Tech Won't Save Us - Thinking about Tech in the Present Tense w/ Ben Tarnoff

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Paris Marx is joined by Ben Tarnoff to discuss why we should look to the Luddites for inspiration, how history could inform a better future of technology, and what tech organizing might look like under a Joe Biden administration.Ben Tarnoff is a co-founder of Logic Magazine and co-authored “Voices from the Valley: Tech Workers Talk About What They Do–and How They Do It” with Moira Weigel. The book will be released in October and can be preordered now. Follow Ben on Twitter as @bentarnoff.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.Mentioned in this episode:“To decarbonize we must decomputerize: why we need a Luddite revolution” by Ben Tarnoff“From Manchester to Barcelona” by Ben Tarnoff“The Making of the Tech Worker Movement” by Ben Tarnoff“The Making of the English Working Class” by E.P. Thompson“The Machine Breakers” by Eric Hobsbawm“Present Tense Technology” by David NobleSupport the show

The innovation that would bring us to this better world is as much social as it is technical, and we can't separate those two modes of innovation. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us, a podcast that's always trying to think about ways that we can make technology to better serve the public good and our social goals. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and today I'm joined by Ben Tarnoff. Ben is a co-founder of Logic Magazine and a co-editor with Moira Weigel of Voices from the Valley. Tech workers talk about what they do and how they do it. It comes out in October, and you can pre-order it now. Ben is also a writer who has written for The Guardian, Jacobin, and a number of other publications. In our conversation, we talk about different ways

of developing technology that would better serve the public good and how those can be informed by struggles and actions taken in the past. We also discuss a bit about how tech workers have been organizing in recent years and what that might mean with the election in the United States in November. If you like our conversation, please leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts and make sure to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think would find it interesting. And if you want to support the work that I put into making the show, you can go to patreon.com slash techwont't save us and become a supporter. Enjoy the conversation. Ben, welcome to tech won't save us.

Hey, Paris, thanks for having me. So obviously, I wanted to speak with you because you have this really great perspective on technology, the future of technology, and also how we can draw inspiration from the past and really learn from, you know, a wide range of history that isn't just necessarily focused on tech. And so some of what you've written focuses on the Luddites. I was hoping you could start by explaining who the Luddites were and what are the misconceptions that we often have about them today? Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. So the Luddites were a group of English textile workers who, in the early 19th century, smashed machinery, destroyed raw material, and targeted the property of their employers in order to protest their working conditions, and in particular,

their displacement from their jobs because of new machinery. And it's an interesting historical phenomenon. E.P. Thompson, in The Making of English Work and Class, looks at the Luddites as a kind of bridge phenomenon between the radicalism that emerges in England in response to the French Revolution and the later emergence of Chartism and the kind of proper working class movement. Eric Hobsbawm memorably calls Luddism collective bargaining by riot. So in the period before the emergence of legal trade unionism, because this is a period where trade unions are outlawed,

one of the ways to extract concessions from employers and the state was to destroy property. This is something that may come as somewhat of a surprise to many liberals and conservatives today, who I think have kind of deluded themselves into believing a certain kind of sanitized partial version of the civil rights movement story, and suppose that property damage has never had anything to do with progressive social change. Of course, history shows something very different. So broadly, that's who the Luddites were. I think their reputation, apart from the actual historical experience, their reputation today, of course, is a group of people who were anti-technology. And this is how the term is used colloquially today. Luddism is someone who hates technology.

It's important to point to the history to show that, in fact, they were not against technology in the abstract. Technology in the abstract, in fact, doesn't really exist. They were opposed to particular technologies, which embodied particular social relations. And those social relations were destroying their livelihoods, were immiserating their communities. And so they fought back. And an important misconception to speak to, in addition to the fact that they weren't just purely anti-technology, is that in many cases, they were successful. This is the thrust of Hobsbawm's point that, in fact, this collective bargaining by riot was successful in many cases in securing wage increases and securing

concessions of one sort or another. So briefly, that's what the Luddites were. Yeah, the way that we, I guess, often refer to Luddites today is not completely an accurate reflection of who they actually were and what they were actually doing, right? And so in an article last year for The Guardian, you wrote that what we need right now is kind of like a 21st century Luddism to combat some of the technologies that we're seeing today, right, that are coming from these big tech giants, but, you know, not even those, just the tech industry more generally. So how would you say that we should kind of update that for the 21st century and why is it necessary now? Yeah, well, I should say, first off, that that article produced incredible amount of vitriolic response. And I was surprised. And I think that really speaks to the power that the idea of Luddism still possesses. These people who are providing that response were obviously not particularly well-versed in the actual history of who the Luddites were. But there's something about that idea that one

could oppose technology or specific technologies that people have a surprisingly kind of effective response to. That's a kind of bit of context that I was a bit surprised by. The sense in which I'm interested in the Luddites and drawing on their example is really inspired by the historian David F. Noble. And Noble looks at the Luddites and describes them as people who are thinking about technology in what he calls the present tense. In other words, these are people who are not buying into the gospel of progress that's being sold to them. These are people who, as textile workers, are not believing the bourgeois propagandists who are coming into their communities or who are publishing papers and pamphlets in London saying, well, obviously things are going to get a little worse, but then they're going to get a lot better. And their point was, in the present, their livelihoods were being destroyed, their communities were being destroyed. So it was in the present that they were going to confront actually existing technologies and not pretend

that some paradise lay in the future. I think that is a really useful insight today, particularly when we think about computerization and digitization, because just as with previous moments of technological development, the history of capitalism, these phenomena are sold to us in very similar terms, that they are natural, inevitable, that they kind of flow from the logic of progress, kind of capital P progress as an abstraction that we have no control over, but which just kind of dictates the circumstances of our lives. And that while they may cause dislocations for some in the present tense, in fact, the important point is to put those aside and to think about all the different advantages

that they will bring in the near and the far future. And I think it's a really important narrative to challenge, I think, on two counts. The first is the notion of the inevitability of a particular path of technological development. You know, technological development happens within a particular social context, within different phases in the development of capitalism. And they involve all sorts of choices made by particular people in pursuit of particular people's interests. We could call them class interests, in fact. And they could have gone differently. And we could drill down into some of those historical periods, if you like, and think about what some of those crossroads were. But it's important to note that much of the technological

world that we currently take for granted was the outcome of fairly contingent circumstances and human choices. I think the other point that I would make, once again, is that this whole calculus that's presented to us of present dislocation or suffering is worth it in exchange for future gain has always been a false one, because the question of who benefits, what are the distribution of those gains, is absolutely critical and is one that is consistently occluded in these discourses. But inevitably, the future in mind is one that will benefit fairly few. I think that's a really important thing to think about, right? And the fact that you received

so much vitriol for the article, I feel like in some sense it doesn't even surprise me, right? Because the narrative of what you're describing of kind of challenging these technologies and thinking more deliberately about the technologies that are being produced really does kind of fly in the face of the narrative that we've received now for several decades about technology, right? If we are to challenge technology, then progress stops, innovation stops, the movement of humanity forward ends, right? Because it's described as being so bound up in technological development. And that really works well for Silicon Valley and the billionaires who, you know, kind of drive it forward and control it, right? Yeah, I mean, I think in that sense, you're right

that it's not surprising because there's a lot that depends on that narrative to what you're saying, right? There's a fairly big and lucrative edifice that is constructed on the basis of that narrative. On the other hand, I felt that what I was saying was fairly common sense. I mean, I think if you phrase this the right way, it would be very difficult for many people, I'm tempted to say most people, to disagree with the argument that maybe we shouldn't put computers absolutely everywhere, right? And maybe we shouldn't render every bit of human experience into data that can be operated on by those computers. Again, I guess I don't think of that as a particularly controversial idea. It's not an original one. I certainly didn't come up with it. But I also don't think it's that controversial. There's something about the

ideology of progress in its current iteration that has to become so extreme because the evidence to the contrary has become so overwhelming. And it's one thing to be a bourgeois ideologist of progress in the 19th century. It's another thing, I think, in the 20th and the 21st century, where we're surrounded by these abominations, right, that progress has produced, like the atom bomb and climate change and a host of other horrors. So there's something about that discourse, and a proper historian would be able to speak to this more eloquently than I can, but there's something about that discourse that I think has intensified to try to compensate for the fact that we're surrounded by these artifacts of progress that have made people's

lives worse and in fact are threatening the habitability of the planet. I feel like one of the challenges there is that all of these new technologies, when they are produced, are kind of sold as the next stage in some form of convenience, right? And a way to make your life easier. Like you see it with obviously the smartphone, but increasingly all of these smart home gadgets and just all of these new forms of technology that these companies want us to kind of integrate into our lives. The argument is that by owning these things, your life becomes simpler. And obviously a lot of people now are incredibly stressed, not just

with their finances, but with time and having to work more in order to bring in enough money to pay the bills and, you know, just all of the obligations of everyday life, right? So I feel like it taps in really well to a lot of the anxieties that have just been created by capitalism and the stage of capitalism more generally, but also by the form of capitalism that actually benefits these tech companies, right? Yeah. And it's interesting that you point out the convenience argument because historically, many technologies that are sold on that basis, in fact, end up creating more work for the user rather than less. And this is the subject of a fair bit of feminist scholarship. There's a famous book called More Work for Mother that explores this in the realm of

domestic technology, things like vacuum cleaners and dishwashers, and how in fact that ended up generating more work rather than less because standards around home cleanliness rose. So yeah, and I think you're pointing out how many of these digitized technologies, certainly in our pandemic moment, in which many people, at least those people who are fortunate enough to be able to, are working from home. That kind of 24-hour work culture has only intensified. I mean, I was seeing a study the other day that most people who are working from home at the moment report working many more hours than they were formerly. And there's obviously a number of different technologies that are facilitating that process.

Yeah, it's very worrying, you know, just to see how it's all been developing. But I think part of the value of your perspective is that it gives us this longer historical trend, I guess, that we can look at or this longer period of development that we can see. And we can see that these things are not completely new, you know, as you say about domestic technologies and what that meant for women who were staying at home and, you know, who were expected to be housewives. And so I find that something really valuable in your work, because you do know the history and you bring that in and you make sure that we know about it in the various pieces of yours that I've read. What do you think is the value of learning about the history and then

using that to kind of inform what we're doing and what we're thinking about in the present? Well, I think probably the value of learning about history is that it denaturalizes the present. It shows current arrangements of our society as being constructed and contingent, not inevitable, not permanent, but formed through previous periods of struggle. And I think that's a very valuable insight because it both draws our attention into the past to try to understand what those struggles were that have formed the various contours of our present moment. But I hope also gives us a measure of inspiration that current arrangements can in fact be changed, that there's nothing inevitable about the way our society is organized at present, and that through another cycle of struggle, we could find a

different form of organization. Speaking in very general terms, but I think this perspective is particularly useful within the context of technology because technology is, I would say, kind of more than other fields of human life discussed in this kind of eternal presence. And this is obviously the preferred mode of Silicon Valley leaders as well, to forget their history. And they have good reasons to forget their history, because particulars of their history, how they grew out of government funding and the military-industrial complex, is often at odds with their present political objectives, or at least the way they present themselves, let's say.

So there's that amnesia often has a real strategic value. But I think technology is especially prone to this kind of ahistorical thinking. So restoring the historical perspective is, I think, useful and radicalizing. It has real political force. Yeah, I very much agree with that. I find in recent years, I've been reading a bit less history than I used to. And more recently, I have been trying to read a bit more of it. Every time I do, I always see these incredible similarities with what's happening in the present, right? And just how the kind of struggles that we're facing today and that we're engaged in today are not as new or as novel as we really like to think that they are.

Absolutely. Every conjuncture is different. So we have to do the hard work of undertaking that analysis and trying to understand as precisely as possible where the obstacles are, where the opportunities are, but we're blessed to have this history that we can consult and draw inspiration from and draw guidance from. And in the realm of thinking about technology, to bring us back to the Luddites, that's an important example to look to. These are people who are acute technological thinkers who are trying to articulate a theory of how technology should serve social ends, should serve communities, what they call commonality in one of the letters, and not just the profit motive. And I think it's a prescient critique, and it's one that we have a lot to learn from. In one of your, I guess, more recent pieces, I think it would have been last year as well,

you kind of gave two historical examples through which we should see, you know, the way that technology is developed, right? And that is the example of Manchester and the kind of industrial capitalism that, you know, really took place in Manchester and the worker self-management of Barcelona during the Spanish Revolution, and how that could potentially show us a different way to understand technological development and how it might be undertaken in, you know, a different form and for different, you know, outcomes. Did you just want to explain a bit about that example and why you think it is one that can really inform how we think about technology and not just these kind of larger stages of capitalism

and, I guess, opposition to capitalism? Yeah, absolutely. So maybe a good place to begin would be the contradiction, as Marx and Marxists see it, between the social production of wealth and the private ownership of wealth. So on the one hand, capitalism makes the creation of wealth a more collective process than ever before, that more and more people participate in the production of commodities. And I think that a good way to represent this visually is the factory. The factory system is generally thought to have started in Manchester. This is obviously a city that Engels spends time in and studies and Mark studies as well. And in Manchester, in the birth of the factory system, you see for the first time large numbers of workers collected into these buildings arrayed

around various forms of machinery, you know, organized along this elaborate division of labor. And Engels has a line in Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, where he talks about how, you know, no single worker can point to the finished product that comes out of the industrial factory and say, I made this, you know, this is mine, right? So it's a real contrast to a more artisanal, more craft model that precedes it. So on the one hand, wealth is being socially produced. It's being produced through the coordination of these many different labors. On the other hand, wealth is still privately owned, right? Because the wealth that all of those workers in Manchester are producing is being appropriated by the owner of that factory,

men like Engels' father, which is, of course, how he kept Marx alive. And we're all very grateful for that. But that's a fundamental contradiction in how Marxists understand capitalism. I should say they see the contradiction operating within capitalism. So that's broadly what I mean by the kind of Manchester model. And my argument is that tech, which itself is a very vague term, but I take tech to be the cluster of technologies associated with the internet and with mass digitization, that tech intensifies this contradiction. On the one hand, it makes the production of wealth even more collective than before. But it preserves this principle, which is, of course, is a fundamental principle for capitalism of private ownership. So to take

example of Facebook, Facebook is a platform with more than 2 billion users. Those users contribute to the production of Facebook's wealth because their activity provides data that can be used to sell them personal advertising, which is the basis of Facebook's business model. And yet Facebook's wealth, all of that wealth that is being produced accrues to a small handful of individuals, right? The people who own Facebook and principally Mark Zuckerberg, because he's managed to maintain a commanding ownership stake in Facebook, essentially making him the autocrat of Facebook's vast empire. So the contradiction is being intensified by tech, is kind of what I propose. The Barcelona model is a different way of organizing production. Barcelona was the site of some very interesting experiments in worker self-management during the Spanish Civil War.

There have been others, of course, but the Spanish Civil War is a particularly kind of heroic and romantic period in history, so why not use that one? The kind of experiment that's occurring in Barcelona and has taken place in many other places throughout history is how might we resolve this contradiction at the heart of capitalism, right? So if this contradiction is between the social production of wealth and the private ownership of wealth, what would it mean to own that wealth socially? And then we would have the social production of wealth and the social ownership of wealth. This is an idea that appears throughout Marx's writings. It appears in the

Communist Manifesto most prominently. But in terms of how we do that exactly, this is, of course, a very contested question, like all questions. The history of the left is a history of arguments, and this is some of the most heated and, in fact, often quite literally violent arguments. How do we socialize the production of wealth? Barcelona, to my mind, and the kind of tradition of worker self-management, offers the most promising starting point because it represents a particularly democratic approach to these questions. So that's where I end the piece is trying to explore what the Barcelona model might mean for attempting to resolve or even attempting to manage the contradiction slightly

better than it's currently being managed, that tech intensifies. I think it's a great way to frame it, you know, and you mentioned the arguments within the left. And I would also note that, you know, one of the things they say that kind of, I guess, helped Franco to win in the Spanish Civil War thing I find really interesting that you describe about Facebook is how it kind of takes this Manchester model and brings it to this much greater level because it has like, what, two billion users or something around the world. And, you know, in Manchester, you have this wage labor model, obviously, where, you know, people are getting paid to work in the factory. But when it comes to Facebook, they're also benefiting immensely just from capturing our use of the platform and turning

that into wealth, right? That we are not really compensated for at all, except for the fact that we can use this platform. Yeah, I think you're pointing to what is a subject of a lot of scholarly debate, which is when people click around on Facebook, click around on Google, should that be considered labor? I don't want to wade into that debate. I would say only that it doesn't look a lot like labor, and it's looking less and less like labor. Tatiana Taranova, who comes up with this idea, I think, of digital labor, and I would say helps start this debate, is writing at a time when these technologies hadn't quite matured yet. So she's thinking about things like AOL and volunteer moderators on AOL. Today, I think it's fair to say that

there's a lot of value generating activity that just looks less and less like labor. I mean, not just activity on Facebook's platform, but an example that I provide in the piece of walking into a cafe in San Francisco and having your face recorded by a webcam that was running. This was the Brainwash Cafe, which existed in San Francisco for many years. And then having those images from the webcam, including your face and the face of thousands of others, be integrated into a machine learning data set that's used to train models for facial recognition, including some models that are being implemented by the Chinese government to implement social control in Xinjiang. So it's a fairly complicated question. And I think, again, to my mind,

this draws attention to how tech is making the production of wealth more collective than ever before. Because by walking into a cafe in San Francisco one day, you may have helped a firm thousands of miles away make a bit of money by improving their machine learning model for facial recognition, then selling it to the Chinese state. So it's an interesting but complicated subject. No, definitely. So I guess then part of the question is, how do we get from here to there? How do we get from a point where, you know, the benefits of all of this collective labor is not going to enrich these wealthier and wealthier billionaires? I think Jeff Bezos is over like $200 billion now to a point where those benefits are, you know, actually benefiting society as a whole.

And we're actually deciding what kinds of technologies we want to be using because they're meeting the goals that we actually want to meet instead of just these goals of creating more and more wealth for shareholders. Right. And so you've written a lot about the organizing that has been happening among tech workers in recent years that has really been growing, especially since 2016, but even before that. So do you see the organizing by tech workers, you know, all the way down from like the gig and janitor workers, all the way up to software developers and people at higher ranks in these

companies? Is that the way to, you know, hopefully reach a point where we are in control of this wealth and the production that's happening? Or do you think it's going to require more than that? Certainly the question of how we get from here to there is always the question. And it's always a difficult one. And it's always one that has a lot of competing answers to it. I might add a bit more color on what there looks like before we get to the question of from here to there. To return to our Manchester contradiction between the social production of wealth and the private ownership of wealth, one answer to this question of how to resolve the contradiction is the Left Ricardian answer, which is to say the workers who produce this wealth should receive

this wealth. And this is an answer that Marx is very critical of, particularly in the critique of the Gothic program. And I think it's fair to say that, you don't have to agree with it, but I think the more specifically Marxist perspective on these questions would be the point is not to make the system more fair in the sense that people are receiving the rewards of their labor, but in fact, to abolish it, to have a world of use values where people's needs are met. And ideally are met in this higher stage, hopefully we'll get there. But ideally are met unconditionally. To paint a there for us that's even further away, just because we love the challenge. What that might mean for tech, again, I think your guess is as good as mine, but I think that helps frame it. And I think that might help us see with

some skepticism, some proposals for things like a data dividend that would pay us for the data that we give to Facebook that they use to make their money. It's not really about making these various kind of social relations more just by returning to us the value of our labor, it's really about trying to disassemble that whole structure and create in its place a system that meets human needs directly. When it comes to the tech worker movement, I think, look, this has been an incredibly encouraging development in recent years. It's, I think, look, this has been an incredibly encouraging development in recent years. It's, I think, unprecedented in its scale and scope, particularly in the white-collar layers. This really hasn't taken place within the tech industry before.

This is an industry that has been seen, I think, correctly as hostile to collective action, to labor organizing, to even thinking of oneself as a worker, thinking in a laboring class term. So I think these developments represent a real breakthrough on a number of levels. In terms of how and whether it takes us closer to a more democratic digital sphere, I think it does, but I think the paths are very indirect. And I don't think that's any knock on the tech worker organizers. I just think that the type of world we might hope for, our road to it is just not very simple. So I think there's incredible value in addition to the concrete victories that these organizers have won. I think there's incredible value more broadly to articulating this critique from within the industry, from practitioners, from the people who just have no idea what they're talking about, because these are people who know much more, in fact, about how these technologies work than the

leaders who are the ones who are constantly giving quotes to the press. So yeah, I think it's a somewhat tortured answer, and I apologize. I think there's value there for the types of conversations that need to happen, the types of experiments that need to happen, the types of experiments that need to occur in order for the contours of this more democratic digital sphere to come into view. But I think it's a complicated process. It involves, let's say, moving contradictions around more than resolving them, I would say. Maybe that's just me and my skepticism, but I think it's a long road, let's say. No, I think that makes sense. And I guess I should also note that in framing my

question in that way, I wasn't trying to take away from the organizing that's happening in tech, which I think many of us find very inspiring. On that front, I also have another question for you. It's been argued that a lot of the activism that is taking place in tech has been in response to the 2016 election of Donald Trump and opposition to him, but also to his agenda. is elected later this year. And the agenda doesn't necessarily change all that much. That diminishes some of the activism that's been happening from people who saw it more as opposing this Republican president. And then in the same way that, say, even when Obama did negative things, it wasn't focused on as much as, say, when Trump does similar things. Do you think that, I guess, has a chance to diminish what's been happening? Or do you think it will continue now that it's been started and has been growing for a number of years? It's a good question. My instinct is no, in the sense that I think Trump's election, and particularly the surprise that it represented

for a lot of people, I think did unquestionably supply a catalyst for these mobilizations to spread to the white collar leaders of the tech industry and for new conversations to begin around the social impact of the technologies they were building and who they were building them for. I think now that those conversations have begun, now that those conversations have in fact been going on for years, I think they will continue to go on for years. Trump obviously provides a radicalizing context. I think this has been true not just for people in tech, but for people throughout US society. But the deep crises that he both represents and has intensified will continue under a Biden administration. So I suspect the conversations and the activity will continue as well. I think that the obstacles to organizing are likely to come from other quarters. On the one hand, there's been a wave of repression from management, prominent white collar organizers getting fired at places like Google and Amazon.

That has an effect. I mean, this is why employers do things like that, because I think they can intimidate people. And I think, you know, the pandemic is another obvious piece of context here. And on the one hand, that has created an economic situation that I think, understandably makes people a bit more nervous when it comes to engaging in potentially risky action. And for a lot of white-collar tech workers, they're working from home. And I think it's safe to say that this also means that it's harder to create and sustain

the kind of face-to-face personal relationships that organizing is really built on. So again, I don't mean to exaggerate those challenges. And obviously, the extraordinary energy and creativity of organizers can overcome those challenges. But I think that those are more likely to be the sources of difficulty, rather than the change of the guard from Trump to Biden. Yeah, no, I think that makes a lot of sense, especially when you see, I think it was just earlier today, like Amazon had this job posting for an intelligence agent or something like that to do research on labor organizers within the organization, but also hostile political figures, right? And so there has been this growing push,

I guess, to look at these massive tech companies, think about breaking them up, applying other kind of antitrust and anti-competitive measures to them. Do you see that kind of escalating in the coming years? Or do you think the pressure will be taken off if Joe Biden is elected president? It's an interesting question, you know, what Biden's tech policy will be. I mean, the choice of Kamala as VP, I mean, this is someone with deep ties to Silicon Valley leadership who kind of came up in California. So obviously has connections to that world, deep connections. On the other hand, I think she has had to, I don't want to say make her peace with, but I'd say somewhat accommodate the trend against tech

or the trend towards tech reform, which has felt quite powerfully in Democratic circles and even in some Republican circles. And so, for instance, in California, she supported AB5, the bill that Uber and Lyft are fighting so hard to dismantle. So it's a good question. You know, I think antitrust policy in particular has become a focus, I would say, of a lot of democratic lawmakers. There's this big antitrust investigation underway in the Democratic House, which is going to be producing a report. On the other hand, tech has done very well in this crisis. I mean,

the profits of the big tech firms are soaring. They're pushing the S&P 500s and new highs. And this means that these companies will have even more cash with which to purchase political influence, to field lobbyists. And they have an important source of leverage over policymakers across the political spectrum because they can say, look, our valuations sustain the stock market and our extraordinary profitability is one of the few bright spots in a very stagnant economy. So just thinking about how the US political system works and how, frankly, corrupt it is, I mean, how the parameters of possibility are set by the rich and by corporations, I find it very difficult to imagine that a Biden administration and a Democratic Congress, let's say they get the trifecta, will pass meaningful tech reform. I mean, for the same reason that I don't think we'll get Medicare for all from a Democratic trifecta, because that's not really what the Democratic

Party is, at least at the moment. It's not what it's designed to do. And it's certainly not what the US political system is designed to do. So I am somewhat skeptical. That doesn't mean that interesting ideas aren't being generated, and that this is a very important moment for these conversations. I mean, we should be thinking about very specific policy measures that would push things forward. And we don't need to, in my view, apply an impossible standard to them. I mean, I think a lot of the antitrust measures, even though I don't share the politics of the people who are proposing them, I think a lot of the measures are good short-term measures for ways to weaken corporate power, and specifically corporate power in the tech industry. But I think even those measures, which are capitalist market measures,

I mean, these are not folks who are interested in resolving our Manchester contradiction, but would involve a fair bit of pain for these big firms. I don't think that our political system and the Democratic Party in particular is willing to inflict that pain, but I could be wrong. Yeah. I have my own critique of the antitrust movement and kind of what their politics seem to be, but I don't think this is the time for it. on the use values, right? And not the exchange values, which is something I really love and completely agree with. Do you have a vision for kind of what this future of tech would look like and how it would be concretely different from like our experience of technology and how it works in the present? I think it's helpful to look at very specific experiments that embody

some of the values, some of the principles that you might associate with a more democratic digital sphere, and which are necessarily imperfect because they have to exist within a capitalist social reality that are, you know, have to make certain concessions, have to continue to operate according to these laws of motion, but nonetheless contain within them latent capacities that could be developed in a more radical direction, right? Possible seeds of a new world or half seeds, however we might hedge that. I think there's a few that I would point to. One which is referenced a lot, but I think justly so, are community networks. And these are municipally owned broadband networks, but also networks that are run by cooperatives,

like electric cooperatives, many of which were founded in the New Deal. And these have had extraordinary success, despite the incredible opposition of the telecom lobby, which as you'd expect is very well financed. But there have been real achievements in terms of bringing places online, particularly rural and low-income places that have been completely abandoned by the for-profit broadband sector. One example that I'll give you is rural North Dakota, which has some of the best broadband connectivity, not just of any rural place in the country, but of anywhere in the country. And this might surprise you, right? Because if you think about North Dakota, if you know anything about North Dakota, you might think that the best internet would be found in Fargo, in the few small cities of North

Dakota. But in fact, it's found in these very low population density counties. And the reason for that is these counties are full of these electric cooperatives, which 20 or so years ago got together and bought up a bunch of infrastructure from one of the baby bells and built their own fiber and got state grants and federal grants to do so, and now provide at a very reasonable rates, incredible connectivity to some of the most rural regions of the country. So the model is there. And I think what's appealing about this model is, again, in latent capacity, as a kind of kernel, these are organizations that are putting social needs over the profit motive. They have to turn a profit to survive.

They are market actors. They have to continue to obey these laws of motion. But when you read about the stories of their users and the stories of the people who work for these organizations and who create these organizations, it's clear that they're trying to articulate and embody a different set of values, one where the good of the community and the good of the individuals that compose that community comes first. So I think that's an inspiring place to start. And as we move further up the stack into the so-called platforms and the application layer, I think things get a little bit more complicated, but again, we could look at a lot of different experiments up there from platform cooperativism to the experiments that Darius Kazemi is doing with kind of small

scale social media to a host of others. And I think, you know, briefly, I would say what we need is more experimentation. We need people who are not just writing code, but putting together new forms of social organization around technology, because the innovation that would bring us to this better world is as much social as it is technical. And we can't separate those two modes of innovation. I love that. It's like the seeds from which, you know, if we sow enough of them, hopefully some of them will start to grow into that new world that we want to see. I really appreciate you taking the time, Ben.

It was great to speak with you. Thanks so much, Paris. This was fun. Ben Tarnoff is a co-founder of Logic Magazine and a co-editor with Moira Weigel of Voices from the Valley. Tech workers talk about what they do and how they do it from Logic Books and FSG Originals. It comes out in October and you can pre-order it now. You can follow Ben on Twitter at Ben Tarnoff. Thanks for listening.