross-listed LIS and women's studies course on digital feminism. That's smart. That I audited because I just couldn't fit in my schedule, but I wanted to talk about cyborg feminism. And one of the most controversial topics in the class actually was it,

I forget the exact name of the theory, but basically the idea that objects and items can have autonomy. Right. What is that called object-oriented ontology? Actor theory or something. Or actor network theory or, yeah. Yeah, something like that. And like talking about like the implications of like adore having autonomy

because it's like when we already are talking about like women not having autonomy or something. It's like the objects have more autonomy than women and stuff. And so I didn't know if any sort of like autonomy or it's like because like I love that like these questions of like of labor are coming up with the digital hellscape that we are in. But I just didn't know from skimming the everything like labor as it also concerns the tech itself. if we're doing any sort of like actor network theory, especially with machine learning and stuff, like the labor of the machine as well, if it can have labor or anything,

just because I'm curious. That's not my personal interest. I would just say like that doesn't really do it for me. Yeah. But one thing that I think is really interesting, and I had an incredible kind of visit with a recent PhD from UCLAIS named Brian Justy, who's worked on like the history of a few different AI systems. And Brian talked about the way that human labor is embedded in every

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you know that. But it was needed my students to learn that like, humans need to annotate data in order for it not to be meaningless. And like, Brian's special, one of his special areas is the history of capture. Oh, okay. You know, there's a really interesting history there. When it was common to get, you know, those recaptures where you had to like type out, it just kind of translate a garbled set of text into characters.

You probably know this. We were actually reading garbled Google books data. Like how the picture of training drones and should hit bicycles. Yeah. So that was really interesting with students because they didn't know that. They didn't realize that they were participants in this, you know, decades-long endeavor to train models. Yeah. Yeah, there was a thing, Asid Horizon put out a little video recently that was data is dead labor.

Yeah. And so it's how it's embedded labor is what makes all data. and I think it was Trash Future was talking about how we've hit sort of like the, you know, like the before present in archaeology because like we can't do radiometric data before 1950s because we polluted the atmosphere with too much radioactive material. So we've polluted the internet now with too much AI generated nonsense. It's not made by humans anymore. So it's AIs are now going to be eating AI generated nonsense. Speaking of cannibalism, yeah. We lost the ability to actually have a clean, open internet you can scrape.

Now you have to scrape proprietary databases, which is all academic labor and stuff, like Elsevier and things like that. True. That's true. Which means data cartels and all that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Man, it's so.

All that data is locked up for. Shit's fucked. Yeah. Shit is fucked. And, you know, that reminds me that one thing that I would do, I mean, there are many things I would do differently in the next, like, iteration of this class. but I realized like halfway through the quarter, I need to make it so that if I teach it again, like we need to talk about what to do every class because like if we wait till the end,

then you get this incredibly like dispiriting litany of the way in like the specific ways in which different shit is fucked. And I think at a certain point that really got people down, It just began to seem like we were stuck and this was inescapable and, you know, all-consuming and all-pervasive. And so whether or not that's true, you know, it doesn't help us, I don't think, to kind of sit there, sit in that place. And so I need to get better about talking about resistance every class. Yeah. Yeah. I saw someone posting about how they saw like utopianism and utopian thought, like, becoming more acceptable.

and popular lately. And like I think it's so important, especially when we are talking about subjects where shit's fucked. To like have this sort of like, okay, what is a sort of future we can, that we would want to work towards? And like being able to actually think

of what that might look like is just going, shit's fucked. Yeah. Like even if you go, well, we can fix it this way, this way. If you're just fixing things without a goal of what it will ultimately look like, then you're just like,

It's like spot treatment acne or something. You're not actually cleaning anything. Yeah. No, for sure. I'm not incredibly good at thinking in that way, but I'd love to get better. And I think, you know, the class would really be enriched by like an understanding of what an alternative might look like.

Yeah, even just using your imagination is kind of enough to, like if we were to make this look like. And it is a hard question because that's the one I throw at guests a lot. is like in a perfect society, what would what would the solution to this problem we've been talking about look like? And a lot of people freeze up. Because they want to get it right.

Yeah. Yeah. Or it's just you're not encouraged to think utopianly because it's like you want to think pragmatically because like that's what you do day to day. That's the majority of your life. That's the big insight marks gives us as most of our life is working and not really thinking a whole lot.

So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, interestingly, this came up in class a little bit, the fact that for me and for my students as well, like a moment that interrupted the tendency to think pragmatically was ironically the pandemic. Like that was a moment when very briefly, like all bets were off and all the things that you thought were certainties. Like you have to go to school.

You know, you have to go to work. You, you know, you can't get free money from the government. All those certainties were thrown up into the air. that became clear that we'd all been thinking way too small, that, like, actually everything is up for growth. And I don't think, well, I think, I think for some people you can't go back once you've seen that. I know for me it really, like, convinced me that, like,

I've been thinking way too small for a long time. There's a reason so many people transitioned during the pandemic. That's a really good point. Yeah. Yeah. Or got the leg lengthening surgery for becoming double sis. I get real long thighs. Get the Jack Hanma surgery.

Yeah. The BBL. Yeah. We get the cheap one and you go, oh, shit, I got to get it redone. Yeah, but you know, you can tie. Sleep on your stomach for a year. Yeah. That would never work for me.

The leg lengthening or the BBL? The BBL. I couldn't sleep in just one position. Oh, yeah. It wouldn't work. You have to put me in the. the cow soother thing, the cow press. Yeah, the temple grande.

Or like the weird, the weird bed from crimes of the future that, like, adjusts. Yeah, but for your ass. Right. Crime and birds could probably think it's not for you. It's just got, like, a whole cut out in the bottom, and it just moves you. For your ass. Funneled into it all night. You get a custom-made breakfaster when you're eating, so your ass is okay.

And then... Did you see Friends of the Future Miriam? No, but I'm really inspired by hearing you guys talk about. That's a good movie. Yeah, it's genuinely just a good movie. I have been talking a lot recently about digital deaths as like platforms are dying. Twitter's dying. So I decided to get myself banned to send all the, to send all the, all the things I've

been wanting to say to Ted Cruz. I went ahead and set them. And no, I got permanently instantly banned. Wow, that was efficient. It took them about a day to get them off. You were posting like addresses and stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The mom's for Liberty, I posted her address along with a photo of Bud Dwyer, I think.

Nice. He should have got me faster, quite honestly. Down into Blaze of Glory. Yeah, I said I posted my way into this mess and I'm posting my way out. Because I told my coworker that I did this and she was like, you can just delete your account. I'm like, no, I don't want to go back. I want to make sure I can't create a new account. Burn all the bridges.

Exactly. It's that Homer Simpson gift where he drives the golf cart and he burns the bridge behind him. That was me. Well, I salute you. It was, it was worth it. But the way we talk about digital deaths, I've kind of been thinking about it in terms of like we lose connections, we lose information. Like if you're over on blue sky, everyone's like, how do I find my Twitter mutuals again? How do we all get back together over here? But I've been on dying, we've all been on dying platforms before. We've been on MySpace. We were on Facebook's not dead, but like people left. Google Plus. Yeah. Tumblr.

Aim. You know, they've all like come and gone. Yeah. But some of them are also like still around. But each time you kind of lose all these connections and you lose information. And when Twitter started having all these changes, people were like, oh, my God, how do I archive my life? Like if Twitter goes down, I have like years of work here. Where does that go?

Come to think of it. How do you get in an archive? And they're asking all these. like archival questions that are really that librarians can actually answer. And the answer is give a lot of money to a university, right? The John D. Fuxmith Institute for getting your dick wet. Yeah. So you have to give your money to the John D. Fuxmith Foundation.

And but for this episode, I wanted to switch it and talk about like, because I've burned my Twitter, are we relying on social media a lot more for our work connections? Did that come up? Is that something you've been thinking about? like this centralized kind of social media seemed really important for making connections probably like half the people ever got on there. So when that dies, what kind of digital death does that mean for like your labor life? God, I know. I mean sex workers.

Sex workers, yeah. Tons of swaps are on Twitter and that's like they get to yell at Ted Cruz and tell them to, you know, rearrange the marbles in his head and then post a photo. That's what I did. You can't do that because you get banned. but sex workers are the canaries in the coal mine I guess for always have been for a lot of like changes like this but I don't know about you guys but I definitely had a moment of pause when I realized like it was it was a real possibility that Twitter was going to die and I was like I don't know I don't like thinking of myself as like someone who like relies on online connections

career wise or like beaks cloud or anything like that But when I think honestly about my career, I realize that a lot of opportunities I've had have been through connections I've made via Twitter, honestly. And so I think- I shit posted my way into like a guest lecture. There you go. I mean, yeah. So I think you could actually like assign a price tag to like the opportunities

Twitter has afforded me. I mean, arguably like, you know, part of my. my job or, you know, lecturing opportunities or book contracts, whatever. And I realized, like, I might be fucked in a way that, like, I'm not even ready to acknowledge if all of this kind of accumulated capital is burned. Yeah. I don't know. That's the cool thing about digital deaths is you get to grieve your own death.

You don't get to do that with your physical death. You only... And most of that's something to think about. Imagine your own funeral and like watching all the people say nice things about you, like making your death and watching people say nice things at your funeral. Like we get to have that. You get to mourn your own death. And so I think that's what's really interesting about it because people aren't very good at dying because you only do it once generally.

So that's why people are really bad at like getting their bank accounts set up, getting their will done, getting their paperwork done. People are bad at it because they don't have any practice. And that's why I think digital deaths is so interesting because we like, oh my gosh all my documents are gone oh this is a huge pain in the ass to have to do and it's sort of preparing you in these ways for your actual death where you're like oh someone is going to have to deal with all my crap i i probably should put it you know in a folder somewhere so that they know how to deal with it when i um so when i got top surgery um i was terrified as soon as i got

the appointment scheduled that i would die no one has ever died getting top surgery um because it's it's just liposuction that's fancy it's like you know it's it's a double's mastectomy like it's fine and then they contour it and looks lovely yeah it's like it's a really low risk surgery but surgery freaks me the fuck out I don't like being put under I don't I'm a control freak I was like well yes I'm gonna die but I was like I have no other choice now do I and my um my gender therapist at the time was the only person who who's ever done cognitive behavior therapy on me and it actually be helpful and good and not just gaslighting lib bullshit. Where she was like, well, hey, it's not a zero percent chance.

So there is a literal chance. You're not wrong to be scared of that. But let's look at, you know, that's probably not the most likely option. But hey, if this is going to be the thing you fixate on, let's say you die. What happens? Walk me through what happens. What happens if you die on that operating table? Okay.

this, this, this, all right, well, what can I do if I go home? What can I do to repair like my passwords and stuff in case my dad, in case I die? So my dad can get them or something, right? Like, she had me like walk through that, like, that may be like, would give me some sense of control over the situation to help me calm the fuck down a bit about being like, I'm going to die in the operating table. It's like, okay, what happens if you do? You don't have control over that. So what can you do to like, what does that actually look like? And part of that was like thinking about like, well, I should probably maybe have my password for my computer somewhere in case people need to get into it.

We're on my passwords for everything else's or my whole life and career and everything is in this stupid machine I paid a grand for, right? Like, someone should probably be able to get into that if I, if I kick the bucket on the operating table. So, yeah, a therapist had me like walk through that. And it's like weird to think of like, oh, if I don't give someone my access to my passwords, they're just shut out of everything. I'm not some celebrity where they'll grant access to my family members.

It was like, it was an interesting exercise to walk through. And it helped. I still thought I was going to die. But, you know, it helped for a little bit. That's a good, like, lesson, actually. Yeah. Just like take that problem seriously and plan for it. Yeah.

I want to shout out my I.S. colleague, Tonya Sutherland. There was a book coming out about, like, digital death. I have not read it yet, but Tonya is a genius. And so I'm sure the book is also a work of genius. I think I have it either pre-ordered or something. Oh, resurrecting the black body, race and the digital afterlife. Ooh. All your.

That sounds real good. Yeah, I think there was another book. Yeah. Actually, I think we're good on covering everything. If you do want to wrap up, if anything, you want people to check out, if you do have any upcoming papers. Or if you want somebody to follow you on Blue Sky or Twitter or, uh. Is it blue sky or blue sky or blue sky? I think Blue Ski is that little cartoon dog.

I've heard people say Blue Ski. I don't know. Yeah, I assumed it was Blue Sky, but what do I know? I did too. Nothing. I don't do anything, yeah. Well, they can follow me on either platform and all platforms. Are you on the Blue Sky?

Yeah, Marion K.P. Are we friends yet? Which I only chose initially because Marion Posner wasn't available. Now it's more ever handled. And I have nothing, nothing to promote. I'm just like spending the next year in North Carolina, like brood deep underneath the ground, finishing my book.

Send pie recipes. Yeah. Just send me all your good thought. Like, send me your good work thought. That's my request for your listeners. Okay. I'll put the accounts in the notes and I'll also put Tanya's book in the notes. And also your class, which is on your website.

So I'll put that there and you can see. the whole syllabus and the readings, because there's lots of good stuff in there, especially if you want to build a class like this. Yeah, thank you for being interested. You know, I haven't, I never read my student evaluations until like a year has passed because otherwise I take it too personally. So I don't have those yet, but I did, they did tell me specifically that they liked the readings.

So that made me happy. So maybe other people would like them too. Yeah, they're very practical. Yeah. They're very like straight to the point. This is what it's about. Indeed, yes. Get to the heart of the issue.

Well, thanks so much for coming on. Thank you for having me. It's really fun. Yeah, anytime. And thank you guys for your excellent podcast. And also thank you for sharing this syllabus publicly with the whole world. My pleasure. So that people can access this themselves, too.

Like, this is really cool to have access to this. Yeah, I'm glad it's useful. And, like, I've cannibalized so many other people's syllabi. So it's the least nothing to do. You said the word of the day. Yeah, for sure. Okay, guys. Thanks.

Thanks a lot. Okay. Yeah.