Tech Won't Save Us - The Frictionless World of Silicon Valley w/ Anna Wiener

Episode Date: January 7, 2021

Paris Marx is joined by Anna Wiener to discuss her journey into the tech industry, how Silicon Valley’s desire for a “frictionless” world is affecting culture, and why it’s important to analyze Substack’s claims about the future of journalism.Anna Wiener is the author of “Uncanny Valley” (available in paperback on Bookshop) and a contributing writer at the New Yorker. Follow Anna on Twitter as @annawiener.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 Anna’s articles on Substack, Section 230, and Salesforce Park in San Francisco.Ava Kofman, Francis Tseng, and Moira Weigel explain how Amazon self-publishing has become a haven for white supremacists.Venture-capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz wrote about what they see as the “passion economy.”Support the show

Andreessen Horace has had a hand in shaping the gig economy and in reshaping labor in a lot of ways. And so when they put their institutional support behind Substack, I have to take them seriously. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Anna Wiener. Anna is the author of Uncanny Valley and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. She's written fascinating pieces about how the tech industry is affecting the landscape of San Francisco, about Substack, the new platform that says it's going to transform the future of journalism, and so much more. In this conversation, we cover a lot of topics, and it's really interesting to get Anna's take on her trajectory from publishing into the tech

industry and now into journalism at her position at The New Yorker, and how that has given her insight on how the tech industry is affecting our culture, the way that it is a homogenizing force in many ways, and the problems of diversity and sexism that are in the tech industry, but also across the broader society. I was really happy to have Anna on the show, and I think you're really going to like our conversation. Just a reminder that Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, and you can find out more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com. If you like the show, make sure to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, and make sure to share it with any friends, colleagues, or on social media to show that you like it

and give that social proof so other people might give it a shot. We've also reached 80 Patreon supporters and are quickly approaching the first goal of $500 a month. So if you are liking the show and you want to support the work that I put into making it every week, you can join supporters like Vincent Lassan, Xavier Kay, and Kirsten from Brooklyn by going to patreon.com slash techwontsaveus and becoming a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Anna, welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's great to speak with you. You know, obviously, I have been really looking forward to chatting. I really enjoyed your book, Uncanny Valley, and also reading, you know, your more recent work in

The New Yorker. But I wanted to start with how you didn't begin in tech, you weren't one of these people who like, did computer science in university, and then like, you know, join Google and whatever, right? You had a different pathway, which I find is really interesting, going from publishing into tech, and then gaining insights through that journey that you were on. And now being, I guess, out the other side of tech and reporting on it for The New Yorker or writing about it for The New Yorker. What kind of insights do you think that provided you as you analyze the industry or were just interested with what's going on and were looking at the prospects for what direction you wanted to go?

Yeah. So I started working in tech when I was 25 and I had been working in the book publishing industry in Manhattan and wasn't really sure what the future was. This was the early 2010s. Amazon had come onto the scene and was sort of squeezing the industry for all it was worth. And it was very clear that this was not going to change, that Amazon wasn't going anywhere. Two of the biggest publishing houses were merging. There was just a sense that the sky was falling. I've since learned that this is a feeling that people in publishing have had for decades, that the sky is falling. But at the time, especially having graduated from college into the recession, it really felt like it wasn't an industry where I was going to have

a sustainable future. I was an assistant at a literary agency. I was applying for other jobs that were still being an assistant, but maybe taking on clients. It was a very slow moving field with the sense that you could climb the ladder for decades before really doing the work you wanted to do. My entry point into tech was that I was reading the Paris Review blog at work one day, famous for its tech coverage. They had a little piece about this new startup that had raised $3 million to build an e-reading app. And there was a sort of language of Silicon Valley in all of the coverage about this company. I don't remember if it was on this blog in particular, but when I Googled it, that was new language to me, that this is the future of reading and this is innovative and whatever. And I thought that $3 million was a preposterous amount of money that if a company

had raised $3 million and they were the future of publishing, this was the sort of scale that I was operating on in terms of my financial knowledge. So I just reached out to them and said, I don't know anything about technology, but I know a lot about books and you probably need someone on your staff who knows about books. I can write copy. I can do recruiting, like whatever. I'll do anything to work for you. It was truly a document of desperation, but they were, I think, kind of open to this because there's this sense in Silicon Valley that the hungry are rewarded, the go-getters are rewarded. And I didn't think I was being a go-getter. I thought I was just being sort of thirsty, but I went and worked for them on a part-time basis for three months, basically doing in-app

curation and some copywriting and just various office tasks that like sort of degenerated into my just being like an office manager and ordering snacks and stuff. And it was clear that this was not going to be a job. Like they didn't have a staff, they didn't have a public product, but this sort of launched me into going to work for the state analytics company in San Francisco. And so this was never my dream. But the way that people were talking about tech at the time was with such breathless enthusiasm that I wanted it to be my dream. I knew that it was so many other people's dream that surely there must be some reason why everyone wanted in on this industry. The persuasiveness of the mythology was just so intense. And I think I was saying to you earlier before we were recording that

I was never really a true believer, but I really wanted to be a true believer. And so I think I deluded myself into thinking I was a true believer for quite a while, even though there was always some part of me that was thinking this isn't quite right. But I think that in terms of coming from book publishing, coming from a background that wasn't, you know, oriented toward computer science or technology in any way, I studied sociology as an undergrad. I didn't go to graduate school. When I was in college, I wrote a senior thesis on evangelical pop culture and the seductiveness of form over messaging. Like just, this is not, this is not for the tech industry. But I do think in writing about Silicon Valley now, and one of the reasons why I continued

to write about it, even when I left the industry, you know, left my job as an employee of tech companies is that there's so much rich material about the way people interact and how they form belief systems. And there's like all the drama of literature in the competition and rivalries and failure. There's so much like pathos in Silicon Valley. So I think to me, that's always the angle that's most exciting. It's just like, what's the human story? What is non-obvious about this? Why are people participating in this? And then what does it mean? You know, like for cities when during a pandemic, the ghost kitchen model becomes increasingly popular or becomes at least a hot topic that people think will become increasingly popular. You know,

what are the sort of long-term repercussions of these utopian, techno-utopian futurist visions that are beholden to like pretty short-term financial incentives? So that's sort of a long-winded answer to your question, but I think I have the most fun thinking about Silicon Valley when I try to place it in context and also almost read it as you might read a piece of literature, which I know sounds really pretentious, but I think you know what I mean. I think that's fascinating, right? And I think it shows that it's such an interesting way to look at the tech industry. As I was telling you earlier, I started paying attention to the publishing industry back around 2013. And that's

when I saw how Amazon was affecting it, but also these kind of narratives of self-publishing and how it was giving people opportunities who have been excluded from the publishing industry in this way that is really reminiscent, I think, of a lot of what these tech companies have promised to people, right? The kind of independence that they can have, escaping gatekeepers, not having a boss, all of these similar narratives, I think you could see in what was happening at that time with self-publishing and how Amazon was affecting the publishing industry that I think has gone on to kind of inform how technology can affect a whole range of different industries and how its promises don't always pay off, how there might be superstar kind

of people who benefit from it. There might be certain people who benefit and they become kind of the faces of the success, but that doesn't necessarily mean that everyone is benefiting or that the benefits are getting distributed in a way that is kind of fair and equal or that we would want to see or that that's incredibly white. I mean, the whole marketing and sales apparatus is oriented to a certain idea of what a reader is or should be. The primary currency is taste, which is embedded with all sorts of classist, racist assumptions, which is to say that self-publishing can be remarkable. It's a huge opportunity for people whose work has been overlooked by establishment publishers. At the same time, some of the most successful books, I think, of the early 2010s were initially books that were self-published. And so there's this

interesting sort of ecosystem that happens where, like you're saying, people become the face of a phenomenon when they are the most successful. And it sort of ignores the long tail of people who have either like a middle range of success or no success at all. And, you know, I think also as these platforms progress, like they also provide homes for extremist content. They also provide homes for the sort of writing that one would hope, I would hope, never gets an audience. And I don't mean that as a matter of taste. I mean that as a matter of morality, which is also, I guess, a matter of taste in a certain way. I don't know. This is the tension between representation and reality, like the representation of an idea or of a new cultural form or of a company,

and then how people actually engage with it as users, as participants, as consumers in a way. So, I mean, I feel like we could sort of map that to any tech company. But I think especially in the kind of the culture industry, this gets really interesting because it's not just kind of looking at like a marketplace or, I mean, it is looking at a marketplace, but it's not looking at like infrastructure, like transportation. It's looking at the way people choose to shape their worldview, to put it at the most in the most basic of terms. I feel like one of the things that you can do is, you know, you can recognize the issues that were with publishing. And then obviously, you went into tech. And, you know,

you said you wanted to become a true believer to really embrace this kind of lifestyle, this view. And then the cracks started to show, right? And in the same way that you just described that, you know, publishing has its problems, itself as the future, as bringing these kind of positive visions to light, that you also found that these issues were still endemic to the tech industry as well. So I wonder, what does that tell you that these problems were in publishing, then you went to tech and the problems are there? And I think it's very fair to say that these problems are just across society. Yeah, maybe there's some sort of cohesive, unifying economic system that we might investigate. Yeah, I mean, I think that every industry has its own sort of flavors of the same problems.

You know, publishing, there are a lot more women in publishing in positions of leadership than there are in Silicon Valley. But you're also seeing in publishing that some of the biggest books in the past year were published by Trump administration insiders who sort of tell all accounts that these are highly lucrative products. Silicon Valley has its own discourse around women in leadership, but I don't really know that having someone like Sheryl Sandberg at the helm of Facebook is progress. I think that anyone in that position would behave in the same way, regardless of whether or not they're, you know, man or woman. It doesn't change the shape of that product either.

So I think there are some commonalities there, I guess. But when I moved to San Francisco, when I became a part of Silicon Valley, the conversation around diversity in tech, I first was exposed to that in like 2012, I guess, when I was sort of looking around at jobs that kind of were at this one job, not jobs. I don't want to overstate my professional savvy here, but I met with one woman who worked in tech who was not an engineer and we had lunch in Manhattan somewhere. And I remember that the conversation was very much about like lean in feminism. It was about how to get women into positions of power and to leadership roles. And this was also a book that was being read in publishing. I mean, everyone was reading Lean In. And I think that that conversation has really shifted over the years. And at the time, it really meant like,

how do we get white women into positions of power? And now the conversation around diversity in tech is way more complex and interesting and meaningful. And there are people inside of Silicon Valley corporations and startups that are actually working on diversity and inclusion initiatives. I think that that work is really important. I think that it all comes down to how much buy-in people have, those people have inside of their companies, whether they are listened to,

whether they can actually push forward meaningful programs and changes to the company. And I think that where people hit a wall is when diversity and inclusion programs might run counter to some of the company's other values like speed or efficiency. And so what I mean specifically by that is creating a more equitable or inclusive workplace sometimes means firing people who are in positions of leadership. It means moving more slowly and doing more research and consulting more people before you ship a product. It means designing a business that has to fall in line with those values too. And a lot of businesses don't. I'm going off the rails a little bit, but I do think that the conversation has changed

in really interesting and exciting ways. And that the sort of last push is going to be willpower shift because that's what needs to happen for there to that the sort of last push is going to be will power shift because that's that's what needs to happen for there to be any sort of sustainable change inside these companies that doesn't just kind of end up at window dressing so yeah are these are the people who are doing important work are they empowered to actually see it through earlier today like before we were having the conversation i was was thinking about this as well. And I was like, it was that kind of Sheryl Sandberg feminism that seemed to be promoted as the solution initially, right? Even though there was initially pushback saying like, this isn't going to be the solution. And it became clear that that was not the case, right? And so I find it really

interesting. And I completely agree in what you're saying that the change is going to come when workers have the power to kind of force those changes and to ensure that they can do the work that might not always be the most profitable direction to go, but will be more in line with their values as a result, instead of just the values of profit and speed and innovation, whatever that still means, and things like that. Right. I'm almost regretting starting the sentence because it's such a thorny conversation, but thinking about content moderation and how what we're discussing intersects with the sort of sense of inevitability that a lot of technology

is discussed with. Like, do we need instantaneous, you know, streaming and uploading to a platform like Facebook or YouTube? Is there some mechanism that could throttle that a little bit? Or Twitter even, you know, it doesn't have to be visual content. That would slow a business down, but it might also reshape the tone of some of these platforms, the sort of divisive, combative, knee-jerk reaction culture that is both incentivized by and therefore thrives on a lot of social networks and platforms. So yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that moving slowly is not in the industry DNA, although I personally think it could make for, if not more virtuous and

certainly more interesting products, but that's about the incentives of capitalism and also the venture model. And it's really about the economic structure, not any internal conversation that people are having about the ethics of what they're doing. Because at the end of the day, that's what governs everything, I guess is all I'm saying. But listeners of this podcast know that, so we don't have to dwell on that too much. But I still think it's an important point to bring up. And I wasn't really planning to get into this at all. But it makes me think of the ongoing conversation around Section 230 in the United States, this kind of law that is associated with, I don't know, making the internet as it currently exists possible, right?

And just to say there's an argument that if this law were to go away or be reformed in some way, that it would get rid of the internet as we know it. And this isn't necessarily a comment on Section 230 and that whole debate. I'm not sure I even want to get into it. But just that kind of argument, when I hear it, it strikes me and I say, but maybe we should get rid of like the internet as it exists today, because there are a lot of problems with it. Like, why can't we accept that there are parts of it that are good and that are working and that are positive and that we like, but also say like, there are also a lot of really big issues here. And why shouldn't we want to examine those and change the internet?

Because ultimately, it is like these kind of rules and frameworks that we put in place that determine what gets kind of built on top of them, right? And so, you know, I completely accept that maybe the regulatory environment or the legislative environment in the United States might not be conductive to, you know, a good debate over what that might look like. But I still don't think it's worth kind of brushing it aside. I think that's something that we really do need to be talking about and what changing that kind of legal structure, and obviously antitrust is part of that as well, would look like if we want to promote a tech industry, or not even a tech industry, but technology that serves a public good more than

profits and speed and things like that, that you were just talking about. Yeah, I think you're wise to not want to go too deep into Section 230. But I will say shamelessly that I wrote a piece for The New Yorker about Section 230 and some of the proposals for reform that have emerged from legal scholars, if People are interested. So Section 230 gives tech companies legal immunity from basically being held liable for content that users post on their sites. So one of the objections to repealing Section 230 is that it will intensify existing monopolies, that the companies that have the money to litigate will thrive and dominate, and that it will suppress any innovation or any startups or any new alternatives to companies

like Google, Facebook, Amazon, whatever. I bring this up only because I think that you had wanted to talk about homogeneity and monopoly and how this sort of ties into disruption. And I wonder if you want to go in that direction a little bit and just using this question of ties into disruption. And I wonder if you want to go in that direction a little bit, and, you know, just using this question of like, a commercial internet that's dominated by a fairly small handful of corporations, and kind of what the aesthetic implications of that are, or maybe also the sort of commercial or economic implications of that. I think it's just a broader trend that we've experienced where we see these websites having fewer customization options and just looking so similar to each other. I think we can even look at this trend in logos over the past few years where they're

all adopting this kind of sans-serif font that is so similar, right? But I think we can also see it in the broader culture. And this is something that you've discussed in your work as well, right? Where there's not only this kind of promotion of like a lifestyle and an aesthetic that is adopted in tech, but it's also being kind of pushed into the urban landscape and not just in San Francisco, but around the world where we're kind of seeing this kind of aesthetic recreated, whether it's in San Francisco, New York, London, everywhere around the world, right, is kind of adopting this kind of sterilized, you know, I think some people might call it like more of like a Scandinavian kind of minimalist, you know, aesthetic, right? And so it just seems that in an industry that seems so based on individualism and promoting this idea that people are pursuing their own desires and, as you say, need to fight for themselves and show that they are different

and can take initiative. Those kinds of ideas are paired with this homogenization that we're seeing through the activities that people engage in, the way that they live, their homes, the businesses that they frequent, the design of the cities that they live in. There just seems to be this massive divide that is just increasingly evident in so many aspects of life. Yeah, I mean, I think that it sort of feels to me like an extension of the values of software to aesthetic or cultural forms. Like, I mean, for me, one of the things that was really

interesting working at the state analytics company was being able to see what other software companies were trying to optimize for and how they did that and how that shaped the user experience. And this idea of frictionlessness, that everything should be as fast and easy as possible to get you to whatever moment in a digital experience generates revenue. And this sort of simplicity of that efficiency obsession that Silicon Valley is famous for and has built an industry on

is pervasive in this way that I sort of identify in really superficial ways. Like, I feel like Everlane is such a perfect example of the culture of like generics, basically. But I find this kind of hard to reconcile with the just unfathomable quantity of objects that are available to order into one's own home from across the world. I think that another kind of interesting place where this manifests is like in sites like the Wirecutter or sites that do roundups of objects on Amazon using affiliate links. And, you know, this is obviously to generate revenue, but it's also a huge service to Amazon because someone else, some other entity

is doing the labor of curating all this stuff on Amazon's marketplace. And I find that kind of funny and interesting, not least because then you go to your friend's homes and like all of you have the same toaster and it's like, oh yeah, like wire cutter, right? Like this idea that someone else has selected for you the very best example of a certain type of object and that there's an efficiency to that, like this idea of sort of like ratings culture too. And you see it also on like Yelp or gig work platforms, right? Where people are treating every experience as a sort of consumer experience and rating it accordingly. I mean, for me as a writer, I find this very disturbing on Goodreads where it's like the star system on Goodreads. You know, I think it puts the reader in a position of like it's like almost a mode of disengagement.

Like I love reading comments on Goodreads, especially the negative ones. But something about that quantification of things that I think are largely qualitative feels very of a piece with Silicon Valley's approach to cultural artifacts. And I think, I mean, I have this whole like totally uninformed, ahistorical rant in the book about EDM and how that's sort of like the music of the industry,

where it has the illusion of coming from nowhere, although obviously like electronic dance music has a long history and an interesting history. I don't really know where I'm going with this, except to say that I do think that like frictionless is one of the sort of defining qualities of our cultural moment in ways that are still not totally obvious. And I think you also see this in styles of sort of white noise music and streaming entertainment that is anodyne and sort of designed to be partially paid attention to. I think it's always harder to discuss this with respect to culture than it is to just sort of talk about like Amazon or Uber, the sort of more infrastructural,

disruptive, quote unquote tech companies. I think you're right though. Like it's difficult because when it comes to culture, it does feel like it's more subjective. But like what you're describing there, I think about it in like a really long trajectory. Like one of the things I always found fascinating was how in the United States and in the West more general, there was this idea that capitalism was associated with consumerism and all these choices, etc., etc. But then we look at these images of suburbia where everyone has these cookie cutter homes and the similar cars in the driveway. The idea is communism is supposed to be where everyone's the same, but like capitalism is supposed to be where people are different. But then like that's not actually necessarily observed. And I think we're just seeing like an extension and an entrenchment of that. with culture in general is about how these companies are so focused on, or at least these

like consumer oriented ones on promoting convenience and everything needs to be more convenient. And that's what we're all kind of looking for ostensibly. And so even if this convenience is hurting workers who are in Amazon factories or delivering food on these apps or, you know, musicians who are not getting paid through Spotify, it seems like it's harder to get people to care because it's convenient, right? It's frictionless, it's easy. And so those things are like accepted as trade-offs because having to do something that's more difficult is harder to convince people to do, or is even becoming difficult to even find,

right, as these things become normalized in our lives. Yeah, I think it is hard to change behavior. But I also wonder with, I mean, the frictionlessness is kind of interesting when it's combined with like continuous play in a way, or that's not exactly the right phrase. But I'm thinking about how at this analytics company, we introduced, we, still speaking in the collective first person, how when I was there, the company introduced this new metric that it called addiction. And the metric basically measured, it was like a retention graph, more or less. And the idea behind it was that the more addicted a user was to an app, the better,

because it meant that your app was the one that they were constantly opening and checking and spending time on. And I think that something like Spotify, it's convenient because it kind of aggregates everything ostensibly. It's just like a gigantic spreadsheet. And it's convenient because it's fairly inexpensive. And it's, I would say has a monopoly on streaming music, but I don't actually know if that's true. That's, that might just be tainted by my own experience. It has a monopoly in my house, but I don't actually know that as a user, it's a pleasurable experience. Like I often find myself listening to music, like in the way that there's music playing in the back of an advertisement and you don't really notice it. And I will, you know, I will realize that I've been listening to something on repeat

for an hour, some album on repeat by accident, or that I'm accidentally listening to like Bob Dylan B-sides because like the algorithm has just like taken a left turn. So I think that there's sort of like an oversaturation that happens, I guess is what I'm getting at. And I guess I reject the idea that efficiency creates a better experience for people. It certainly creates a more convenient consumer transaction. But when it comes to culture, I have a much higher tolerance for experimentation and air, you know, and for spaciousness. But one of the things I think is so interesting about the sort of the pervasiveness of the, this like value of being data-driven and you see this in like body modification stuff in

Silicon Valley or like body optimization, I should say. But with Spotify, like the year-end wrapped campaign, I think is so interesting. And I've been trying to write about it for years. And I just like, I just can't stick the landing because it just ends up being an unhinged rant. But I think it's so interesting that people not just do, you know, free advertising for Spotify, but that they find that their playlist metrics say something about them. Like that there is some replacement of like other forms of subcultural affiliation are replaced by like this list of your top played songs that

ostensibly say something about your personality or the time that has passed someone recently suggested to me that like the early internet was the last subculture i don't know if i buy that but i don't know how much of it is just that i like came of age at a time when things were much more material and subcultural affiliation was signaled in a really different way in ways that weren't like quantifiable. I think it's fascinating. And we're talking about, you know, the way that technology has transformed these different industries. And one, obviously, that has been really interesting lately is, as journalism has been going through this kind of decline now for a number of years, and again, part of that decline is affected by Google and later Facebook kind of absorbing all

of these ad dollars that journalism is losing. There has been this kind of push, especially this year, to have more journalists kind of go independent or do their own thing or like investigating this new model. And in my mind, I always think back to self-publishing and what I saw in publishing many years ago when I think about these things, right? And so you recently wrote about Substack, which I think is like the kind of premier example of this, the one that has been most promoted, that has been featured in many different publications discussing like, is this the future of journalism? And so I'm wondering what you think about Substack and how it is

positioning itself and whether, because, you know, obviously we've talked about how a lot of these companies position themselves in one way and then their impact can be something quite different. How do you think about how it's positioning itself and what you think its ultimate kind of impact might be or what we're seeing its impact being so far? Yeah, such a good question. I think that if our conversation so far has seemed a little rangy, it's partially because talking about tech now, there's a business story, there's a cultural story, there's a social story. Obviously, these are all inextricably tangled together, but it can be sort of hard to know what to pull out. And so I did just write this piece for The New Yorker about Substack,

and I tried to contextualize it both in the history of newsletters as a form of independent media that became popular in the 1980s with the rise of desktop publishing, but also to put it in context of what this business model is. What Andreessen Horowitz, who is the primary investor in Substack, how Substack fits into their portfolio and their vision of the future of labor, while also trying to look at what's being written on Substack and who's writing it and what's succeeding. I should say for people who aren't familiar with the platform, it's software that lets people send out email newsletters and people can also receive payment for them and take on subscribers. So it's kind of like a CRM combined with a CMS. And Substack, the company, has been offering advances, really

high advances in the low to mid six figures, has been offering those to prominent journalists and influencers, you could say, to start publications on Substack. And so some of these people have left well-paying jobs at digital media companies or magazines or newspapers to do this. But the majority of people on Substack just signed up and started their own newsletter aren't getting paid by the company. Which is all just context to say that I think the narrative about Substack being the future of media wouldn't exist if Substack, the company, had just said, we make software that helps you write subscription-based email newsletters, and we're going to pay some people to use it. Instead, the conversation has been muddied about Substack as a response to the sort of decline of media institutions. And I think that this is a very Silicon Valley tendency

to position a company against an institution. You see this also with like coding bootcamps, right? Like the narrative around coding bootcamps rather than being another form of education as being like an alternative to higher education. Like this is unnecessary. We don't need this combativeness. There's room for everyone. But anyway, with Substack, I think that for me, there's a lot of great writing on Substack. It resembles the blogosphere to me. There's a lot of writing that wouldn't be published elsewhere, in part because media has contracted. I think this is great. Is it journalism? I don't know. Does it matter that it's journalism? It only matters because Substack has positioned itself as a home for journalism. I think that one of the things that's really interesting about it is that while it does provide a home for new

voices for people who wouldn't be publishing that work elsewhere, it's really hard to build an audience. You have to rely on external platforms. There isn't really a discovery mechanism on Substack. And so not that long ago, you had publications like The Toast or The All or The Hairpin, where you had this sort of voicier sort of journalism, sort of creative writing, sort of personal essay, this mix that I think you see a lot of on Substack now. And you would go to those sites and you would discover new writers. And so I think you really lose that when everything is kind of atomized and individualized. It's revealing that one of the founders of the Toast, Daniel Laverie, he has a really popular Substack, but all of the younger, newer writers that might have been

published on the Toast might also have Substacks, but you're never going to find them. There needs to be some, you know, some sense of like a collective project, I think, for those voices to be heard. And I think that in part, because of this sort of entanglement with journalism or with the media business, we're also seeing people who feel victimized. How do I put this? Some of the most popular and prominent substacks are written by right-wing pundits who were beginning to get criticized for their political views by their colleagues, by their readers at more traditional media outlets. And so it's become sort of like a home for, I would say, like reactionary punditry. I don't personally find that exciting to read or enlightening, but it's fine because I think that Substack positions itself as a neutral platform.

Obviously, this is not a concept that has proven to be tenable, but the users will shape what the platform is when you purport to take a hands-off approach. I think it's interesting that it's becoming known for, you know, being a home for someone like Dana Loesch, who's the former NRA spokesperson, who's, you know, been booted off other platforms. So anyway, I don't know, that's a whole sort of the culture war dimension to this is a little bit less interesting to me, actually, than the economic model that Substack is championing, which I think is an extension of the gig economy spoken of by investors as the passion economy or the creator economy. I just think that writing changes, I think, with the expectation of monetization. And so on the one hand, I think

that people should be getting paid for their work always, and that this was a failure of the blogosphere, that there wasn't an easy way for bloggers to get paid other than through partnerships or affiliate links or advertising. On the other hand, I think that there is this kind of professional tone that pervades paid sub stacks, at least, that I think is really interesting. The platform or the incentives of the platform shape the type of writing that you see on the platform. So to me, aesthetically, that's really interesting. I think that this piece that I wrote for The New Yorker, it was received in a lot of different ways. And I think that, you know, my critique of the company was conflated with a critique of the writing, which I think is a shame and,

but also really interesting that there would be that sort of sense of identification with a platform because the identification in many ways is up to the users. I think there are several aspects of this that I find really interesting, right? Firstly, as you say, Substack positioned it as the future of journalism. And I feel like that was designed to garner maximum attention, right? At this moment where journalism is suffering these problems. But then what you have is you saw when you published your piece that any criticism of substack or even just analysis will generate this kind of response from some people who are doing well on the platform or who associate

themselves with the platform and you know i felt like there was this response like oh my people are writing so much about sub sack, like paying so much attention to this platform when we're just writing on it. And it's like, okay, but the company designed it that way. Like the company designed its pitch to have like this maximum impact to have people pay attention. That's the reason why there are so many people like going to this website, right? Because they were able to craft it in this way where they weren't newsletters like MailChimp or somewhere else, which doesn't receive this kind of attention. They were the future of journalism, right? And so one thing I found really interesting was when this narrative was playing out and when you see these people who are really successful on Substack kind of pushing back against criticism and analysis, what that immediately made me think of was self-publishing and Amazon Kindle, right?

Because there were people who were successful through that platform who, as you say, self-published books and then had them take off in a really major way. And then they would go to bat for Amazon and say, but Amazon made it possible for me to do this, kind of pushing back against criticism of that company. And we see where that went. And I'm not saying that Substack isn't Amazon. That's not the comparison that I'm trying to draw. But just trying to say that you shouldn't criticize this platform because it has worked for me, I think is like the wrong way to approach it. And I think is like a really not a good way to kind of shut down an important discussion,

especially when journalism is so important to like our collective understanding of the world, how we, you know, are able to have a discourse and understand what's happening in our societies to be critical of all of these things. And just the model that's promoted, as you are mentioning there, of monetization through paywall, through subscription, and also the individualization of writing, especially if we're thinking about it as journalism and not blogging or sending newsletters, that's naturally going to have implications for the kind of writing or the kind of journalism that's done.

And I think that is worthy of analysis and criticism and thinking about whether that is going to produce the benefits of a different model of journalism. Because, you know, as I said, journalism is so important to just our general society, right? I think so. Although when I expressed that in the piece, I was called a communist on Twitter, but that's fine. It's like, I'm not a communist. I have an Amazon account.

I guess I'm sensitive to the reality that this was a piece published in the New Yorker. This is like an old media institution. And that this has been, or 2020, you know, thousands of people lost newsroom jobs. And a lot of people, this is something Casey Newton really emphasized when I spoke with him on the phone about for the piece. Casey is a tech journalist who was at The Verge. He's been reporting on Silicon Valley for 10 or 15 years. He has a sub stack that's basically like reinventing the trade publication for Silicon Valley. But he really emphasized like there are thousands of people who want journalism jobs. So where are they going to go? And I do think Substack

is a worthy option for a lot of people. I don't think it's a substitute for newspapers, but newspapers are shrinking and local media is disappearing. And I think that I'm aware that I'm really lucky to have the job that I have, and I love to do it. And so I think that anything published in a publication like The New Yorker about this kind of nascent form of media that has been a lifeline for some people who have been pushed out of the industries by no fault of their own, I get it I get it like that. It's, it's tricky. It's like a high, it's a high wire act. And I don't know that I like successfully navigated it in this piece, but I think that when Andreessen Horowitz is funding a company and like, I have no idea how Substack pitched their company to investors, but I take them at their word. I, you know,

I think Andreessen Horowitz has had a hand in shaping the gig economy and in reshaping labor in a lot of ways. And so when they put their institutional support behind Substack in the form of a $15 million investment, I have to take them seriously. I have to believe that there's some theory about the future of work at play here that we will probably see realized in one way or another in the next decade. And so I think that that's worth criticizing, but in the same way that I would never disparage people who are, you know, working for a delivery app or working for Amazon. You know, I have no animosity for people who are writing on the platform, obviously. And I think that there's a lot of wonderful stuff on there. Like it's just, it's a different form. I think it should be treated as such, even though like this is an age old debate, right? Like journalism was happening on blogs and like blogging happens in papers of record. So there's always overlap and it's not distinct. But I do think that, you know, the reaction that Substack has provoked is really revealing. And I think it's in part because like you're saying, like some collective understanding or like journalism is meant to be a collective project. It's meant to be for the greater good. That doesn't mean you shouldn't read Andrew Sullivan or like other pundits on Substack. I wouldn't recommend it. Personally, I'm not enriched by Andrew Sullivan.

You can not read Andrew Sullivan. It's okay. I'm trying to be diplomatic here. Now that I've confessed to your listeners that I have an Amazon account. This is where I just go full reaction. You get what I'm saying. I don't know. It's thorny. But I think that people get touchy about it because it does enter the sort of culture war discourse, which is also a question about like what sort of political form we should be living in. And yeah, I got a lot of shit for saying that it might not be in the collective interest to have media replaced by individual, largely opinion-based writing. That prompted the communist remark. Anyway, yeah, I don't know. I think anyway yeah i don't know i think it's

fascinating and i also think it's like a totally new platform and we'll see what happens right it's still being shaped they're getting into rss which is kind of predictable and also i think it's sort of a shame subsec will do whatever it wants and they will get funding to do whatever they want and it's not a shame that they're doing, pursuing their roadmap. Let's just put that aside. But I think it's a shame that like, people with ambitious ideas and with new ideas for what technology can and should be that they, they have so few paths to realizing those ideas, right? That the sort of like incubator and venture model is like, what's available to young ambitious people who want to create something. So I guess, I don't know, I guess like one question I have and have been

entertaining with people over the years is like, what are the alternatives? What's it going to take to make this look different? Because it's surely not going to come from the institutions that we have now and the conglomerates and corporations that we have now. But I'll leave that to the other people that you speak with who talk about cooperatives and collectives and unions. And there are models taking shape for sure. I think that's just another thing that your piece illustrated, right? Whenever we have these discussions about journalism, what's happening with journalism right now, what the future of journalism should look like, what tech is doing to journalism. I feel like there's this recognition, or at least among people who think like I think, that this kind of model of private corporations being the main

deliverers of journalism just isn't working, or at least isn't working anymore. And even when we look back at the ad model, which I think is valorized in some ways right now, we can still see that there were a lot of issues there with advertisers being able to influence certain journalism. And I know journalists don't like to say those sorts of things, or some don't like to recognize those sorts of things. But when you have whole sections of newspapers that are about homes and cars, people are being hired for certain types of reporting because the money is there for those sorts of things. And so I think that's always something that's important to recognize. model where there are more paywalls and more journalism is closed off to people who can't afford to pay for it, then that leads to a natural discussion about equity and whether, you know, we need to look at different funding models and organizational models for journalism that are

promoted around the public good or focused on the public good instead of, you know, trying to find some way to turn a profit for whoever is going to be earning that money in the end. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think that that just circles right back around to the conversation we were having about publishing where like media has a lot of problems. And that runs the gamut from the funding model, like you're pointing out, to the gatekeeping that exists in these institutions that are fraught with all sorts of problems that one could detail. But and I don't mean the sorts of problems that lead a person like Andrew Sullivan to leave New York Magazine.

I mean, the sorts of problems that lead people to write on Substack when they should be getting a sort of institutional attention that perhaps lesser writers are receiving. So I hear you. And I think that especially digital media, you know, has had to grapple with that. But it is true that there are these incentive models

that digital publications have had to grapple with that. But it is true that there are these incentive models that digital publications have had to reorient themselves toward, and it doesn't necessarily produce good work or interesting work. And I think that, you know, to work at one of those publications can be, I think it can be really dispiriting to people who do have to, you know, optimize their work for clicks. But I'm not an expert on any of this. So I feel like I'm just like, I'm like on a walk and I've just like fallen through a, like a hole that was covered with leaves or something. But anyway, there needs to be a new model. I don't know what it is, but I guess I like remain optimistic that we'll start to see new forms emerge, whether it's

a non-profit publications or cooperative of some sort or we're starting to see it already a little bit i very much agree and you know even though a lot of things are really shitty right now i am also optimistic or at least try to remain optimistic about the future right because if you don't have optimism then i don't know i feel like you just sink into like despair or something and i definitely don't want that but i think you just sink into like despair or something. And I definitely don't want that. But I think we are seeing a lot of positive things, even as we see a lot of negative things. And Anna, I've found your work really interesting and really enlightening because of how you look at all of these different aspects of the tech industry and tech culture in your writing.

So I really appreciate you taking the time to come on the podcast today and to chat about your experiences and your thoughts on all these issues. Thanks so much. Thank you. This has been a delight. I really appreciate it. Anna Wiener is the author of Uncanny Valley and a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her book recently came out in paperback, and you can find more information about that and links to some of her stories in the show notes. You can also follow Anna on Twitter at Anna Wiener. You can follow me at Paris Marks, and you can follow the show at Tech Won't Save Us. Tech Won't Save Us is part of the Harbinger Media Network, a group of left-wing podcasts that are made in Canada. And you can find more information about that at harbingermedianetwork.com.

If you like the show, please consider going to patreon.com slash tech won't save us and becoming a supporter. Thanks so much for listening.