Tech Won't Save Us - Escaping the Processed World w/ Chris Carlsson

Episode Date: August 1, 2024

Paris Marx is joined by Chris Carlsson to discuss Processed World, a tech-critical, anti-capitalist magazine that satirized the absurdity of work in its publishing run between 1981 and 2005.  Chris Carlsson is the author of many books, including most recently When Shells Crumble. He’s the director of Shaping SF and a cofounder of Critical Mass. He was also one of the people behind Processed World.Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Support the show on Patreon.The podcast is made in partnership with The Nation. Production is by Eric Wickham. Transcripts are by Brigitte Pawliw-Fry.Also mentioned in this episode:You can find the full archive of Processed World on the Internet Archive.Chris wrote about his experience making Processed World in Notes from Below.Jacob Silverman wrote a great piece on the legacy of Processed World for The Baffler.Support the show

There is these ways of engaging with these tech booms that doesn't mean you have to buy into the logic of, oh, I've got to make a million dollars and be a startup and cash out and all that stuff. I think there's a way of making choices in this world that people tend to forget that are available to us. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, made in partnership with The Nation magazine. I'm your host, Paris Marks. I'd like to say thank you to the people who reached out to let me know I was mispronouncing Kamala Harris last week.

I will make sure not to do that in the future. So thanks for that. This week's guest is Chris Carlson. Chris is the author of many books, including most recently, When Shells Crumble. He's the director of Shaping SF and a co-founder of Critical Mass. And the main reason he's on the show today is that he was also one of the people behind Processed World. If you're not familiar with Processed World, it was a tech critical magazine looking at the computerization of society in the 1980s, the 1990s, and, you know, had a few issues in the early 2000s. But as we talk about criticisms of the tech industry today and all of the things that these major corporations have done to our societies, it can often feel like this is something that just exists now, right?

That we're just realizing over the past little while. But the truth is that people have been criticizing these technologies and how companies were using computers to increase their power for much longer than the past five or 10 years. And I think that is what is so important about something like Processed World, especially looking at it now, is that we can see the evidence that this has been around for a long time. But we can also see how so many of the critiques that were being made in the 1980s and 1990s are so similar to the types of things that we're criticizing major tech companies for today, right? It seems like these things are novel because they have all this power now. And because you know, the internet has allowed them to expand so much. But really these were things that were around much earlier in the

row load of computers as people were starting to see computers change the way that work was done and that other, you know, aspects of society were changing as well. And so naturally I wanted to have Chris on the show to dig into all this with us to understand like how process world came to be and the perspective behind it, right? Like what was driving it and what the similarities are between then and now and also what the differences are, because I think that there are some there as well. It was a real thrill for me to have Chris on the show. I've had the pleasure of meeting him a couple times now. And he's such a great person to like hang out with and chat with, you know, even in this interview, you'll probably be able to hear that we could have gone on

much longer than we did. Just kind of digging into all these different stories that Chris has and, you know, the experiences that he has with this industry, with these technologies, and just pushing back against corporate power for so long. Before we get into the episode, I will say that if you've never heard of Process World before, I highly recommend that you you've never heard of Process World before, I highly recommend that you go check out the archive of it. Every issue is available on the internet archive. It has been backed up there so you can dig through the pages of this magazine that has these criticisms of technology, these fun comics and illustrations that really take

digs at major tech companies and what they're doing to the world, it's really worth your time just to like have a little browse through and take a look. And I'll also include a few articles in the show notes that people have written since then that, you know, talk a bit about what Process World was and what it meant in the time that it was around and what it can still mean for us today. So I hope you go take a look at that. And in the meantime, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Chris Carlson. If you do, make sure to leave a five-star review on the podcast platform of your choice.

You can also share the show on social media or with any friends or colleagues who you think would learn from it. And if you do want to support the work that goes into making the show every single week so I can keep having these in-depth conversations that hold the tech industry to account, you can join supporters like Aaron in Los Angeles,

Thomas in The Hague, and Jill from Edmonton by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus where you can become a supporter as well. Thanks so much and enjoy this week's conversation. Chris, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm so happy to be on your show. Thanks for inviting me. No, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. You are someone who has just been working on these issues, if it's okay for me to say, since long before I was even born. Since the dawn of time, I've been trying to say it won't save us. God damn it. So it's a real thrill to have you on

because you know, you are one of the people behind this magazine processed world, which was really doing like, you know, we talk about the tech criticism that's happening today and how it feels like more people are critical of technology in this moment. But this is not a new or novel thing, right? People have been looking critically at technology for a long time in various periods, and it feels like it kind of ebbs and flows in particular moments. And in the 1980s, when you and some of your friends and stuff were working on Process World, this was another one of these key moments that I think a lot of people today who are interested in technology, who are critical of technology, don't often think about

what happens back then. But I think knowing those sorts of things can inform us, can give us a better perspective about what's happening now. And so I wanted to start by asking, how would you describe Processed World to people who aren't familiar with it? Well, I've done that quite a few times, so I'll try to not make it sound like a canned slogan, but we used to always call it the magazine with a bad attitude. And it was essentially a publication that was started in the financial district of San Francisco when a number of us were temp workers down there. And several of us had recently learned this incredibly exciting new skill, word processing, which doubled our wages

because we used to be typists. And then suddenly, you know, learning this new way to handle magnetic media and put it in and out of a box and so on and so forth, it just suddenly became a highly paid skill. It went from $6 to $12 an hour in 1980. That was quite significant at the time. The magazine was essentially about the experience of working in the modern office life as it started. It became a broader focus for the magazine over its life. We published 32 issues over 13 years, about three times a year. But we always characterized it as the underside of the information age, as told by the alienated wage slaves of the modern office and beyond.

And we met a lot of the readers and writers by actually going out into the streets of the financial district on Friday afternoons and selling magazines directly. And that we did primarily by wearing strange costumes. We made these papier-mâché video display terminal heads with mylar screens, this type material. And, you know, the brightly painted, it said, IBM, intensely boring machines, or GM, general monotony. And then other ones were like commodity boxes that, you know, look like common products on the shelf in a supermarket, like a Tide detergent box. And it looked exactly like that, except it said, bound, gagged, and tied to useless work day in, day out for the rest of your life.

And then, of course, you turn around and there's all the ingredients of the modern world, the modern office life of fluorescent lights and green screens and bad air, et cetera, et cetera, wage labor, things that we were doing, I think in a way to really understand the magazine, which sets it apart from a great deal of what was going on then of the old and new left, and continues to be fairly unique even in this era, is that we took our own experience as our starting point. We really wanted to look into what we were living through and what we were experiencing, and recognizing that the alienation and futility and anger that we'd had as a daily experience, you know, dealing with stupid bosses. I mean, everything's quite normal. Everybody has these experiences at their jobs. But why? Why should we put up with this? And the funny thing was that almost everybody in our world that we were of ourselves and people that we knew, you know, we'd look around at the job

and it was like, well, we're all here, these ugly suits or stupid clothes and pretending to have a good attitude at your job, make sure you keep your work. All you had to do was scratch the surface for a minute, and you'd find the other person or multiple different people with bad attitudes like your own, like, this is stupid. Why are we here? That bifurcation we experienced right from the beginning was that I'm not an office worker. I'm just here for a little while making some money because I got to pay my rent. But that's not me. That's not what I do. I'm actually a dancer. I'm a photographer. I'm a historian. I'm a writer. I'm a this, I'm a that. source of the magazine's excitement and humor and brilliant insights at certain moments and completely dumb ones at others, and gave rise to a great deal of creativity because we recognized that we were not going to get any sense of creative fulfillment by the so-called job. That was laughably obvious. But we were stuck there, so we might as well make the best of it. And so we ended up purloining a great number of resources from those

rather bulging cabinets in the modern office that were around in 1979, 1980, 1981. We stole all the paper for the first three issues. We had a little slogan, a ream a day keeps the paper bills away. And so you had half a dozen people stealing a ream of paper every day. Pretty soon your office is full of stacks of paper. And we had access to our own little multi-lift printing press. And we got a typesetting machine, which at that point was quite a big deal to have real typesetting. After 1991 and desktop publishing, it all seems kind of, so what? Everybody's got that. But there was a long time there where it was dot matrix printers and daisy wheel IBM Selectrics, and that was it.

And if you had a typesetting machine with photo typeset galleys coming off of it, you actually look like a real magazine. So Process World had a kind of a professional appearance, even though it was very much of an underground zine. One of the things that I really love that you brought up there is that the magazine is not just like, you know, people from the outside looking in and kind of analyzing what is happening here. But a lot of or most of the contributors are people who are actually in these offices who are doing these temp jobs, if not working these proper jobs in these big banks and big technology companies and all this

sort of stuff, and then relaying back their frustrations at doing this sort of work and how they would be preferring to do something different or how they were seeing, you know, their workplaces change. And also how they were trying to like throw some wrenches into the machine to try to, you know, slow things down, to try to stop things from working properly. And like going back to read it, it just feels so, I don't know, it's fascinating. But it's also like to get these insights from the workers themselves who are doing this work feels particularly novel as well, maybe, or maybe something that we don't see enough of today in some of the criticism that happens. We had a format that we developed kind of not spontaneously, and we didn't think it up ahead of time. It just evolved from our work, which was called Tales of Toil. And so people began writing these amazing stories of their work lives and you know if you stop and think about it for a minute you realize even today the hardest thing to find out is what is it really like to be at work it's our greatest public secret we don't want to talk about it everybody acts like

oh you have a problem at work well just quit and get another job move on don't if you don't like it leave that's the answer it's never oh, you should actually organize and transform your experience at work. Or even more profoundly, the work you're doing is a complete waste of time and nobody should do it. The whole place should be shut down immediately because it's destroying the planet. Whether it's banking, insurance, real estate, advertising, military production, the production of shoddy goods that last for six months instead of lasting for 75 years. I mean, we don't get to participate at any moment in our society in a discussion of the aggregate division of labor, of why we do what we do and how we do it. And that, to me, was always underlying the processed world experience, which was worth mentioning that

when we started the magazine, Jimmy Carter was still the president when we were working on it. And we were quite sure he would win re-election and that Reagan was a bumbling idiot, would never possibly get elected. That's just how we feel about Trump today. And shockingly, he did get elected. And of course, the whole kind of militarization society that accompanied his election win was part of that new experience that we were living through. But what we really didn't understand at the time, and now we can see quite clearly in retrospect, 40 plus years later, 44 years later, that was the dawn of neoliberalism. I mean, really, Carter was the dawn. I mean, he was the first president that started privatizing things really drastically and deregulating them and bringing in the market and the idea that

private business should take the initiative more and the state should step back and the state's more of a problem than a solution, which, you know, that may well be. I'm not a big statist either, but the idea that, you know, the market is somehow the happy answer for every problem is just laughably stupid. And yet we've had to suffer through this for decades now. But that's when it started. And we didn't fully grasp that that's what was going on. I have to admit, you can't see in the pages of the magazine, especially the first 10 issues or so, really no sign that we're understanding this deeper transformation that's underway. Although we saw it in much the way that the left saw it at the time, you know, attack on organized labor. And we were critical of organized labor. So that didn't

necessarily become the defining feature of our interests of how we understood it, but we could certainly understand that the state had been turned against the people as it were. And so it made more sense for us to spend time rather than, you know, there was plenty of things that we were connected to, you know, fighting against the wars in El Salvador, fighting against apartheid in South Africa, supporting various liberation struggles around the world. Everybody was sort of like, yeah, sure, the Iranian revolution, great, hopefully, but

then of course not, as it turns out. But that and the Nicaraguan revolution, same story. You know, revolutions have a way of turning on the sour rather quickly. But there was a lot of hope and enthusiasm for them when they first happened. And seeing the social movements that accompanied those revolutions in the United States, particularly here in San Francisco, we had a very strong movement amongst the Sandinistas all lived here before they went back to Nicaragua and made the revolution. And ultimately, we came to know some of those folks who moved back to San Francisco afterwards and resumed their lives here. So there's a way that we were connected to all that

stuff. But what we really thought, no, we should be looking at our own experience. I mean, my life as a straight white guy in San Francisco is actually worsened by the sexism and the racism and the homophobia that I live in the middle of. That's making my life worse. Not to mention the fact that I'm expected to spend my life doing completely stupid things under ridiculous bosses who are dumber than me telling me what to do and following rules that make no sense to anybody. What kind of a life is this? My life is degraded by all these different conditions. And so let's talk about my life, not to be just selfish about it, because my life is

representative of a lot of other people's lives. Let's start the conversation where we are and recognize that a political movement that has any kind of attraction or ability to go anywhere, it better be enjoyable. It better be something you like doing. It better be something that gives you joy in the world and pleasure. Because if it's not oriented around that, it's just sacrifice and suffering, which of course is the story of the left. Oh, you must sacrifice. You must give everything up. You must work, work, work, work, work. You have to be active every day. Get out there and struggle and get out there and protest. Like, no way. Our attitude was that's the problem, not the solution. Activistism is as much of the problem as anything. And so we were always looking

for ways of creating kind of like convivial and funny ways of intervening in life. So I described how we sold magazines on the street. That was a big part of that. It was just like walking around in a strange costume, bellowing at the top of my lungs. If you hate your job, you'll love this magazine. Get one here. You know, and then most people walk by you and say, oh my God, that person's nuts. I'm not talking to them. But they'd read the box and they'd smile. And that's when you knew you got them. And then they might stop at our table, where there's a calm, usually female, standing at the table, willing to have a real conversation and make magazines available to them. It was kind of an interesting model that really worked. And then we had a gathering at a bar in North Beach every other week for several years. And we

went on strange field trips. We did a bus ride to Silicon Valley at one point where we actually went to this very large statue made by a famous communist sculptor, actually, Benjamino Bufano, who lived in San Francisco for most of the 20th century. He'd make these large Madonnas, and one of them is made out of old missile parts. It's very large, and it's very close to the NSA's Blue Cube, where they were doing global surveillance from. So we went out there with people dressed like having toilet scrubbing brushes and whatnot and tried to scrub the fences of the Blue Cube. And we all jump out of a big blue school bus, processed worlds and all of our weird props and costumes and laughing and carrying on and just having a crazy time. And then we had a big moment in front of the Our Lady of the Missiles, as we called it, because it's supposedly a peace monument in the middle of the Silicon Valley's most intense military industrial complex. So we were always laughing.

We couldn't help it, but there's an awful lot to laugh at in this crazy world, and it was staring us in the face all the time. I mean, one of the other issues I think that's worth mentioning since we're on that, we spent a lot of time being ironic and satirical. And that kind of came out of other things in the larger culture, whether it's Mad Magazine or Saturday Night Live or all these other things that are going on around us all the time. You had to do that. If you didn't have an ironic tone, you were a chump. If you were trying to be sincere, clearly you don't get it. We bought into that kind of heavily at the early days because partly we were young and radical and cool and all that sort of stuff. So in retrospect, we didn't help the world very much by embracing that so thoroughly, because invalidating sincerity is one of our problems. We haven't figured out how to take sincerity as sincerity. You can have sincere opinions about things,

and you should care about that. You should care about hearing other people's sincerity and honor it and respect it, and then build something from that, and not just degrade it and say, oh, you're an idiot. Oh, you're a chump. You don't get it if you're going to be sincere. You've got to be snide. If you're not snide, you're not on the team. That's one of the little self-criticisms that emerged for me over the years, looking back on the work we did. But it's pretty funny. You know, we had this recurrent series of different cartoons and sometimes just strange collages. We created a fake company called Contech.

And the slogan is, people like you helping people like us help ourselves, which is very much the world we still live in today. Yeah, no, it definitely is. And one of the things that really stands out about the magazine is just how funny it is and how it's filled with a lot of things to try to, you know, make you experience joy while you're reading these stories about what is happening in the world or in the office or whatnot. You were talking a bit about the political moment that the magazine emerged out of, and certainly, sure, you didn't understand everything that was going on at the moment. Some of that was just understood in retrospect. But can you also talk about what was happening in work at that moment? Because as I was reading the magazine, there was a lot of discussion about, you know, the shift away from manufacturing and

toward office work and kind of the services that we talk about today. And also the transformation of work through the increased use of computers and word processing, as you about today, and also the transformation of work through the increased use of computers and word processing, as you were saying, and these other tools that were put into the workplace and obviously had these other motivations behind them as companies were rolling them out. So what was happening in that moment that really helped to motivate this magazine and this perspective that a lot of these workers that you were associated with had about this? Yeah, good question. You know, this was the dawn of the automated office. This is when they really began rolling in the Wang computer. My first job was working on an IBM

mini computer on a terminal that had a glowing green screen. Later, when we got amber screens, it felt like a big improvement because the green was so harsh. But basically, you're using lines of code to access various programs that are already preset, and you're learning to interact with those in a very limited fashion is generally what was involved. And then word processing in those environments. Originally, word processing for me was working on an IBM Selectric that had a memory attached to it, a big box next to it that you'd put a mag card into that looked a lot like a punch card. But it was the magnetic material that ended up in diskettes later. And you had to know in your head where you were in the document and figure it out mentally.

It didn't have a screen at all. So there's a series of steps that involved learning to be in the automated office in the 1980 period. And then there was, I remember, a big conference at our Moscone Convention Center here in San Francisco called the Office Automation Conference 1982. And we all showed up there with picket signs and costumes and everything else. And we call it the Office Automaton Conference. And that's where you may have seen this logo that one of our artists drew, which is a pictograph, a little tiny square image of a white character smashing a computer on a black background. It's a really common image that started in the Pages of Process world back then in 1982. It was actually done for that conference. And so the experience we had of that sort of shifting office life was, you know, things were moving into this digital realm. And we recognized that that was partly a way of, you know, getting more people to do more work in less time,

and then eventually less people would be employed. In the early stages of that, there's a great number of us being brought in as temps. And we had friends in France, because we were kind of connected to radical political milieus elsewhere. And friends of ours from France told us, you know, that's great that you're writing about this stuff, but it won't last. The temp thing will be over very soon. We had that here in France in the early 70s when we started doing more automated offices there. And sure enough, temp things did start to shrink. And of course, permanent employment started to shrink in various capacities. So there's all that going on. Then meanwhile, we're trying to sort of think about, well, how could we actually mess with this? Like, where's our power? Because

we had the thought, oh, we're organizing at this point of circulation. You know, we're kind of Marxist about it. And we want to be able to intervene and, you know, stop them from accumulating capital by stopping the realm of circulation, which is where, you know, money moves around in circles over there. We had a whole joking campaign for Disinformation Day 1985, which was going to be May Day, of course, and just try to really encourage a massive wave of noncompliance and bad behavior at the level of data entry. But there's also different discussions that erupted in our magazine and to some extent in various workplaces about being in a smaller group and somewhat isolated in any given workplace you and the three other people with the bad attitude amongst 40 people who mostly

are acting all cheerful and like oh the work is great i love my job and this is a wonderful place but uh one of the most common things we got which we didn't publish always because it became a little bit too much like just publishing your own fan mail but people would write these heartfelt letters with even just only a pair of like thank thank God you're here. Thank God I'm not alone. So that was the key experience. I think that we tapped was people who really were very isolated and couldn't figure out how to start the conversation about their actual experience or their actual feelings. And then they would encounter a copy of our magazine, which circulated. We had over 3,000 copies of each issue going out into the world, and we sent them to Australia and England and all over the world,

plus all over the United States. We had pretty good distribution for a number of years. And 3,000 doesn't sound like much, and it's not. But if they get handed on three or four or five or 10 times each time, that can be quite dramatic. So those letters then were really a big part of what gave us juice, gave us life. And actually, curiously enough, as the internet email really kicked in around 1990, 1991, and then the World Wide Web shortly after that, letters to the processed world just dropped off and stopped happening. And pretty soon we started wondering, like, why are we publishing? Or I certainly did. Some of our other collective members were kind of angry at me because I finally made an argument in 94 that we should stop publishing.

We've sort of said everything. We've kind of taken on a lot of different issues. We had a special issue on food, a special issue on the good job, a special issue on immigration and exile, issues on public education. I mean, we tried to cover a lot of things, health issue, et cetera, et cetera, plus continuing tales of toil and continuing things that we were doing. But, you know, at some point we kind of had said it all several times. I thought, well, you know, we kind of had a good run here. 32 issues, never had anybody, nobody ever got paid.

There was no money, no advertising, no religion, none of that stuff, just hard work with people putting out their heartfelt creative experiences into the pages of the magazine and then physically producing them and physically distributing them and getting them to the post office and paying all those bills to the printer in the post office. And after that, there's no money left. As the cycle of producing the magazine began to slow down, the revenues fell really radically because people weren't renewing as quickly because we weren't sending out renewals often enough. And to some extent, we fell victim to the logic of the small magazine. It wasn't, even though our content was quite different than any other small magazine that ever existed, we nevertheless faced the economics of a small magazine in a world in which that was a dying breed. And, you know, people have still continued to start small magazines even to this day, but they very rarely last very long. You know, not more than 10 issues is a good run now. And we had 32 issues. And then we did another one

in 2001 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the first one from 1981. And that was really fun. And it was a great issue. It was one of the best ones we ever did. We called it, the theme was the greatest speed up in human history that we were living through for sure at the end of the dot-com boom in 2001. And that was so much fun that we thought, oh, well, let's do another one. Because a bunch of us had come back together and we were having fun doing it again. And so we started working on a new one. And as we worked on the next one after that, everybody started getting pissed off at each other again and dropping out and having other aspects of their lives kicking in.

And so finally, there was just two of us left standing who were quite committed to getting it done. So the issue that's called 2005, Processed World 2005, which exists, that was it. We'll never do another one. But I should say that the entire run of Processed World is online at the Internet Archive. So you can go to archive.org and if you just search for Processed World magazine or Processed World Collective, you'll find every one of our issues, including the one that never existed anywhere except online, the issue 33 and a third. And have at it. It's all there and pretty high resolution scans and easy to read and download and have fun checking them out. Yeah. And I'll include the link to that in the show

notes as well. So people can check it out, you know, because I think Process World is this really unique thing. And like, I'm so happy it did exist. And I'm so happy that like, I discovered it and got to meet you and, you know, learn more about it. I wonder like, you know, obviously, with Processed World, you're looking at the particular moment in time. But as you're saying, as you know, you published additional issues, when you get to 2001, you're looking at the internet boom and what was happening there. And I wonder, I feel like today, when we look at these issues, you know, we can be focused on newer developments. So we can see the issues with things like crypto or

generative AI, or even, you know, smartphones. But then when you start to look back and say, question the rollout of computers and what they did to offices or to life or whatnot, certain people will kind of take a step back and say, no, those things were okay. It's these things that are newer that are the real problem. And I wonder, you know, when you have this kind of longer perspective, you've lived through this, you've been criticizing these technologies for decades now. I wonder what you think about how the concerns we have today, you know, are much longer than just the past 10 years, but have existed for quite a long time. I wonder how you reflect on that. That's well said. I mean, that's exactly right, is that this stuff is so not new,

the conversation and the kind of critical sensibility that some of us bring to bear on it, your program being a key contributor to that. I'll give you a little history, two different episodes of history that I think will inform this conversation a little bit. First of all, I had gotten a job before the very first issue of Process World was published and before I even thought of it. I was hired as the male secretary for a project called Community Memory, which existed in Berkeley, California, and ultimately had an installation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, curiously enough. So for Canadians, you might want to go and look into that history of the Community Memory Project in Halifax. Community Memory was an attempt to create a

series of distributed public computer terminals where people could have access to online communication when nobody thought at that point in the 1970s that the man was going to let people have access to computing. And so these guys, including folks around the Home Group Computer Club famously, giving rise to the Apple computers and Bill Gates and all those kind of people. But one of the people in that area, in that group, was Lee Felsenstein, who was the designer of the Osborne, the very first computer in a briefcase, which we had a lot of jokes about in the processed world over the years. He funded the Community Memory Project, and they created a couple of pieces of cutting-edge software at the time,

a relational database system, and also a X.25 packet-switching software for behind-the-scenes in the internet to allow packets of information to go back and forth. And that became really desirable for big multinational defense contractors. And so my job as a secretary for their for-profit marketing arm was to print out on WordStar 1.0 nondisclosure agreements and have these defense people come through and sign these things and have discussions with our people about buying these $30,000 licenses. So I went through this whole experience of a dot-com version of a computer startup, which was called Pacific Software. That was their for-profit marketing arm.

We went from three employees, a third employee, and then we went up to 25 employees. And then a year and a half later, we collapsed because of lack of revenue and Lee not wanting to put more money in. So I lived through that whole experience then in 1980, 81, and got deliberately laid off so that I would be on unemployment. And I never had a job ever since. I was doing self-employment after that from then on and various weird side gigs and black market activities and whatnot. So that's a moment where we already understood the emptiness of the process of creating products for ostensibly a good goal, which was to create this dynamic way for human beings to communicate with each other.

That was their vision that had given rise to this left-wing computer collective in which everybody made the same money working on state-of-the-art Unix computing. But to make money, they did this thing, and they sold it to the worst people on the planet you know and then finally those people all absorbed it and took over and you know oracle actually has roots of the original relational database system that they made a community memory in their software today you realize like you know this kind of drama of you know we're going to change the world through technology is simply false and it was false then so the second, you know, in the latter stages of processed world, in 91, 92, we were publishing stuff about bicycling because a bunch of us were bicyclists. So we would come to work, you know, come to the office that I had in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco by bike. It was just my way of getting around since

the 70s. I didn't think much about it, except that I was treated as a second-class citizen on the street. So we started agitating about that in various ways. And then that gave rise to critical mass, the big, huge bike movement that swept the world, actually. Although in Montreal, they had a mass bike movement much earlier than most other cities. So we ended up connecting a little bit with those folks too later. But anyway, through that process, then we kept looking at different ways of engaging with the world. And we found people who were part of the anti-war movement who come into the city by bicycle and thought maybe they started Critical Mass because they'd showed up on bikes. And they wrote to me and said, do you think you got your idea from us? And I was like, well, no, not really. And then they came back later and the guy said,

are you the same Chris Carlson who's publishing Processed World? And I go, yeah. He said, well, that's where we got the idea for the bike right in the first place. I was like, okay, fine. So there's a lot of these funny little loops like that. But then when the magazine ends, I'm riding my bike through the financial district, and I had this idea like, oh, how cool would it be to be able to be in the room in 1905 when that guy who was Attorney General of California handed an envelope stuffed with cash to the bag man for the mayor, bribing him for whatever they were trying to do for the Southern Pacific Railroad. I thought, that would be cool.

Maybe we could do that as a computer game. So this was the era of Myst and SimCity and all that stuff. And so we started thinking about that. And then this is when San Francisco's multimedia gulch took off and everything was about interactive multimedia. And it was going to change everything and eliminate TV and radio and, you know, all other forms of communication, magazines, newspapers, books, everything was going to disappear. And it's going to be delivered to you on CD-ROMs. So, you know, we knew that was a

laughable joke. And we actually knew that the idea of interactive multimedia was a fraud, essentially, because it's not interactive, you in a box. Somebody had to put it all in there. It's all pre-programmed. And then you get to choose amongst pre-programmed possibilities. I mean, obviously, it's a different experience than reading a magazine. So, yeah, there's some art form there that might be interesting to play with. So, anyway, the upshot of it is that we just started off for 18 months trying to make a game. That turned out to be the game part of it was silly because the idea was quickly just that you're a bike messenger. You'd made a pickup. You go down the

hall with the pickup and you get in the elevator. And as you're in the elevator, San Francisco's hit with a giant earthquake, which will happen at any minute. It could happen right now, but it didn't, but could have. And so then the doors open and you've been knocked into the past. Now, how do you make your way back to the present? You have to solve problems in San Francisco history. That was the premise of the game, which sounds kind of good at first glance. And then on you deal with nonlinear media, nonlinear knowledge, and hyperlinks? And what does this even mean for cognition? Like, does this change the sense of narrative? Does this change, is the reader the writer by following hyperlinks? Really? No. But that's what people were arguing at the time was that the reader was becoming the writer. And so we were trying to come to grips with that and figure it out. And we ended up rolling out our thing in 1998 as a CD-ROM on Windows computers because we didn't have the money to do Apple.

We also ended up putting out a series of public kiosks. And the public kiosks were sitting around town. And the idea of the public kiosks was that, you know, somebody might sit down and look at it. It was free. You didn't have to put any money in a box or anything. And that hopefully somebody else would come up behind them and go, what is this thing? And they'd say, well, I don't know, some crazy commie made this weird history project.

And look at that. What do they think? They're putting this stuff out here on a computer. And then the two people would start discussing and arguing. That was, for us, was the interactivity. Like we thought the technology was a Trojan horse to really produce a conversation amongst human beings. And so to some extent that succeeded,

I can't say exactly how much it's not quantifiable or anything like that, but we do have vast logs. If anybody ever wants to do some data diving into what people actually did on our kiosks, because we have whatever they did, we can see, we don't know who did it, but we have the every user session ever on about 25 kiosks that were around whatever they did we could see we don't know who did it but we have the every

user session ever on about 25 kiosks that were around town for a bunch of years so that again that's another moment in the history of technology where there's this buzz promoting something that's a fraud interactive multimedia and yet there was ways to use it that kind of took it and turned it inside out that's what we did and that was people from Process World and myself who came together as a different kind of a project group and tried to produce this thing. So we ended up producing a million-dollar piece of software for free and giving it away for free, except for the CD-ROMs we asked $20. But, I mean, basically it was given away. And then we hit the typical cul-de-sac of, you know, the stuff stopped working because Windows changed the drivers and Apple never worked. So we were suddenly stuck with a screen that went blank after we'd

done all this work. And we had to decide, do we want to chase Bill Gates around or Steve Jobs? No, no, not going to follow those guys anywhere. Let's see if we can get online somehow. And so we created a really crude version of HTMLtml pages for a bunch of this stuff and that looked horrible and we just sort of sat on our hands and then eventually we got it all out of this very kludgy homemade system that we created and somebody by about 2005 or 6 said why don't you get why don't you do a wiki it's like duh of course by then wikimedia and wikipedia had started and we hadn't really put it together in our minds like, oh, we have a version of that of San Francisco history. Let's use that software. So we use

Wikimedia software today for our website at foundsf.org. And it's more than tripled in size since we finally opened it in 2009. And it's a living archive of the city. It's a way for people to actually see themselves as agents of history and actually contribute to the historical record. So not only do we present San Francisco's history in over 2,300 screens of material, many of them are excerpted from books, or in some cases we have entire books that have been integrated into the site, thousands and thousands of historical and contemporary photographs, dozens of videos, oral histories, all sorts of stuff. It's quite an unusual project. There's really nothing like it in any other city that I'm aware of.

But it's kind of a good use of the technology, but it's also still problematic. Like I look at it and I think, well, this is kind of static, and it's like a giant book that sprawls on and on and on, and it doesn't really give you a narrative flow unless you know what the narrative flow is you want to find. You can find it and wander through the site, but a lot of it's pretty darn random. And so how do you get back to sort of storytelling with that? That's what I end up doing in public. I do a lot of walking tours and bike tours and boat tours where I tell stories. And I've learned too much. I can talk about San Francisco history until I'm blue. And that's just part of the deal for me, because history isn't contained in convenient little

silos. It actually does sprawl in every direction at once. And there is this phenomenon now that we put it all online, or so much of it online, that it kind of necessarily escapes your logical thread at any given moment. you might hop sideways through a hyperlink and go oh now i forgot where i was let's what was the thing i was reading and you lose your train of thought well this is the everyday experience of the internet even when you're doing a in a dedicated site so anyway i guess my point was just that there is these ways of engaging with these tech booms that doesn't mean you have to buy into the logic of oh i've got to make a million dollars and be a startup and cash out and all that stuff. It's like some of us have chosen

to do the exact opposite of that. And of course, remain poverty stricken to this day relatively to the rich people in this world. But I'm not poor. I live very well. I'm not complaining. I have a great life. And I've never had to work for anybody for all these years, except for clients who come in and employ me to do various publications and whatnot for them. So I think there's a way of making choices in this world that people tend to forget that are available to us. And Processed World was really kind of rooted in that logic. And here's a funny story to loop it back to Processed World is that there's a lot of people that we met over the years and wrote for us and sent us letters and whatnot. And then occasionally we'd lose touch with them and not see them for a long time. And every once in a while,

I'd run into one of these former old friends from five or seven years earlier. And one guy in particular really stuck in my mind because he was really sheepish. He's like, Oh, God, I'm sorry, I didn't get back to you, but I found a good job. And he was really embarrassed about it. And I was like, Well, that's great. I'm so glad for you. That's really everybody wants to find something they like to do and they don't feel bad going, getting up in the morning and going to do it. That's good for you.

But he was a little bit ashamed because he thought, you know, it's contrary to the spirit of the magazine. You should always be hating your job and finding a way to mess it up. And it's like, well, that was a coping mechanism to a great extent. And it was also, you know, a little bit of a tactical approach to the larger issue of how do we begin to throw a wrench into the kind of complacent acceptance of a world in which we have no control. We want to assert that we should have control over our lives. We should control how we decide what to do with what technologies and when and, you know, what are the mechanisms which we might create to make those kind of decisions together. We don't even talk about it, let alone begin to actually engage in it. So there are many steps removed from the possibility of shaping our technosphere in a meaningful way. But I do think that's the task at hand, especially in light of

the dire condition of the climate. And I think that that is, on the one hand, what a lot of the focus is today when people are skeptical of technology or critical of technology is that, you know, they really feel that they have lost control of something in their lives, that they're just, you know, kind of being pushed along and, you know, remain reliant on these various tech companies. Or, you know, they accept like the conveniences that come with it because they recognize that there's so little power that they have that at least this is something that they get from this kind of trade-off, right? But, you know, I think when you go back and read Process World, you see this issue

of kind of control and agency is so central to a lot of the criticisms that are being made. And if I can draw a through line, I think that that remains today, right? Certainly we've had these narratives about how technology is going to empower us and, you know, be more democratic and all this kind of stuff for a long time. But I think that when you look at how people really feel about these things, a lot of people feel that it has reduced their power, right? That in kind of pushing all of this, you know, this speed up and trying to automate so much of what happens, that there has been a loss there. And that that is often, I think, what

a lot of people are reacting to when they start to feel critical of these technologies or, you know, start to find aspects of them that they don't like or, you know, that are causing their lives to feel like there's something wrong. That I think that is like a really motivating factor. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I actually did write a book in 2008 called Nowtopia, and it was an attempt to draw this through line that you're talking about and try to understand the ways that people do take really interesting and creative sort of action, I guess is a word to use, in the face of this predicament. Like, how do we reconnect with some sense of agency, ability to actually shape the world that we're in?

Because for the most part, as you correctly pointed out, that agency has been taken away from us, and we just feel like we're being pushed along in a river that you can't get out of, that we're stuck in this river, and maybe we can paddle sideways for a minute, but that's about it. And it's not entirely true. We actually do have possibilities. And in Nautopia, the subtitle was How Pirate Programmers, Outlaw Bicyclists, and Vacant Lot Gardeners Are Inventing the Future Today. And it has a long analysis about the sort of dire atomization and fragmentation of our lives that has been imposed by the market primarily, and certainly through neoliberal capitalism, making all that much more dire

and more severe. And so, you know, as atomized, sort of lonely individuals, most of us face the world from that stance in one form or another, either with or without family, with or without close friends, where do people take action? And so I thought, well, I believe in the possibility of revolution. I believe in the possibility of changing our lives. And if I believe in that, then it must be actually already underway. It should be visible that people actually do things that matter that can change the world. And, of course, there's plenty of examples of people in co-ops and doing all sorts of little projects like that. And I started noticing things, though, that in particular were defined by people taking their time and their technological skills out of the market.

When they're not at their stupid-ass job trying to make some money, they were busy. They were working really hard, in fact, harder than when they're at their jobs, and doing things that really mattered, whether it was creating a DIY bike shop and sharing skills with kids who don't know the first thing about repairing bikes or learning how to take the salvage of discarded bicycles from the waste stream of modern life and turning them into useful transportation for people, or the community gardening phenomenon in which people are out taking plots of land that are essentially wastelands in urban environments and turning them into these thriving gardens in which people grow food and begin to actually address this kind of predicament of the last mile of food and how far away it comes and all these kinds

of things. And obviously, some climates are better than others. San Francisco is very well suited to this. San Francisco is a city that once had 70,000 gardens at the end of World War II as part of the Victory Gardens Project. And what people have forgotten is that by the end of World War II as part of the Victory Gardens Project. And, you know, what people have forgotten is that by the end of World War II, 45% of all the fresh produce in the United States, and I think in Canada too, was being grown in urban gardens.

And now it's down to less than 3%. Because they said, oh, no, don't worry, we'll take it back to agribusiness and we buy it at the supermarket. It's like, well, actually, that's the problem, not the solution. That's the problem. And so, you know, this idea of of the other thing is about recomposing communities. So when you're in a community garden, you might find the person in the plot next to you here in San Francisco is from El Salvador. And on the other side, they're from Cambodia multiracial moment, and you're learning about different foods, and you're learning about different life experiences. And there's a sense of coming together on a different basis than, oh, we have a job together, or, oh, we live next door to each other by completely random chance, besides which I'll be leaving in five years and moving on to another place. So there was a way in which real communities start to emerge from these projects, even programmers who meet each other through long-distance connections, but are doing projects that aren't about making money, but are about something they care about, something they think is actually useful and important for facilitating communications, often amongst political movements. Then a ton of that kind of work done over the years, and most of it gets sort of flushed aside and forgotten about quite rapidly. But anyway, so my vision or my argument at the time in Nowtopia,

which again is 16 years ago when it was published, but I think, you know, it's wrong, but it also could still be right going forward, is that the working class broadly understood, that's all of us, you know, pretty much everybody on the planet is part of the working class, whether you make $8,000 a year or $18,000 a year or $180,000 a year, you basically have to sell yourself to somebody else and do what they tell you or you don't have a job. And you might get a union and you might protect yourself a little bit from the most onerous authoritarian moments in that work experience, but you finally still have to do what the owner tells you to do or you don't have a job. That's the problem. At the point of sale, we lose control over the world we make. And so for me, the question of technology, it's part of this menu that faces us all the time. How do we want to live? What do we want to do? Why? What are we here for? And once we start

looking at those deeper questions, then there's lots of different kinds of answers. And some of them involve, well, I think I'll use this hoe and this shovel or this vehicle that I can repair myself or this computer that allows me to communicate with people in this interesting way or whatever, fill in the blank. I'm not an anti-technology person because everything is a technology, whether it's a paper clipper or some kind of really weirdly high-tech communication or transportation device. I don't know. I already don't control most of that. Like I don't know how to make a paper clip more than I know how to make a shovel. But I'm going to use these things because I live. I'm a human being.

And so the question for me, and one of the arguments I made just to get it finally to the sort of more abstract theoretical level, is that we all engage all day long with the general intellect. We are a part of it and we reproduce it. That is to say that the technosphere, all the stuff that we understand about life, how to use a phone, a smartphone, how to make a plane reservation, how to take the bus with your smart card down the street, how to ride a bike and fix the brakes, whatever. All of that stuff is a physical embodiment of all the labor that's been done up to this moment in history. And most of it, the individual, me, you, anybody else, we don't know how the hell it works. We don't know how that got that way. But all of us together maintain it and keep reproducing it. And so the question is, can we get conscious control over the direction of the general intellect? And I think we can.

Most people say, no, that's impossible. It just has to be run by the market or has to be run by the state. And it's like, no, both of those things are problems. We see what it's producing is it's destroying the planet. So we actually have to turn that general intellect in the direction we want it to go, which is to invent a world in which we have enough of everything for everybody. Everybody lives quite well, and we have a lot of fun doing it. That seems like a pretty good goal. I'll sign up for that one. How do we do it? Well, that's the question. I don't know.

Let's figure it out. That's what human beings are good at. Yeah, no, absolutely. And one of the things I love about process world is it always takes the technology and puts it in the context of these broader like capitalist, social and economic relations, right? It's never just focusing on the technology itself or what it's doing. It's always understanding that as part of this kind of broader process. I have a couple of final questions for you before we kind of close off quickly. You know, when we think about the companies that are often in the crosshairs today, it's like, you know, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, things like that, right? Back in the 1980s, what were kind of the

companies that were really drawing people's ire at the time? Or was it just focused on certain technologies rolling out generally? Well, IBM and Apple, I mean, famously, the Apple ad in 1984, with the woman throwing the thing through the screen, which, you know, seemed to be some sort of a claim for the liberatory qualities of Apple computing, which we now can clearly say was a fraud. Not that it wasn't really obvious to us at the time. I mean, we didn't have any fantasy. We knew Apple was a fraud already, long before the 1984 moment. And we didn't like IBM or Microsoft either. We thought all of them were, you know, the behemoths which we want to overthrow,

along with Bank of America, PG&E, Wells Fargo, Chevron Oil. I mean, fill in the blank. Those are the companies we were focused on in the 1980s were the large multinationals that had their headquarters here in San Francisco, most of which are now gone. They almost all moved out of San Francisco since the 1980s. And that's a separate conversation, which I won't digress into, but it's a very interesting one about why they left and what the different companies were that left and where they went. All those things are quite interesting in terms of the evolution of modern capitalism. So our focus wasn't really on tech companies back then so much. I mean, we recognized that some of them were part of the problem, not part of the solution, but the big ones at the time were essentially IBM and Intel and Microsoft were the main companies.

And we had a lot of writing in Process World about the pollution of the groundwater in Silicon Valley that IBM was primarily responsible for, but so was Intel, and so were anybody else, advanced micro devices and all the other chip makers that were, at that point, spewing toxic waste into the groundwater down there. Many of them, again, have moved to other locales where they continue the same toxic production processes, but out of

sight, out of mind for people in California and people in the United States. Focusing on companies was always less of our issue. We had a lot of fun at their expense. We made a lot of jokes about all of them. Bank of America was often our target for us because it was the giant bank in the country and it was headquartered here in San Francisco at the time. Later got stolen by a bank in North Carolina and it's no longer here. Yeah. So I would say that even then understood that these companies were manifestations of a logic and it was the logic that we objected to. And the logic that we had perceived was one of which we were part of the cogs in the machine at the point of circulation and the circulation had to do with records of property data about

you know the flows of value and money and so on and so forth but it was very hard to get your head wrapped around that stuff then as it is today because all of it is designed to be too abstract to make any sense to you as an individual and most of it frankly should be abolished it just should disappear we'd be better off as human beings if it were to disappear. I think that makes a ton of sense, especially when today, these what we call tech companies now are some of the biggest companies in the world. And certainly IBM was a big company at the time, but the Microsofts and Apples were not on the same scale that we see today. So it probably wouldn't have made as much sense to really have those in the center of the crosshairs at the time. I'm wondering,

obviously, you got started doing this in the 1980s with Process World in looking at this world and then have kind of followed it up through now. As we were talking about earlier, a lot of the things that you identified while the technologies are different and things have changed in capitalism over those number of years, there are still a lot of similarities there between the types of problems you were identifying in modern capitalism, but also in the ways that technologies were being deployed by it that were happening then that are also happening today. I was wondering how you feel about how things are going today and this sense that there is a new wave of tech criticism or Luddism that is

emerging and whether you feel hope for what that represents or at the same time, recognizing that these companies are massive and huge and taking them on is difficult. But obviously, that's a challenge that is always there. I wonder how you reflect on the current moment after having been watching this for as long as you have. Well, that's a lovely question. I enjoy that one quite a bit. And partly, it would be easy to take a rather dire and pessimistic view. But I actually tend to think that the status quo that we're in today is unbelievably fragile. It feels like it's just like the thing that's just about to crumble. That's really how I feel about it.

And I probably felt that way at other times in the last 40 years. So that would be a reason to take it with a note of caution when I say that, because there's a lot of people on the left who have said, oh, it's all going to collapse any minute. The crisis of capitalism is finally here and it's all over. Well, capitalism is incredibly resilient. It's a system in which people, their own time and labor is turned against them again and again and again, in spite of their best interests and their best intentions. People try really hard to do good things in the world, and it's used against them over and over again, on a micro level and on

a macro level. And some of these behemoths that you're referring to today, these giant tech companies, they are disgusting. The way they behave in the world is disgusting. The way they've taken sort of a behaviorist science and turned it into this vast apparatus of data gathering and surveillance and everything else that Zuboff and other people have written about. I don't agree with all their analysis, but that part's right. But that system doesn't really work. That's what cracks me up. It's like people get so freaked out by all this stuff and they act like, oh, it works. They can control everything. It's like, no, they can't. They can't hardly control anything.

It's actually barely control anything, actually. It's just credibly out of control logic that's underway. And so the odd thing that I'm interested in is how do we find a way for human beings to make intelligent decisions together? Well, there's very little that encourages us to think we can do things collectively. We don't get a lot of experience doing that, even though we do, in fact, produce the world together every day, all of us, without anybody thinking about it that way, because we're not encouraged to think that way, and we actually don't have any mechanisms to allow us to engage in it consciously. We're just only allowed to engage in it unconsciously.

So I don't think this system can last for all kinds of obvious, measurable reasons, having to do with the rising temperature on the planet, the endless amount of pollution being dumped into the seas, and the heat dumped into the seas and the degradation of human life and the incredible biodiversity crisis. I mean, you know, the laundry list is long of what's going wrong in the world. And all of those things are converging into a crisis that can only be answered by a radical change in how everything on earth reproduces itself. We can't keep reproducing life the way we do, or it will in fact come to an end, period. So that existential reality is facing us all the time, and none of these companies are the least bit interested in addressing that

other than through advertising campaigns that wrap themselves in the mantle of being a solution, but none of that's real. So to take it seriously, it's really difficult because, again, we don't have a mechanism as a human being, individual human being, to engage in these very large questions and taking action on them on a small level is the best we can do. So there are, in every city, dozens if not hundreds of examples of communities of people who are really trying hard to do the

human and earthbound thing to figure out how to live together as earthlings with not just humans, but all the other species that are here that are still here and hopefully make it possible for them to persist as well. And to figure out what to do about freshwater, what to do about arable land and food and these kinds of issues. And if you leave it to private capital, well, they will destroy it systematically as they have been for a very long time. So we do need some version of a revolution, a revolution of social values and social power. Much of that is already clearly visible at the base of society. It's just there, but it's invisible to anybody who gets all their information from mass media. The media, as we know it, will not report on the kinds of initiatives

that people actually engage in that might meaningfully change the direction of the world. And so we're never going to see it until we're living it completely. And that's a reason for optimism, actually, not a reason for pessimism. It's like, really, keep going. Everybody out there, whatever you're doing, keep going. And know that there's millions and millions of us who are doing the best we can under really dire circumstances. And we all know what's at stake. And sooner or later, either we win or we die. Yeah.

A hopeful point to end it on, maybe? Yeah. I believe in human beings figuring it out. I actually think we could figure this out. But it's not going to be easy. I think so too. You know, even though there's, there's a lot of things to be pessimistic about today, I remain really hopeful in seeing the ways that people are trying to push back against it. And, you know, even though you can recognize that these major companies and these governments have a lot of power and those are

difficult things to challenge. I think we need to have that hope or else it starts to feel impossible and we just give up. Right. Even if that hope can be, you know, a faint hope sometimes in seeing the dire things that we face. But I think we always need to have it so that we have that kind of flame that pushes us forward to try to keep challenging these things. Yeah, I mean, there's so much evidence that human beings have the capacity to radically alter things in a short time. And there's been many moments of eruptions throughout history, you know, revolutionary movements that came seemingly out of nowhere. But, you know, to go beyond those spasms, those moments of rebellion, you have to actually have a pretty good idea of where you're trying to get to. there are peasant movements in various parts of the global south or the indigenous movements in the global north or the agricultural resistance around organic food and people who are taking

seriously protecting the water. I mean, there's so many different interesting initiatives that really do address the predicament. People bicycling, just ride a bicycle every day. That actually does help. It's very tiny. It's ultimately an industrial machine itself, but it's a far better choice than embracing the electric vehicle or the car. So, you know, there's many small steps you can make that at least you're in the game. And then someday we might all face a moment where we can make better choices about the larger direction of society.

Let's keep pushing for that. Why not? Yeah. And I think that answer also does like what Process World did to show us that it's not just about the technology. It's about so much more than that. And certainly we can challenge these major companies because they are outgrowths of this capitalist system, but it's not just about them as well. And we needed to be thinking broader too. Chris, it's always fantastic to talk to you. I could talk to you forever. Thanks so much for taking the time. It's been a great pleasure, Paris. Thank you so much. And thanks for keeping your vital show on the air. We need to keep the conversation going in every direction.

So good work. Thanks so much. in partnership with The Nation magazine and is hosted by me, Paris Marks. Production is by Eric Wickham and transcripts are by Bridget Palou-Fry. Tech Won't Save Us relies on the support of listeners like you to keep providing critical perspectives on the tech industry. You can join hundreds of other supporters by going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and making a pledge of your own. Thanks for listening and make sure to come back next week. Thank you.