Tech Won't Save Us - The Complex Systems that Govern Our Lives w/ Tim Maughan

Episode Date: December 23, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Tim Maughan to discuss the exploitative infrastructures that make the modern world possible, how complex technological systems rob us of our power to control our collective destiny, and why predicting trends isn’t hard when you understand capitalism.Tim Maughan is the author of “Infinite Detail” and “Ghost Hardware.” He’s also written for BBC Future, New Scientist, and Motherboard, and is writing a new column for OneZero. Follow Tim on Twitter as @timmaughan.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, and support the show on Patreon.Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.Also mentioned in this episode:Read about the trip Tim took with Unknown Fields on a container ship, at manufacturing sites in China, and near a toxic lake in Inner Mongolia that’s the product of mining rare-earth minerals.Read the first article in Tim’s new column, No One’s Driving.Kim Stanley Robinson says billionaire space visions are “just a fantasy of our culture right now.”Media mentioned by Tim: Judge Dredd comics, The Running Man, RoboCop, Rollerball, and Ad Astra.Support the show

I actually think it's very easy to spot emerging trends and to follow them through to their natural conclusions simply by understanding capitalism and how, well, how shitty it is really. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week I'm joined by Tim Mon. Tim is the author of Infinite Detail and Ghost Hardware. He's written for BBC Future, New Scientist, Motherboard, and he has a new column with One Zero exploring the complex systems that we interact with in our everyday lives and might not even realize the extent to which they're important and hard to understand. We have a really interesting conversation today that delves into Tim's work and the implications of supply chains, infrastructures, technologies, how they shape our world, how they shape us, and how these increasingly complex,

technologically controlled systems are hard to understand and thus not only take power out of our hands, but also out of the hands of any kind of elected leaders who we might want to change our society for the better. I've been looking forward to speaking with him on the podcast for a really long time. And I'm happy that we were finally able to connect and chat and discuss all of these really important issues that we're both really interested in, in the end. And I highly recommend that you check out Tim's column and his other work once you're done listening to our conversation. Just a reminder that Tech Won't Save Us

is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share it on social media or with any colleagues or friends who you think would enjoy it, because obviously that social proof helps to convince other people to give the podcast a shot. And if you like listening to the show every week and you appreciate the work that I put into it to make it possible to get these conversations to you and to ensure

that there are more critical perspectives on technology out in the world. You can join people like Tristan, Blub Blub News, and Jacob Hall by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Tim, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thanks for having me, Paris. This is great. It's great to speak with you. I've been looking forward to chatting for a while. Obviously, I really enjoyed your fiction and I love reading your journalism. And there is like an interest in supply chains and infrastructures that is really obvious,

both in your journalism and in your fiction, right? And it seems to be kind of a topic that you return to and that really inspires kind of the work that you do. And so I was wondering how you initially kind of got that interest into looking into kind of these deeper aspects of technologies and these systems that we rely on every day. And what do you find so intriguing about it, you know, that keeps you coming back to it? That's a really good question. And probably a multitude of convoluted answers um kind of got into writing in an era where there was kind of a general kind of interest in infrastructure stuff coming through

a lot in the kind of circles for want of a looser term that i kind of operate in uh futurism and i hate that term but kind of people looking at futures and foresight stuff or people looking at near future fiction or speculative stuff and people in the kind of design area which kind of brush up against as well in weird ways very very interested in in infrastructure stuff and especially in shipping containers you know there's a thing about roundabout sort of like the beginning of the last decade when people start becoming interested in the concept of shipping containers because there was people think realize how essential they were to our existence. And also the kind of aesthetically, kind of the look of them

and what they represent as this kind of like icon for globalism and standards and hegemony, I think, in some ways, in a way that the uniformality and the kind of global standards that they're built in and stuff like this. You can get very into that stuff. And it's very exciting and interesting for people looking at this stuff, especially designers, like I was saying, people working in the spectrum of design and stuff. And I came into writing about the future and related issues that ran about that time.

And a couple of people I kind of started hanging out with and collaborating with very early on at the time were Liam Young kate davis who run an organization we're used to i'm not sure what the status of it is at the moment i think it's kind of on hiatus permanent hiatus at moment called unknown fields and they're both speculative architects is the is what they call themselves and at the time they were both based at the architectural association in london and they run a course there also called Unknown Fields. It's a really fascinating and really excellent teaching course they do there where they get architecture students who have learned all these skills, these design skills and how to build things and how to design stuff in CAD

and how to use computer graphics and things like this. And they basically sit them down and they take them on some kind of field trip to see some kind of infrastructure. And then they come back and they have to make speculative short films about using their skills as an architect. And it allows them to interrogate all kinds of issues around architecture, like the use of space and capital and all this kind of stuff. And it's a really interesting course. And Liam had asked me to write a piece of short fiction for an anthology he was doing. And then he asked me to come in.

Him and Kate asked me to come in and teach kate asked me to come and then teach the class in london a few times which i did and also taught when i was in new york i taught liam's class in princeton and in la so it's just a really fascinating fascinating area to be in but they more importantly so i cut to the chase they asked me in 2014 they asked me to go on a trip for them to china it was the second trip they had personally done to China, but it was a supply chain trip where we traveled back up the supply chain. And we started in South Korea and spent a week on a container ship, on a huge Mercer container ship, spent a week stopping at megaports from China Sea and stuff.

And it was just mind-blowing. That week was just a mind-blowing experience just incredible just to be inside that infrastructure see the scale of it see how vast these ports are see how regulated it is and how regulated the sea is how the oceans are and stuff like that and just get this huge kind of insight into that side of it and it's kind of like it's impossible not to be impressed by it as well even if you're someone like me who's, you know, kind of at heart, like an anti-capitalist and at heart kind of anti-globalization in many of its aspects, it's impossible not to be impressed

by the scale of the engineering of it. Especially when you stand there on the bridge of a container ship looking at these ports and it's so beautifully choreographed and everything, you everything your container comes off the ship and nobody knows on the ship puts on the container and the crane driver doesn't know what's in the container and the guy driving the truck doesn't know what's in the container but it comes off and falls onto the truck literally the second the truck slides into position and there's a queue behind that truck of another 20 trucks and they just constantly cycle around shifting

containers off and there's clearly something very precise and controlled and centralized happening this really vast complex system so i was initially kind of impressed by that and fascinated by that and then also i could say that just the scale of the engineering you hear a lot of people myself included have used this metaphor comparing it to kind of the apollo program to moonshot. At some point in the last 20 years, we built this huge global engineering project that spans every single nation in the world. It's incredibly complex and features like megastructure scale engineering. I mean, literally, you know, I went to the port in Yangshan in China, which is an artificial island.

They built a whole island from scratch just to build a container port on it. It has the world's longest bridge, which we went under. Container ships went under. You look up at this thing. It's just insane. It's like being in a science fiction movie. And there's only, I think it's like a six-lane highway on this bridge. And it's just trucks and containers going back and forth.

And we sat underneath that, you know, like for a day, stared at it. And it was just, it's hard not to be impressed by these kind of things that look like they're out of, you know, like a cyberpunk movie or something like that, like out of Blade Runner or Aliens. But then the rest of the trip, it was a three-week trip and then the other two and a half weeks were spent traveling overland in China and visiting mainly factories and markets. And that just puts it all into massive perspective for you instantly. Because you're like, well, this huge engineering project that I was so impressed by exists

purely to keep wages artificially low. It exists purely to make the manufacturing of the cheapest products in the world cheaper by doing it in a different country. It's very easy when you talk about these supply chains to talk about iPhones because it's the really obvious example to talk about an Apple, a bad company, and Foxconn are a bad company. But most of what I saw being manufactured

was things like Christmas decorations or pencils or tiny components in electronics. And this was the big eye-opener for me as well right in the same day i think it was or adjacent days when we were in shenzhen we visited the world's second largest tv factory with 10 000 employees with three or four thousand of them living on site in dormitories the size of a small city this place was huge or a small town right and we visited a components factory in a back alley in Shenzhen somewhere with maybe 100 employees that was making components.

And it's impossible for me not to say that the conditions weren't better in the mega factory than they were in the sweatshop. Those components, though, that's the sort of place, for example, people in the makers movement buy all their stuff. So these kind of – it's their stuff i said these kind of it's just it started exposing me all these these these kind of terrible hypocrisies to me you know because you know we're told that the makers movement pride yourself on making stuff itself actually it's bolting together tiny components made by teenagers in sweatshops where i can barely breathe because

the air quality is so bad as opposed to like foxconn who were awful in their own way but it's in clean in the large factories i went to and the cafeterias had decent food i know because i sat and ate some of it and stuff so there's all these weird mythologies and hypocrisies and stuff that need to be encountered but the main thing is that you know we've built this fascinating global engineering project just to artificially maintain a labor divide and a global inequality between the markets in the global north and manufacturing in the global south obviously hugely simplified geographically what i'm saying but um so yeah so that was one side of it and then the other side of it was just like the stuff that i'm writing about for the one zero column at the moment was just this degree of complexity that you know it's very clear from

occupying these environments especially the shipping environment that people don't understand what's going on they're like you know they're literally just you literally just have control over this small part of the process which is exactly the same whether you you're a q a tester in a components factory or whether you're the captain of a ship or it turns out from work i did for someone that's quite senior in logistics at maersk you only really know a little bit of like of the whole process but this process is fundamentally what our society and our civilization is built on the supply chain is fundamentally how our civilization is run but most people don't understand it's clearly out of the hands of most people it's

very clearly out of the hands of democratically elected governments and that just struck me as being like really worrying and concerning. And then I ran about the same time, Adam Curtis was doing some work at this, you know, machines of love and grace and hyper-normalization came out a couple years after that as well, where he kind of starts digging into this.

And I realized he was kind of very much onto something. I don't believe everything he says, but he's very good at highlighting these points. So I kind of, I kind of very obsessed with that, which is why I've kind of gone back to writing about that now. I think what you're describing there

is absolutely fascinating, right? Because if we think about what some of these folks in Silicon Valley say, I think it was Peter Thiel who said that we expected to have, I don't know, flying cars or something now, and we have 280 character tweets or something. But obviously what you're describing

is there's this kind of massive innovation project that has happened, but that is completely hidden from many of us, right? We don't really see what has actually happened here and the infrastructures that have been created in order to ensure that the life that we think is normal here in the West can continue without us having to feel the kind of guilt that comes along with that or recognize, you know, the broader impacts that's happening, right. And previously on the podcast, I spoke to Jenny Chan about the Foxconn factories in China. I've also spoken to Theo Riofrancos about, you know, the mining that is required for so many

of these electronics that we use today. And, you know, that will be required even more for the electric cars and other green technologies that are supposed to like save us from climate change, right. And more recently, I spoke to Xiaowei Wang, who described how so many of these massive kind of e commerce companies are increasingly moving production even into like rural China, right? Because there's even lower wages and fewer standards there. And you know, you described like seeing pencils and things like that created. And Xiaowei described like Halloween costumes and things like that, that are being created in these like rural towns and villages, right? And so it really does show you how, you know, so much of this manufacturing and so many of these products that we rely on come from this really intricate process.

But so much of it is hidden from our day-to-day lives, and we don't even recognize that it's really going on. Very much so, yeah. I mean, when I was doing that trip in China, we traveled by train a lot because the rail network in China is excellent. It's relatively cheap and it's relatively fast. But still, because of the size of the country, I think we did a 28-hour train journey at one point. And, you know, I was full of sleep and wake up surrounded by, like, all Chinese workers that got on the train for me just staring at me

because they'd never seen, like, this weird fucking white guy with a beard on a local train before, you know. But it was fascinating to just – I just sat there and I shot loads of footage of it actually on my phone and and you just sit by the window just watching this landscape roll past which is beautiful chinese landscape it's beautiful and then it'd be cut up by a city just in the middle of nowhere like half built a lot of the time most of the time and these cities would pop up and then just disappear and these little new cities that were being built and they build these cities they do market analysis of what what the west wants

products find a gap in the market and then build a city and move rule workers into it so for example you know they might identify there's there's a high demand for umbrellas and they haven't got the manufacturing capacity from both they'll build a city just to manufacture umbrellas and it's a fascinating model it really is it's why i have so much trouble with and it's i don't want to get into this whole thing because it's very controversial area to get into but i have a lot of trouble with the so-called left on twitter and they're quite often standing for the chinese communist party because there's very little communism left and do you know what i mean the top-down organization

seems like a kind of communist approach but you know you can't have you're not a communist country if you've got like three high-tech stock exchanges it's like you know i mean like you know it's not it's not it's not a thing that you can be right and if you're trading you know trading shares in tech startups on the kind of nasdaq equivalent in shenzhen you're not a communist country let's not can we just drop that guys can we drop that facade when we have these conversations about about the ccp and stuff so it's fascinating it's as someone i still roughly believe in the role of the state you know i mean to to solve problems and manage things it's fascinating to see this kind of top-down decisions being made. There's a sense that the top-down decisions are being made, and then it's just feeding into this kind of like this ocean

of complexity and algorithmic management and stuff like that. I'm increasingly wondering how much the Chinese government still has control over stuff any more than the US or the Canadian governments, for example, have control over these things, which, you know, with so many things this year, COVID has kind of exposed a lot more of that, I think. I think the point that you make about the complexity and the lack of democratic control that comes out of that is really interesting, right? And I think really illustrative of what's

going on in the world. Like, I think there are a ton of examples that you could give about it, right? But when I was reading what you were writing about it, one of the things that I immediately thought of was Iran, where they elected this government that wanted to kind of open up more, that pursued this deal with the United States and with Europe, even though these were essentially like their enemies. And then they made those kind of sacrifices in order to get that deal, in order to try to open up to the West. And then, you know, Donald Trump gets elected, new sanctions come in, everything is like, shut off. And it's like, they really have no control. It's like they're kind of electing kind of middle managers, but they have so little ability to actually determine the future of their

country, right? Because these decisions are being made above their heads. And I think that what you're describing with these larger systems is how even in the West, it has come to a place where in a lot of areas, we have kind of lost the sovereignty to make these core decisions about the way that our societies are being run because these systems are just so complex and so outside of our ability to understand them. And after decades of privatization and giving things over to the private sector, the state has also lost some of that capacity to make those decisions and manage those things and get control of things in a way that it might have in the past, I guess.

Yeah, very much so. This is the thing that kind of struck me when I came back and started looking at this stuff. And then there was these minor earthquakes building up to larger earthquakes of kind of disruption in democracy of the last few years. The one that kind of snuck under a lot of people's radars outside of the country is probably the Scottish independence referendum, which was a shock when it didn't happen the way people expected it to happen. It's less explainable. And then Brexit happened. And then Trump eventually as well.

And I started piecing together, like you exactly were saying, there's this vacuum. So, you know, we've had 20 years plus maybe, maybe since the end of my perspective, maybe since the end of factorism, maybe since the end of Reaganomics, if that ever ended really, in the US. But this concept that, you know, people don't trust politicians

because politicians are corrupt, which they are often, you know, but more that they make promises they can't deliver on and they seem to especially promise change that they can't deliver on. You know, with Obama being perhaps the best example of this, Blair being another example of this this huge distrust and kind of looking at the supply chain stuff and then how the complexity of that and then as an upfront effect because you can't look at complexity of supply chain without looking at complexity of global markets and financial industries as well and then also the complexity of the internet itself looking at these networks

how they interact i suddenly realized that yeah you were saying, they're creating a political vacuum because they're taking away power from politicians. And we're just electing middle managers who, like the captain of the ship or the crane driver or whatever, understand a little bit of the process that they can control. And the two just seem intrinsically linked and logically dovetail into each other. The fact that part of the reason people distrust politicians so much is that they can't do anything. They can't actually affect change for their nations. They still operate within this huge hegemonic system, this kind of global system, which doesn't tolerate any kind of change. It doesn't provide room for change.

And the knock-on effect of that is it's very easy to be a strongman leader and take advantage of that. It gives you the perfect opportunity to go, look, these politicians are weak. You, as a voter, probably suspect that they are weak and you can't quite put your finger on it. And someone else, it gives you the opportunity for someone else to come along and go, well, they are weak because, look, it's trained the swamp or it's the deep state or it's corruption. And a lot of these things are true as well. These things are true. But the answers that these politicians and people like Nigel Farage or Steve Bannon or Trump, Farage and Bannon are perfect examples of this

because they both come from the finances. They worked on stock exchange. They were both traders in various ways, worked in banking. I can't remember where Farage was, but Bannon was at Goldman, right? And so they've seen this. They've stared it in the face and understand how scary it is.

Neither of them are particularly good at it, otherwise they wouldn't be fucking around doing what they're doing now as well, I suspect, right? So they both made a lot of money doing it, but not enough, right, that they can relax in the kind of like the sort of succession style utopia that they want to be living in, right? So instead, you know, they're piddling around trying to get attention with what they're doing but so i've gone very off topic there but you as a voter you look in the world doesn't quite work the way you've been led to believe it works and and things politicians said they do they don't do and your life's getting

worse in the multitude of ways whether it's the quality of consumer goods is dropping or you're losing your job or you haven't got health care or you can't get a pizza delivery or you're middle class and you can't afford the car that you want and your neighbor's got these things kind of start to get to you and you realize that something's like not right and then someone comes along and goes well it's because politicians are weak and useless and they're right but they're not for the right reasons right do you know what i mean and you know like trump's not going to come along or Farage's not going to come along and say, well, you know, it's the complexity of global supply chain. We need to take control of the ship.

Though, in a way, they both have kind of tried to argue that just for completely the wrong reasons and as a grift and as a scam, you know, like what happened with Wisconsin with Trump and the Foxconn deal there that was always a scam. Or, you know, the real, real to me the actual real motivation point brexit which is to turn the uk into kind of its own special economic zone and deregulate labor and environmental protections so that it can become a cheap manufacturing island just off continental europe right which is what i really i mean even today i was reading johnson he's flown

to brussels today to talk to the eu and he was saying, you know, whether we get a deal or not, the UK is going to become a much more interesting opportunity for outside investment. And I was like, yeah, that's what this is about. So it opens up the door, that lack of understanding by the general public and politicians and so-called experts opens up the door for

a kind of fascism to walk in, right, that says yes, the problem is weak politicians, also it's immigration also it's trans people or it's antifa it's liberals and the woke scolds or whatever the fuck they're saying this week do you know i mean it's it's these forces in society that have made democracy weak it's not the market because trump and faraj don't mean actual economic and political platforms deregulation they want to make the situation worse. They want to hand more control over to the markets at every opportunity.

And, you know, Trump's stance on China is scapegoating rather than a serious economic approach or a serious long-term social approach to readdressing the various economic and labor balances that go both ways in that relationship. There's no denying that the offshoring of production to other nations has impacted the us and british labor movements there's no denying that but then demonizing that isn't the answer either right so yeah it's a big fucking mess basically and like it just felt to me you know like the endless discussions about why brexit happened the way trump happened we'd love to pretend we live in a binary reality. We very much live in the non-binary reality. And it's not, you know, it wasn't her emails or whatever that were the cause.

It wasn't Bernie running that stopped Hillary from winning. It was a hundred different things. But this felt like one of the things, this relationship to power and organization and complexity that we never talked about, that I kind of just feel like it's my obsession to kind of highlight and talk about them for some reason. Definitely. And I think what you're describing there is really interesting, right? Because it's true that, you know, even though the solutions that are being presented to the problems that exist in our world are like complete bullshit, in a lot of senses by,

you know, these Trumps and Farages and Johnsons and whoever, there is that kernel complete bullshit in a lot of senses by, you know, these Trumps and Farages and Johnsons and whoever. There is that kernel of truth in a lot of it that makes it more palatable, right? That people say, you know, okay, yeah, this is somehow related to trade or whatever. So, you know, what they're describing sounds like somewhat plausible. So, you know, let's go with that, right? Because as you say, the world has become so complex, it's really difficult to wrap your heads exactly around what's happening here, right? And I think what you describe is that technology is really helping to make that possible in a way that it wasn't in the past. So we look at financial markets and like so many of these trades are done by algorithms.

And I spoke to Tim Wong who described how like the digital ad markets work in a very similar way to those financial markets and have been modeled off of them. And all of these trades that, you know, determine which ads that we see are done by algorithms in like milliseconds or nanoseconds or whatever while the page loads.

And, you know, even beyond that, like what you described on that trip you did with Unknown Fields, how the people who are, I don't know, driving the boats, they don't necessarily always know what's even in these crates, but they get little notifications from head office saying like, oh, slow the boat down, speed it up,

go check on this crate because like the refrigeration might not be working properly. And it's like, so all of this is just completely outside of the control of any human and just exists in this kind of technological space or technological system. And we have no real control over it, no understanding of it. And it's just kind of existing. And we're hoping that, you you know it'll just continue to somehow work and not collapse and throw our whole society off the rails right yeah exactly exactly and i've worked on the crisis side of it the novel i wrote deals with the supply chain collapse due to the internet collapse and you know we've seen stuff with covid which i'm still there's still a lot there's a lot of reporting on what happened with supply chain collapses during the COVID pandemic and what happened with PPE stuff and what happened with, you know, toilet paper supplies and things like that, which I'm looking at. I read articles saying, no, it wasn't panic buying that caused the toilet paper shortage or it wasn't supply chain failure.

And I'm looking for journalists to be able to put their hands up and go, we can't tell, and we might not ever be able to tell them. Because it's easy to go, well, actually, it wasn't failure of supply chain. It wasn't panic buying. When three days before lockdown, I was walking around Ottawa, and there was boomers pushing shopping trolleys full of toilet paper, because there'd been panic buying outbreak in Australia, and they'd seen it on

facebook and it was like no way you can deny this is happening like it because it's a convalescent of all of these things at the same time so the point i'm trying to make is the crisis side that the fact that it might all collapse is terrifying enough on its own and this is similar to how i kind of approach when i'm writing and talking about surveillance as well which is the other thing i talk about it's very easy to go with the extreme examples and scare people about surveillance. You know, someone at Amazon is listening to you or, you know, you could be hacked and your private data could be taken or you could be being watched on your webcam or whatever it is. These are extreme examples. There's actually more fundamental, both surveillance and

something like shipping complexity. there's more fundamental problems that i worry about right which is the impact they have on democracy and policy making like you know i mean i talk about this a little bit in some of my work it's you know i'm fascinated by the interaction between the data mined by surveillance capitalism and like something like gentrification you know if i move as a gentrifier which i had to do in in new york i had to move out of the neighborhood i was living in because i couldn't afford it and move into a to a predominantly black neighborhood as a first-rate gentrifier which was i felt incredibly fucking guilty about but i had no choice at the time right you know if i bought an alexa which i'd never have then

suddenly you know amazon knows everything about my buying habits and where i live and stuff so suddenly you're building like data maps of changing demographics very quickly, far quicker than, you know, the census can do, or even companies whose job it is to track those things using traditional methods can do. Amazon's able to pull that data up very quickly and maybe show it to property developers. Do you know what I mean? So these kind of like, these kind of processes go through my head. And I feel the same way about like shipping and what that says about supply chain interactions,

what that says about how that impacts a community or neighborhood or democratic process in other ways that we don't think about. And I'm very obsessed with how these networks are basically creating and impacting what's in effect policy, whether it's government policy or corporate policy, because it's very hard to see the difference between the two now the neighborhood i lived in in brooklyn was technically designated by the city to be a food desert because it was hard to get fresh vegetables you had to go on the subway and travel for 20 minutes to get to a decent supermarket but you know what happens if amazon gets enough data to say that they can move in and set up a whole foods there but it's one of these amazon Go Whole Foods where you need to have a time account in order to use it or something like that. These kinds of scenarios start playing out in my head.

And it's kind of like, well, you know, then that's a massive policy change. You've decided what the food policy is in this neighborhood. It has a very direct knock-on effect on who can afford to live there and shop there and who it attracts and who it pushes out of that neighborhood. And these are things that have been happening without us being aware of them at all. And you can't even see them happening until some storefronts open, some storefronts close at certain times, which point it's too late. The decision has been made by the network or whoever. It's kind of come out of this kind of osmosis of different complex systems has decided that

this is now a white neighborhood and deserves white stores it's really creepy and scary that stuff it's fascinating because i had this this one zero article went out last week and i had like it's had a lot of attention which i'm really pleased that more than i expected it to i was worried that people wouldn't really get it but majority of people seem to get it and understand it to be fair but i do get a lot but this is nothing new this has always been like this replies from you know fucking tech bros and then they proceed to get it things have always been complicated and then proceed to tell you how the inside of a cell works like you know like they take an example from the natural sciences is gonna like i'm talking about that but even then you know people go well actually the byzantine empire was incredibly

complex to run and they're like dude't, right, in comparison to this. You can believe it was. And at the time, it might have seemed very complicated. But there was, what, like less than a billion people living on the fucking planet at the time? You know, and we didn't have computers and algorithms and global automatic supply chain networks and TikTok and a million things. Do you know what I mean? So it's kind of like I'm not arguing that this is a new phenomenon that things are getting complex.

I'm arguing the scale's changed in ways that are just hard for us to fucking fathom, let alone understand or calculate or catalogue. There's so many different factors and different complex systems at play at any one time and any kind of decision that's been made that it's radically different. When my book came out, which is about the internet collapsing, I remember people saying, well, it's fine.

I don't see a problem. It was the British Empire. It was run on pieces of paper. And you're like, dude, you know, like, it feeds into the argument I'm making that we don't understand it. The fact we don't understand it, we can't say how complicated it is. We can't understand that, like, if a certain data center in Copenhagen goes out, literally container ships can't understand that like if a certain data center in kobe goes out

literally container ships can't load into ports because that's literally the situation so it's been fascinating to see people kind of interact with this stuff and they're kind of like wow it's always the same but you know when we everybody started talking about surveillance capitalism people are like this is just capitalism it's always been like that's not man things have fundamentally changed the scale and the speed of how these interactions work now compared to 20 or 30 years ago it's not even the same league you know i grew up a time when bank transfers were still done using telegram lines and things like this way you know just where you know you had to book a satellite in order for me and you to talk like this in real time we would have had

to book a satellite it cost us tens of thousands of dollars and there'd be a delay as we were doing it as we were speaking and now everybody has that capacity literally in their in their pocket right and that seems very utopian and exciting and it is in some ways right but at the same time it's also just an indicator of how incredibly complex i know i'm worried that i'm coming just over like as a bit of an old man about this because I am an old man and I'll be, you know, like 50 in a few years. And it's kind of like, there's two things I worry about all the time.

I'm just saying this stuff because I'm annoyed I don't understand how my computer works. And I'm just, you know, angry about pop culture because I don't like what happened to hip hop. And these are both like things that are legitimate probably critiques of me, right? You know, but at the same time time we live in an era of unprecedented acceleration of complexity and

scale right and scale is the word that i think it's just we just have far more of these systems and just far larger populations of people i think that's one of like the powers of your work right and why it's so interesting because so often like the conversation of your work, right? And why it's so interesting, because so often, like the conversation around technology is positioned in this really optimistic way, right? Like what these companies say is taken as face value, that it's going to be like some really positive thing is going to come of whatever technology or innovation that they say that they're working on, right? And then we find, you know, five, 10 years down the road that, oh, wow, surprise, it didn't actually work out how they said it was going to work out. And there are really negative

things that are coming of that, right? And I think one of the interesting things that I find, like reading your short fiction and your book, is that, you know, you are not distracted by these kind of positive things that people say, or that get reported in the media all the time. But you actually think really critically, like you described with, you know, what Amazon could potentially do with this Alexa data about what could come of these technological systems and how they could be used in a way that, you know, produces really negative outcomes for people beyond what we're already experiencing. And I would argue that are far more likely than like the positive outcomes that are so often promoted and treated as accurate or realistic, just because these tech companies say that that's what they're intending to do, or that's what their PR people say that they're not, you know, pretending to be some kind of like person who's predicting the future or whatever. But I think that your work allows us to think in a really critical way about these technologies and these systems so that we can recognize what's actually going on here instead of like... And my journalist work as well. I'm not quite the weird saying

the word journalist, to be honest, because I don't have any training in it at all and I kind of stumbled into being a journalist. Yeah, I don't use that word either. I say like a writer or a columnist. Yeah, it's a weird one. I actually won an award for journalism a few years ago and I was like, what are you doing?

I never won an award for fiction and I'm like, that's what i do yeah i i don't i'm never trying to present answers and stuff right which is infuriating to some people especially people in tech who will listen to you but they want an answer at the end and i'm like i'm not here to do that kind of the thing i'm fighting against in a lot of ways is answers prescribed answers right it's a common mantra that that i repeat all the time but you know the problem with silicon value is that it tries to find problems and then make those problems technological problems so it can build and sell you technology to solve them that's the mantra of how silicon value works you know the y combinator kind of philosophy

and that is really what's been one of the most damaging and devastating trends of the last like decade or so and given us the gig economy and amazon and the kind of elements as well as capitalism that we you know the internet of things kind of everything's listening to you kind of culture we live in now but like you say i'm never trying to predict the future but also i am to a certain extent that's kind of what i do for a living. I'm very conflicted over that because I like to say that you can't, but I also think it's possible to do it to a certain extent. I don't think you can predict the future as in I can tell you what's going to happen on a certain day, but I think it's very,

I actually think it's very easy to spot emerging trends and to follow them through to their natural conclusions simply by understanding capitalism and how, well, how shitty it is really. You understand that everything is driven by profit and growth and the bottom line, then it's very easy to bolt stuff together. And there's a lot of discussion this week about cyberpunk as a literary movement because this video game's come out and stuff. And it's something that is, again, very conflicting to me because i get called fun punk right all the time and i

i kind of vehemently kick against that because i don't think you can write some punk in the 2020s of any use it's a literary movement in the 80s and 90s and it was incredibly important back then and it was incredibly important to me personally, like very important to me. I grew up in a family where everyone read science fiction, especially my father. My mom as well, though. But my dad would have, you know, the house was full of science fiction books. And I was reading science fiction from a very early age. And me and my dad would read the same books and say,

I need a hand, give me books to read and stuff. I remember New Romance coming out and stuff, one of the first books I bought myself, took back and gave to him. And he didn't quite fully get it. So there was this kind of important cultural movement there, you know, this kind of moment for me where I had my own kind of subculture that I was involved in for the first time

when I was like, you know, 13, 14. At the same time, rave culture was happening and I was into hip-hop culture and stuff like that. But all these things kind of gelled together. My point is more that it was very important to me and I learned a lot of skills from it, but it's not something I want to write cyberpunk now. And looking at some of the same issues. Science fiction and publishing are super lazy. If you write a book about computers, it's cyberpunk. And it's like, can you imagine writing a book

that isn't historical fiction, that isn't about computers now? I mean, do you know what I mean? It's kind of, this is what I kind of laugh at about literary fiction and science fiction they're both kind of like oh you're writing about hackers must be a cyberpunk writer and it's like do you watch the news do you use your smartphone we're all cyberpunk writers now you know if that's the definition you want to use sorry to go back i'm going horribly off topic again cyberpunk and a lot of hollywood movies amazingly that have been made in the late 70s early 80s through to the 90s really taught me to you know just take capitalism and exaggerate it and you'll probably be right right you know i grew up in judge dread comics which seem

probably tame sometimes after watching what happened with the cop riots in the u.s over the summer right and? And police brutality. It looks horribly tame when you see images of like militarized police. And I grew up with Running Man, which seems kind of, if you take out the dystopian, like gladiatorial game aspect, it seems like a fairly good summary of the Trump era, right? You know, like through to the reality president, reality TV celebrities and presidents and stuff and robocop and the paul

verhoeven movies and these are satirical like over-the-top action movies but they understood just follow the trend of financialization or the trend of corporate culture you know you can go back to something like rollable or something you know followed these movies about how corporations and financialization is going to eat america and they were right and i think you can do that and i kind of try to do that now it's harder now because everything's more complex and things happen like trump or things happen like the coronavirus which are some of these kind of like barriers where it's hard to see random a lot of time but you still can do it so yeah i spend a lot of time thinking about the future rather than trying to predict it but i think it's i think it's fairly easy to spot the larger trends as they

emerge and apply the rules of capitalism to them it's very depressing but kind of fairly accurate kind of idea of where things are heading you know i would very much agree with that i i think i definitely need to go back and like revisit some of that older science fiction when i talked to aaron beninov he was like giving me a bunch of recommendations. And I was like, 2021, like I really need to explore more science fiction and up my knowledge on that kind of stuff. But I found really interesting because he wrote a piece for One Zero a few months ago, kind of looking at what science fiction thought that 2020 was going to look like, right? And one of the things that you said in that piece

that I found really interesting was how a lot of science fiction is not so much about the future, but a reflection on the present as well. Can you expand a bit on that and kind of explain how you think that works? Yeah, it's kind of a cliche. You hear people say a lot, but it's a cliche because it's 100% true's 100% accurate. Any writing, whether it's science fiction or not, right? And this is particularly true, actually, for futures work and corporate consultancy and futures work, which is an area that I work in as well because I need to pay rent. These people have money. But any writing about the future is about the present.

It can't not be, right? It's literally a summation of people's fears and hopes for the future. That's what any writing about the future has to be, by definition. I don't think you can escape from that. What I was trying to get out in that article, and I've got out in some various interviews I've given over the years and stuff, because a lot of my fiction, for example, is set very near future to the point it's practically set in the present.

I write stuff that's sometimes set two or three years in the future right which is a fucking ridiculous thing that's a crazy thing you know i wrote zero hours in 2013 which is about the gig economy before we'd started using the term gig economy that was actually set in 2023 but i was fairly tame in my predictions in some ways right but also very accurate with it. The point is, people say to me, why do you write, isn't that dangerous writing? Dangerous in quotes, right? Isn't that a risk writing about stuff that's that near future? Because it's going to look very dated very soon. And I said, well, my response is, what's wrong with being dated?

If we accept that you're writing about the present, then being dated isn't an issue. Because if we all accept that writing about the future is actually about the present, if you come back and look at a book in the 1960s that was obsessed with nuclear war that didn't happen, it's a valid book because it was catching the present. It was a relevant book to the present. And you can say that about any science fiction any futures work and any time right it's not about getting it accurate it's about accurately catching the fears and hopes and and the trends of the time it was written and then exploiting those out into a story right

and highlighting the stuff that the writer's particularly concerned about or excited about even and i think that's something that people that write about the future, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, you should be proud of. You should kind of seize and own, right? My work is going to look dated because it's of time. I think it's even as true for people looking at policy work and stuff. It's important to do this. It's about the same as sociology. I did a sociology degree, right?

And I started doing a PhD afterwards, which i dropped out of after like a year and a half or so but most of my way looking at futures i kind of learned from sociology and i realized that as i was studying sociology and looking at ethnographic research or quantitative research even people are particularly worried about certain issues what they were doing is they were worrying about the future they're saying like this emerging trend in society whether it's a labor issue or an issue around racism or issue around around pop culture stuff, which was my kind of area when I was in sociology. Or whatever it is, we're looking at this scenario and saying, you know, if we don't do something about this or understand this in some way or have policy that tackles these issues,

the situation is going to get a lot worse. You're then worrying about the future. You're then making predictions or worrying about predictions or raising your concerns or hopes or fears or whatever about the future and that's kind of been my approach is like i'm not trying to necessarily make accurate predictions but i am trying to look and see what's happening and then we can kind of address this stuff or talk about it in certain ways if it looks dated in a few years it doesn't matter because it was important at the time right and there's a part of me that secretly wants to write like a story that you could pinpoint the day or the week it was written just by the references

that were in it or the concerns that were in it stuff you know but i come out of all these fun stupid ideas of things that are just going to be disastrous projects i was trying to write a piece of fiction a week about something in the news and yeah i just realized certain things you can do but you don't want to take them on my point is kind of don't worry about being dated if you're writing about the future that's not the point the point is to catch the moment and like i say it's particularly true for corporate writing as well a lot of corporate writing is written exactly that way it's to catch the client's fears of clients aspirations and to reinforce them in certain ways which are often fairly unhealthy and dangerous but that's how that industry works as well it's not really about making accurate prediction

i get invited to a lot of workshops and events and conferences and stuff and there's whenever there's and someone's talking about the future there's always the inevitable trends coming up in the future and there's always that inevitable slide about asteroid mining and i know it's time to check out at that point because this person doesn't really know what they're talking about. But that's what corporate industry wants to believe the future is. It understands that things are fucked, understands the environment's fucked, understands that its customer base is getting poorer. But what if we invested in blue sky thinking where there's nothing bluer sky than resource exploitation in space? That's kind of what I guess what I'm trying to say is you can't predict the future, but it's important to do it

and it's important to get it wrong if you get it wrong for the right reason. I think it was Kim Stanley Robinson who said recently that the idea of like colonizing Mars or mining asteroids is just like a fantasy of the time. And, you know, so many people are just accepting that this is something that might actually happen when it would never actually work out, right? Exactly. You know, you can't go live on Mars because radiation will kill you. And no one talks about that. They just don't talk about that it's fascinating the self-delusion around the radiation issue of mud it's just fascinating people talk about everything they will talk about how there's this i can't remember it's called there's a chemical in marsham soil which

is toxic to humans but they've worked out ways to get around that but they haven't worked out ways to get the fact that you need like a miles worth of fucking lead between you and the atmosphere weirdly the only piece of fiction I'd seen recently that dealt with this really well was I actually liked it nobody else did

that Brad Pitt space film Ad Astra if you've seen that and he gets to Mars and he has to go down this huge mine shaft and he never sees any light for the time he's

there and everybody's really fucking depressed because they're living like a mile under the ground in caves right that's the only way you can there's like 12 people there on shitty u.s moon base there's nothing glamorous about this and musk knows this he's not a fucking idiot he knows this but it's not part of his grift or his brand or the dream that he sells to people to point out that he hasn't got a solution for that yet there's magical sci-fi solutions where

you build force fields to keep out the radiation that's might be technically feasible but feels like we're two centuries away from having that kind of technology right you know so it's it's just hilarious and depressing to watch these things but they're really dangerous as well right because you know i was having this discussion with someone recently about i go to like a futures workshop or a workshop on the future of cities or something that i'm invited to talk about or be part of and we're sitting around trying to have a discussion about buses you know like a sensible discussion about city policies and buses and how buses can be more efficient

and environmentally friendly and how they can serve all the neighborhoods and what's a different approach to the funding models for buses we We need to definitely rethink mass transit. And someone will inevitably, at the table or in the event, put their hand up and go, but what about driverless cars? What about Musk's Hyperloop? What about his tunnels? Because he owns the future, right? He's caught the public imagination for the future,

and that his future is a highly individualistic one, where he openly doesn't like trains and cars, which he openly now just says on Twitter. He doesn pretend not to like he did like four or five years ago he's just like i hate trains i put cars on but his idea of the future has been he's captured that he owns the the public imagination around transport it's disgusting and dangerous and really worrying because it just derails conversation. And suddenly you argue with a guy in a fucking room about how self-driving cars aren't going to happen anytime soon. The tunnel thing's stupid.

And it's not the argument we want to be having. We want to be having a constructive argument about how do we fund mass transit? How do we make people use it? So these things are like, they're really worrying and disturbing and upsetting and not wasting he's blocked me on twitter now they say it's a lot easier i'm jealous i completely agree though i i don't know if you know my master's thesis was actually focused on like what tech

is proposing for transportation and why like oh right it would never actually work you know as they promise it would right and you know why that's not kind of the solution that we need to be pursuing. So I completely agree with you. Like, it drives me crazy. Exactly. Yeah. But I wonder, we've talked about the complexity and kind of the narrowness of a lot of the tech solutions that are put out there for these big problems that we face, you know, and the need to kind of think critically about what these technologies are doing or the future that they're driving us toward, right? And obviously you have this new column that is looking at these kind of complex systems that exist around us that maybe we don't recognize as much. And you've talked about how that complexity is kind of affecting democracy and our ability to understand the world around us. Do you think that the world or the systems that we inhabit need to become less complex, or we need to have some better way of

understanding them or having control over them? It's a good question, and I don't fully know the answer. And I guess I'm hoping the column is going to kind of allow me to explore that a bit. It's the first time I've really, I've been obsessed with this whole question and this whole issue for nearly a decade now, but specifically since I did that trip to China. And this is the first opportunity someone's given me luckily to kind of drill down into looking at this stuff a bit more. I suspect it's a complex issue and there isn't a simple answer. You know, I like to use the term reality is non-binary.

And I feel like that's probably very true, with especially this. I feel like probably we need to regulate a lot of these networks in order to limit how complex they are or slow how complex they are. I kind of like the idea of moratoriums and technology a lot,

quite how you implement those, I'm not sure. I like the answers that make silicon valley very nervous which is like you know moratoriums regulations bodies that govern things the sort of stuff that like valley venture capitalists and e-token kind of people get very terrified by if they're scared then there's probably the right way to go and then there's there's more you know like liam young who i mentioned earlier who i traveled to china with he has interesting ideas about how supply chain could be used to distribute labor as much as it distributes products right so you could actually move manufacturing to different parts of the world

based on the need for labor rather than the need for cheapness right you know right if you need to create jobs well if you can move components around the world in like 48 hours with this highly sophisticated supply system, then there isn't a need. If you're not worrying just about how cheap labor is, there isn't. You could build a Foxconn factory in Wisconsin, or you could build factories in parts of the world where there's a need for labor, and components could be made. He likes to use the idea of a computer that's been assembled for different components in different countries,

which is a lot of how manufacturing used to work for a certain amount. The automotive industry, there was times when certain parts were traditionally made in other countries and then shipped around here and there. I mean, even like today, I was looking at Honda factory in the UK, which is shut down production simply because of the Brexit port stuff. It means it's not getting its parts from europe that it needs to assemble cars so we'll all be doing this to a certain extent that's an interesting idea which i'm not sure how practical is i'm not sure if it doesn't actually create

other problems but it's interesting concept to look at that we use these networks to redistribute as much as we do to centralize they like to pretend they're decentralized networks and they are because a lot of, and this is where it starts to get murky and stuff and kind of trying to drill into the column. A lot of decision-making isn't centralized at all. It's being made by systems we can't see or necessarily locate or multiple systems at once,

which might physically be located in different data centers or offices or people in different parts of the world. So it looks like a centralized decision different parts of the world so it looks like a centralized decision a lot of the time when it's not or vice versa it looks like decentralized decisions when it is centralized ones everything's very opaque which is the problem right that's the problem i'm trying to get at is that we don't understand how this stuff is done so there's an argument to be made which is interesting that we repurpose these networks to redistribute labor decision making as much as we do products and wealth.

That's one way of kind of looking at that. But I kind of fall on the side of a heavy regulation. But probably it's the kind of regulation we're not going to see under the average neoliberal government. So then you have that kind of issues as well about how we tackle these things. It's hard to say. But I'm hoping some of that's going to come out with with conversations i'm going to be having over the next few months but at the same time i'm quite prepared for a lot of those conversations to be just people ripping their hair out going i don't understand if you're listening to this podcast

actually i just want to shout out to your listeners if you're listening to this podcast and you work at a large tech company or a large shipping company and you're what i'm saying is connecting with you because you understand that the internal systems you're working on you know maybe your team large tech company a doesn't understand what the other team at large tech company a is doing or you know your line manager doesn't really understand the code you're working on or you're working on code that you like has been there for like five or ten years and the person originally wrote it left six years ago and you don't understand it but you're still some of it's working somewhere sarah john made a really great point recently about after the election the last week of the election the algorithm at facebook clearly

changed and started serving up less biased less fake newsy kind of more reputable content, right? But she made good points that they might change something. They probably changed something without realizing they changed something, which is something that I see happening a lot of time. Someone comments out a bit of code in order to test something and nothing breaks or changes or something. But if you're one of these people listening to the podcast and this sounds muted and you'd like to talk to me off the record, please reach out to me.

Because I'm kind of looking for people at the moment. Trying to get first hand, you know, labor experiences of this. I got a little bit of it from working in the supply chain stuff. You know, I talked to people and a few people worked on ships and stuff. It's harder to talk to factory workers in China. That's not something as a foreigner that you're able to do. But I would love to talk to tech workers and people about this stuff directly. And hopefully that's something we're going to get to do.

And hopefully out of those discussions, we can start to find ways to re-evaluate this problem. I would like to see politicians pick it up in a genuine way. It's what I'd like to see. I'd like to see a populist movement in a positive way of politicians that address, literally sit down and address people's fears by pointing out what causes them a little bit like in all democratic politics there's something going on i'm not so much sure about canada because i don't follow canadian politics i feel really bad man i lived here for three years and i don't really understand canadian politics

but i moved here in the time when my home country and my last adoptive home country, the US's politics, was so fucking crazy. I just had my brain space to really even sort of delve into Canadian politics much more than surface level. But, you know, there's people, you know, I see AOC talking about this stuff occasionally. I see Bernie talking about stuff. I see people in the UK talking about it occasionally.

But I would like that to become a dealing with these issues and owning up to the complexity so we can start figuring it out i'd like to see that as a platform that politicians would adopt but we'll see yeah no definitely i'm really looking forward to the column i think it will be really interesting and you know you might start with some of these systems but then the questions will grow from there tim i really appreciate you taking the time to chat. I've really loved this conversation. I thought it was super interesting. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Sorry I rambled quite a bit. You ask me one question and I'll try and

answer three for some reason at the same time. Tim Mon is the author of Infinite Detail and Ghost Hardware and has a new column with One zero that I think you're really going to like. And you can find the links to those in the show notes. You can also follow Tim on Twitter at at Tim Mon. You can follow me at at Paris Marks and you can follow the show at at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network and you can find more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. And finally, if you appreciate the work that I put into making this show every week, you can go to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus

and become a supporter. Thanks for listening. Thank you.