Tech Won't Save Us - How Tech Platforms Affect Our Digital Lives w/ Joanne McNeil

Episode Date: May 19, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Joanne McNeil to discuss how our experience online has evolved over the past three decades, the class backgrounds of tech founders, how the AIDS crisis robbed us an important contribution to the early web, and whether COVID-19 will change how we use platforms in the future.Joanne McNeil is the author of “Lurking: How a Person Became a User.” She has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, WIRED, the Baffler, and more. Follow Joanne on Twitter as @jomc.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. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter.Support the show

I'm not sure if, say, in two years, we are back in the world. Are we using the internet the same way? Are we using mobile apps the same way? Are we thinking of the internet as maybe it's better off in the house? Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that absolutely loved to see Lily Wachowski attack Elon Musk and Ivanka Trump on Twitter. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm speaking to Joanne McNeil. Joanne is the author of Lurking, How a Person Became a User, and she's also written for a number of different publications, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Wired, and the Baffler. She writes a column at Filmmaker Magazine called Speculations,

and you can follow her on Twitter at at J-O-M-C. I think you're really going to like our conversation today, where we talk about how online platforms affect us as users and how our experience online has evolved since the beginning of the internet until today. Before we get into the interview, if you want to support the show, you can do so by leaving a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, by sharing the show on your social media, or directly to friends and colleagues if you think they'll like it. And if you want to support the work that I put into this show, you can also go to patreon.com slash Paris Marks and support us through there.

Thanks so much and enjoy the interview. Joanne McNeil, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Hi, Paris. It's great to speak with you today. So you have this new book called Lurking, where you kind of talk about how our experience online has evolved over the course of, I guess, a couple or a few decades now, as the internet has slowly evolved and, you start by kind of explaining a bit how our experience online has changed, and maybe also how that has kind of changed us and how we interact with each other online. So one of the things I wanted to tackle with this book is the idea that the internet was so great, and now it's awful. And so, you know, a lot of the things that we are familiar with today, like surveillance and harassment, that was present even from the very beginning.

And in this book, I start in 1990 with the beginnings of the web, certain kinds of early online communities, and including AOL, which was a very commercial program. I mean, a very, very corporate enterprise. And so I wanted to contrast that element of coming to the Internet as a place where you're interacting with strangers under a screen name and that there was a freedom and creativity that came from it and how that transitioned over time as we start using our real names or photos became more identifiable in our online experience and there are still aspects of that early internet available to us today and just as those not so great aspects of the internet were happening back then do you think that because i

guess the way that generally we use the internet has changed as you said in the past like there was aol and you also describe how and even i remember from my earlier days using the past like there was AOL and you also describe how and even I remember from my earlier days using the internet like there were some things that you talked about that I wasn't really online for and I didn't really see but like I remember in my earlier experiences online it was like all like discussion boards and like in kind of like group chats and then like it slowly kind of merged into these larger platforms like myspace is the first one that i really remember using but more to the tail end of it when facebook was already started starting to kind of eat into it so obviously i have this really specific experience of it. And

as you say, you talked about how nostalgia is one of the things that you wanted to kind of address in this book. And I feel like I certainly feel some nostalgia for like that period. But as you say, it's not necessarily the case that everything was so great back then too, right? Yeah, I mean, what I think some of that nostalgia is, and I certainly feel it, is the kind of dreamy quality of those early encounters, the ways that people would communicate with each other. I mean, when I look back at some early Usenet posts, I'm just floored by how beautifully written they were. And that's an aspect of language, use of language that hasn't really been appreciated. I also get into the book, like elements that happened around the time of the Great Recession, when you had the literary

critics who were like, well, everything on the internet is dumb and it's all trashy people on the internet. So why would we pay attention to the internet? But I think in those early years, you didn't have that sense of needing to define the gatekeeping aspects that came forth. I think that kind of ultra gatekeeping aspects, I associate that with kind of the late ops, whereas people like me would sneak in and write books. Right. Which I did. And so that quality of the texts are sometimes so beautiful.

And I really would encourage anyone curious to kind of look at some of those old Usenet posts just like do a random search for some time in like 94 or something and look at like the ways that people spoke to each other there was something really touching and vulnerable about that um which could be because they be because these users would have been quite divorced from their real world experiences, their real world encounters. One of the online communities I do talk about is quite the opposite. It's called Echo. They were very much integrating the real world and having offline encounters as well, because they were all

basically based in New York. So that's part of the reason that community has thrived for many, many years. Like I want to say that there's still a lot of them are still really closely in touch. But then there are those very ephemeral interactions that came through just because you were trying something out and not really defining yourself and your participation in the community. It was more just like fluttering in and fluttering out. And that freedom, that's something that I would like to be able to see more of these days. I mean, like I said, there are really interesting projects, if you look hard enough, but I think that that element of really wanting to write something beautiful and share that with utter strangers, I don't see as much of that there was maybe in the 90s.

I even thought about it, like, when there was this shift kind of that there was maybe in the 90s. I even thought about it like when there was this shift kind of that that I noticed at least like in the way that I saw people around me kind of using the internet and and the people in the communities that I used to frequent using the internet at that kind of time of Facebook's real real dominance and kind of colonization of the internet, where it went from like these discussion boards and communities into like Facebook groups and, and things like that. And it just wasn't, it was never the same, right. And I feel like there are probably some Facebook groups that thrive and that do really well. but it's a completely different way of forming a community and having an interaction between people, right? So what was really that you kind

of see this change that happened when we go from those smaller communities to these kind of globe-spanning platforms with millions, if not billions of users? Like, how does that kind of change the way that we interact with each other online, but like, I guess also how this kind of online experience works? Yeah, absolutely. Because back then, there weren't really like buttons or ways to go viral or the whole aspects of broadcasting your posts. I mean, you could be popular online, but it wasn't the same as having that one quippy post that will get a thousand retweets in 30 minutes. And also the kind of financial incentives

to have that one quippy post that maybe that means you get a job at Buzzfeed or something. I mean, it's just like, there are rewards available to people if you do have that visibility online these days. And I don't want to be critical of people who do benefit from that because I can see why. And I have a little bit of a mixed feelings about it just because I know that the internet has certainly shaped my career in terms of making a writing career possible for me. I don't see a future for me writing essays or books at any other period in time. I just would not be able to be a writer without the internet. But that sense of being tied to an online persona, having the pressure to

constantly get that engagement, that's very different from group community interactions on a forum. That's all like everybody is kind of in on the joke and you can have peers and you can have a community as opposed to you're the star, you're the micro celebrity or the actual celebrity. So I think that's like one of the tricky things happening. And then also, I just I mean, like I say in the book, I'm not really, I haven't been on Facebook in ages. I have a number of problems with it. It's really just because A, I'm lucky enough to not need to use Facebook. B, it just makes me feel bad. I just like the times that I have logged in, I've just felt awful. But my memories of using Facebook, usually for work or something like that, is just like, even when I was engaging,

I just, the sense of the surveillance, like the sense of someone finding this post that it wasn't intended for. It was just kind of like, you know, interacting with relatives at a wedding all times. Like that kind of like sunny kind of something sinister is happening underneath it, like underneath the smiles, but let's like, all be very sunny and professional ish. And yeah, so I could never really deal with that.

Because it felt like work even when it wasn't work. I completely understand that feeling. I was off Facebook for, I would say a couple of years, I think. And then I got it back because it's just like the way that you keep in touch with so many people, right? And it feels so difficult. And it can almost feel like because so much has moved onto Facebook, it can almost feel like if you're not on there, you're being excluded from things that are happening and it's like you should know about this thing because it was on Facebook but you're not on

Facebook so you don't know and like it's completely wild right it's like become this really essential piece of how we live in the real world and in that way it becomes this platform that like everyone kind of has to have if you want to just be part of like this social life. That's so funny because I'm reminded of I moved to LA five years ago. And when I moved there, I had a friend who was just like telling me about this party that she went to and something else. And it's like, how did he hear about it of course she was just like hearing about a facebook event and i realized what a burden i would be to just like ask her whenever there was a party in our mix of like you know art and tech kind of community of people

yeah um but i still did not want to join and it was just this weird and i keep thinking back to that moment i was like if i had signed up for Facebook could I have formed enough of a social life that I would I would still be in LA I mean it was just like actually it might have impacted me but I I know I I know it just it's something that does not work for me and I I have enough people who know that I'm set in my ways that they come to me unless I move into a city like LA and everybody else has their habits. They don't care if I know about it or not. That's good, though. And I feel like there's been this, at least personally, like I've been like trying to reduce, if not eliminate, like my uses of these major platforms in recent years just because like I hate them and

like I hate the companies that I hate their business models so much and like I just want to get away but it can it can feel so tough right because of how they've just worked their ways into all the different aspects of our lives and you know just how we how we exist in this world and like it's so it's so frustrating because it's like we we can't escape you know, just how we how we exist in this world. And like, it's so it's so frustrating, because it's like, we can't escape, you know, they're just like, they are like a utility in a sense that we just have to rely on, but they're not owned or controlled by us in like any way. Yeah. And if anything, or like setting the terms to be able to use, because I've just, I only use Twitter on my phone. And so I, one day, I just deleted the app. And I think because I've had the app on for years and years, I just did

not have any of the kind of algorithmically sorted view of Twitter. But then I deleted it for a couple days, redownloaded. And I'm like, oh my gosh, if my tweets don't get at least one fave, they will be hidden from everyone and no one will ever see it. And it's just like that. It's actually forcing you in order to even have a community experience there, you have to phrase things

in that like really attention getting way. And that's becoming more and more part of the user experience is just like the terms that they've set for you to be very eye catching and attention grabbing. Yeah, I totally get that. And I actually have the Facebook app removed from my phone, I only use it on desktop, because I'm like, that's the way I won't use it, like nearly as much, you know. So that's like one way I try to get around it without actually deleting the account completely. But and I completely understand that about Twitter, too, right? Because that all the platforms just build it in this way, especially these kind of like social media interaction platforms where like you want these likes and you want these faves because like it gives you

that sort of validation and and you know that people are like seeing it and liking it um if you get that right and and and it's not just from people who are trying to like you know build a brand as a writer or like trying to build a community or something right you even get it from like regular people who are just going about their everyday lives on Facebook and posting about stuff with their family and friends. And they're like, you know, are the people who I know, like liking my posts and am I getting that validation from that, right? So it's so interesting.

And one piece I definitely wanted to touch on while speaking with you was the way that our labor is actually essential to creating these platforms in that very way, you know, because all of our posts on Twitter, all of our posts on Facebook, but even even beyond that, because you talk about how, when Google was making its search engine, like in the early days, rather than just kind of indexing the web, it relied in large part on the changes that individuals were making to their personal websites and the metadata that they set and kind of the way that they were using the internet in order to properly rank the web pages and

to see what people were actually doing with them. So it was the labor of users and the people who were using the web that were really essential to creating Google in the same way that our became so prominent as a search engine is because they had the best search engine. The other search engines were, you know, Ask Jeeves or something. I think Lycos, like all of these search engines that you just enter information, you enter a search string in, and it would be kind of like a jumble of results because they were searching just for the words. But the PageRank, what they came up with as a formula to decide what would be the most relevant results, they were looking at the words that were in a link. So if the text you used on the link to

the Museum of Modern Art were the words Museum of Modern Art, they would score that as, oh, this is probably a link to the Museum of Modern Art. Why would someone just use that language for a link to Yosemite Park or something? I mean, it's probably the reason that it's a link. And so that would also mean that it would get high scores for museum or art or other things. So these are decisions that users made when they were setting up webpages. And the thing is, we're not really seeing that return back to the user because this is a business. It's not a co-op. It's not a nonprofit. They're using this information to build a business

and scale it up. It's so interesting as well, because search has just become like one of these really essential tools to using the web. And we have so little control over it. And another, I think, really important piece when considering the history of Google in particular is that it wasn't one of these companies that was founded in a garage and built by these entrepreneurs, right? The founders of Google were at Stanford. They got public research funding. Google was the recipient of government grants when it was getting started. And then this tool that was developed at a university with public funds was then privatized and turned into the company that is Google now, right?

I mean, that's one of those things. I don't really get into it much in the book, but I am kind of fascinated with the different class backgrounds of various founders. And so with Google, you have very much academics and Zuckerberg, well, he dropped out of Harvard, but he didn't stop using Harvard in every single possible press release and like mention it all the time. But Twitter, Twitter was founded by Ed Williams and Biz Stone. They were working at Google, but they were working class dropouts. So there was like a pushback

to these academics and where the people who had very humble upbringings. And it's something that I would like to see more research into it because one thing that's very intriguing about Silicon Valley is that it's a place

that being a dropout is not, the stigma is not quite the same. Now, a dropout, if you're a white cisgender man, is very different from other kinds of dropouts or high school graduates. But that's one of those things where I feel like publishing and the media is still not quite getting Silicon Valley or the tech industry in general because of the very funny ways that class plays in that industry as opposed to in publishing. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. I was recently talking to Rob Larson. And we sort of touched on that as well, because Bill Gates obviously comes from this, you know, quite wealthy and well-off family in Washington State. Jeff Bezos, like we were talking about this as well, how Jeff Bezos, how Peter Thiel, how Elon Musk kind of have these fathers who are engineers and had these links to

colonial Cuba in the case of Bezos's father and apartheid South Africa in the case of Thiel and Elon Musk, right? And, you know, kind of obviously gained some wealth through their associations with that. So it is really interesting to kind of see the class backgrounds of a lot of these founders. And honestly, I hadn't known so much about the working class backgrounds of some of them as founders. And honestly, I hadn't known so much about the working class backgrounds of some of them as well, because it seemed like there were a lot that were coming from this more well-off background, even though they presented themselves as like these really kind of self-made individuals, right? I would say that's the case for most of the

founders, but there are still a few and certainly executives and workers. It had pretty early on presented itself as like an alternate path for someone who might not have fit in to, say, media publishing, Hollywood, even Wall Street. So that's definitely like underwritten about and and another like wrinkle there that is something that I've I've been thinking a lot about is that we have these stories about you know I've talked about this in my book why I wrote my book as my first internet experiences are AOL is because I was so tired of hearing about people who set up BBSs when they were seven like their father came home with a computer and their father was a computer engineer. And so there is also this upper middle class background of your father was an engineer and you brought home a computer in the 80s. And so you had a head start and that's why you have a career in computer science. And then I wanted to kind of push back that a little bit. Well, yes, I was on AOL.

It was very ordinary. It was for the masses. And just like kind of push back against these narratives because it is a lot more complicated than as simple as like, these were all rich white guys. They were white guys, but the class thing is still a little bit tricky. That's so interesting. And, and like, I completely agree with you. I feel like so many of the stories

that I see are like, yeah, you know, my dad brought home this computer when I was like a kid, like, you know, way back when before the internet was even really kind of getting going. Right. And so obviously, those people have kind of a leg up on the others who might be trying to get into the industry. And I think when we talk about kind of the people who are present in our histories of tech and the people who maybe we leave out or are not even so aware that we're leaving them out, I think your book provided a really interesting and really insightful example of that. Because you talked about how, at the time that the internet was growing and kind of, you know, emerging people are getting online. It was the same time that

the AIDS crisis was gripping the world, right? And how as a result of that, there was a large group of queer people who were not online and who were not participating in that kind of emergence in the same way that many other people were. And that we potentially missed out on, you know, a lot as a result of that. So do you have any further thoughts on that? And maybe even just further, you can explain, you know, your thinking on that in the book. Absolutely. I'm glad that you're asking this, because it was something that I kind of debated when I was working on the book, whether to include or not, because I didn't have, I wrote it very awkwardly. But to kind of explain the context of it. In that chapter, I talk a lot about Silicon Alley, 90s New York tech scene. And I wanted to give people a look at what the tech scene was like back then and show that it was more diverse than

people seem to think. There were people of color founding online communities. There were many women who were founding startups. And so that perspective should open up this idea that, yes, what you think of New York and New York culture was very much the culture of the internet in the 90s coming out of New York. But the absence there is that because, you know, I was starting out right around 1990, an important art and culture oriented community in New York was just absent. And I think another part of that was I was reading the David Wynne wrote biography by Cynthia Carr. And I just, early on in writing this book, and that book, it was just something that I picked up and sped through because it's beautifully written.

But just seeing all of his references to surveillance and seeing how he was a very multimedia-oriented artist and knowing, you know, it was Laurie Anderson, I love the internet. It was Chris Marker, who took to the internet, these artists who had a very multidisciplinary multimedia oriented practice, they were the ones who really took to the internet. And I remember reading that book of being, I wonder what he would have done with the internet. So I added this, it's just like several paragraphs. It's quite brief, but I'm glad it resonated because I just, I wanted to respect that there had been an absence in the city and give people an opportunity to imagine what could have

been. I thought it was a great inclusion because so often when things are lacking, it can be so difficult to even recognize that they're not there, right? And especially when you consider the importance of the internet and online communities to a lot of queer people in discovering and learning more about, you know, their sexualities, their genders, what have you. That's so important to so many queer people. And then to think that, I don't know, it could have been even more important in such a greater way had this real crisis not hit the queer community and taken out so many, just so many people in it who could have been using the internet and getting that started and growing that at a much earlier stage, you know? Yeah, absolutely. So I love that piece of your book, even though it was only a few paragraphs. But, you know, I think it I think it drew attention to an important thing that,

you know, again, it wasn't something that I had seen before. So maybe it's, again, another thing that there does need to be more writing and researching on and just thinking on, you know, what that might have looked at, and even just chronicling the ways that queer communities were using the internet at that really early stage to have it there, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's what I hope my book might do is that give people ideas of areas that there isn't a lot of writing about at the moment, because there is a lot to say. And I'm kind of, I thought of my book always as like, okay, if you have eight hours to

tell someone everything you know about the internet, go. And that's all that I was just like, how much can I stuff in here? In as little time as possible, it's still making enjoyable. And so if people find things in there and they want to run with it, I hope they do. Because we certainly need more writing on these subjects. Yeah, personally, obviously, I think it's a success because I really like your book. And so I wanted to ask you about one more thing, because speeding up to the present, there, I think, is this kind of ongoing change in how we use tech platforms, because,

you know, COVID-19, this pandemic is raging and we're all stuck at home. You know, Facebook and Instagram and they say that these YouTube, they say that these platforms are kind of seeing greater use than they normally do because people are stuck at home. And this is the way that many people are having to communicate now. I know personally, like I've taken note of how it's terrible to say, but like there just seems to be more death kind of like when I'm scrolling through Twitter and like you see these stories about earlier on, it was, you know, about China and then about Italy. And then, you know, as it hit more European countries, Spain after that, and now what's happening in the United States is really terrible and really tragic and really concerning, right? So I wonder if you have any thoughts on how COVID-19 is maybe, again, kind of affecting our experiences online and having to be so reliant on these platforms. One thing I think is interesting about this moment is that we've just gone through a decade of mobile being the way of interacting online.

We were just talking about what we have on our phone and what we don't. I only check Twitter on my phone. You only check Facebook on your computer. But the experience of the internet being on your person as you're out in the world you snap a photo of your vacations and put it on instagram check into something on on foursquare or look up a restaurant on yelp when you're in a new town like all of these experiences have been our experience of the internet for the past 10 years um and now like you said many of us us back in our homes, it's a weird throwback to that early aughts internet. So I'm using my laptop for the internet, which I haven't really done in years.

I'm very careful about making sure that my laptop is my workspace, writing only except for some research kind of things. But now all of a sudden, it's just, I'm having these video chats, and I'm checking things that I normally would only look at on my phone, and sharing my home with the people I'm communicating with. So that stationary aspect of the internet, like all of a sudden, because the users are stationary, that's really interesting. And I'm not sure what's going to come of it. I'm not sure if, say, in two years, we are back in the world, are we using the internet the same way? Are we using mobile apps the same way? Are we thinking of the internet as maybe it's better off in the house? That could be possible. With video chat, I remember feeling like, oh, this is not so fun when it's on my phone, because it's just like a

little screen. But when it's on your laptop, it's okay. But the other thing that I think is interesting about that question is aspects of grieving and having to account for these tragedies, these deaths that we're encountering on platforms as stories. I mean, I hope people are seeing these stories because there are so many and they're outrageous and many times like how unfair or exploitative a lot of the work especially situations of workers who don't have protections and having that as part of the ordinary scroll I know that I'm not white my ordinary sarcastic self on um on platforms as I might ordinarily be just I feel feel very awkward promoting stuff on my own

because it feels like I don't want to be mixed in with this moment that at least among the people that I follow on Twitter, I feel like I follow good people on Twitter. So they're really respectful and aware of what's going on. And just taking that as part of the context that we're speaking in. But I have been splintering off into various kind of group chats and group DMs. And that's energizing in a way that I haven't felt about social media in a long time because all of a sudden in a little group DM, there's, there's no pressure to go viral. It's just you and your several friends.

And then the other thing that's really nice, you can kind of let it sit for a couple of days and then maybe someone shows up and has something to say and then you disappear. And it's, if there, you know, if it's like five close friends that are just all various places in the country you're just going to drop in and say something remember when when forums were like that that you didn't have to write something every single hour it was just kind of casually drop in maybe remember oh i'm gonna go to that message board tomorrow so that that's slowing things down a little bit decentralizing it a little bit

even on the platforms i mean these are damn so i'm using twitter um but i'm finding i i don't want to say the internet's great now because it's actually it's just the ways that people are using technology whereas you can't see people in person. So it's kind of doing more than the internet ever should have to. But I will say that people are, given these circumstances, it's interesting to see people, users, take control of their internet experiences and say, hey, I just don't want to like go viral anymore. I'm just going to have this group chat. And, and that's going to be my social media experience. Yeah. I think that's a great observation. And, you know, I hope more people

are experiencing that and diving into group DMS and things instead. Right. I remember I have this group chat and like as you say like sometimes you know people just don't post in it for a long period of time in my case like the one that comes to mind is this group chat with my co-workers who I worked with in Australia all the way back in 2015 and like it used to be much more active. And now it like, like once a year or a few times a year, like someone might post and then all of a sudden, like for a few days, we're like chatting and then it goes silent again until something else comes up. And we're all like talking again. And like, it's, it's just so cool. You know, it's just so fun. Well, Joanne, it was fantastic speaking with you today. Your book is just, I just think it's so interesting. And it makes us think about the way that, you know, we use the web and we interact

online and how that has changed over many years. And like, you also say, like, even though I think there is some nostalgia for the way that things used to be, you kind of say, like, we shouldn't be nostalgic necessarily, because this just shows that we're really eager for, you know, a better internet and a better way to interact online. Right. And, you know, hopefully, as you say, something better or thinking about something better or how we can interact better, how we might use these platforms better. You know, maybe how we might take control of these platforms might come out of this, right? Yeah, I hope so. Certainly do as well. All right. Well, it's been great speaking with you. Thanks so much for taking the time. This is great. Thank you. Joanne McNeil is the author of Lurking, How a Person Became a User.

It was published by MCD Books, and you can buy it from your local bookstore, you can borrow it from your local library, or you can get it anywhere else that sells books. You can follow Joanne on Twitter at at J-O-M-C. You can follow the podcast at at Tech Won't Save Us, and you can follow me, Paris Marks, at at Paris Marks. If you liked the interview, please leave us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts. And thanks so much for listening. Thank you.